RCC Fellow Event: Towards a New Collaborative Economy: Decentralizing Power and Value with Blockchain by Samer Hassan

Date: 

Friday, September 7, 2018, 2:00pm to 3:00pm

Location: 

MIT Media Lab 75 Amherst Street, E14-244 Cambridge, MA 02139 US

Today's Collaborative Economy relies on centralized hubs for data collection, where communities are disempowered and economic profits are concentrated in the owners of the infrastructure. In this talk, Samer Hassan, researcher at Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and UCM in Madrid, will present P2P Models: an EU-funded 1.5M€ 5-year interdisciplinary research project to build Blockchain-powered organizations which are decentralized, democratic and economically sustainable, in order to boost a new type of Collaborative Economy.

The project has three pillars:

  1. Infrastructure: To provide a software framework to build decentralized infrastructure for Collaborative Economy organizations, providing building blocks to build "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" (DAOs). The idea is to replace centralized platforms where a single owner of the infrastructure has absolute control.  
  2. Governance: To enable democratic-by-design models of governance for communities, whose rules are, at least partially, encoded in the software to ensure higher levels of equality and inclusion. We hope to facilitate the processes of commons-oriented communities, co-designing prototypes with them. 
  3. Economics: To enable value distribution models which are not solely based on markets, exploring forms of improving the economic sustainability of both individual contributors and organizations.

Speaker: Sammer Hassan, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University); RCC Fellow; Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain).

Sponsors: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; RCC; Digital Currency Initiative at MIT Media Lab. 

 

See also: Cambridge