Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zoë Corbyn at The Observer: “The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms. So how does it work and when will it be here?...What is the decentralised web? 
It is supposed to be like the web you know but without relying on centralised operators. In the early days of the world wide web, which came into existence in 1989, you connected directly with your friends through desktop computers that talked to each other. But from the early 2000s, with the advent of Web 2.0, we began to communicate with each other and share information through centralised services provided by big companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. It is now on Facebook’s platform, in its so called “walled garden”, that you talk to your friends. “Our laptops have become just screens. They cannot do anything useful without the cloud,” says Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Blockstack, a platform for building decentralised apps. The DWeb is about re-decentralising things – so we aren’t reliant on these intermediaries to connect us. Instead users keep control of their data and connect and interact and exchange messages directly with others in their network.

Why do we need an alternative? 
With the current web, all that user data concentrated in the hands of a few creates risk that our data will be hacked. It also makes it easier for governments to conduct surveillance and impose censorship. And if any of these centralised entities shuts down, your data and connections are lost. Then there are privacy concerns stemming from the business models of many of the companies, which use the private information we provide freely to target us with ads. “The services are kind of creepy in how much they know about you,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. The DWeb, say proponents, is about giving people a choice: the same services, but decentralised and not creepy. It promises control and privacy, and things can’t all of a sudden disappear because someone decides they should. On the DWeb, it would be harder for the Chinese government to block a site it didn’t like, because the information can come from other places.

How does the DWeb work that is different? 

There are two big differences in how the DWeb works compared to the world wide web, explains Matt Zumwalt, the programme manager at Protocol Labs, which builds systems and tools for the DWeb. First, there is this peer-to-peer connectivity, where your computer not only requests services but provides them. Second, how information is stored and retrieved is different. Currently we use http and https links to identify information on the web. Those links point to content by its location, telling our computers to find and retrieve things from those locations using the http protocol. By contrast, DWeb protocols use links that identify information based on its content – what it is rather than where it is. This content-addressed approach makes it possible for websites and files to be stored and passed around in many ways from computer to computer rather than always relying on a single server as the one conduit for exchanging information. “[In the traditional web] we are pointing to this location and pretending [the information] exists in only one place,” says Zumwalt. “And from this comes this whole monopolisation that has followed… because whoever controls the location controls access to the information.”…(More)”.

European science funders ban grantees from publishing in paywalled journals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Martin Enserink at Science: “Frustrated with the slow transition toward open access (OA) in scientific publishing, 11 national funding organizations in Europe turned up the pressure today. As of 2020, the group, which jointly spends about €7.6 billion on research annually, will require every paper it funds to be freely available from the moment of publication. In a statement, the group said it will no longer allow the 6- or 12-month delays that many subscription journals now require before a paper is made OA, and it won’t allow publication in so-called hybrid journals, which charge subscriptions but also make individual papers OA for an extra fee.

The move means grantees from these 11 funders—which include the national funding agencies in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France as well as Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics—will have to forgo publishing in thousands of journals, including high-profile ones such as Nature, Science, Cell, and The Lancet, unless those journals change their business model. “We think this could create a tipping point,” says Marc Schiltz, president of Science Europe, the Brussels-based association of science organizations that helped coordinate the plan. “Really the idea was to make a big, decisive step—not to come up with another statement or an expression of intent.”

The announcement delighted many OA advocates. “This will put increased pressure on publishers and on the consciousness of individual researchers that an ecosystem change is possible,” says Ralf Schimmer, head of Scientific Information Provision at the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, Germany. Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication, calls the plan “admirably strong.” Many other funders support OA, but only the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation applies similarly stringent requirements for “immediate OA,” Suber says. The European Commission and the European Research Council support the plan; although they haven’t adopted similar requirements for the research they fund, a statement by EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas suggests they may do so in the future and urges the European Parliament and the European Council to endorse the approach….(More)”.

