# Decentralized Web Summit 2016

Founded in 1996 in San Francisco, California, The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library with the mission of "universal access to all knowledge". The archive is made up of free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books.

The Internet Archive allows any member of the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, however, despite having human users who save digital material, the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its [web crawlers](robots_txt.html), which work to preserve as much of the public Web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains over 308 billion web captures. The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects.

The Decentralized Web Summit (full title: "Decentralized Web Summit - Live From The Internet Archive") was a live stream hosted by The Internet Archive on the 8th of June 2016 on YouTube, the summit had a diverse group of Web architects, activists, engineers, archivists, scholars, journalists, and other stakeholders to explore the technology required to build a Decentralized Web and its impact.

One of the more noticeable guests of the live summit was Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who can very much be called the grandfather of the Web. One of the other guest of the summit was founder of Neocities, Kyle Drake, who was not only invited to the summit, but also presented a talk on why he made the host in the forum of a pre-recorded video.

Kyle's talk was introduced by Wendy Hanamura (The Internet Archive's Director of Partnerships), where she started off by talking about[Geocities until she showed the video.

You can watch the video here, you can also watch a better version of the video from the Neocities Vimeo page.

## References

1. Original wiki article about this subject
2. SAVE THE DATE: Decentralized Web Summit 2018 (Internet Archive)
3. The Internet Archive on Wikipedia