DirectDemocracyP2P—Decentralized deliberative petition drives—

E-Procurement Management for Successful Electronic Government Systems, 2012

The present chapter aims to introduce the construction of a generic platform and open secure voting and multipurpose for the realm of the Internet. This platform will allow for collecting signatures and supporting multiple contexts through the use of electronic IDs and digital certificates. Potential applications of this platform are almost endless but some of the most significant may be: Voting at shareholders meetings, and votes in communities of neighbors, collect signatures, collect signatures for nominations, proposals for ILP ( ...

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2009

In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications, peers exchange their opinions with each other and make an agreement on one opinion. Agreement procedures have to be so flexible that persons can change their opinions, withdraw previous opinions under some constraints on the opinions, and use various types of agreement conditions like majority-condition in our society. We discuss a flexible agreement protocol of multiple peers by taking into account human behaviours in a fully unstructured P2P system model. We discuss forward, backward, mining, and observation strategies to efficiently make agreement. We discuss how peers cooperate to take consistent strategies at each round.ABSTRACT

2021

Peer-to-peer networks and protocols have inspired new ideas and ideologies about governance, with the aim of using technology to enable horizontal and decentralized decision-making at scale. This article introduces the concept of "dissensus" from political theory to debates about peer governance in online communities. Dissensus describes the emergence of incompatible differences. Among peer-to-peer technologies, blockchain stands out as a set of ideas that explicitly seek to resolve dissensus through consensus protocols. In this article, we propose dissensus as a "protocol" for foregrounding the often sidelined yet productive aspects of incompatible differences. The concept highlights that there might not always be consensus about a consensus algorithm, and that indeed, dissensus is the precondition for new possibilities and perspectives to emerge. We discuss the concept in relation to the histories of governance ideas in blockchain, namely, a "materialist," "design," and "emergent" approach. We then describe moments of dissensus in practice through two cases of online communities, Genesis DAO and Ouishare, discussing their different ways of recognizing and navigating dissensus. Finally, we give a critical overview of consensus algorithms, voting, staking, and forking as the mechanisms that make out blockchain governance ideologies. In conclusion, we argue that dissensus can serve as a useful concept for pointing attention to governance as it is conducted in practice, as historically and culturally specific practices, rather than as a problem to be solved through supposedly universal mechanisms.

In the last decade, many countries have shown a growing interest in digitalizing elections, particularly through the use of e-voting technologies. In this context, the DemTech research project (www.demtech.dk) has been established in order to test whether it is possible to digitalize the electoral process while balancing the trust of the people on the trustworthiness of the deployed technology. In Denmark, the discussion about implementing e-voting technologies has been put aside, at least for the time being. The law for permitting experimentations with e-voting technologies has been turned down by the Danish parliament. Consequently, our research focus has shifted from how can trustworthy e-voting machines be designed to which parts of the electoral apparatus would benefit from some sort of digitalization. After all, elections are composed of, not only election day-where the voter cast their ballot-but also, of a long and complicated chain of procedures and processes (e.g., ordering election material, organizing advance voting, training employees, setting up polling stations, etc.). Some of these processes are already supported by different technologies (e.g. generating the voters list), while others are far from being digitalized. One of the areas where technology can potentially support the process of organizing election is in developing and maintaining infrastructures for knowledge sharing.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2020

The decentralized architecture of Internet sparkled technoutopian visions of a virtual freedom space for humanity. Peerto-peer systems, collaborative creation (wikipedia), open source software (Linux), universal shared knowledge, and the hopes for disintermediation contributed to this major vision. However, the reality is bleak: centralization is reigning in the cyberspace, with huge technological corporations controlling our data, and re-intermediation and control are stronger than ever in the so-called "sharing" economy. The Internet is also fragmented by countries, with many states imposing heavy controls to information and communication services. The 21st century will witness the major clash between centralization and decentralization in human history. And the major struggle will be around the communication and feedback technologies that will intermediate and govern every interaction in our lives. Unlike previous approaches that propose to socialize the feedback infrastructure or to use anti-monopoly laws to break Big Tech companies, in this article we advocate for the decentralization of the information and communication infrastructure. And the key to this decentralization is the creation of standards enabling interoperability between data platforms. This will in turn produce a true disintermediation from well established technological players and open competition to small third parties. In this article, we sketch such a decentralized open infrastructure including communication, sharing, matchmaking, and reputation services that can be constructed over open source technologies and standards.

ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 2006

In this article, we introduce and study a framework, called peer data exchange , for sharing and exchanging data between peers. This framework is a special case of a full-fledged peer data management system and a generalization of data exchange between a source schema and a target schema. The motivation behind peer data exchange is to model authority relationships between peers, where a source peer may contribute data to a target peer, specified using source-to-target constraints, and a target peer may use target-to-source constraints to restrict the data it is willing to receive, but cannot modify the data of the source peer.A fundamental algorithmic problem in this framework is that of deciding the existence of a solution: given a source instance and a target instance for a fixed peer data exchange setting, can the target instance be augmented in such a way that the source instance and the augmented target instance satisfy all constraints of the setting? We investigate the computa...

In recent years, Web 2.0 has become manifest in new types of applications causing fundamentally new experiences of large-scale social interaction. It has affected the way people communicate, share, collaborate, and-ultimately-participate on the Web. The technologies associated with” the Web 2.0” have a focus on broadened participation by lowering the technical barriers for users.

2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2018

Decide Madrid is the civic technology of Madrid City Council which allows users to create and support online petitions. Despite the initial success, the platform is encountering problems with the growth of petition signing because petitions are far from the minimum number of supporting votes they must gather. Previous analyses have suggested that this problem is produced by the interface: a paginated list of petitions which applies a non-optimal ranking algorithm. For this reason, we present an interactive system for the discovery of topics and petitions. This approach leads us to reflect on the usefulness of data visualization techniques to address relevant societal challenges.

2011 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference, 2011