This co-op lets patients monetize their own health data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eillie Anzilotti at FastCompany: “Diagnosed with juvenile arthritis as a kid, Jen Horonjeff knew she wanted to enter the medical field to help others navigate the healthcare system in America. She went on to get her Ph.D. in environmental medicine, hoping to better understand the social and contextual factors that surround the strict biology of a disease. Throughout her studies, though, something began to irk her. In both the practice of and research around medicine, she found that the perspective of the patient was all but nonexistent.

So in 2016, Horonjeff, along with her co-founder Ronnie Sharpe, who grew up with cystic fibrosis and founded a social network for others with the diseases, started Savvy, a platform to bridge the gap between patients and practitioners. The platform officially launched in the fall of 2017, and recently became a public benefit corporation….

But Savvy also tackles another imbalance in the patient-practitioner relationship. Whenever a patient is seen by a doctor, or enters their information into a medical app or platform, they’re providing the health community an invaluable resource: their data. But they’re not getting compensated for it. To ensure that patients participating in Savvy get something in return, Horonjeff and Sharpe set their platform up as a cooperative, owned collectively by the patients that contribute to it. Any patient who wants to become a Savvy member pays a buy-in fee of $34, which establishes them as a member of the co-op (the fee is waived for patients who cannot afford it, and some other members give more than the base membership fee to subsidize others). “When people become members, they have a voice in what we do, and they also share in our profits,” Horonjeff says….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing – a New Paradigm of Organisational Learning of Public Organisation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Regina Lenart-Gansiniec and Łukasz Sułkowski: “Crowdsourcing is one of the new themes that has appeared in the last decade. Considering its potential, more and more organisations reach for it. It is perceived as an innovative method that can be used for problem solving, improving business processes, creating open innovations, building a competitive advantage, and increasing transparency and openness of the organisation. Crowdsourcing is also conceptualised as a source of a knowledge-based organisation. The importance of crowdsourcing for organisational learning is seen as one of the key themes in the latest literature in the field of crowdsourcing. Since 2008, there has been an increase in the interest of public organisations in crowdsourcing and including it in their activities.

This article is a response to the recommendations in the subject literature, which states that crowdsourcing in public organisations is a new and exciting research area. The aim of the article is to present a new paradigm that combines crowdsourcing levels with the levels of learning. The research methodology is based on an analysis of the subject literature and exemplifications of organisations which introduce crowdsourcing. This article presents a cross-sectional study of four Polish municipal offices that use four types of crowdsourcing, according to the division by J. Howe: collective intelligence, crowd creation, crowd voting, and crowdfunding. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the management personnel of those municipal offices. The research results show that knowledge acquired from the virtual communities allows the public organisation to anticipate changes, expectations, and needs of citizens and to adapt to them. It can therefore be considered that crowdsourcing is a new and rapidly developing organisational learning paradigm….(More)”

Long Term Info-structure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Long Now Foundation Seminar by Juan Benet: “We live in a spectacular time,”…”We’re a century into our computing phase transition. The latest stages have created astonishing powers for individuals, groups, and our species as a whole. We are also faced with accumulating dangers — the capabilities to end the whole humanity experiment are growing and are ever more accessible. In light of the promethean fire that is computing, we must prevent bad outcomes and lock in good ones to build robust foundations for our knowledge, and a safe future. There is much we can do in the short-term to secure the long-term.”

“I come from the front lines of computing platform design to share a number of new super-powers at our disposal, some old challenges that are now soluble, and some new open problems. In this next decade, we’ll need to leverage peer-to-peer networks, crypto-economics, blockchains, Open Source, Open Services, decentralization, incentive-structure engineering, and so much more to ensure short-term safety and the long-term flourishing of humanity.”

Juan Benet is the inventor of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)—a new protocol which uses content-addressing to make the web faster, safer, and more open—and the creator of Filecoin, a cryptocurrency-incentivized storage market….(More + Video)”

The Copenhagen Letter (on ethical technology)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Letter: “To everyone who shapes technology today

We live in a world where technology is consuming society, ethics, and our core existence.

It is time to take responsibility for the world we are creating. Time to put humans before business. Time to replace the empty rhetoric of “building a better world” with a commitment to real action. It is time to organize, and to hold each other accountable.

