New initiative launches to decentralize the Internet
The initiative, D-CENT (Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies), backed by the European Commission, will see the development of new open source, decentralized and privacy-aware digital tools and applications for direct democratic and economic empowerment. Together with citizens, social movements, and developers, D-CENT is creating a distributed social networking platform for large-scale collaboration to solve social problems and allow full citizen participation in the democratic process. The project will study possible implementations of liquid democracy: collective deliberation, decision-making, and the pros and cons of proxy voting. The project will also explore how to link democratic decision-making to economic empowerment, experimenting how communities might manage common goods and facilitate online exchanges with Bitcoin-style crypto currencies for the common good. Through engagement with well-established citizen movements, such as M15 in Spain, Open Ministry in Finland and Citizen Foundation in Iceland, the tools will be tested in large-scale pilots in Finland, Iceland and Spain later this year. Francesca Bria, coordinator of D-CENT at Nesta, said: 'D-CENT will valorize the collective knowledge of citizens, allowing them to re-imagine and re-design new democratic institutions. After Snowden’s revelations, digital rights are perceived as key issue that D-CENT is going to address, ensuring that people are in full control of their data, maintaining privacy and trust in technology they use. With D-CENT we want to support new citizen movements and build technologies designed for the common good.' D-CENT will use free, open source software and open data, and the code will be released under an open source license. This allows reusability across Europe, and software developers to use the code and write API-based applications on top of it. D-CENT will work with existing open knowledge initiatives that have similar aims to redecentralised digital infrastructures for citizens empowerment. The project is a part of a larger set of so-called CAPS initiatives (CAPS = Collective Awareness Platforms for Social innovation) in which collective online platforms are being developed. These initiatives aim to help people to improve their lives and collectively achieve better well-being, exploiting the power of the Internet. To find out more about D-CENT and to get involved in the project visit: www.dcentproject.eu
Countries
Spain, Finland, France, Ireland, United Kingdom