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.
A special section of Internet Policy Review, the “Glossary of decentralised technosocial systems” is an interdisciplinary glossary on peer-to-peer, user-centric and privacy-enhancing decentralised technologies. In order to tackle the existing gap in shared semantics, this glossary converges the efforts of experts from various disciplines to build a shared vocabulary on the social, technical, economic, political aspects of decentralised, distributed or sovereign technologies.
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?
Follow the project’s updates on this space!