Re: D-CENT: state of the art - not

Having personally participated in two FP7 projects I can say that the format is typical and unsurprising. In my experience these projects define the principles and detailed goals during the project and not before. Generally all the parties will come to the project wanting to fund/develop their own technologies whilst building some sort of structure they can all fit into.

The best that we can do is work through the partners to make sure that the project is built in components with clear open APIs. If there is a clear case that technologies have become obsolete then reviewers would have to be persuaded for the change in direction, but this is possible.

I see that OuiShare is involved. I will chase this from my end.

Meanwhile I'll resend out my request for feedback for the Social Web Summit in Paris 1-4 May.

Cheers Daniel

On 24 Feb 2014, at 13:25, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> Before trashing the technology solutions, perhaps it's worth noting:
> 
> 1. D-CENT seems to be one of seven projects selected, competitively, under "objective 5.5. CAPS – Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation and objective 1.7b – Internet Science -- the focus is application more than technology.
> 
> 2. The focus of D-CENT is described as "New tools for direct democracy, participation, new economic models."
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> 3. The project seems to explicitly build on current civic engagement projects in Spain, Iceland, and Finland - with some explicit goals for expanding on current activities and platforms.
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> In this kind of project, existing technology base seems to be a major consideration - with scaling, interoperability, and application being the appropriate focuses.  And I note that one explicit goal is scaling up the existing use of Ellg by the Spanish participants.
> 
> What strikes me as a lot more notable is that, given that the stated focus and goals are things like: "Open Ministry," "Crowd-Sourced Democracy," "Digital Currencies & Collaborative Consumption," and "incentive structures (for)linking civic action to collaborative economic models" - my reaction is more along the lines of 'way too much focus on technology, way too little on group process, economics, organizational design, etc.'
> 
> This reads like "let's throw a large-scale town meeting by throwing lots of people in an electronic room" with no thought about rules of order; and, at the same time, "let's design a new economy" with no thought about market structures.  "Build the right platform and it will solve all problems" seems a little thin.
> 
> Or, put another way, as Larry Lessig so aptly put it "code is law." The organizing principles that get built into a platform will dictate/constrain/influence its application.  I see very little attention to what organizing principles the D-CENT team are trying to encapsulate and apply beyond a few platitudes on their last slide (e.g., "community ownership of data and access to knowledge").  How about organizing principles for how the platform will actually support "direct democracy, participation, and new economic models.").
> 
> By the way, for those who bemoan dead projects - "electronic democracy" and such really hasn't made much progress since the 90s (speaking as one who bashed my head against such problems at the time) - the issues have very little to do with technology and much to do with politics and economics.  Arguably, the most effective results to date have been the use of twitter by revolutionaries in the streets, and the emergence of eBay and Amazon as new marketplaces.
> 
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> Miles Fidelman
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> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 25 February 2014 07:50:23 UTC