A Grassroots Architecture for the Digital Realm

Abstract: The digital realm is dominated today by global digital platforms with autocratic or plutocratic governance and lacks democratic alternatives. We subscribe to the manifesto of Project Liberty and in this talk describe an egalitarian and democratic alternative architecture to the digital realm.

The architecture realizes the notion of grassroots distributed systems, which, informally, are smartphone-based peer-to-peer systems that do not depend on global platforms or global resources to operate and flourish, and retain the ownership of data and its control with the people that produce it. 

We present a grassroots protocol stack that employs the blocklace, a partially-ordered counterpart to the blockchain. The first layer of the protocol, grassroots dissemination, can realize grassroots social networking; the second layer, of equivocation exclusion, can realize grassroots cryptocurrencies, and the third layer, of ordering, can realize grassroots consensus. Together they can provide a grassroots foundation to egalitarian and democratic alternatives to existing global platform-based applications.

Project Liberty Manifesto: www.projectliberty.io/news/a-manifesto-from-project-liberty-s-founder-a-better-web-for-a-better-world

game theoryhuman-computer interactionsocial and information networkslaw and economics

Audience: researchers in the topic

( chat | video )

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Metagovernance Seminar

Series comments: The Metagovernance Seminar invites individuals working in online governance to present their work to a community of other researchers and practitioners. Topics of the seminar include, but are not limited to, computational tools for governance, governance incidents and case studies from online communities, topics in cryptoeconomics, and the design of digital constitutions.

See archived videos: archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Metagovernance%20Seminar%22

The seminar is intended for researchers and practitioners in online governance, broadly defined. We welcome guests and curious members of the public, but please note that the discussion is moderated. Our governance structure is defined here: metagov.pubpub.org/metagov-governance

Please contact a planning committee member (Cent Hosten, Nathan Schneider, Divya Siddarth, Michael Zargham, Joshua Tan, and Seth Frey) if you are interested in becoming a member of the seminar.

Where available, a direct link to the archived video is linked beneath the video tags.

Join our community to participate in the discussions around this series: metagov.org/join/community

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- Time: every Wednesday at 12:00pm ET (GMT-4). - Meeting Link: us06web.zoom.us/j/89076250096?pwd=flXetP53CxRFX7emjtiDhkbCR0CjBx.1

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