In this post, we analyze Wikipedia — a site that has achieved tremendous success and scale through crowd-sourcing human input to create one of the Internet’s greatest public goods. Wikipedia’s success is particularly impressive considering that the site is owned and operated by a non-profit organization, and that almost all of its content is contributed by unpaid volunteers.

The non-commercial, volunteer-driven nature of Wikipedia may cause developers from the “decentralized web” to question the site’s relevance. However, these differences may be merely cosmetic: IPFS, for example, has no inherent commercial model, and most of the open source projects that underlie the decentralized web are built, at least in part, by volunteers.

We believe that a site that has managed to coordinate so many people to produce such remarkable content is well worth a look as we search for solutions to similar problems in the emerging decentralized web.

To better understand Wikipedia’s success, we first survey some key features of Wikipedia’s battle-tested (to the tune of 120,000 active volunteer editors) coordination mechanisms. Next, we present some valuable high-level lessons that blockchain projects interested in human input might learn from Wikipedia’s approach. Finally, we explore vulnerabilities inherent to Wikipedia’s suite of mechanisms, as well as the defenses it has developed to such attacks.

Wikipedia: key elements

While we cannot hope to cover all of Wikipedia’s functionality in this short post, we start by outlining a number of Wikipedia’s foundational coordination mechanisms as background for our analysis.

User and article Talk Pages

While anyone can edit an article anonymously on Wikipedia, most regular editors choose to register with the organization and gain additional privileges. As such, most editors, and all articles, have a public metadata page known as a talk page, for public conversations about the relevant user or article. Talk pages are root-level collaborative infrastructure: they allow conversations and disputes to happen frequently and publicly.

Since talk pages capture a history of each editor’s interaction — both in terms of encyclopedia content and conversational exchanges with other editors — they also provide the basis for Wikipedia’s reputation system.

Clear and accessible rules

If we think of the collection of mechanisms Wikipedia uses to coordinate its editors as a kind of “social protocol”, the heart of that protocol would surely be its List of Guidelines and List of Policies, developed and enforced by the community itself. According to the Wikipedia page on Policies and Guidelines:

“Wikipedia policies and guidelines are developed by the community… Policies are standards that all users should normally follow, and guidelines are generally meant to be best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense.”

For many coming from a blockchain background, such policies and guidelines will likely seem far too informal to be of much use, especially without monetary or legal enforcement. And yet, the practical reality is that these mechanisms have been remarkably effective at coordinating Wikipedia’s tens of thousands of volunteer editors over almost two decades, without having to resort to legal threats or economic incentives for enforcement.

Enforcement: Peer consensus and volunteer authority

Upon hearing that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, no money is staked, no contracts are signed, and neither paid police nor smart contracts are available to enforce the guidelines, an obvious question is: why are the rules actually followed?

Wikipedia’s primary enforcement strategy is peer-based consensus. Editors know that when peer consensus fails, final authority rests with certain, privileged, volunteer authorities with long-standing reputations at stake.

Peer consensus

As an example, let’s consider three of the site’s most fundamental content policies, often referred to together. “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), “No Original Research” (NOR), and “Verifiability” (V) evolved to guide editors towards Wikipedia’s mission of an unbiased encyclopedia.

If I modify the Wikipedia page for Mahatma Gandhi, changing his birthdate to the year 1472, or offering an ungrounded opinion about his life or work, there is no economic loss or legal challenge. Instead, because there is a large community of editors who do respect the policies (even though I do not), my edit will almost certainly be swiftly reverted until I can credibly argue that my changes meet Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines (“Neutral Point of View” and “Verifiability”, in this case).

Such discussions typically take place on talk pages, either the editor’s or the article’s, until consensus amongst editors is achieved. If I insist on maintaining my edits without convincing my disputants, I risk violating other policies, such as 3RR (explained below), and attracting the attention of an administrator.

Volunteer authority: Administrators and Bureaucrats

When peer consensus fails, and explicit authority is needed to resolve a dispute, action is taken by an experienced volunteer editor with a long and positive track record: an Administrator.

Administrators have a high degree of control over content, include blocking and unblocking users, editing protected pages, and deleting and undeleting pages. Because there are relatively few of them (~500 active administrators for English Wikipedia), being an administrator is quite an honor. Once nominated, adminship is determined through discussion on the user’s nomination page, not voting, with a volunteer bureaucrat gauging the positivity of comments at the end of the discussion. In practice, those candidates having more than 75% positive comments tend to pass.

Bureaucrats are the highest level of volunteer authority in Wikipedia, and are also typically administrators as well. While administrators have the final say for content decisions, bureaucrats hold the ultimate responsibility for adding and removing all kinds of user privileges, including adminship. Like administrators, bureaucrats are determined through community discussion and consensus. However, they are even rarer: there are currently only 18 for the entire English Wikipedia.

Since there is no hard limit to the number of administrators and bureaucrats, promotion is truly meritocratic.

Evolving governance

Another notable aspect of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines is that they can change over time. And in principle, changing a Wikipedia policy or guideline page is no different than changing any other page on the site.

The fluidity of the policies and guidelines plays an important role in maintaining editors’ confidence in enforcing the rules. After all, people are much more likely to believe in rules that they helped create.

If we continue to think of the policies and guidelines for Wikipedia as a kind of protocol, we would say that the protocol can be amended over time and that the governance for its evolution takes place in-protocol — that is, as a part of the protocol itself.

Lessons for the decentralized web

Now that we have a little bit of background on Wikipedia’s core mechanisms, we will delve into the ways that Wikipedia’s approach to coordination differs from similar solutions in public blockchain protocols. There are three areas where we believe the decentralized web may have lessons to learn from Wikipedia’s success: cooperative games, reputation, and an iterative approach to “success”.

We also hope that these lessons may apply to our problem of generating trusted seed sets for Osrank.

Blockchain should consider cooperative games

Examining Wikipedia with our blockchain hats on, one thing that jumps out right away is that pretty much all of Wikipedia’s coordination games are cooperative rather than adversarial. For contrast, consider Proof of Work as it is used by the Bitcoin network. Because running mining hardware costs money in the form of electricity and because only one node can get the reward in each block, the game is inherently zero-sum: when I win, I earn a block reward; every other miner loses money. It is the adversarial nature of such games that leaves us unsurprised when concerns like selfish mining start to crop up.

As an even better example, consider Token Curated Registries (TCRs). We won’t spend time describing the mechanics of TCRs here, because we plan to cover the topic in more detail in a later post. But for now, the important thing to know is that TCRs allow people to place bets, with real money, on whether or not a given item will be included in a list. The idea is that, like an efficient market, the result of the betting will converge to produce the correct answer.

