This event will take place at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 7, 2018 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Today’s Collaborative Economy relies on centralized hubs for data collection, where communities are disempowered and economic profits are concentrated in the owners of the infrastructure. In this talk, Samer Hassan, researcher at Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and UCM in Madrid, will present P2P Models: an EU-funded 1.5M€ 5-year interdisciplinary research project to build Blockchain-powered organizations which are decentralized, democratic and economically sustainable, in order to boost a new type of Collaborative Economy. The project has three pillars:
- Infrastructure: To provide a software framework to build decentralized infrastructure for Collaborative Economy organizations, providing building blocks to build “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). The idea is to replace centralized platforms where a single owner of the infrastructure has absolute control.
- 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 and inclusion. We hope to facilitate the processes of commons-oriented communities, co-designing prototypes with them.
- Economics: To enable value distribution models which are not solely based on markets, exploring forms of improving the economic sustainability of both individual contributors and organizations.
About Samer:
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 economically sustainable organizations for the collaborative economy (“P2P Models” project). Coming from a multidisciplinary background in Computer Science and Social Sciences, he has 50+ publications in those fields. In the EU-funded P2Pvalue project, he coordinated building decentralized free/open source web-tools for collaborative communities and social movements, such as SwellRT and Jetpad. 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