* For the afternoon discussion sessions, workshop participants (including those that will not present a paper) can present short demos or tutorials of tools they are working on, or they can give a lightning talk about novel ideas for which they want to get some early feedback. If you're interested in presenting something, feel free to contact us. Below is the current list of demo speakers:

This demo presents a decentralized collaborative drawing application running on top of a peer-to-peer network. The state of the drawing is stored with symmetric replication using transactional protocols to provide strong consistency. The demo is used to trigger discussion about different transactional protocols for decentralized systems.

We are pleased to announce that the workshop will open with a keynote speech by Tyler Close (Google), author of the Waterken web server:

Using the Web for decentralized coordination of distributed processes. You can get there from here.

At first blush, the Web might not seem like a good starting place for decentralized coordination of distributed processes. A typical Web application is vulnerable to multiple central authorities and so is not decentralized. Most often, coping with the travails of distribution depends upon human intervention via the browser's 'refresh' button; which doesn't bode well for headless processes. Coordination between Web applications, where it's done at all, often results in complete vulnerability between participants. Looking at the Web as a platform for decentralized coordination of distributed processes, it seems reasonable to conclude: "You can't get there from here".

Sometimes, a different perspective is all that is needed to find a way forward out of the maze. In this talk, we'll reacquaint ourselves with the Web's core technologies: the URL, HTTP and TLS. With a fresh outlook on these technologies, we'll explore how to use them for the desired effect, while still working within the existing Web infrastructure. Using simple and compatible extensions to the Web, we'll study cases where we can now coordinate the formerly intractable. The Waterken Server and an extended Web browser enable demonstration of these implementation techniques. With a different perspective on where "here" is, we'll get "there".

Accepted papers will be published as a volume in Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science.

Decentralized Coordination of Distributed Processes (DCDP) is a new Workshop, co-located with the 5th International Federated Conferences on Distributed Computing Techniques in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The workshop will take place June 10th, immediately following the main conference.

The central theme of the workshop is the decentralized coordination of distributed processes:

• decentralized: there is no single authority in the network that everything is vulnerable to.
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• coordinated: processes need to cooperate to achieve meaningful results, potentially in the face of mutual suspicion.
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• distributed: processes are separated by a potentially unreliable network.

We invite you to read the Call for Papers and to join us for an interesting discussion in Amsterdam this summer.