One problem with mechanisms like TCRs is that many people have a strong preference against playing any game in which they have a significant chance of losing — even if they can expect their gains to make up for their losses over time. In behavioral psychology, this result is known as loss aversion and has been confirmed in many real-world experiments.

In short, Proof of Work and TCRs are both adversarial mechanisms for resolving conflicts and coming to consensus. To see how Wikipedia resolves similar conflicts using cooperative solutions, let’s dive deeper into what dispute resolution looks like on the site.

Dispute resolution

So how does a dubious change to Mahatma Gandhi’s page actually get reverted? In other words, what is the process by which that work gets done?

When a dispute first arises, Wikipedia instructs the editors to avoid their instinct to revert or overwrite each other’s edits, and to take the conflict to the article’s talk page instead. Some quotes from Wikipedia’s page on Dispute Resolution point to the importance of the Talk pages:

“Talking to other parties is not a mere formality, but an integral part of writing the encyclopedia”

“Sustained discussion between the parties, even if not immediately successful, demonstrates your good faith and shows you are trying to reach a consensus.”

Editors who insist on “edit warring”, or simply reverting another editor’s changes without discussion, risk violating Wikipedia’s 3RR policy, which prohibits editors from reverting 3 changes on a given page in 24 hours. Editors who violate 3RR risk a temporary suspension of their accounts.

If initial efforts by the editors to communicate on the Talk Page fail, Wikipedia offers many additional solutions for cooperative coordination, including:

• Editor Assistance provides one-on-one advice on how to conduct a civil, content-focused discussion from an experienced editor.
• Moderated Discussion offers the facilitation help of an experienced moderator, and is only available after lengthy discussion on the article’s Talk page.
• 3rd Opinion, matches the disputants with a third, neutral opinion, and is only available for disputes involving only people.
• Community Input allows the disputants to get input from a (potentially) large number of content experts.

Binding arbitration from the Arbitration Committee is considered the option of last resort, and is the only option in which the editors are not required to come to a consensus on their own. According to Wikipedia’s index of arbitration cases, this mechanism has been invoked only 513 times since 2004 — a strong vote of confidence for its first-pass dispute resolution mechanisms.

A notable theme of all of these dispute resolution mechanisms is how uniformly cooperative they are. In particular, it is worth observing that in no case can any editor lose something of significant economic value, as they might, for instance, if a TCR was used to resolve the dispute.

What the editor does lose, if their edit does not make it into the encyclopedia, is whatever time and work she put into the edit. This risk likely incentivises editors to make small, frequent contributions rather than large ones and to discuss major changes with other editors before starting work on them.

“Losing” may not even be the right word. As long as the author of the unincluded edit believes in Wikipedia’s process as a whole, she may still view her dispute as another form of contribution to the article. In fact, reputation-wise, evidence of a well-conducted dispute only adds credibility to the user accounts of the disputants.

Reputation without real-world identity can work

Another lesson from Wikipedia relates to what volunteer editors have at stake and how the site’s policies use that stake to ensure their good behavior on the system.

Many blockchain systems require that potential participants stake something of real-world value, typically either a bond or an off-chain record of good “reputation”. For example, in some protocols, proof-of-stake validators risk losing large amount of tokens if they don’t follow the network’s consensus rules. In other networks, governors or trustees might be KYC’d with the threat of legal challenge, or public disapproval, if they misbehave.

Wikipedia appears to have found a way to incentivize participants’ attachment to their pseudonyms without requiring evidence of real-world identity. We believe this is because reputation in Wikipedia’s community is based on a long-running history of small contributions that is difficult and time-consuming to fake, outsource, or automate.

Once an editor has traded anonymity for pseudonymity and created a user account, the first type of reputation that is typically considered is their “edit count”. Edit count is the total number of page changes that the editor has made during his or her history of contributing to Wikipedia. In a sense, edit count is a human version of proof-of-work, because it provides a difficult-to-fake reference for the amount of work the editor has contributed to the site.

If edit count is the simplest quantitative measure of a user’s total reputation on the site, its qualitative analog is the user talk pages. Talk pages provide a complete record of the user’s individual edits, as well as a record of administrative actions that have been taken against the user, and notes and comments by other users. The Wikipedia community also offers many kinds of subjective awards which contribute to editor reputation.

Reputable editors enjoy privileges on Wikipedia that cannot be earned in any other way — in particular, a community-wide “benefit of the doubt”. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual’s page on vandalism and spam provides a good high-level overview, instructing editors who encounter a potentially problematic edit to first visit the author’s talk page. Talk pages with lots of edits over time indicate the author should be assumed to be acting in good faith, and notified before their questionable edit is reverted: “In the rare case that you think there’s a problem with an edit from this kind of editor, chances are you’ve misunderstood something.”

On the other hand, the same source’s recommendations for questionable edits by anonymous editors, or editors with empty talk pages, are quite different: “If you see a questionable edit from this kind of user account, you can be virtually certain it was vandalism.”

Blockchains which adopt similar reputation mechanisms might expect to see two major changes: slower evolution of governance and sticky users. And while no public blockchains that we’re aware of have made significant use of pseudonymous reputation, it’s worth noting that such mechanisms have played a significant role in the increasing adoption of the Dark Web.

Assigning power based on a long history of user edits means that the composition of the governing class necessarily changes slowly and predictably, and is therefore less subject to the “hostile takeovers” that are a fundamental risk for many token-voting-based schemes.

Sticky users are a consequence of the slow accretion of power: experienced users tend to stick to their original pseudonym precisely because it would be time-consuming to recreate a similar level of privilege (both implicit and explicit) under a new identity.

All in all, Wikipedia’s reputation system may represent an excellent compromise between designs offering total anonymity on one hand and identity models built on personally identifying information on the other. In particular, such a system has the benefit of allowing users to accrue reputation over time and resisting Sybil attacks by punishing users if and when they misbehave. At the same time, it also allows users to preserve the privacy of their real-world identities if they wish.

Iteration over finality

Wikipedia’s encyclopedic mission, by its very nature, can never be fully completed. As such, the site’s mechanisms do not attempt to resolve conflicts quickly or ensure the next version of a given page arrives at the ultimate truth, but rather, just nudge the encyclopedia one step closer to its goal. This “iterative attitude” is particularly well-suited to assembling human input. Humans often take a long time to make decisions, change their minds frequently, and are susceptible to persuasion by their peers.

What can Radicle, and other p2p & blockchain projects, learn from Wikipedia in this regard? Up to this point, many protocol designers in blockchain have had a preference for mechanisms that achieve “finality” — that is, resolve to a final state, with no further changes allowed — as quickly as possible. There are often very good reasons for this, particularly in the area of consensus mechanisms and yet, taking inspiration from Wikipedia, we might just as easily consider designs that favor slow incremental changes over fast decisive ones.

