The October issue of the ERCIM News publishes an article about the D-CENT Project, written by Harry Halpin of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The article, titled Decentralized Social Software for Political Autonomy, describes our efforts to build applications for the common good. W3C is one of the D-CENT project partners.

D-CENT is a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment. It develops decentralised social networking tools for large-scale collaboration and decision-making.

“As an alternative to closed and centralised internet platforms whose business models crucially rely on monetising the identity and social lives of their users, D-CENT aims to create a uniquely European open and decentralised approach aimed at empowering ordinary citizens to take action for the common good”, W3C fellow Harry Halpin explains in his article.

D-CENT builds on open standards for a distributed identity management system. This gives people control over their own social data.

“Using a decentralized architecture in D-CENT, proposals will be able to start from the bottom-up and then be modified and applied across different contexts, ranging from neighborhood assemblies to cities to nations, even at the European level”, writes Halpin.

Read the full article: http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en103/r-i/the-d-cent-project-decentralized-social-software-for-political-autonomy

Harry Halpin is a W3C Fellow funded by Eduserv. Guiding his work at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is his commitment to keeping the Web an universal space of information for the development of collective intelligence. W3C is one of the partners of the D-CENT project.

D-CENT interview: Harry Halpin from D-CENT on Vimeo.