Related papers: Decentralizing Platform Power: A Design Space of M…
Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems…
Mainstream social media platforms function as "walled garden" ecosystems that restrict user agency, control, and data portability. They have demonstrated a lack of transparency that contributes to a multitude of online harms. Our research…
Online discourse takes place in corporate-controlled spaces thought by users to be public realms. These platforms in name enable free speech but in practice implement varying degrees of censorship either by government edict or by uneven and…
Decentralized architecture offers a robust and flexible structure for online platforms, since centralized moderation and computation can be easy to disrupt with targeted attacks. However, a platform offering a decentralized architecture…
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of…
Decentralized social networks like Mastodon and BlueSky are trending topics that have drawn much attention and discussion in recent years. By devolving powers from the central node to the end users, decentralized social networks aim to cure…
For more than a century, the grid has operated in a centralized top-down fashion. However, as distributed energy resources (DERs) penetration grows, the grid edge is increasingly infused with intelligent computing and communication…
Novel blockchain technology provides the infrastructure layer for the creation of decentralized appli-cations. A rapidly growing ecosystem of applications is built around financial services, commonly referred to as decentralized finance.…
Decentralized social media protocols enable users in independent, user-hosted servers (i.e., instances) to interact with each other while they self-govern. This community-based model of social media governance opens up new opportunities for…
Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially…
Advances in low-communication training algorithms are enabling a shift from centralised model training to compute setups that are either distributed across multiple clusters or decentralised via community-driven contributions. This paper…
Foundation models including large language models (LLMs) are increasingly attracting interest worldwide for their distinguished capabilities and potential to perform a wide variety of tasks. Nevertheless, people are concerned about whether…
Web 3.0 focuses on the decentralization of the internet and creating a system of interconnected and independent computers for improved privacy and security. We extend the idea of the decentralization of the web to the social media space:…
Aiming to support a cross-sector and cross-border eGovernance paradigm for sharing common public services, this paper introduces an AI-enhanced solution that enables beneficiaries to participate in a decenntralized network for effective big…
Digital societies come with a design paradox: On the one hand, technologies, such as Internet of Things, pervasive and ubiquitous systems, allow a distributed local intelligence in interconnected devices of our everyday life such as smart…
We present a hierarchical framework aimed at decentralizing the distribution systems market operations using localized peer-to-peer energy markets. Hierarchically designed decision-making algorithm approaches the power systems market…
We propose a research initiative to explore and evaluate end-user technology, infrastructure, business imperatives, and regulatory policy to support the privacy, dignity, and market power of individual persons in the context of the emerging…
On the Internet large service providers tend to control the digital identities of users. These defacto identity authorities wield significant power over users, compelling them to comply with non-negotiable terms, before access to services…
The decentralized architecture of Internet sparkled techno-utopian visions of a virtual freedom space for humanity. Peer-to-peer systems, collaborative creation (wikipedia), open source software (Linux), universal shared knowledge, and the…
Platforms are increasingly adopting industrial models of moderation that prioritize scalability and consistency, frequently at the expense of context-sensitive and user-centered values. Building on the multi-level governance framework that…