For instance, imagine a protocol in which (as with Wikipedia) it is relatively easy for any user to change the system state (e.g. propose a new trusted seed), but such a change might be equally easily reverted by another user, or a group of users with superior reputation.

Or consider a protocol in which any state change is rolled out over a long period of time. In Osrank, for instance, this might mean that trusted seeds would start out as only 10% trusted, then 20% trusted one month later, and so on. While such a design would be quite different from how Wikipedia works today, it would hew to the same spirit of slow, considered change over instant finality.

Attacks and defenses

While the previous section covered a number of ways in which Wikipedia’s mechanisms have found success up to this point, the true test of a decentralized system is how vulnerable it is to attacks and manipulation. In this section, we introduce Wikipedia’s perspective on security. We then examine some of Wikipedia’s vulnerabilities, the attacks that play upon them and the defenses the Wikipedia community has evolved.

How Wikipedia Works: Chapter 12 discusses the fact that nearly all of the security utilized by Wikipedia is “soft security”:

“One of the paradoxes of Wikipedia is that this system seems like it could never work. In a completely open system run by volunteers, why aren’t more limits required? One answer is that Wikipedia uses the principle of soft security in the broadest way. Security is guided by the community, rather than by restricting community actions ahead of time. Everyone active on the site is responsible for security and quality. You, your watchlist, and your alertness to strange actions and odd defects in articles are part of the security system.”

What does “soft security” mean? It means that security is largely reactionary, rather than preventative or broadly restrictive on user actions in advance. With a few exceptions, any anonymous editor can change any page on the site at any time. The dangers of such a policy are obvious, but the advantages are perhaps less so: Wikipedia’s security offers a level of adaptability and flexibility that is not possible with traditional security policies and tools.

Below, we discuss three kinds of attacks that Wikipedia has faced through the years: Bad Edits (vandalism and spam), Sybil Attacks, and Editing for Pay. For each attack we note the strategies and solutions Wikipedia has responded with and offer a rough evaluation of their efficacy.

Bad edits: Vandalism and spam

The fact that anyone with an internet connection can edit almost any page on Wikipedia is one of the site’s greatest strengths, but perhaps may also be its greatest vulnerability. Edits not in service of Wikipedia’s mission fall into two general categories: malicious edits (vandalism) and promotional edits (spam).

While Wikipedia reader/editors are ultimately responsible for the clarity and accuracy of the encylopedia’s content, a number of tools have been developed to combat vandalism and spam. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual gives a high-level overview:

• Bots. Much vandalism follows simple patterns that computer programs can recognize. Wikipedia allows bots to revert vandalism: in the cases where they make a mistake, the mistake is easy to revert.
• Recent changes patrol. The RCP is a semi-organized group of editors who monitor changes to all the articles in Wikipedia, as the changes happen, to spot and revert vandalism immediately. Most RC patrollers use tools to handle the routine steps in vandal fighting.
• Watchlists. Although the primary focus of monitoring is often content (and thus potential content disputes, as described in Chapter 10: Resolving content disputes), watchlists are an excellent way for concerned editors to spot vandalism.

Given the incredible popularity, and perceived respectability, of Wikipedia, it’s safe to say that the community’s defenses against basic vandalism and spam are holding up quite well overall.

Sybil attacks

Sybil attacks, endemic to the blockchain ecosystem, are known as “Sockpuppets” in Wikipedia, and are used to designate multiple handles controlled by the same person. They are usually employed when one person wants to seem like multiple editors, or wants to continue editing after being blocked.

While Sockpuppets are harder to detect in an automated fashion than vandalism and spam, there is a process for opening Sockpuppet investigations and a noticeboard for ongoing investigations. Well-thought-out sockpuppetry attacks are both time-consuming to mount and defend against. While dedicated investigators (known as clerks) are well-suited to the task, it is impossible to know how much successful Sockpuppetry has yet to be discovered.

Hired guns — Editing for pay

Hired guns — editors who make changes to in exchange for pay — are becoming an increasingly serious concern for Wikipedia, at least according to a 2018 Medium post, “Wikipedia’s Top-Secret ‘Hired Guns’ Will Make You Matter (For a Price)”, in which Author Stephen Harrison writes,

“A market of pay-to-play services has emerged, where customers with the right background can drop serious money to hire editors to create pages about them; a serious ethical breach that could get worse with the rise of—wait for it—cryptocurrency payments.”

In the post, Harrison draws on a number of interviews he conducted with entrepreneurs running businesses in this controversial space. According to Harrison, businesses like What About Wiki, operate in secret, utilizing large numbers of sockpuppet accounts and do not disclose the fact that that their edits are being done in exchange for pay.

In the past, Wikipedia has prohibited all such activities and in fact, businesses like What About Wiki violate Wikipedia’s Terms of Use — a legally binding agreement. However that seems to be changing. According to Harrison,

“A 2012 investigation discovered that the public relations firm Wiki-PR was editing the encyclopedia using multiple deceptive sock-puppet accounts for clients like Priceline and Viacom. In the wake of the Wiki-PR incident, the Wikimedia Foundation changed its terms of use in 2014 to require anyone compensated for their contributions to openly disclose their affiliation.”

The upshot is that since 2014, paid editing is now allowed on the site so long as the relationship is disclosed.

And yet, major questions remain. For one thing, at least according to Harrison’s analysis, companies acting in compliance with Wikipedia’s disclosure policy represent just a small fraction of the paid editors working (illegitimately) on the site. For another, he argues that complying with Wikipedia’s policies leads to paid editors making less money, because there’s a lower chance their edits will be accepted and therefore less chance the clients will be willing to foot the bill.

This leads to a final question, which is whether paid edits can ever really be aligned with the deep values that Wikipedia holds. For instance, one of Wikipedia’s main behavior guidelines is a prohibition against editors who have a conflict of interest in working on a given page. It’s hard to imagine a clearler conflict of interest than a paid financial relationship between the editor and the subject of a page.

DAOs

Wikipedia’s success is inspirational in terms of what can be accomplished through decentralized coordination of a large group of people. While we believe that the decentralized web still has many lessons to learn from the success of Wikipedia — and we’ve tried to touch a few in this post — a great deal of work and thinking has already been done around how a large organization like Wikipedia could eventually be coordinated on-chain.

Such organizations are known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and that will be the topic of a future post.

Photo by designwebjae (Pixabay)

The post What the decentralized web can learn from Wikipedia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

All the powers of the old-world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: liberal States and dictators, banks and FANG, regulators and speculators.

Where is the State that hasn’t attempted to muzzle freedom of communication and information, or to expand surveillance of its own citizens? Which major online service hasn’t monetized their users’ data without their knowledge or closed user accounts without possible recourse? Which banker hasn’t publicly opposed the right of everyone to have personal and absolute ownership of one’s assets through cryptocurrencies?

