Blog

​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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

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

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