Towards an Agent-supported Online Assembly: Prototyping a Collaborative Decision-Making Tool

The promise of online assemblies has been present for years already, and a diversity of tools have attempted to fulfill it. This work aims to reapproach the issue from a novel standpoint that relies on a federated architecture, a real-time collaborative environment, goal-oriented software agents and a consensus-based methodology. Consensuall is a prototype of consensual decision-making collaborative webtool that allows the elaboration, rating and commenting proposals in order to build consensus among a group. The webtool design follows the AgentOriented Software Engineering paradigm. Thus, it proposes the use of software agents as complementary automatic participants fulfilling specific roles, as a way to address decision-making common issues. The article presents Consensuall, a prototype of an agent-based collaborative decision-making webtool within the distributed real-time collaborative platform Apache Wave, providing a proof-of-concept of the adopted approach

Decentralizing peer reviewing to increase transparency, quality and reliability

Fac. de InformáticaTRUEUnión Europea. Horizonte 2020pu

The Challenges of Finding Peer Reviewers: Insights from our Product Design Research

Finding good peer reviewers is a difficult task. In Decentralized Science project we are designing and developing a tool to improve the quality, fairness and reliability of academic peer reviewing. Our approach relies in opening peer review, giving transparency to the peer reviewing process using decentralized technologies such as Blockchain. During our ongoing product design research we gained interesting insights about the peer reviewing selection process, and how editors currently deal with it. Our research methods are oriented towards the development of a software tool. We use Lean Design and Agile development principles, favoring fast iterative learning over the precision and completeness of more formal approaches. This contribution shares what we learned in the process about how editors deal with peer reviewer selection: from their needs and complains to their tricks, including some of their confessions. It also explains how we embraced this insights to improve our current prototype design

Peer-to-Peer System Design Trade-Offs: A Framework Exploring the Balance between Blockchain and IPFS

The current state of the Web, which is dominated by centralized cloud services, raises several concerns on different aspects such as governance, privacy, surveillance, and security. A way to address these issues is to decentralize the platforms by adopting new distributed technologies, such as IPFS and Blockchain, which follow a full peer-to-peer model. This work proposes a set of guidelines to design decentralized systems, taking into consideration the different trade-offs these technologies face with regard to their consistency requirements. These guidelines are then illustrated with the design of a decentralized questions and answers system. This system serves to illustrate a framework to create decentralized services and applications, that uses IPFS and Blockchain technologies and incorporates the discussion and guidelines of the paper, providing solutions for data access, data provenance and data discovery. Thus, this work proposes a framework for the design of decentralized systems and contributes a set of guidelines to decide in which cases Blockchain technology may be required, or when other technologies, such as IPFS, are sufficient

Building Real-Time Collaborative Applications with a Federated Architecture

Real-time collaboration is being offered by multiple libraries and APIs (Google Drive Real-time API, Microsoft Real-Time Communications API, TogetherJS, ShareJS), rapidly becoming a mainstream option for webservices developers. However, they are offered as centralised services running in a single server, regardless if they are free/open source or proprietary software. After re-engineering Apache Wave (former Google Wave), we can now provide the first decentralised and federated free/open source alternative. The new API allows to develop new real-time collaborative web applications in both JavaScript and Java environments

Ostrom’s crypto-principles? Towards a commons-based approach for the use of Blockchain technologies for self-governance

Fac. de InformáticaTRUEUnión Europea. Horizonte 2020pu

When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance

Blockchain technologies have generated enthusiasm, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterized by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity of social organization; and critical accounts of such discourses which, while contributing to identifying limitations, consider the role of traditional centralized institutions as inherently necessary to enable democratic forms of governance. In this article, we draw on Ostrom’s principles for self-governance of communities to explore the transformative potential of blockchain beyond such standpoints. We approach blockchain through the identification and conceptualization of six affordances that this technology may provide to communities: tokenization, self-enforcement and formalization of rules, autonomous automatization, decentralization of power over the infrastructure, increasing transparency, and codification of trust. For each affordance, we carry out a detailed analysis situating each in the context of Ostrom’s principles, considering both the potentials of algorithmic governance and the importance of incorporating communities’ social practices into blockchain-based tools to foster forms of self-governance. The relationships found between these affordances and Ostrom’s principles allow us to provide a perspective focused on blockchain-based commons governance