Two things result from this fact:

1- Peer-to-peer is already acknowledged by all world powers to itself be a power.

2- It is high time that peer-to-peer supporters should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies; that they counter oppressive forces with their diverse and energetic initiatives. To this end, peer-to-peer contributors will assemble in Paris from the 8th to the 12th of January 2020 at the Paris P2P Festival, the first event dedicated to all forms of free interplay between peers: technical, political, cultural, social, and economic.

If we indulge in allusion to a much more famous Manifesto, it is because we believe that p2p technology projects (Bitcoin, blockchains and Web3, distributed Web and Solid, self-sovereign identities, decentralized protocols…) need to be put in perspective.

In 2019, people’s protests and social demonstrations have flooded the streets of every continent: Sudan, Chile, Hong Kong, Catalonia, Algeria, Iran, India, and of course, in France, our Gilets Jaunes. In many cases, governments reacted not only through police or military crackdown but also with censorship of electronic communication: the internet shutdown in Iran, the censorship of social networks in Hong Kong, the prohibition of decentralized identity systems in Spain… Unfortunately, it is now well-established that internet censorship effectively protects the police states that use it.

Therefore, it is no surprise that we’re seeing an increase in infringements of freedom of the press and physical attacks against those who spread information. Antoine Champagne, journalist and co-founder of reflets.info, will come to the festival to talk about the current state of the protection of journalists and whistleblowers.

Along with the cypherpunk tradition, we believe that cryptography and decentralization are essential means to protect individual and collective civil liberties. We hope that talks on the history of the cypherpunk movement and on the history of decentralization will spark conversations about this point of view among the festival participants.

Peer-to-peer technology is a concrete way to arm the resistance against oppressive powers by providing the resilient and confidential communication channels needed to coordinate social movements in hostile environments. Multiple initiatives in this domain will be presented, from the research work of the LIRIS-DRIM team (CNRS) on streaming and Web request anonymization, to Berty‘s decentralized messaging protocol, to talks and workshops on libtorrent and ZeroNet, Ethereum’s network protocol, cjdns, ZKP and identity, and homomorphic encryption.

For the general public less comfortable with the nuts and bolts of p2p cryptography, the documentary Nothing to Hide will give evidence of how mass surveillance impacts everyone and why we have come to accept it so easily. The festival will also host a show on mentalism and social engineering and a serious game which aims to help everyone learn about effective cybersecurity practices.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are another branch that stems from the cypherpunk movement. Over the last few years, the importance of having a form of money that is independent from political powers and financial institutions became obvious. At first it was ignored, then it prompted only laughs and sarcasm, and finally, open hostility. Now states and mega-corporations try to compete with their own digital and centralized currencies.

Hence the necessity of articulating and educating the public about what makes decentralized currencies so special! We will tackle this challenge in many ways: a talk on Bitcoin by the founders of Cercle du Coin, a screening of the documentary Protocole with its director in attendance, workshops introducing how to use wallets and cryptocurrencies, presentations and workshops on Libre Money (Monnaie Libre), Dash, Ark…

Since the inception of Ethereum, the scope of the blockchain, this decentralized ledger which stores cryptocurrency transactions has exceeded its monetary applications. Blockchain-based Dapps, DeFi and DAOs refer to new ways to perform peer-to-peer interactions and new approaches for managing common resources in more open and less inegalitarian ways. The audience will be introduced to several programmable blockchains such as Ethereum, Holochain, Tezos, or Aeternity.

DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are a way to introduce self-governed and transparent rules in place of the arbitrary exercise of centralized power in organizations. We will review the most interesting DAO initiatives such as Aragon, DAOstack and MetaCartel, with a panel, talks and two workshops: co-designing a DAO using DAOcanvas and participating in a decentralized jurisdiction with Kleros. Lessons learned with iExec and Paymium will shed light on decentralized marketplaces and exchanges, another form of decentralized and programmable entities.

But blockchains are not the only way to decentralize the internet. The Solid standard, created by Tim Berners-Lee, aims to re-decentralize the Web, which today lies under the control of a small number of global mega-firms such as Google and Facebook. In France, this standard is actively supported and extended by several teams gathered in the Digital Commons Consortium, present at the festival. They will give talks and workshops covering the Virtual Assembly and Startin’Blox.

Blockchains and distributed Web are closely associated with open source and free software, considered a type of digital commons. More generally, the question of the commons, is defined as a shared resource that is co-governed by its user community according to the community’s rules and norms and is an essential aspect of peer-to-peer networks.

The P2P Foundation, which will give one of the opening talks of the festival, claims the autonomy of the commons with respect to both the private and public sectors. An event within the festival, the Public Domain Day, organized by Wikimedia France and Creative Commons France, will invite open conversations about multiple aspects of intellectual property in the age of the commons: open science and open education, free licences and development aid, and the implications of IA and blockchain on art production. We will also screen a documentary telling the tragic story of Aaron Swartz, the freedom activist behind Creative Commons, and Hacking for the Commons, a brand new documentary about the clash between supporters of intellectual property and those who stand for open and free knowledge. Several members of the Coop des Communs will also participate, such as the Digital Commons Consortium and Open Food Network. Finally, a talk by The Commons Stack will show how blockchain, DAOs and commons can be tightly coupled.

The last major theme of the festival will be shared governance and peer collaboration, as these are critical to all the other topics mentioned above, from blockchain upgrades to management of the commons to the ability of people to act as free citizens and economic agents. We will open the festival with the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, the first experiment of direct democracy embedded in the institutions of the French republic, as a response to the demand for real democracy expressed the Gilets Jaunes, in the context of climate emergency. The association between climate and collective intelligence will also be discussed during a talk and workshops on the Climate Collage. Tools, practices, and ideas for distributed governance and collective sense-making will be discussed and experienced with Jean-François Noubel, Open Source Politics, the Open Opale collective, and a Warm Data Lab by Matthew Schutte.

In short, peers and commoners everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as a leading question in each, the intellectual and physical property question, no matter its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for a unanimous agreement on initiatives supportive of civil liberties and the construction of the commons.

Peers and commoners disdain the concealment their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the overthrow of the prevalent logic of concentration of power, wealth, and information.

Free Peers of All Countries, Unite!

Lead image: Close view of Hong Kong Lennon Wall by Ceeseven under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Special thanks to Kirstin Maulding.

The post The P2P Festival in Paris: Unite the Peers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.

That threat may now be materializing. On June 18, Facebook unveiled a white paper outlining ambitious plans to create a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, to be launched in 2020. Facebook reportedly has high hopes that Libra will become the foundation for a new financial system free of control by Wall Street power brokers and central banks.

