The European Commission has awarded €1.905 million to D-CENT, a project building blockchain tools for citizens to engage in democratic decision-making. The initiative, which launched in October 2013,
The European Commission has awarded €1.905 million to D-CENT, a project building blockchain tools for citizens to engage in democratic decision-making. The initiative, which launched in October 2013, aims to create a decentralized social networking platform where people can discuss issues, deliberate collectively, and vote.
D-CENT introduced its first prototype in autumn 2014. This year, the project runs pilots in four countries—Iceland, Spain, Finland, and Italy—to test blockchain-based complementary currencies that could operate alongside traditional money.
Marco Sachy, who designs currencies for the Dyne.org foundation, leads research on social crypto currencies for D-CENT. He described the work this way: "D-CENT is going to prototype the Freecoin Toolchain as a set of features that are apt to advance the state-of-the-art in two domains of social innovation: complementary currencies governance systems and decentralized trust management systems."
Each pilot tackles a specific use case.
Iceland's effort builds on models from Libra Circuit in France and HullCoin in the UK. The city of Reykjavik is partnering with D-CENT to create "Social Kronas," a cryptocurrency that rewards residents for participating in Betri Reykjavik, the city's civic platform.
Barcelona launched Eurocat as a complementary currency in April 2014. D-CENT will decentralize how it operates, distributing control of the system rather than concentrating it in one place.
Helsinki Urban-Cooperative Farm, called Multapaakku, needed a way to track and reward what members contribute to the cooperative's common goals. D-CENT is building a decentralized currency system for this. The same model will run in Milan at Macao, a cultural workspace.
Milan's Commoncoin project targets the cultural sector. The currency would measure how engaged cultural workers are and establish reputation within that industry network.
Sachy explained the connecting thread across all four pilots: "The common characteristic of the different pilots is the need to strengthen the democratic debate necessary to consolidate and preserve the management of economic transactions, especially those with a social orientation and impact, inside the local monetary circuit."
He expanded on the philosophy: "It is only through a democratic and participatory deliberation system that citizens can collectively define bottom-up their social needs, also in terms of monetary needs, and inform the choices made not only on resource allocation, but also about investment in social objectives and ethical criteria, i.e. digital social currency experiments to foster direct democracy across Europe."
The project runs through mid-2016. Its partners span Europe: Nesta in the UK, Citizens Foundation in Iceland, CNRS in France, Dyne.org Foundation in the Netherlands, Forum Virium Helsinki in Finland, the Open University of Catalunya and Barcelona Media in Spain, and others.
On July 7, D-CENT is holding a roundtable in Brussels during CAPS 2015, a conference on collective awareness platforms for sustainability and social innovation. The discussion will address how to reshape politics around citizen power, what digital infrastructure citizens need for real democratic involvement, and what models of self-governance could support a new digital commons.
