---
layout: post
title: 'SeaGL speaker Q&A: Paige Peterson'
status: publish
type: post
published: true
categories: news
tags: '2015'
---

SeaGL speaker Paige Peterson talks privacy, security, and
freedom:

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?

Paige is an advocate for open standards, user privacy and decentralized
technologies. After receiving a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art
practicing experimental tech art with a strong focus on complexity in
nature, her interests were drawn towards decentralization as a concept
that would bring reliability and sustainability into existing
human-designed systems. Her job with mesh networking startup, Open
Garden and becoming an organiser of the San Francisco bitcoin meetup put
her at the center of the newest technologies with decentralization at
their core. In early 2014, Paige met Scotland-based company MaidSafe,
who are building a peer-to-peer Internet using the very principles of
natural systems which she became attracted to many years prior, and she
has been working on various communication efforts for them since.

Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?

For almost a decade, a small but growing team based in Scotland has been
researching and developing what it would take to build an Internet with
privacy, security and freedom for all its users. It was observed that
servers were the primary points of vulnerability in the existing
Internet and that while there is no one central point of control, they
not only allow but incentivize major points of centralization and
dependency. By drawing inspiration from the resiliency of systems found
in nature, MaidSafe has built an open source peer-to-peer network and
developer framework with inherent properties of privacy, security and
freedom for users and their data. I'll be talking about how this system
works and what to expect as a user, developer and node operator.

Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If
not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

I have not been but am very much looking forward to experiencing the
free/libre culture from this part of the world. I attended LibrePlanet
earlier this year and had a great time bonding with folks who value
freedom in software.
