Interview: Denis “Jaromil” Roio
Currencyadmin

Denis Roio, also known as Jaromil, is a researcher in philosophy of technology and a software artisan. His creations are recommended by the Free Software Foundation and redistributed worldwide. Since 2000 Jaromil has dedicated to build Dyne.org, a software house gathering the contributions of a growing number of developers who value social responsibility above profit. Dyne.org is also a partner in the D-CENT project.

“The digital money of the 21st century is definitely not going to be a number in a database of a bank. It’s going to be a blockchain, triple-signed ledger that more people can have in custody. Hopefully it also involves the creation of new forms of institutions that can re-establish the trust towards value circulation – the same trust that banks have lost today”, states Denis Roio.

D-CENT interview: Denis Jaromil Roio from D-CENT on Vimeo.

The emergence of the Internet-era citizen movements and political parties
DemocracyPilotsProjectadmin

The 19th century institutions of democracy, such as Parliaments, elections, parties, manifestos democratic assemblies are in great need of revival since they are out of synchronization with the 21st century technologies, norms and collective aspirations. Network parties are appearing in Europe: the Pirate Parties in Iceland, Germany and Sweden; and the Five Star Movement in Italy have pioneered Internet-based decision-making structures. Podemos in Spain, now leading in the national pools, is opening decisions up to large numbers of people through the Internet, involving citizens in shaping policy and sharing their expertise. Read more +

Join us at FutureFest
CurrencyProjectadmin

FutureFest is almost here! The upcoming weekend in London is full of immersive experiences, compelling performances and radical speakers to explore and challenge perceptions of the future. On Sunday 15th of March, D-CENT is hosting two panels: one on the future of political parties and another on the future of money. Join us, there’s still tickets for Sunday!

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Interview: Ansgar Koene and Yohko Hatada
Projectadmin

Ansgar Koene is the Research fellow from the University of Birmingham. He is a multi-disciplinary Research Scientist with experience in Computational Social Science, Robotics, Computational Neuroscience and human behaviour/perception experiments. Yohko Hatada is the Director and founder of Veram Vitam. She is Research Associate in the University of Birmingham, School of Psychology.

“I don’t think that public assemblies – as such – are going to dramatically change in the near future. The main change is going to be how the public can give their points of views towards these assemblies”, Koene says.

D-CENT interview: Ansgar Koene and Yohko Hatada from D-CENT on Vimeo.

Connecting the Basque and Icelandic cases: an ethnographic chronicle about democratic regeneration
Democracyadmin

Writer: Dr Igor Calzada

This article aims to connect Iceland and the Basque Country from the democratic regeneration perspective. The time frame chosen for the case studies is the period before and after 2008 global crisis. In Iceland the crisis had an economic and political aspect affecting the self-understanding of the territory as a whole. In the Basque Country it also deals with the current peace process to settle down political violence and its causes. In both cases there are deep underlying democratic regeneration issues. This article is part of a broader research project entitled ‘Benchmarking Future City-Regions’.

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Interview: Marco Sachy
CurrencyProjectadmin

Marco Sachy is the currency designer of the Dyne.org foundation, Ph.D Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at University of Leicester School of Management. His research focuses on the nature of money, currency design and banking engineering in order to proactively expand the representational horizon and the modes of conducting the bottom-up resistance against the unfolding violence of financial capitalism.

Sachy works for Dyne.org in the D-CENT project doing research on Social Crypto Currencies and geo-localized market places.

D-CENT interview: Marco Sachy from D-CENT on Vimeo.

Interviewing Gunnar Grimsson
DemocracyPilotsadmin

Gunnar Grimsson is the CEO of the Citizens Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Reykjavik, Iceland. Citizens Foundation has developed the online open source e-democracy platform Your Priorities and has used it to promote online, democratic debate and increase citizens’ participation in their community in Iceland and worldwide.

D-CENT interview: Gunnar Grimsson from D-CENT on Vimeo.

Democracy makes itself at home online
DemocracyProjectadmin

These are exciting times for new parties, like the UK’s UKIP, Germany’s Alternativ Deutschland, the True Finns and the Swedish Democrats, all of which are benefitting from anger and distrust directed against incumbent politicians and elites. Most are very traditional in their methods, but a few are radically reinventing how parties should work, and here I predict that 2015 will see the emergence of the first Internet-era political party in the UK. Read more +

Designing and testing D-CENT prototypes
DemocracyPilotsProjectadmin

D-CENT project started in 2013. Since then, we have conducted workshops with communities in the pilot countries Spain, Finland and Iceland, and did an analysis of distributed social networking, identity eco-systems, social data stores and privacy-aware tools. 

We continued by merging the technical findings and existing user requirements into technical requirements for the D-CENT platform. In October the technical design document was ready, and plans for pilot implementation were published in November.

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