But apparently Libra will not be competing with Visa or Mastercard. In fact, the Libra Association lists those two giants among its 28 soon-to-be founding members. Others include Paypal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft and eBay. Facebook has reportedly courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join the Libra Association, an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency. Entry barriers are high, with each founding member paying a minimum of $10 million to join. This gives them one vote  (or 1% of the total vote, whichever is larger)  in the Libra Association council. Members are also entitled to a share proportionate to their investment of the dividends earned from interest on the Libra reserve—the money that users will pay to acquire the Libra currency.

Needless to say, all of this has raised some eyebrows, among both financial analysts and crypto-activists. A Zero Hedge commentator calls Libra “Facebook’s Crypto Trojan Rabbit.” An article in The Financial Times’ Alphaville calls it “Blockchain, but Without the Blocks or Chain.” Economist Nouriel Roubini concurs, tweeting:

Another Zero Hedge writer calls Libra “The Dollar’s Killer App,” which threatens “not only the power of central banks but also the government’s money monopoly itself.”

From Frying Pan to Fire?

To the crypto-anarchist community, usurping the power of central banks and governments may sound like a good thing. But handing global power to the corporate-controlled Libra Association could be a greater nightmare. So argues Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who writes in The Financial Times:

This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests — profits and influence — ahead of public ones. …

The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that [they] will encourage “decentralised forms of governance.” In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. …

What Libra backers are calling ‘decentralisation’ is in truth a shift of power from developing world central banks toward multinational corporations and the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.

Power will shift to the Fed and ECB because the dollar and the euro will squeeze out weaker currencies in developing countries. As seen recently in Greece, the result will be to cause their governments to lose control of their currencies and their economies.

Pros and Cons

Caitlin Long, co-founder of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, recently agreed that Libra was a Trojan horse but predicted it would have some beneficial effects. For one, she thought it would impose discipline on the U.S. banking system by leading to populist calls to repeal its corporate subsidies. The Fed is now paying its member banks 2.35% in risk-free interest on their excess reserves, which this year is projected to total $36 billion of corporate welfare to U.S. banks—about half the sum spent on the U.S. food stamp program. If Facebook parks its entire U.S. dollar balance at the Federal Reserve through one of its bank partners, it could earn the same rate. But Long predicted that Facebook would have to pay interest to Libra users to avoid a chorus of critics, who would loudly publicize how much money Facebook and its partners were pocketing from the interest on the money users traded for their Libra currency.

But that was before the Libra white paper came out. It reveals the profits will indeed be divvied among Facebook’s Libra partners rather than shared with users. At one time, we earned interest on our deposits in government-insured banks. With Libra, we will get no interest on our money, which will be entrusted to uninsured crypto exchanges, which are coming under increasing regulatory pressure due to lack of transparency and operational irregularities.

United Kingdom economics professor Alistair Milne points to another problem with the Libra cryptocurrency: Unlike Bitcoin, it will be a “stablecoin,” whose value will be tied to a basket of fiat currencies and short-term government securities. That means it will need the backing of real money to maintain its fixed price. If reserves do not cover withdrawals, who will be responsible for compensating Libra holders? Ideally, Milne writes, reserves would be held with the central bank; but central banks will be reluctant to support a private currency.

Long also predicts that Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be a huge honeypot of data for government officials, since every transaction will be traceable. But other reviewers see this as Libra’s most fatal flaw. Facebook has been called Big Brother, the ultimate government surveillance tool. Conspiracy theorists link it to the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Facebook has already demonstrated that it is an untrustworthy manager of personal data. How then can we trust it with our money?

Why Use a Cryptocurrency at All?

Why has Facebook chosen to use a cryptocurrency rather than following WeChat and AliPay in doing a global payments network in the traditional way? Yan Meng, vice president of the Chinese Software Developer Network, says Facebook’s fragmented user base across the world leaves it with no better choice than to borrow ideas from blockchain and cryptocurrency.

“Facebook just can’t do a global payments network via traditional methods, which require applying for a license and preparing foreign exchange reserves with local banking, one market after another,” Meng said. “The advantage of WeChat and AliPay is they have already gained a significant number of users from just one giant economy that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s population.” They have no need to establish their own digital currencies, which they still regard as too risky.

Meng suspects that Facebook’s long-term ambition is to become a stateless central bank that uses Libra as a base currency. He writes, “With sufficient incentives, nodes of Facebook’s Libra network would represent Facebook to push for utility in various countries for its 2.7 billion users in business, investment, trade and financial services,” which “would help complete a full digital economy empire.”

The question is whether regulators will allow that sort of competition with the central banking system. Immediately after Facebook released its Libra cryptocurrency plan, financial regulators in Europe voiced concerns over the potential danger of Facebook running a “shadow bank.” Maxine Waters, who heads the Financial Services Committee for the U.S. House of Representatives, asked Facebook to halt its development of Libra until hearings could be held. She said:

This is like starting a bank without having to go through any steps to do it. …  We can’t allow Facebook to go to Switzerland and begin to compete with the dollar without having any regulatory regime that’s dealing with them.

A Stateless Private Central Bank or a Publicly Accountable One?

Facebook may be competing with more than the dollar. Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, writes:

[It] seems that the company is not seeking to compete with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Rather, Facebook is looking to replace the existing global financial system with an all-new setup, with Libra at its center.

At least at the moment, the Libra is being designed as a form of electronic money linked to many national currencies.That has raised fears that Libra might someday be recognized as a sovereign currency, with Facebook acting as a “shadow bank” that could compete with the central banks of countries around the world.

Long thinks Bitcoin, rather than Libra, will come out the winner in all this; but Bitcoin’s blockchain model is too slow, expensive and energy intensive to replace fiat currency as a medium of exchange on a national scale. As Josh Constine writes on TechCrunch:

[E]xisting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum weren’t properly engineered to scale to be a medium of exchange. Their unanchored price was susceptible to huge and unpredictable swings, making it tough for merchants to accept as payment. And cryptocurrencies miss out on much of their potential beyond speculation unless there are enough places that will take them instead of dollars. … But with Facebook’s relationship with 7 million advertisers and 90 million small businesses plus its user experience prowess, it was well-poised to tackle this juggernaut of a problem.

For Libra to scale as a national medium of exchange, its governance had to be centralized rather than “distributed.” But Libra’s governing body is not the sort of global controller we want. Jennifer Grygiel writes:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg . . . is declaring that he wants Facebook to become a virtual nation, populated by users, powered by a self-contained economy, and headed by a CEO–Zuckerberg himself– who is not even accountable to his shareholders. . . .

