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The Lexicon of Digital Cultures: Organizing Knowledge in Times of Digital Transformation

20th April 2021, IViR

The Lab – in collaboration with P2P Models (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Trust in Distributed Environments (Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin) and Blockchain Gov teams (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris) – has officially launched the Glossary of decentralised technosocial systems, a long-term collaborative project featured as a special section on the Internet Policy Review.

On the occasion of the release of the 2021 editorial, the Lab has hosted a roundtable discussion bringing together glossaries, encyclopedias or other types of projects that, through different formats and sizes, seek to systematize, organize, update and coalesce discursive fields of knowledge.

The discussion, hosted by Balázs Bodó, involved stellar speakers and projects, namely: Francesca Musiani, National Centre for Scientific Research, Abécédaire des architectures distribuées; Edward N. Zalta, Stanford University, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Hay Kranen, Wikimedia; Valeria Ferrari, University of Amsterdam, Glossary of Decentralised Technosocial Systems (Internet Policy Review); Nicolo Zingales, Fundação Getulio Vargas Law School, Glossary of Platforms Law and Policy (Internet Governance Forum); Noopur Raval, AINow Institute, A New AI Lexico.

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The idea of the Glossary of Decentralised Technosocial Systems arose from the need to define terms that – while being relevant to current discussions about power of/in/over digital cultures – remain ill-defined and contested. The definition of the scope, content and format of the Glossary triggered many questions about the usefulness, feasibility, necessity of such an effort. What gives our project the “authority” to select and define terms in ways that should be accepted by a broader community of researchers? How can our glossary include multiple and diverse academic and nonacademic voices, without losing coherence and soundness? How can the tension between terminological definition and dynamism be resolved?

Image: “L’univers, l’intelligence, la science, le livre”, Paul Otlet, history-computer.com

 

On 9th December 2020, the Lab hosted a guest lecture by Carola Westermeier, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science (University of Amsterdam) and part of the ERC-project FOLLOW-Following the Money from Transaction to Trial, led by Prof. Marieke de Goede. 

Carola presented her research paper “Money is data – the platformization of financial transactions“, which brings new perspectives on the relationship between money and data and illuminates on issues deriving from the monetisation of (supposed) trust-generating infrastructures. 

The discussion highlighted many points of convergence between the research interests of IViR and the objects of investigations with which the FOLLOW Projects is concerned. The dialogue between the two teams will, therefore, continue in search of mutual inspiration and interdisciplinary research integration.

On 11 June, Dr Balázs Bodó will be speaking at the Asser Institute. During this research seminar, he will be presenting his paper: ‘Mediated trust: a theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators’.

Trust is what enables the cooperation of strangers in face of risks, contingencies, and potential harm. We are going through a global crisis of trust due to globalization and digitization. On the one hand, digital technologies contribute to this crisis through their destabilizing and disruptive effects. On the other hand, they offer new ways to produce trust. In either case, digital technologies permeate and transform almost every space where trust may emerge, is produced, and used. This creates new, often unknown types of risks and contingencies, which also require trust to be overcome.

We are entering an era where trust is technologically mediated, yet what little we know about the trustworthiness of trust mediating technologies gives us no reason to trust them.

We need trust technologies we can have confidence in. To achieve that goal, we need to understand the limitations of using purely technological ways of producing trust, and upgrade or change our existing institutional logics of trust production and distrust mitigation to incorporate technological trust mediators.

This talk outlines the current crisis of trust, the challenges technological modes of trust production generate, the nature of the institutional change, and the policies which can produce trustworthy technological trust mediators.

Source: T.M.C. Asser Instituut – Events

The EU Blockchain Observatory has organized a workshop on the research priorities around blockchain technologies. Balazs was part of the academic panel. Please read the report, and watch the panel below:

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full call here: https://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2020/02/20-080-postdoctoral-socio-legal-research-scientist-at-ivir.html?origin=dxuSI3bDRY2CW7N9J3yPlw

As a research scientist, you’ll be working on the social and institutional aspects of trust in and by technological systems. Multiple technologies emerged to produce trust (such as global reputation systems, (self-sovereign) identity systems), or minimize the need for trust (DLTs). Trust, as produced by technical systems has many possible sources: strong cryptography, censorship resistance through decentralization, good governance, or legal legibility, certainty and compliance. Some of these trust sources, like technology governance and regulation, can complement each other. Others, such as compliance and decentralization, seem to be in contradiction. As a social scientist, you will be working with legal scholars on answering the following two questions at the intersection of trust and technology:

• How do (decentralized) technologies produce trust or minimize the need for trust?
• What makes these systems trustworthy?

