Committee Grant #018 - Spritely Networked Communities Institute

Project Description / Executive Summary Spritely Navi: Secure Collaboration Laboratory Spritely is developing secure collaboration technologies free from centralized gatekeepers. Navi will be another step towards user-empowering, decentralized, and capability-secure means of communication. This project combines a number of Spritely research projects into a single laboratory setting for working directly with others. In Spritely Navi, chatting can be done without a central server, code can be freely shared without establishing trust, and everything can be modified and extended using either Scheme or JavaScript. Navi will be first major user-facing application using Spritely's technology, combining Spritely's Goblins distributed programming environment, the OCapN distributed networking protocol, and our Scheme-to-Webassembly compiler Hoot. Navi will be flexible for secure collaboration extensions across a wide variety of domains. We will demonstrate extension of Navi with both a practical example for organizational collaboration needs and also with an entertaining example in the form of a Multi-User Dungeon game which will push all of our technologies to their limit. The wider goal for this project is adoption of collaborative tools that can help everyone.

Project Goals Spritely Navi will bring object capability security generally, and Spritely's technologies specifically, to a broader audience. Navi will blur the line between decentralized chat / social network systems and collaboration systems. People deserve secure collaboration; we aim to make secure collaboration not only possible, but the default.

Target Milestones

• Development of secure collaboration environment core, including integrated chatroom along with secure ocap flows, built upon Spritely's Goblins, Hoot, and OCapN projects.
• Support for Javascript-based extensions alongside the Scheme-based coding solutions we already support.
• Integration of untrusted code execution permitting collaborative extensions
• Petnames integration to resist phishing attacks.
• Demo: collaboration suite extension for organizational environment
• Demo: multiplayer game with player-built contributions

Timeline / Path to Production This project builds on a number of Spritely technologies that have already been proven in various contexts. Spritely Goblins, our distributed programming environment, has achieved core stability. Goblins also integrates directly with OCapN, the Object Capability Network protocol being developed through consensus with the OCapN group. And recently, Goblins programs have been demonstrated speaking over OCapN in the browser thanks to recent developments in Hoot, our Scheme-to-Webassembly compiler (previously funded by the Metamask Grants DAO). With all these combined, Spritely's tech is primed to pivot to user-facing technologies. This application will be an opportunity to bring capability security through Spritely to a wider audience. Approximately we indicate a 9 month window for the completion of this grant:

• at 3 months: Core secure collaboration environment and secure UI prototypes
• at 6 months: Javascript integration and first demo
• at 9 months: Polished core with robust demos and documentation

About Team The Spritely Networked Communities Institute has experience building broadly adopted decentralized networking technology. ActivityPub, built by two of the co-founders of the Spritely Institute (Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Tallon), is the most successful decentralized social network protocol on the web to date, with tens of millions of users, tens of thousands of servers, and many interoperating implementations. The Spritely Networked Communities Institute carries forward object capability security to bring more private, more secure, more decentralized networking tech to a wider audience. Granular privacy flows, phishing resistance, and secure collaboration are designs well expressed from this area of work and approach which we carry forward to a wider audience. Spritely's team has a track record of successfully delivering on their ambitions. We look forward to working with Metamask on this grant so we can bring Spritely's tech to a wider audience of end users.

Funding Status Spritely have already fulfilled three successful grants with the support of the Metamask Grants DAO, culminating in bringing Spritely's tech to browsers. Spritely Goblins, our secure distributed programming environment, now successfully runs in browsers thanks to these prior grants supporting the development of Spritely Hoot, our Scheme-to-Webassembly compiler. We are a 501(c)(3) US nonprofit and are also supported by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, NLNet / NGI Zero, and individual donors.

Funding Request 250000

Budget Breakdown All funds are going to engineering / project development.

• $65,000: Oversight and project direction
• $65,000: Lead technical architect
• $60,000: Core engineer
• $30,000: Technical administration
• $30,000: Integration engineering

What specific software license does the grantee intend to publish under? Apache Software License v2

What is your/the team's legal status and vendor information? The Spritely Networked Communities Institute is a US 501(c)(3) registered nonprofit

Does the team agree to open source all code produced as a result of a successful grant application? Yes

Other Information / Relevant Links / Supporting Documents

• [spritely.institute/goblins/ https://spritely.institute/hoot/ ](https://spritely.institute/goblins/ https://spritely.institute/hoot/ )
• spritely.institute/news/spritely-goblins-v0-15-0-goblins-in-the-browser.html

Have you been referred to apply by a MetaMask team member/worked with us in the past? Please feel free to share your experience Project concept discussed and invited to apply by Dan Finlay