Abstract

In the modern era of data collection by governments and corporations, concerns have grown over user privacy and autonomy in personal and cloud computing. One outgrowth of this concern is the "self-hosting" movement which promotes open source web applications that are made for users to install and manage themselves, ideally on their own hardware. Self-hosting is an alternative to using services provided by companies, that by necessity have access to the user's activity. The downside of self-hosting is that it is generally more difficult than running desktop or phone software. To deal with this issue, a few platforms have been developed to manage the installation and maintenance of web applications, making the user experience much closer to a desktop or phone. One such platform is Sandstorm, a community project that began as a startup company in 2014. Sandstorm has a unique security model that isolates the applications from each other, and focuses on small, simple, versatile applications.

Online mapping offers an interesting use case for privacy and self-hosting. OpenStreetMap has a rich ecosystem and offers many tools for mapping, both online and offline. Many mapping solutions can be performed privately on a phone with OpenStreetMap applications such as Organic Maps, with almost no need for the web. However for social features such as sharing locations and collaborating on travel plans, a web application is very helpful. The traditional OpenStreetMap web stack, including map tiles and search, has many components and is a notoriously involved process to set up. There have been a few attempts to make self-hosting an OpenStreetMap application simpler, and this presentation will go over one such attempt: Desert Atlas, which is built on Sandstorm. The presentation will discuss building the application, the Sandstorm platform, and potential use cases in both the commercial and academic sectors.

Bio

Daniel Krol received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2005. He has been a software engineer since 2006. In 2014 he was one of the original backend engineers at Brilliant.org. Since 2019 he has focused on open source development. He is involved in the Sandstorm Community project, both in a leadership role and as an application developer. In his free time he enjoys juggling and editing OpenStreetMap.

Presentation slides are here. 

Presentation HTML, with demo animations .zip file is here.