Related papers: A Grassroots Architecture to Supplant Global Digit…
Informally, a grassroots system is a distributed system that can have multiple instances, independent of each other and of any global resources, that can interoperate once interconnected. Grassroots applications are potentially important as…
Grassroots platforms aim to offer an egalitarian alternative to global platforms. Whereas global platforms can have only a single instance, grassroots platforms can have multiple instances that emerge and operate independently of each other…
Offering an architecture for social networking in which people have agency over their personal information and social graph is an open challenge. Here we present a grassroots architecture for serverless, permissionless, peer-to-peer social…
While the physical lives of many of us are in democracies (one person, one vote - e.g., the EU and the US), our digital lives are mostly in autocracies (one person, all votes - e.g., Facebook). Cryptocurrencies promise liberation but stop…
Grassroots currencies are means for turning mutual trust into liquidity, with the goal of providing foundations for grassroots digital economies. Grassroots coins are units of debt that can be issued by anyone -- people, corporations,…
We propose a framework for the fair democratic governance of federated digital communities that form and evolve dynamically, where small groups self-govern and larger groups are represented by assemblies selected via sortition. Prior work…
Global cryptocurrencies are unbacked and have high transaction cost incurred by global consensus. In contrast, grassroots cryptocurrencies are backed by the goods and services of their issuers -- any person, natural or legal -- and have no…
The goal of grassroots cryptocurrencies is to provide a foundation with which local digital economies can emerge independently of each other and of global digital platforms and global cryptocurrencies; can form and grow without initial…
Global digital platforms are software systems designed to serve entire populations, with some already serving billions of people. We propose atomic transactions-based multiagent transition systems and protocols as a formal framework to…
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…
In this paper we argue that the set of wireless, mobile devices (e.g., portable telephones, tablet PCs, GPS navigators, media players) commonly used by human users enables the construction of what we term a digital ecosystem, i.e., an…
The importance of digital identity as a foundation for digital public services is considered. As the classical, centralised model digital identity has proven to be subject to several limitations, self-sovereign identities are proposed as…
Though successive generations of digital technology have become increasingly powerful in the past twenty years, digital democracy has yet to realize its potential for deliberative transformation. The undemocratic exploitation of massive…
A multidimensional financial system could provide benefits for individuals, companies, and states. Instead of top-down control, which is destined to eventually fail in a hyperconnected world, a bottom-up creation of value can unleash…
Picture a community torn over a proposed zoning law. Some are angry, others defensive, and misunderstandings abound. On social media, they broadcast insults at one another; every nuanced perspective is reduced to a viral soundbite. Yet,…
Cloud Computing is rising fast, with its data centres growing at an unprecedented rate. However, this has come with concerns of privacy, efficiency at the expense of resilience, and environmental sustainability, because of the dependence on…
Classical monetary systems regularly subject the most vulnerable majority of the world's population to debilitating financial shocks, and have manifestly allowed uncontrolled global inequality over the long term. Given these basic failures,…
The rapid expansion of AI-based remote services has intensified debates about the long-term implications of growing structural concentration in infrastructure and expertise. As AI capabilities become increasingly intertwined with…
The discourse about sustainable technology has emerged from the acknowledgment of the environmental collapse we are facing. In this paper, we argue that addressing this crisis requires more than the development of sustainable alternatives…
To mitigate the restrictive centralising and monopolistic tendencies of platformisation, we aim to empower local communities by democratising platforms for self-organised social coordination. Our approach is to develop an open-source,…