Decentralised Technologies To Support the Digital Commons

Talk at P2Pvalue Project Presentation in Barcelona (Spain)

Frequently the Web 2.0 is praised as the ultimate user-empowerment experience, overlooking its proprietary, corporate, and especially centralised nature. Centralisation has multiple flaws, and free/open-sourcing is not enough to overcome them. We need decentralised infrastructures.

Transcript

1. Decentralised Technologies Samer Hassan 1/22/14 www.p2pvalue.eu To Support the Digital Commons
2. 1/22/14 www.p2pvalue.eu  E.g. Youtube!  Great! Users produce contents!  empowerement  participation  communication  collaboration  Boost of online communities  Boost of user-generated contents  Boost of free culture and digital commons?  But... A Few Large For-Profit Corporations (!) centralising web services in "the Cloud" Web 2.0 CC-BY-SA Image by Wikipedia
3. 1/22/14 www.p2pvalue.eu  For-profit  "If you are not paying for the service, maybe it's because you are the product"  Surveillance  NSA  Backdoors  Monitoring  Data Mining  Profiling  Single point of failure  Concentration of power/control/resources  Centralised Control  Censorship  Filtering  Policies (e.g. compulsory real names) Centralisation: issues  Top-down  Decision-making  No community involvement  US-centric  Centralised in one country  One legal framework  Data channels through one territory  Proprietary Software  Opacity  Take-it-or-leave-it  Single Ownership  ...of the infrastructure  ...of the contents/results => Commons?
4. What to do? 1/22/14  Free/Libre Software: needed...  Open  Transparency  Accountability  Secure  Flexible  Reproducible  Community-driven  No backdoors  No dependencies  ...but not enough  => Decentralisation www.p2pvalue.eu CC-BY Image by OpenSourceWay in Flickr
5. 1/22/14 www.p2pvalue.eu  Privacy  By Design  Encryption  Anonimity  Multiple identities  Nicknames  No single policy  Decentralised control  No single actor controlling all the infrastructure  Autonomy & Social control Decentralisation  Bottom-up  Community-driven  Shared ownership: network of nodes  Diversity  Multiple regions  Multiple legal frameworks  Adapted nodes to local communities
6. 1/22/14 www.p2pvalue.eu  Centralised infrastructure, one node  e.g. Facebook  Centralised infrastructure, many nodes/communities  e.g. Ning  Federated infrastructure, many nodes/communities  interoperable with each other  e.g. Kune  P2P infrastructure:  each user installs/runs a piece of the infrastructure  e.g. Twister How to decentralise?
7. 1/22/14 www.p2pvalue.eu  Software Platform for boosting the sustainability of Commons-Based Peer Production communities  Federated infrastructure  Building on top of Kune, by the Comunes Nonprofit  Interoperable nodes  Privacy By Design approach  Social research driven platform  Deployment of several nodes for real-world communities Within P2Pvalue Project