Filecoin helps improve the way people share, organize, and archive their work

Welcome to the fourth installment of the Filecoin Community Highlights series, which features users and developers building essential tools and services on the Filecoin network. The goal is to inspire others to build world-class tools for the distributed web. Check out the recent post about Ben Fino-Radin, founder of Small Data Industries.

Jonathan Schwartz is the co-founder of Open Work Labs (OWL), a Brooklyn-based product studio that builds tools to improve the way people share, organize, and archive their work. They spend most of their time helping other teams develop distributed web applications and infrastructure that they hope to eventually reuse on their own products.

The two words that come to mind when talking about the Open Work Lab are our hope, what we want to achieve, and epicenter, what we care about. Our hope is to improve the way people share, organize, and archive their work. We care because if we have a persistent, well-organized, and publicly accessible system for managing the work of all humanity, we should be able to learn, innovate, and collaborate more effectively. That’s the appeal behind “open work.”

OWL is currently working on Glif – a set of interoperable tools on the Filecoin network.

Glif is an identity that represents the independent but connected Filecoin tools we are building. Each tool can be considered its own "Glif".

The web wallet Glif is designed to be a simple and intuitive interface for sending Filecoin and viewing your transaction history. It supports ledger devices, seed phrases, and single private keys. It should serve non-technical people well and also be flexible enough to accommodate developers and miners. Throughout development, we have released some JavaScript Filecoin modules that may be helpful to the community, they are at the bottom of the wallet README.

To support the web wallet, we created a second Glif: a set of open source modules that make it easier for us and others to launch our own Kubernetes-managed Filecoin node clusters. The cluster supports basic wallet functionality and load balances requests across the nodes. We also provide visibility into the health of the cluster with graphs and monitoring. We intend to make it easy for anyone to get started with this setup - all of this work is open source and live on GitHub, with more documentation coming soon.

Before developing Glif, we were integrating IPFS-Ethereum into Aragon (like Quasar), which makes it easier for people to create decentralized organizations running on Ethereum. Before that, I worked on Ujo, a platform that helps artists make more money through Ethereum.

I first came across IPFS when I was at Ujo – where we store data “off-chain”. Thomas O’Brien, co-founder of OWL, would hang out with me in Roberta’s office in Brooklyn in his free time, talking about the idea of ​​“Open Work”. We thought Filecoin had the right qualities to be used as a persistent storage layer. So we started with IPFS first and gradually became familiar with the distributed storage space. It seemed to make sense for Open Work Labs to become a studio to help other teams advance their tooling by building infrastructure for more compelling applications.

We have an ongoing company project called Streams, which is our evolving attempt to help people share, organize, and archive their work. Our current approach is to aggregate disparate work data generated by independent applications like GitHub, Zoom, Figma, Notion, etc., transform the data into a more useful queryable structure, and allow client applications to fetch, filter, and search the data. Any conversation, whether spoken in a Zoom call, written in a GitHub commit, or commented in a Google Doc, can be easily found with a simple search.

Our long-term plan has always been to store Stream data on the Filecoin network, so your work in any individual application is backed up in a single, secure location.

The most exciting benefit to me is content addressable data. Juan Benet gave a great talk on this topic where he compared location addresses and content addresses using the example of getting a specific book.

To reiterate Juan’s point, writing about the location of a book is like me telling you, “Hey! You need to read this book at the New York Public Library – it’s on the third floor, top shelf, last book on the left!”

There are obvious problems with this approach. What if the book is moved? What if the library is closed? What if someone steals a page from the book without anyone else knowing? Location-addressed data is how many networks work today.

In theory, content addressing makes more sense. Referring to the previous example, content addressing a book is like me telling you, "Hey! You need to read this book by title, author, number of pages, etc." By describing the content of the book, you can get it from anywhere. Amazingly, once you get the book, you can verify that it is indeed what you asked for! This is a more secure model, e.g. no bad guys changing things without anyone else knowing.

The exciting part about content-addressed data is that once you know what to look for, you can get it from anywhere! Filecoin is exciting because it incentivizes more people and machines to join this effort. It’s the impetus for making networks based on content-addressed data work at scale. This enables a lot of cool stuff, some we know about (and are trying to build), and others we may yet discover.

To me, Web3 feels like the right and secure internet. I find it promising that people in developing countries and those under corrupt governments have an unprecedented appreciation for Web3 applications.

My hope is that people living in countries that value internet freedom will develop the same appetite for these applications and take early preventative measures so that we are ready for a better, more secure, and more robust web and internet. Ultimately, most Web3 tools will have to go a long way to compete with the world’s current digital experiences. We at OpenWorks Labs are excited to be the studio that can help build and improve this infrastructure.

As far as my interest in Filecoin, I am familiar with many projects in this space, but the interesting thing is that out of all of them, Filecoin is the one that makes the most sense when I explain it to my parents, which says it all! If they can understand it, then many others can too.

In the end, it feels good to be building on more secure, consumer-facing technologies and applications. When I encounter the odd bug or face an uphill technical battle, it's easy to remind myself that I'm (and believe I'm) working on solving important problems for the future of the web and the internet. There's no better way to fire me up.