Tech is not above us. It should be governed by all of us, by our democratic institutions. It should play by the rules of our societies. It should serve our needs, both individual and collective, as much as our wants.

Progress is more than innovation. We are builders at heart. Let us create a new Renaissance. We will open and nourish honest public conversation about the power of technology. We are ready to serve our societies. We will apply the means at our disposal to move our societies and their institutions forward.

Let us build from trust. Let us build for true transparency. We need digital citizens, not mere consumers. We all depend on transparency to understand how technology shapes us, which data we share, and who has access to it. Treating each other as commodities from which to extract maximum economic value is bad, not only for society as a complex, interconnected whole but for each and every one of us.

Design open to scrutiny. We must encourage a continuous, public, and critical reflection on our definition of success as it defines how we build and design for others. We must seek to design with those for whom we are designing. We will not tolerate design for addiction, deception, or control. We must design tools that we would love our loved ones to use. We must question our intent and listen to our hearts.

Let us move from human-centered design to humanity-centered design.
We are a community that exerts great influence. We must protect and nurture the potential to do good with it. We must do this with attention to inequality, with humility, and with love. In the end, our reward will be to know that we have done everything in our power to leave our garden patch a little greener than we found it….(More)”.

The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Kevin Werbach: “The blockchain entered the world on January 3, 2009, introducing an innovative new trust architecture: an environment in which users trust a system—for example, a shared ledger of information—without necessarily trusting any of its components. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is the most famous implementation of the blockchain, but hundreds of other companies have been founded and billions of dollars invested in similar applications since Bitcoin’s launch. Some see the blockchain as offering more opportunities for criminal behavior than benefits to society. In this book, Kevin Werbach shows how a technology resting on foundations of mutual mistrust can become trustworthy.

The blockchain, built on open software and decentralized foundations that allow anyone to participate, seems like a threat to any form of regulation. In fact, Werbach argues, law and the blockchain need each other. Blockchain systems that ignore law and governance are likely to fail, or to become outlaw technologies irrelevant to the mainstream economy. That, Werbach cautions, would be a tragic waste of potential. If, however, we recognize the blockchain as a kind of legal technology, which shapes behavior in new ways, it can be harnessed to create tremendous business and social value….(More)”.

Why Proven Solutions Struggle to Scale Up

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kriss Deiglmeier & Amanda Greco at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…As we applied the innovation continuum to the cases we studied, we identified barriers to scale that often trap social innovations in a stagnation chasm before they achieve diffusion and scaling.

 

Three barriers in particular repeatedly block social innovations from reaching their broadest impact: inadequate funds for growth, the fragmented nature of the social innovation ecosystem, and talent gaps. If we are serious about propelling proven social innovations to achieve widespread impact, we must find solutions that overcome each of these barriers. The rest of the article will explore in more detail each of these three barriers in turn.

1. Inadequate Funding

Social innovators face a convoluted and often elusive path to mobilize the resources needed to amplify the impact of their work. Of the strategies for scale in Mulgan’s typology, some are very capital intensive, others less so. Yet even the advocacy and network approaches to scaling social impact require resources. It takes time, funding, and expertise to navigate the relationships and complex interdependencies that are critical to success. Some ventures may benefit from earned revenue streams that provide funds for growth, but earned revenue isn’t guaranteed in the social innovation space, especially for innovations that operate where markets fail to meet needs and serve people with no ability to pay. Thus, external funding is usually needed in order to scale impact, whether from donors or from investors depending on the legal structure and financial prospects of the venture….

2. A Fragmented Ecosystem

One sector toiling in isolation or digging into an adversarial approach cannot achieve breakthrough scale on its own. Instead, engaging and coordinating actions across various actors from the private, nonprofit, and public sectors is critical. In the case of microfinance, for example, the innovation garnered interest from government and business when nonprofits like Grameen Bank had demonstrated success in providing financial services to formerly unbanked people.

