Blog

Andrea D'Intino
Wednesday, June 12, 2019

One of the challenges in managing a platform built on services and apps, running on different and hardware and software environments, is the integrity of the cryptographic data: current state-of-the-art cryptography is not fully deterministic and can't ensure consistent results in a multiplatform setup.

A virtual machine is an elegant solution to this problem, as it ensures a consistent and deterministic execution of cryptographic functions. Zenroom runs independently from its underlying OS, cause it uses its own built-in pseudo-random number generation function and allocates its memory allocation directly: this combination ensures that complex cryptographical flows can run a variety of platforms.

Antonio Calleja López
Friday, May 17, 2019

Digital Democracy and Data Commons (DDDC), the first DECODE pilot in Barcelona, has closed its key milestone, a 6 month participatory process with two main objectives: on the one hand, to test a new technology that will improve the digital platform for participatory democracy Decidim; on the other, to open a debate on the data politics of the future.

Denis "Jaromil" Roio, Dyne.org foundation
Friday, May 17, 2019

Approaching the year 2020, it's easy to realise we all live in a world in which more decisions are taken by algorithms, rather than by humans following established rules.

Max Kortlander, Job Spierings, Tom Demeyer
Tuesday, April 30, 2019

In this short post we describe the Amsterdam Claim Verification pilot, walking through how the product works as well as our future plans to pilot the technology of Amsterdam.

 
DECODE Pilots in Amsterdam: Experimenting with Attribute Based Credentials
Max Kortlander, Job Spierings, Tom Demeyer
Thursday, April 18, 2019

Two pilots from DECODE are being developed and tested in the Netherlands that make use of attribute based credentials to help people have more control over the data they share.

Andrea D'Intino
Friday, February 22, 2019

Zenroom's implementation of BDD (Behavior-driven development) makes smart contracts accessible to non-programmers by allowing those to be written in natural language (read: "plain English"). Smart contracts enable events (such as payments or voting) to be automatically triggered, based on scripted conditions (such as a predefined event, or a GDPR-compliant digital authorization), storing data on a tamper-proof Blockchain.

George Danezis
Monday, January 14, 2019

In this short blog post, I will outline our first design – for an electronic petitions site – and use it to illustrate the technologies underlying DECODE privacy controls, as well as the architectures that enable this vision.

Theo Bass, Paulus Meessen
Friday, December 7, 2018

DECODE is a fourteen-partner project which aims to understand new types of social value that are generated when people are given the ability to control and share personal data on their terms. It aims to create tools that allow people to flexibly decide who is able to access personal data, and for what purposes

Enric Senabre and Mayo Fuster Morell
Thursday, November 8, 2018

Without data commons at the service of the institutions, the market and society, the collaborative economy ecosystem is hard to sustain and risks drifting towards a horizon of disempowering and extractive impacts, with consequences in many fields. We analyse the implications of data policies, focusing on public policies and research, and including access to these and citizen participation.

Mayo Fuster Morell, Ricard Espelt
Friday, September 21, 2018

The collaborative economy – the collaborative consumption and production of capital and work between distributed groups that interact with the support of a digital platform – is growing rapidly and exponentially, becoming a matter of interest and a priority for governments around the world. In addition, it is creating greater expectations of sustainability for its potential to contribute to the sustainable development of society, a paradigm shift towards a more humane model.

Oleguer Sagarra, Javier Rodriguez, Pau Balcells
Thursday, August 23, 2018

One further step into our journey committed to building tools that enable the creation of a City Data Commons

Mirko Marras and David Laniado
Thursday, June 14, 2018

The BarcelonaNow dashboard was presented by Eurecat’s Data Science and Big Data Analytics team as a demonstration entitled “BarcelonaNow: Empowering Citizens with Interactive Dashboards for Urban Data Exploration” at “The Web Conference 2018” (former WWW), held on 23-27 April 2018 in Lyon (France).

Samuel Mulube
Wednesday, April 18, 2018

In his 2015 talk Haunted By Data, Maciej Ceglowski convincingly argued the case that a lot of the way companies talk about personal or aggregated personal data is almost exactly wrong; rather than thinking about it as a pristine resource that flows in limpid streams, is pooled in data lakes, and then stored in the cloud; it's much more sensible to think about it as toxic waste or radioactive material that we don't yet know how to handle.

Giulia Rocchi, Stefano Lucarelli
Thursday, April 12, 2018

The role of data in the current digitally soaked society is so important that data has been repeatedly defined in several and different spheres as the new oil, a new factor of production, and the currency of today's digital market. 90 per cent of the data present in the world today has been created in the last two years and this huge amount is expected to grow by 40 per cent annually over the next decade, a forecast consistent with the diffusion of smartphone usage and the expansion of the Internet of Things ecosystem.

Eleonora Bassi
Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Imagine a city authority that aims to strengthen citizen participation through transparent petitions, or intends to involve citizens in pollution- and noise-control programs, making people more conscious about health data and the environment. In these cases, we have many actors – citizens, cities, civic organizations, businesses, and communities – that need to make use of technology in order to deploy a service, share information, or control data and activities’ results.

Mirko Marras, Matteo Manca and David Laniado
Monday, November 6, 2017

Mirko Marras, Matteo Manca and David Laniado from Eurecat introduce the visualisations they're developing to use open and citizen-generated data for public good. 

Job Spierings and Max Kortlander
Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Waag Society's Job Spierings and Max Kortlander explore how DECODE is building an alternative vision to our current data models. 

Mayo Fuster
Friday, October 6, 2017

Analytical framework of the democratic and procommons qualities of collaborative economy organizations

David Cuartielles, Arduino
Wednesday, September 27, 2017

A short review of Visual Programming Languages

Theo Bass
Monday, September 18, 2017

For many years it’s been a cliche to claim that information or data are the new oil. This fits well for the purposes of commodifying and selling data, but the analogy poorly matches data’s core properties. Oil is a scarce physical resource. Data and information by contrast can be replicated without limit and often become more valuable the more they are shared.

Priya Samuel
Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Through pilots in Barcelona and Amsterdam, DECODE will be showcase and test a variety of potential use cases for the technology

Jaap-Henk Hoepman
Thursday, July 6, 2017

For the DECODE project we performed an initial study to chart the initial privacy requirements for DECODE and how they could be addressed in the DECODE architecture. As a point of departure we took the Privacy Design Strategies that we developed several years ago. These strategies translate
the soft legal norms into more concrete design requirements that engineers understand.

Cartoon of smartphone and user icons
Theo Bass
Thursday, June 22, 2017

This post offers some thoughts on the opportunities and challenges of blockchain technology, with particular reference to the DECODE project. DECODE is a pan-European effort to research and pilot new approaches to how people manage their personal data. Here I’ll describe what a blockchain is, why blockchains are relevant to personal data management, and what difficulties might arise as the technology becomes implemented more widely.

Smart phone blockchain interaction
Professor George Danezis
Friday, June 16, 2017

The team at UCL introduce their role in DECODE building a scalable distributed ledger

Tom Symons, Theo Bass
Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Nesta's research workshop considered plausible future scenarios for the personal data economy. This blog offers an overview of the discussion.

Illustrated devices
Tom Symons, Theo Bass and Eddie Copeland, Nesta
Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Our new project DECODE aims to give people better control of their personal data.

Eddie Copeland
Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Blockchain powers a personal data revolution