Today’s Collaborative Economy has three challenges:

1. It relies on centralized hubs, that in order to monetize use the massive collection of personal data as business models.
2. There is a big difference of power between the owners of the infrastructure and the user communities, where decisions are concentrated on the latter.
3. The economic profits derived from the communities’ activity are again concentrated in the owners of the infrastructure.

Can we build platforms that are decentralized, democratic, and where profit is distributed? In this talk, I will present P2P Models (p2pmodels.eu), a new ERC 1.5M€ research project to build Blockchain-powered organizations which are decentralized, democratic and distribute their profits, in order to boost a new type of Collaborative Economy. The project has three legs:

1. Infrastructure: To provide a software framework to build decentralized infrastructure for Collaborative Economy organizations, providing building blocks to build agent-mediated “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs).
2. Governance: To enable democratic-by-design models of governance for communities, whose rules are, at least partially, encoded in the software to ensure higher levels of equality (using “smart contracts” of those DAOs).
3. Economics: To enable value distribution models which are interoperable across organizations, improving the economic sustainability of both contributors and organizations.

About Samer Hassan

Samer Hassan is an activist and researcher, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University) and Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Focused on decentralized collaboration, he received a 1.5M€ ERC grant to build blockchain-based democratic and sustainable organizations for the collaborative economy. Coming from a multidisciplinary background in Computer Science and Social Sciences, he has more than 45 publications in those fields. In the P2Pvalue project, he coordinated building decentralized web-tools for collaborative communities and social movements, such as SwellRT and Jetpad. Engaged in free/open source projects, he co-founded the Comunes Nonprofit and the Move Commons webtool project. He’s an accredited grassroots facilitator and has experience in multiple communities and grassroots initiatives. His research interests include the Collaborative Economy, Commons-based peer production, decentralized architectures, blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations, online communities, grassroots social movements & cyberethics. Follow Samer on Twitter: @samerP2P

Personal website

This event will be conducted in English