Following the pioneering role of nonprofits to establish proof of concept, commercial banks entered the market, with mixed social outcomes, given the pressure they faced for profitability. As the microfinance industry matured, governments created a legal and regulatory environment that encouraged transparency, market entry, and competition. The cumulative efforts and engagement across the nonprofit, private, and public sectors were critical to scaling microfinance as we know it today and will continue to refine the approach for better social outcomes in the future…

3. The Talent Gap

To drive social innovations in a world of rapid change, organizations need talented leaders supported by effective teams. The insufficient funding and fragmented ecosystem require highly adept people to shepherd social innovations through the long journey to widespread social impact. Unfortunately, attracting and retaining people to navigate these complexities is a challenge…(More)”.

With real-time decisions, Citi Bike breaks the cycle of empty stations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Melanie Lefkowitz at Cornell Chronicle: “Cornell research has improved bike sharing in New York and other cities, providing tools to ensure bikes are available when and where they’re needed through a crowdsourcing system that uses real-time information to make decisions.

Citi Bike redistributes its bicycles around New York City using a program called Bike Angels, based on research by David Shmoys, the Laibe/Acheson Professor of Business Management and Leadership Studies in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.

Through Bike Angels, which Shmoys helped Citi Bike develop three years ago, cyclists earn points adding up to free rides and other prizes by using or returning bikes at certain high-need stations. Originally, Bike Angels awarded points for the same pattern of stations every morning, and a different fixed pattern each afternoon rush; now the program uses an algorithm that continually updates the pattern of stations for which users earn points.

“The ability to make decisions that are sensitive to exactly what are today’s conditions enables us to be much more effective in assigning those points,” said Shmoys, who is also associate director of Cornell’s Institute for Computational Sustainability.

With co-authors Hangil Chung ’18 and Daniel Freund, Ph.D. ’18, Shmoys wrote “Bike Angels: An Analysis of Citi Bike’s Incentive Program,” a detailed report showing the effectiveness of this approach. …(More)”.

How to Prevent Winner-Takes-All Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kaushik Basu at Project Syndicate: “Democracy is in crisis. Fake news – and fake allegations of fake news – now plagues civil discourse, and political parties have proved increasingly willing to use xenophobia and other malign strategies to win elections. At the same time, revisionist powers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia have been stepping up their efforts to interfere in elections across the West. Rarely has the United States witnessed such brazen attacks on its political system; and rarely has the world seen such lows during peacetime….

How can all of this be happening in democracies, and what can be done about it?

On the first question, one hypothesis is that new digital technologies are changing the structural incentives for corporations, political parties, and other major institutions. Consider the case of corporations. The wealth of proprietary data on consumer preferences and behavior is producing such massive returns to scale that a few giants are monopolizing markets. In other words, markets are increasingly geared toward a winner-take-all game: multiple corporations can compete, but to the victor go the spoils.1

Electoral democracy is drifting in the same direction. The benefits of winning an election have become so large that political parties will stoop to new lows to clinch a victory. And, as with corporations, they can do so with the help of data on electoral preferences and behavior, and with new strategies to target key constituencies.

This poses a dilemma for well-meaning democratic parties and politicians. If a “bad” party is willing to foment hate and racism to bolster its chances of winning, what is a “good” party to do? If it sticks to its principles, it could end up ceding victory to the “bad” party, which will do even more harm once it is in office. A “good” party may thus try to forestall that outcome by taking a step down the moral ladder, precipitating a race to the bottom. This is the problem with any winner-takes-all game. When second place confers no benefits, the cost of showing unilateral restraint can grow intolerably high.

But this problem is not as hopeless as it appears. In light of today’s crisis of democracy, we would do well to revisit Václav Havel’s seminal 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” First published as samizdat that was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, the essay makes a simple but compelling argument. Dictatorships and other seemingly omnipotent forms of authoritarianism may look like large, top-down structures, but in the final analysis, they are merely the outcome of ordinary individuals’ beliefs and choices. Havel did not have the tools of modern economic theory to demonstrate his argument formally. In my new book The Republic of Beliefs, I show that the essence of his argument can be given formal structure using elementary game theory. This, in turn, shows that ordinary individuals have moral options that may be unavailable to the big institutional players….(More)”.