Algorithmic Governance

2019

The commons consists of a wide variety of self-organized social practices that enable communities to manage resources for collective benefit in fair, inclusive, sustainable and accountable ways (Ostrom, 1990). The examples range from seed sharing communities to F/LOSS projects, Fab Labs, and peer-to-peer economy services.

When communities grow increasingly complex, it becomes more difficult to understand the participants’ contributions to and consumption of the commons. Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) may have some affordances to help commoners to make their own governing decisions. They are well placed to play a fundamental role in registering resource production, usage, and transactions; keeping track of account balances; and managing identities and rights. Moreover, with the addition of smart contracts, distributed ledgers are set to play a role in the automated processing of data and conditional execution of transactions through algorithmic governance. They can thus be understood as decentralized databases with built-in verification schemes that allow for immutable record storage and automatic transactions.  

Currently, blockchain is a widely discussed instantiation of this technology. In the Circulate project, we explored the implications of applying blockchain as a new tool for civic self-organization and commons governance through the case of a fictional energy community. Three mechanisms were identified in this process: tracking use of and contributions to the commons; managing resources, and negotiating the underlying rule sets and user rights. We identified six design dilemmas related to these mechanisms that could support designers in reflecting on the set-up of a blockchain-based platform for local communities. Our effort was aimed at making the affordances, as well as limitations, of algorithmic governance tangible for the HCI community.

Circulate was a collaboration between Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (dr. Martijn de Waal, dr. Gabriele Ferri, Inte Gloerich, Wouter Meys, dr. Nazli Cila), Avans University of Applied Sciences (Tara Karpinski), Metabolic, Enki Energy, Spectral, Café de Ceuvel, Space & Matter, Crowdbuilding, Stipo, One Architecture, Pakhuis de Zwijger, Stadslab Buiksloterham Circulair, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Branchevereniging Nederlandse Architectenbureaus, Planbureau voor de leefomgeving, and CTO Office Municipality of Amsterdam. The project was funded by Regieorgaan SIA under the RAAK-PRO programme.

Related Publications:

Nazli Cila, Gabriele Ferri, Martijn de Waal, Inte Gloerich, and Tara Karpinski. 2020. The Blockchain and the Commons: Dilemmas in the Design of Local Platforms. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376660

Gloerich, I., De Waal, M., Ferri, G., Cila, N., & Karpinski, T. (2020). The city as a licence: Implications of Blockchain and distributed ledgers for urban governance. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, section Governance and Cities, 2:534942. doi: 10.3389/frsc.2020.534942.