You will answer these questions by studying various aspects of trust and trustworthiness in technological contexts.
In particular you will:

• conduct empirical research among technology developers on the trustworthiness of technology:
  • design and implement surveys, and conduct qualitative analysis on how technology developers see the trustworthiness of technology they build and operate, and how they implement and balance different sources of trust in technological systems (system design, governance, legal compliance, etc.);
• conduct empirical research among technology users on the topic of trust:
  • design and implement surveys among users of blockchain based systems on the issue of trust and trustworthiness;
  • conduct a qualitative analysis of the discourses around trust and DLTs;
• work on the problem of institutional embeddedness of decentralized technical systems:   
  • conduct empirical research on how existing societal stakeholders (such as businesses, the media, various professional groups, regulators, policymakers) see the trustworthiness of decentralized technologies, and their ability to produce trust;

We are proud to announce that we have won a large Dutch Science Council (NWO) grant to study the legal conditions of trust in decentralized technology systems. Together with the Blockchain Lab of TU Delft, and the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the material support of the Dutch Ministry of Interior, and the Dutch Pension Administration, we will study how law can contribute to various form of decentralized, DLT based trust technologies, such as self-sovereign identities, or decentralized marketplaces.

See the full press release below.

Researchers at the IViR Sovereignty4Europe project are exploring the principles of an ‘Internet-of-Trust’. The aim is to design a system that securely stores varied transactions in a blockchain. IViR is conducting the project in collaboration with researchers from TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam and other partners. The 3.3-million euro project was funded through contributions from NWO, RvIG, Holland High Tech, Topsector HTSM, and Delft Blockchain Lab TU Delft.

Project leader Johan Pouwelse (TU Delft): ‘Internet behemoths like Amazon, eBay, Google essentially sell trust: we use Amazon and eBay as trusted intermediaries, and visit Google to find relevant websites. These giant companies then store our personal data on their own individual servers. We aim to replace these US-dominated central servers with a general, non-profit and open source alternative that can serve as the basis for a reliable blockchain economy. A scalable and reliable way of maintaining trust and reputation in an open environment, with no need for a central authority.’

Blockchain

The project should culminate in the design of an internet-based system capable of reliably storing a wide range of transactions in a blockchain, in line with European legislation. This will make individuals uniquely identifiable and allow researchers to ascertain levels of trust from previous transactions. The Internet-of-Trust infrastructure is currently being evaluated in an online community made up of 50,000 internet users. The legal aspects of this blockchain economy are being evaluated on the basis of national and European privacy laws.

The project is being headed by Balázs Bodó, the founder of the ERC-funded Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab.Bodó: ‘The legal team is assessing how new, technological forms of trust building can work with rather than against the legal system’s current trust building instruments such as regulation, law enforcement and the court system.’

Collaboration with National Office for Identity Data (RvIG)

In addition to the three universities, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations’ National Office for Identity Data (RvIG) is also actively participating in the project. RvIG aims to contribute to an open, universally accessible ecosystem that meets both social (privacy and security) and economic needs. Amongst other benefits, the new system should help strengthen trust in digital transactions, reduce costs and promote the development of alternative forms of service provision such as an electronic ID card.

Europe

The project should also yield insights at a European administrative level. The European Commission (EC) has asserted that blockchain technology allows for new distributed and interaction models that are based on direct peer-to-peer information exchange and do not require any central platforms or intermediaries, and is currently assessing the feasibility of an EU Blockchain Infrastructure (EuroChain). Sovereignty4Europe seamlessly reflects these European ambitions.

After a year or so being part of writing the Dutch National Blockchain Research Agenda, the Lab is now part of a winning consortium which puts parts of that research agenda in practice.

Together with TU Delft’s Blockchain Lab, Erasmus University, the Dutch Ministry of Interior, and others, we will be working on trustworthy blockchain applications in the next 4 years, due to a generous, 1.5M Eur NWO grant, and a similar amount of private contribution.

See the full press release here.