Pablo Aragón

From February 8 to 9, we have held in the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) the kick-off meeting of DECODE project, selected under the H2020 call Distributed Architectures for Decentralised Data Governance.

The agenda included the typical walk through of programme (project overall vision, objectives, work packages, deliverables, and milestones) and a workshop on Lean and Agile, as we did three years ago when starting D-CENT project. Also, given the large number of partners in DECODE, we divided into three groups to make progress on specific issues:

• Breakout sessions (Wednesday)
  • Architecture & privacy design
  • Legal, Policy, socio-economic
  • Communications, dissemination, events, summer schools and hackathons

• Breakout sessions (Thursday)
  • Technology development roadmap and milestones
  • Theoretical Foundations/ sharing economy and commons-based models
  • Community engagement & ecosystem building

Photos: @BCN_digital

Description

Today’s Internet is becoming increasingly centralised, slowing innovation and challenging its potential to revolutionise society and the economy in a pluralistic manner. DECODE will develop practical alternatives through the creation, evaluation and demonstration of a distributed and open architecture for managing online identity, personal and other data, and collective governance in a citizen-friendly and privacy-aware fashion. Strong digital rights that makes it possible for data subjects to determine access rights to their information through flexible entitlements and open standard-based agreements regarding data governance (on the model of Creative Commons licenses) will be woven into the technological architecture.

DECODE will increase digital sovereignty of European citizens by enabling them to produce, access and control their data and exchange contextualised information in real-time, and in a confidential, and scalable manner. DECODE will develop a modular privacy-aware IoT hub with a free and open source operating system backed by a state of the art blockchain infrastructure supporting smart-contracts and privacy protections.

The architecture will be demonstrated through four pilots in Barcelona and Amsterdam, in the field of digital democracy, citizen sensing, and collaborative economy. The pilots will be run with the active involvement of social entrepreneurs, hackers, and makers. Innovators will be able to build solutions on top of the platform through hackathons and open challenges, while ensuring their security, resilience and privacy preserving qualities. This aims to create a decentralised innovation ecosystem that will attract a critical mass able to shift the current centralised data-driven economy towards a decentralised, sustainable and commons-based economy. DECODE puts agency and data control in the hands of citizens, to improve citizens’ well-being and society for the collective benefit of all.