In many ways the company that Mark Zuckerberg is building is beginning to look more like a Roman Empire, now with its own central bank and currency, than a corporation. The only problem is that this new nation-like platform is a controlled company and is run more like a dictatorship than a sovereign country with democratically elected leaders.

A currency intended for trade on a national—let alone international—scale needs to be not only centralized but democratized, responding to the will of the people and their elected leaders. Rather than bypassing the existing central banking structure as Facebook plans to do, several groups of economists are proposing a more egalitarian solution: nationalizing and democratizing the central bank by opening its deposit window to everyone. As explored in my latest book, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age,” these proposals could allow us all to get 2.35% on our deposits, while eliminating bank runs and banking crises, since the central bank cannot run out of funds. Profits from the public medium of exchange need to return to the public rather than enriching an unaccountable, corporate-controlled Facebook Trojan horse.

Reposted from Truthdig. Header image: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Mike Deeroski / Flickr)(CC BY 2.0)

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Toward what? Most of us probably aren’t sure. But the people involved in a Wellington, New Zealand-based network called Enspiral have done more than just about anyone to figure out — to figure out where we’d want the future of work to be headed if the better angels of our nature were in charge. I’ve had the chance to visit them (and lived to tell the tale for Vice). Now, a trip down to Wellington, although I absolutely recommend it, is a little less necessary. The Enspiralites have created a book, Better Work Together, which chronicles in conversational stories and pictures their attempts to create a kind of community worth working toward.

Enspiral is fairly small, as organizations go — a few hundred active participants, a modest budget. Rather, it’s lean. Most of the Enspiralites’ businesses exist outside the organization, but attached to it, allowing Enspiral itself to take risks, learn lessons, and reinvent itself when necessary. It’s a community of early adopters. They offer themselves as beta-testers for a suite of collaboration software they’ve co-produced, such as Loomio and Cobudget. They relentlessly explore challenging governance frameworks like sociocracy and teal. They even funded the book’s production through a new blockchain-enabled platform called DAOstack (which still crashes my browser when I try to use it). These are not ordinary workers; they’re people with the passion, the patience, in many cases the privilege, and the fault-tolerance to repeatedly try stuff that may or may not work.

In the book, you’ll see why. There is a generosity and pleasure and even a spirituality in how they talk about their efforts that makes it all seem less like, well, work. There are typos, but these pale in comparison to the challenges we collectively face. The upshot is not a final theory or doctrine or destination, but a mode of working toward it, of declining to accept disguised versions of feudalism as good enough. Order it, digitally or physically, here.

Cross-posted at the MEDLab website and on Medium.

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mondora is a software services company and a benefit corporation. They care about how their software products are being crafted and used, considering how both people and planet are impacted. For example, they track the paper (and trees) that are saved in the use of their application that allows banks to easily keep digital records.

mondora role models creating benefit for the world and its workers

Their social impact extends beyond outward acts, mondora proposes to change how work is done in Italy by demonstrating a way of working where employees may choose to be as remote as they like and have flexible hours. mondora believes in creating value for their community of workers as well as the world.

mondora was founded with these values in 2002. As they grew from 10 to 60 employees in the last 7 years, they evolved their ways of working to better fulfill their purpose. They have developed a culture of openness and transparency and a flatter organisational hierarchy. They have implemented tools, such as Loomio, so that anyone can share their ideas and everyone decides together.

Loomio helps move discussions to clear outcomes and action

Kirsten Ruffoni, mondora’s Benefit Officer, spoke to a number of the obstacles mondora was facing prior to adopting Loomio. She shared how, “discussions would occur but nothing would happen”. With people working remotely and on flexible hours, it was “hard to move conversation to conclusion”, and, generally, “hard to keep a conversation going as you always run into different people at the office”.

Kirsten reported that they’ve come a long way in this regards, and Loomio has played a role. “Decisions that used to take months now take a week”, Kirsten told me. mondora takes full advantage of the variety of voting and decision tools that Loomio offers, and appreciates not losing messages on Slack and—unlike email—having the ability to indicate deadlines to increase accountability.

Kirsten described a challenging decision that was made on Loomio: making the salaries of mondora transparent to everyone in the company. The CEO had some reservations, but decided to use Loomio to consult everyone in the company. After the input—unanimously in favor—the CEO decided to trust the group and implement the policy. Not only did nothing bad happen, but they were able to do something really positive in the eyes of everyone in their company. They identified, and fixed, a pay gap between women and men, establishing equal pay for equal work. Kirsten commented, “Loomio makes it easier to voice our opinions in front of our boss”. Using asynchronous decision-making tools can make it easier to have thoughtful conversations and hard decisions, whether the team is remote or meeting regularly in person.

Loomio supports collaboration between organisations and across teams

mondora has also been using Loomio to bring customers into the design process to produce better results and strengthen relationships. They involve customers in the process as early as possible and establish open communication between their customer and every person on the team.

Beyond supporting internal communication and decision-making, Loomio allows mondora to invite guest users into specific threads or groups; mondora uses this to improve their interactions with investors and university researchers. According to Kirsten, Loomio supported mondora to “get information they weren’t expecting from stakeholders.”

After acquisition by TeamSystem, a larger IT company, mondora has introduced Loomio as a decision-making tool within TeamSystem’s R&D department.

In their efforts to better the world and cultivate employee happiness, mondora is leading Italy and others into a future of work where there is a new model of employment—a “new employee” where all workers can fully participate with flexibility, remote work, and effective communication and decision-making. mondora leverages Loomio to get better outcomes with less time and effort, supporting every employee to fully participate in all aspects of the business and to deepen their interactions with customers. Want to create more benefit in the world? Look to mondora as a valuable example.

By John Gieryn at Loomio, read the original post here.

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Around four years ago, after Bath lost it’s charity support agency, the founders of 3SG stepped in to quickly build an organisation that could act in its place—facilitating funding from regional sources and helping to unify charities with similar missions.

Taking action

When it started, 3SG had no building, no governmental support and essentially no budget—but what they did have was a passion for connecting charities. Its founders had worked for numerous nonprofits in the past and getting the ball rolling was as simple as recognising a need.

“A lot of people had talked about it, but no one had done anything. I think it was just a case of ‘well let’s start it’. And that’s the key—just doing something.”

In a smaller city like Bath, there are limited funding sources, so different charities focusing on the same cause would end up competing with each other for money.

3SG facilitates connections between the non-profits that are planning similar projects and gives them an opportunity to collaborate, instead of having to compete for funding.

Managing growth

In the past two years, 3SG has quickly grown from 10 founders into a community of around 200 members that consist of representatives and leaders from the majority of charitable organisations in Bath.

The growth is exciting but it also made organizing events, arranging meetings and making community-wide decisions difficult. He explains that all 3SG members are busy people who volunteer their time to 3SG on top of their existing jobs.