Analysis of the Potentials of Blockchain for the Governance of Global Digital Commons

In recent years, the increasing need for global coordination has attracted interest in the governance of global-scale commons. In the current context we observe how online applications are ubiquitous, and how emerging technologies enable new capabilities while reshaping sectors. Thus, it is pertinent to ask: could blockchain technologies facilitate the extension and scaling up of cooperative practices and commons management in this global context? In order to address this question, we propose a focus on the most paradigmatic and widely successful examples of global cooperation: non-rival global commons. Examples of these are the digital resources maintained by large peer production communities, such as free/libre open source software and Wikipedia. Thus, this article identifies and analyses the potentialities of blockchain to support the sustainability and management of non-rival global commons. Our approach draws on Elinor Ostrom’s classic principles for commons governance, although revisiting and adapting these to the more challenging scope of global commons. Thus, in this work we identify the affordances which blockchain provides (e.g. tokenisation, formalisation of rules, transparency or codification of trust) to support the effective management of this type of global commons based on these adapted Ostrom principles. As part of our analysis, we provide numerous examples of existing blockchain projects using affordances in line with each principle, as well as potential integrations of such affordances in existing practices of CBPP communities. Our analysis shows that, when considering the challenges of managing global commons (e.g. heterogeneity or scale), the potential of blockchain is particularly valuable to explore solutions that: distribute power, facilitate coordination, scale up governance, visibilise traditionally invisible work, monitor and track compliance with rules, define collective agreements, and enable cooperation across communities. These affordances and the subsequent analysis contribute to the emergent debate on blockchain-based forms of governance, first by providing analytical categories for further research, but also by providing a guide for experimentation with the development of blockchain tools to facilitate global cooperation

Decentralizing Science: Towards an Interoperable Open Peer Review Ecosystem using Blockchain

Science publication and its Peer Review system strongly rely on a few major industry players controlling most journals (e.g. Elsevier), databases (e.g. Scopus) and metrics (e.g. JCR Impact Factor), while keeping most articles behind paywalls. Critics to such system include concerns about fairness, quality, performance, cost, unpaid labor, transparency, and accuracy of the evaluation process. The Open Access movement has tried to provide free access to the published research articles, but most of the aforementioned issues remain. In such context, decentralized technologies such as blockchain offer an opportunity to experiment with new models for science production and dissemination relying on a decentralized infrastructure, aiming to tackle multiple of the current system shortcomings. This paper makes a proposal for an interoperable decentralized system for an open peer review ecosystem, relying on emerging distributed technologies such as blockchain and IPFS. Such system, named ``Decentralized Science'' (DecSci), aims to enable a decentralized reviewer reputation system, which relies on an Open Access by-design infrastructure, together with transparent governance processes. Two prototypes have been implemented: a proof-of-concept prototype to validate DecSci's technological feasibility, and a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) prototype co-designed with journal editors. In addition, three evaluations have been carried out: an exploratory survey to assess interest on the issues tackled, a set of interviews to confirm the main problems for editors, and another set of interviews to validate the MVP prototype. Additionally, the paper discusses the multiple interoperability challenges such proposal faces, including an architecture to tackle them. This work finishes with a review of some of the open challenges that this ambitious proposal may face

Towards a Decentralized Process for Scientific Publication and Peer Review using Blockchain and IPFS

The current processes of scientific publication and peer review raise concerns around fairness, quality, performance, cost, and accuracy. The Open Access movement has been unable to fulfill all its promises, and a few middlemen publishers can still impose policies and concentrate profits. This paper, using emerging distributed technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS, proposes a decentralized publication system for open science. The proposed system would provide (1) a distributed reviewer reputation system, (2) an Open Access by-design infrastructure, and (3) transparent governance processes. A survey is used to evaluate the problems, proposed solutions and possible adoption resistances, while a working prototype serves as a proof-of-concept. Additionally, the paper discusses the implementation, in a distributed context, of different privacy settings for both open peer review and reputation systems, introducing a novel approach supporting both anonymous and accountable reviews. The paper concludes reviewing the open challenges of this ambitious proposal