Democracy by Design: Perspectives for Digitally Assisted, Participatory Upgrades of Society

The technological revolution, particularly the availability of more data and more powerful computational tools, has led to the emergence of a new scientific field called “Computational Diplomacy”. Our work tries to define its scope and focuses on a popular subarea of it, namely “Digital Democracy”. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in using digital technologies to promote more participatory forms of democracy. While there are numerous potential benefits to using digital tools to enhance democracy, significant challenges must be addressed. It is essential to ensure that digital technologies are used in an accessible, equitable, and fair manner rather than reinforcing existing power imbalances. This paper investigates how digital tools can be used to help design more democratic societies by investigating three key research areas: (1) the role of digital technologies for facilitating civic engagement in collective decision-making; (2) the use of digital tools to improve transparency and accountability in governance; and (3) the potential for digital technologies to enable the formation of more inclusive and representative democracies. We argue that more research on how digital technologies can be used to support democracy upgrade is needed. Along these lines, we lay out a research agenda for the future

Decrypting distributed ledger design—taxonomy, classification and blockchain community evaluation

More than 1000 distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems raising $600 billion in investment in 2016 feature the unprecedented and disruptive potential of blockchain technology. A systematic and data-driven analysis, comparison and rigorous evaluation of the different design choices of distributed ledgers and their implications is a challenge. The rapidly evolving nature of the blockchain landscape hinders reaching a common understanding of the techno-socio-economic design space of distributed ledgers and the cryptoeconomies they support. To fill this gap, this paper makes the following contributions: (i) A conceptual architecture of DLT systems with which (ii) a taxonomy is designed and (iii) a rigorous classification of DLT systems is made using real-world data and wisdom of the crowd. (iv) A DLT design guideline is the end result of applying machine learning methodologies on the classification data. Compared to related work and as defined in earlier taxonomy theory, the proposed taxonomy is highly comprehensive, robust, explanatory and extensible. The findings of this paper can provide new insights and better understanding of the key design choices evolving the modeling complexity of DLT systems, while identifying opportunities for new research contributions and business innovation