Blockchain-facilitated sharing to advance outbreak R&D | Science

Timely and widespread dissemination of resources and information related to pathogenic threats plays a critical role in outbreak recognition, research, containment, and mitigation (1, 2), as stakeholders from government, public health (PH), industry, and academia seek to implement interventions and develop vaccines, diagnostics, and drugs (3). But there are persistent barriers to sharing and cooperative research and development (R&D) in the context of epidemics, rooted in a lack of trust in confidentiality and reciprocity (4, 5), ambiguity over resource ownership (6), and conflicting public, private, and academic incentives (24, 6). Here, we suggest how recent advances in blockchain and related technologies can enable decentralized mechanisms to help break down these systemic and largely nontechnological barriers. These mechanisms resolve scalability, energy consumption, and security concerns of early blockchain models and may be applied to underpin and interconnect, rather than supersede or conflict with existing, well-established systems and practices for storing, sharing, and governing resources.

Source: Blockchain-facilitated sharing to advance outbreak R&D | Science

The Reputation Society – Hassan Masum

The Reputation Society (MIT Press, 2012) is a collection of essays discussing the benefits and risks of online reputation. It focuses on asking the right questions today, so that reputation is better used in society tomorrow. Expert contributors offer perspectives ranging from philanthropy and open access to science and law. The 18 chapters are divided into 6 thematic parts. (The Table of Contents, sample chapters, and reviews are on the Reputation Society MIT Press web page.)

Source: The Reputation Society – Hassan Masum

Trust & Technology Initiative

The Trust & Technology Initiative brings together and drives forward interdisciplinary research from Cambridge and beyond to explore the dynamics of trust and distrust in relation to internet technologies, society and power; to better inform trustworthy design and governance of next generation tech at the research and development stage; and to promote informed, critical, and engaging voices supporting individuals, communities and institutions in light of technology’s increasing pervasiveness in societies.

Source: Trust & Technology Initiative

MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab

The objective of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab is to push the research frontier in the emerging field of cryptoeconomics.

Cryptoeconomics brings together the fields of economics and computer science to study the decentralized marketplaces and applications that can be built by combining cryptography with economic incentives.

It focuses on individual decision-making and strategic interaction between different participants in a digital ecosystem (e.g. users, providers of key resources, application developers etc.), and uses methodologies from the field of economics – such as game theory, mechanism design and causal inference – to understand how to fund, design, develop, facilitate the operations and encourage the adoption of decentralized marketplaces and related services and digital assets.

The resulting “digital economies” often require the definition of a monetary, fiscal, privacy and innovation policy. Moreover, they need effective governance to ensure that the platform maintainers can upgrade the underlying software protocols over time in response to changes in the environment, technology or market needs.

BITNATION Yearly Summary 2017-2018: The Most Productive Year Yet — Steemit

Summary of previous years, for those of you who are new to Bitnation:Year 1 – 2014-2015: Bitnation was launched on 14th of July 2014, and the first Whitepaper was published in October 2014. The first few months we focused on conducting various pilots, including the world’s first blockchain marriage, world citizenship ID, land title and birth certificate. By July 2015 we had released the first version of the Pangea Jurisdiction on the NXT testnet. We built a worldwide Ambassador Network consisting of +50 individuals organising meet ups and hangouts and hundreds of volunteer developers and technologists. Read detailed yearly summary for Year 1 on Medium.

Source: BITNATION Yearly Summary 2017-2018: The Most Productive Year Yet — Steemit

COHUBICOL

This is the website of the CoHuBiCoL research project, for which Mireille Hildebrandt received an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council, enabling to set up a team of both lawyers and computer scientists, to conduct foundational research into computational law. The site will be updated as we go along. Note that the official starting date is January 2019.  We will investigate how the prominence of counting and computation transforms many of the assumptions, operations and outcomes of the law. The research targets two types of computational law:​artificial legal intelligence or data-driven law (based on machine learning), andcryptographic or code-driven law (based on blockchain technologies).

Source: COHUBICOL

Cloud Communities: The Dawn of Global Citizenship? – Globalcit

Contents:
Cloud Communities: The Dawn of Global Citizenship?, kickoff contribution by Liav Orgad
Citizenship in Cloud Cuckoo Land?, by Rainer Bauböck
Citizenship in the Era of Blockchain-Based Virtual Nations, by Primavera De Filippi
Global Citizenship for the Stay-at-Homes, by Francesca Strumia
A World Without Law; A World Without Politics, by Robert Post
Virtual Politics, Real Guns: On Cloud Community, Violence, and Human Rights, by Michael Blake
A World Wide Web of Citizenship, by Peter J. Spiro
Citizenship Forecast: Partly Cloudy with Chances of Algorithms, by Costica Dumbrava
The Separation of Territory and State: a Digital French Revolution?, by Yussef Al Tamimi
A Brave New Dawn? Digital Cakes, Cloudy Governance and Citizenship á la carte, by Jelena Dzankic
Old Divides, New Devices: Global Citizenship for Only Half of the World, by Lea Ypi
Escapist technology in the service of neo-feudalism, by Dimitry Kochenov
Cloud communities and the materiality of the digital, by Stefania Milan
Cloud Agoras: When Blockchain Technology Meets Arendt’s Virtual Public Spaces, by Dora Kostakopoulou
Global Cryptodemocracy is Possible and Desirable, by Ehud Shapiro
The Future of Citizenship: Global and Digital. A Rejoinder, by Liav Orgad