“We were doing it all by email and it was getting really confusing. People felt like they were missing out on being able to contribute.”

Avoiding email confusion with the help of Loomio

James says that Loomio helps them organise and keep track of communications so that their members are never struggling to catch up on information they missed throughout the day or battling the confusion of a reply-all email chain.

He likes the way Loomio provides summaries of every conversation, which cuts down on reading time so they have more time to do the work that matters.

Listening to the voice of the majority

The polling feature on Loomio is another winner in his book. The 3SG team recently used it to decide the theme of their next big meeting and James was surprised by the outcome. He hadn’t realised that so many members were interested in the topic that was chosen.

The voice of the majority, he explains, can sometimes get drowned out by big personalities. People who don’t want to ruffle feathers often miss the opportunity to voice their opinion. With Loomio polls, it’s a less intimidating process.

“It’s more democratic,” he says, adding that it’s also satisfying to be able to see who is engaging.

Future-minded

James’ longterm dream for 3SG is to develop a community hub where charities can share space and work together.

He says that they will need to broaden their scope and potential for funding before that is possible but he hopes that with the structure that Loomio provides, they will be in the position to achieve all of their goals sooner than expected.

And with 3SG’s tireless dedication to taking action on behalf of those who need it, we have no doubt that anything is possible.

Reprinted blog by Madina Knight on Loomio, you can see the original post here

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How do you role-model a democratic workplace?

This was the question on Austen Cordasco’s mind as he set out to integrate new technology to improve decision-making within Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN).

Purpose and community

For more than 30 years, CAN, a workers’ co-op, has catalysed the movement of cooperatives and social enterprises across the UK, helping people work better together through principles of democracy, autonomy, and concern for community.

As a visionary organization committed to empowering and supporting other co-ops, it is important to CAN that they effectively role-model an “active democracy”, where their workers have a voice.

How do we move forward together?

However, as the organization grew, this was proving to be difficult. CAN’s team is geographically distributed across the UK and the time delay in-between meetings, combined with the chaotic nature of email, was leading to big losses.

Austen, a Director and Worker-Owner of CAN saw an opportunity for their board of directors to be more effective and efficient by adopting an online decision-making tool to aid with governance. They chose Loomio.

The power of making decisions online

“Quality of directorship is dependent on the quality of decisions we make, so Loomio has been game-changing for us,” says Austen.

Using Loomio helps CAN to do their decision-making online and organize different threads of conversation, while Loomio’s proposal tool helps CAN move conversations to clear outcomes, creating shared understanding and impact.

Austen adds that using Loomio enables CAN to “effectively have a director’s meeting open all the time,” which not only increases productivity, but also saves money for the organization.

“Our board group has been particularly transformative, enabling continuous governance, improving response times and increasing our agility, resilience and sustainability… Loomio saves us thousands of pounds every year” —Austen Cordasco

More effective co-ops in the UK and beyond

Overall, incorporating Loomio into their company toolbox significantly improves the speed and efficiency of their working together. Undoubtedly, as CAN becomes more agile in their decision-making, they will be able to help even more organizations in the UK put purpose and community at the heart of their work.

Reprinted blog by Madina Knight, John Gieryn. You can see the original post here! and learn more about CAN on their website.

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Written Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Linux and Open Source, originally posted on ZDNet on August 28, 2018

Most people wouldn’t know an open-source license from their driver’s license. For those who work with open-source software, it’s a different story. Open-source license fights can be vicious, cost serious coin, and determine the fate of multi-million dollar companies. So, when Redis Labs added a new license clause, Commons Clause, on top of Redis, an open-source, BSD licensed, in-memory data structure store, all hell broke loose.

Why? First, you need to understand that while you may never have heard of Redis, it’s a big deal. It enables real-time applications such as advertising, gaming financial services, and IoT to work at speed. That’s because it can deliver sub-millisecond response times to millions of requests per second.

But Redis Labs has been unsuccessful in monetizing Redis, or at least not as successful as they’d like. Their executives were discovering, like the far more well-known Docker, that having a great open-source technology did not mean you’d be making millions. Redis’ solution was to embrace Commons Clause.

This license forbids you from selling the software. It also states you may not host or offer consulting or support services as “a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the software”.

If that doesn’t sound like open-source software to you, you have lots of company.

Simon Phipps, president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), snapped on Twitter: “Redis just went proprietary, which sucks. No, this is not just ‘a limitation concerning fair use,’ it is an abrogation of software freedom.”

In an email, Phipps added, “Adding a significant clause to an existing license that has been approved by OSI instantly renders it non-approved, and the text of the so-called ‘Commons Clause,’ which actually fences off the commons, is clearly intended to violate clause 1 of the Open Source Definition and probably also violates clauses 3, 5 and 6. As such adding this clause to a license would be a major abrogation of software freedom removing essential rights from any affected open-source community.”

Software programmer Drew DeVault made his stance clear from his opening words: “Commons Clause will destroy open source.” Commons Clause, he continued, “presents one of the greatest existential threats to open source I’ve ever seen. It preys on a vulnerability open-source maintainers all suffer from, and one I can strongly relate to. It sucks to not be able to make money from your open-source work. It really sucks when companies are using your work to make money for themselves. If a solution presents itself, it’s tempting to jump at it. But the Commons Clause doesn’t present a solution for supporting open-source software. It presents a framework for turning open-source software into proprietary software.”

Bradley M Kuhn, president of the Software Freedom Conservancy and author of the Affero General Public License, blogged, “This proprietary software license, which is not open source and does not respect the four freedoms of free software, seeks to hide a power imbalance ironically behind the guise ‘open source sustainability.’ Their argument, once you look past their assertion that the only way to save open source is to not do open source, is quite plain: If we can’t make money as quickly and as easily as we’d like with this software, then we have to make sure no one else can as well.”

Andrew ‘Andy’ Updegrove, a founding partner of Gesmer Updegrove, a top technology law firm, and open-source legal expert, found it no surprise that many open-source supporters hate Commons Clause. He rejects the conspiracy theory, “that the Commons Clause will be some sort of virus that will deprive innocent developers of the ability to make a living, and will persuade businesses owners to avoid buying or using code that has any commons clause in it.”

Updegrove believes this is because Heather Meeker, a partner at O’Melveny law firm who drafted it, “is a respected attorney and long-term participant in open-source legal circles, so IMHO the conspiracy theory can be ignored. Note also that Kevin Wang [founder of FOSSA]and Heather have both offered the clause as text to initiate a discussion, and not something to be wholesale adopted as it stands.”

That didn’t stop Redis Labs, which is applying Commons Clause on top of the Apache license, to cover five new Redis modules. Redis is doing this, said its co-founder and CTO Yiftach Shoolman in an email, “for two reasons — to limit the monetization of these advanced capabilities by cloud service providers like AWS and to help enterprise developers whose companies do not work with AGPL licenses.”

