DWeb Virtual Meetup—Open Source Ag Tech for Small Farmer Sovereignty

DESCRIPTION

November 2025 DWeb Virtual Meetup — Open Source Ag Tech for Small Farmer Sovereignty & Sustainability

As agriculture consolidates into fewer and fewer hands, large-scale industrial models have exacerbated social, economic, and environmental inequality in innumerable ways. The centralization of food production has led to ecological deterioration, the exploitation of farm workers, and local, unprocessed food becoming an inaccessible luxury.

But there’s hope — as there is immense untapped potential for open hardware and peer-to-peer network technologies to move our food systems away from exploitative practices and towards commons-based, community-centered, agriculture.

From the first DWeb Camp in 2019 at a regenerative mushroom farm, DWeb + Coolab Camp Brazil in 2023, the D:Food Web convenings at DWeb Camp 2024, to DWeb Camp Cascadia earlier this year — agroecological technologies have been an ongoing focus of exploration within the DWeb community. Next spring, it will be the focal point for DWeb Camp / Lablab Festival in Brazil.

We will hear from those who are working on the frontlines to confront the agricultural crisis through decentralized approaches. Through close collaboration with farmers and farm workers, our speakers will describe how people-centered design can lead to transformative technologies that directly respond to the needs of those who produce the food that ends up on our tables.

Join us at our next virtual meetup on November 26 at 10am PT and come hear our speakers share their approaches and learnings as they develop decentralized ag / farmer tech. The presentations will be followed by an audience Q&A with the speakers. Stay after the main event and join us for a post-meetup hang out!

SPEAKERS

• Jesus Torres of Entidad is building privacy-first, decentralized identity wallets and apps serving migrant workers and other immigrants.
• Huire Queiroz and Victor Von Sydow, two of the leaders of DWeb Camp Brazil (March 2026), will share their year-long process to develop teams of Brazilian farmers and technologists who have proposed 12 prototypes — from agriculture hardware to software to research processes — that they will develop and share at DWeb Camp Brazil.

Facilitated by DWeb Senior Organizer, mai ishikawa sutton

AGENDA

00:00 - 00:06 = Welcome & Announcements

00:06 - 00:21 = Jesus Torres + audience Q&A

00:21 - 00:43 = Hiure/Victor + audience Q&A

00:43 - 00:55 = Speaker TBA + Q&A

00:55 - 01:00 = Concluding remarks

======

This meetup embodies the DWeb Principles on Technology for Human Agency & Distributed Benefits:

We stand for technology that enables the primacy of people as beneficiaries of the technology, by upholding their security, privacy and self-determination.

Our technologies must minimize surveillance and manipulation of people's behavior, and optimize for social benefits and empower individuals to determine how and why their data is used.

We believe that decentralized technologies will be most beneficial to society when the rewards and recognition of their success, monetary or otherwise, are distributed among those who contributed to that success.

JESUS TORRES (above)

BIO: Jesus Torres is the co-founder and CEO of Entidad, a public benefit corporation creating technology that empowers individuals to have greater control over their personal data. A Stanford Electrical Engineering graduate, he began his career in Silicon Valley before moving into the entertainment industry, where he supported Grammy-nominated artists through strategic and creative leadership. His passion for mission-driven work grew after leading a research project on farm worker digital literacy. Alongside alumni and longtime friends Jorge Flores and Rene Solorzano, he co-founded Entidad, helping nonprofits deliver nearly $100M in aid through community-centered digital tools.

PRESENTATION: Jesus will discuss his work building digital trust with farmworker communities. Entidad leveraged decentralized identity wallets to distribute over $80 million in USDA disaster relief payments to farmworkers across the country. This talk will share our journey building digital trust with farmworker communities during the recent pandemic, how decentralized technology played a crucial role in that work, and how it could unlock economic mobility for these vulnerable communities.

HIURE QUEIROZ (above)

BIO: Hiure Queiroz is a Ph.D. candidate in Innovation and Technology at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), focusing on social technologies for community well-being. With a background in Physics and Engineering, actively promotes critical engagement with technology through hacker culture and participatory methods. He is also the General Coordinator of the Portal Sem Porteiras Association and co-founder of Transistir Social Tech, an initiative dedicated to developing software and hardware solutions for local communities.

PRESENTATION: This talk will present the LabLab project, a social prototyping laboratory that acts as a training space for network-building in agroecology. Hiure will detail the project's current development phase, sharing our progress in creating both digital and analog experimental spaces. The session will also serve to announce and invite participants to our final culminating event, where we will showcase the outcomes and foster broader community engagement.