On the Redis Labs site, the company now explains in more detail that cloud providers are taking advantage of open-source companies by repackaging their programs into competitive, proprietary-service offerings. These providers contribute very little — if anything — back to those open-source projects. Instead, they use their monopolistic nature to derive hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues from them.

Redis Labs contends that “most cloud providers offer Redis as a managed service over their infrastructure and enjoy huge income from software that was not developed by them. Redis Labs is leading and financing the development of open source Redis and deserves to enjoy the fruits of these efforts.” Shoolman insisted that “Redis is open source and will remain under a BSD license.”

Salvatore Sanfilippo, Redis’ creator, added the change just “means that basically certain enterprise add-ons, instead of being completely closed source as they could be, will be available with a more permissive license,” Commons Clauses with Apache.

Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler isn’t so sure. Sandler emailed that Commons Clause “highlights the fundamental problems connected to the wide adoption of non-copyleft licenses, but I think it doesn’t really solve the problem that it seeks to solve. What we really need is strong copyleft licenses where the copyrights are held diversely by individuals and functional charities to make sure that software remains free and that societally we have the rights we need to have confidence in our software in the long run.”

In an email, Wang defended Commons Clause as “mostly used to temporarily transition enterprise offering counterparts of open-source software projects to source-available”. Wang continued: “Open-source software projects are mainly funded by a proprietary offering/service counterparts. Anything to help this layer monetize is good — the fate of the OSS is directly funded by it.

“The world has changed a lot and the open-source software/cloud ecosystem has a lot too,” Wang added. “The Open Source Definition is an immensely [valuable] set of ideals, but maybe it’s outdated to the modern state of the world. … Licensing follows intent, and I certainly don’t think the clause inspires people to close their source. But sometimes people need to change their license.”

Be that as it may, Updegrove wrote Commons Clause is “simple in concept: basically, it gives a developer the right to make sure no one can make money out of her code — whether by selling, hosting, or supporting it — unless the Commons Clause code is a minor part of a larger software product”.

“In one way, that’s in the spirit of a copyleft license (i.e., a prohibition on commercial interests taking advantage of a programmer’s willingness to make her code available for free), but it also violates the ‘Four Freedoms’ of free and open-source software as well as the Open Source Definition by placing restrictions on reuse, among other issues.”

But, “adding the Commons Clause to an open-source license makes it no longer an open-source license,” Updegrove added. And, were the Commons Clause to catch on, “it could give rise to an unwelcome trend”.

“The wide proliferation of licenses in the early days of open source was unhelpful and a cause of ongoing confusion and complexity, since not all licenses were compatible with other licenses. That means that before any piece of open-source code can be added to a code base, it’s necessary to determine whether its license is compatible with the licenses of all other software in the same product. That’s a big and ongoing headache.”

That’s a big reason, Updegrove wrote, why “Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond created the Open Source Definition and the Open Source Initiative so that there would be a central reference point and authority to determine what was and was not an ‘Open Source License’. That definition and process has held now for 20 years — an eternity, in open-source history.”

Therefore, Updegrove sees Commons Clause as a step backward from a process point of view. Worse, “it would be a very disturbing development if the release of the Commons Clause inspired more people to come up with their own license ‘extensions’, especially if they are also not compliant with the Open Software Definition and the Four Freedoms.”

The result? Companies and programmers veering away from using any Commons Clause licensed software. That was not its creators’ intent, but it’s a realistic concern.

Updegrove adds, “Speaking as a lawyer, the fact that someone can still charge for a product that includes Commons Clause software so long as the value does not ‘derive[s], entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the software’ is certain to invite disputes. The most obvious is what does ‘substantially’ [mean]? There is no bright-line for guidance.”

Georg Greve, co-founder and president at Vereign, a blockchain-secured communication company and founder of Free Software Foundation Europe, also worried, “Overall it seems purposefully vague & misleading, probably overreaching and terribly one-sided to establish Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt for any professional use of software licensed under it while making it terribly easy to ‘accidentally’ incorporate such components.”

Still, Updegrove thinks Commons Clause may be “a useful addition to the licensing menu, but not one that will be appropriate for use in all situations. … Developers should be clear in advance what their goals are when they’re put their fingers to their keys. Commons Clause-licensed software is not likely to get the same amount of reuse as might otherwise be the case.”

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Science-fiction or social reality, the Blockchain. Fact. Fiction. Future. event brought together artists, activists, hackers, designers, scientists, sociologists and political scientists to analyse, question, and discuss the distruptive, cultural and creative potential of this technology. iMAL, Brussels, 4 November 2016.

Alex Pazaitis (GR) P2P Foundation / P2P Lab Blockchain and P2P value creation in the information economy The presentation will concern the techno-economic implications of the blockchain. I will briefly illustrate the economic dynamics of P2P productive relations, specifically in the context of the information economy and in relation to the digital commons. In this picture, I will argue on the potential of the blockchain, as an advanced technology for record-keeping of value, which can effectively encapsulate qualitatively different contributions of labour. About the Speaker Alexandros (Alex) Pazaitis is Research Fellow at P2P Lab, an interdisciplinary research hub, community-driven makerspace and spin-off of the P2P Foundation and the Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance. Alex is involved in numerous research activities, including the authoring of scholarly papers and the participation in research and innovation projects. He has professional experience in project management and has worked as a consultant for private and public organizations in various EU-funded cooperation projects. His research interests include technology governance; innovation policy and sustainability; distributed manufacturing; commons and open cooperativism and blockchain-based collaboration.

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Forthcoming in: Marta Cantero Gamito & Hans-Wolfgang Micklitz (eds.) The Role of the EU in Transnational Legal Ordering: Standards, Contracts and Codes, Edward Elgar 2019

Christoph Busch

University of Osnabrück – European Legal Studies Institute

Abstract

Digital platforms are not only market intermediaries between different groups of platform users. They are also providers of governance mechanisms that are essential for the functioning of digital markets. Moreover, public regulators are increasingly relying on platforms as regulatory intermediaries, drawing on their superior operational capacities, data pools and direct access to platform users. A future EU regulatory policy for the platform economy should consider these multiple roles of digital platforms. Considering the rapid pace of technological innovation and the variety of different business models, the regulatory framework should be flexible enough to adapt to technological and economic developments. The chapter suggests a combination of principles-based legislation and ‘techno-legal standards’ elaborated by European standard-setting organisations involving all relevant stakeholders. A model for co-regulation could be the ‘New Approach’, which has been tried and tested over many years in the field of product safety and which could be transferred to platform regulation.

Read more and download the paper at SSRN.com

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