In recent years, the increasing need for global coordination has attracted interest in the governance of global-scale commons. In the current context, we observe how online applications are ubiquitous, and how emerging technologies enable new capabilities while reshaping sectors. Thus, it is pertinent to ask: could blockchain technologies facilitate the extension and scaling up of cooperative practices and commons management in this global context? In order to address this question, we propose a focus on the most paradigmatic and widely successful examples of global cooperation: global digital commons. Examples of these are the digital resources maintained by large peer production communities, such as free/libre open source software and Wikipedia. Thus, this article identifies and analyzes the potentialities of blockchain to support the sustainability and management of global digital commons. Our approach draws on Elinor Ostromâs classic principles for commons governance, although revisiting and adapting these to the more challenging scope of global digital commons. Thus, in this work we identify the affordances which blockchain provides (e.g., tokenization, formalization of rules, transparency or codification of trust) to support the effective management of this type of global commons. As part of our analysis, we provide numerous examples of existing blockchain projects using affordances in line with each principle, as well as potential integrations of such affordances in existing practices of peer production communities. Our analysis shows that, when considering the challenges of managing global commons (e.g., heterogeneity or scale), the potential of blockchain is particularly valuable to explore solutions that: distribute power, facilitate coordination, scale up governance, visibilize traditionally invisible work, monitor and track compliance with rules, define collective agreements, and enable cooperation across communities. These affordances and the subsequent analysis contribute to the emergent debate on blockchain-based forms of governance, first by providing analytical categories for further research, but also by providing a guide for experimentation with the development of blockchain tools to facilitate global cooperation.
Distributed Ledger Technology can benefit the severe and chronic issues in the planning and execution of complex projects. However, while the general potential is recognized, there is little rigorous discussion of the pathway to benefits or detailed description of architectures to realize them. Here, we start by discussing the severity and causes of the problem. We then present an architecture designed to ameliorate them. Project networks are temporally constrained DAGs; new value is created at project milestones corresponding to the DAG vertices. Building on these characteristics, we describe an architecture for collaborative planning and execution with smart contracts at milestones and tokens backed by project created assets.
Companies increasingly tender knowledge-intensive tasks using crowdsourcing platforms to gain access to scarce knowledge and skills otherwise out of reach, and in this way, gaining competitive advantage. Despite its potential, existing crowdsourcing platforms encounter several challenges, including (1) fragmentation of expertise, as there are many platforms, (2) distrust between task providers and crowdsourcing participants, as identity and past performance are often not known, and (3) inability to learn from experience due to a lack of openness. A reference architecture for blockchain-based knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing platforms to mediate transactions between demand and supply of knowledge is designed in this paper to overcome these challenges. A design science research method is followed to develop the architecture. The reference architecture shows how blockchain and smart contract components can be integrated to support and coordinate knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing activities. By removing traditional e-commerce intermediaries, blockchain reduces search friction, knowledge transfer costs, and cheating by task providers or crowdsourcing participants.
In the past few decades, there has been a sharp rise of research irreproducibility and retraction, to a point that now is deemed as a crisis. Addressing this crisis, we present a peer-to-peer (P2P) publication model that utilizes blockchain and smart contract technologies. Focusing primarily on researchers and reviewers, the conceptual P2P publication model addresses the sociocultural and incentivization aspects of the irreproducibility crisis. In the P2P publication model, instead of a complete publication, a preapproved experimental design will be published on an incremental basis (unit-by-unit) and authorship will be shared with reviewers. The concept of the P2P publication model was inspired by the transformational journey the music publishing industry has undertaken as it traverses through vinyl age (complete albums) to the Spotify age (single-by-single), where there is a growing inclination among artists toward building an incremental album, taking account of feedback from fans and utilizing automated revenue collection and sharing systems. The ability to publish incrementally through the P2P publication model will relieve researchers from the burden of publishing complete and âgood resultsâ while simultaneously incentivizing reviewers to undertake rigorous review work to gain authorship credit in the research. The proposed P2P publication model aims to transform the century-old publication model and incentivization structure in alignment with open access publication ethos of the 21st century.
Eleu Wong Ellinger, Tobias Mini, Robert Wayne Gregory, Thomas Widjaja
An increasing number of platform organizations are run by agentic algorithms. While much is known about algorithmic management on centralized platform organizations such as Uber, where human agency is limited through data-driven surveillance and control, decentralized organizing has begun to emerge in agentic IS platforms, characterized by conjoined human and algorithmic agency. We examine this shift toward decentralized organizing by analyzing multiple cases of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that leverage blockchain technology and seek to expand, not limit, collective human action while being run by agentic algorithms. The phenomenon of DAOs gives rise to a puzzle: How is collective action facilitated in agentic IS platforms when they are increasingly run by algorithms? Our findings show that agentic algorithms have the ability to facilitate collective action that is aligned around a common human purpose dynamically negotiated through adaptation of the set of algorithms running the organization. We explain how collective action is enacted in DAOs, as an example of agentic IS platforms, presenting a grounded model developed inductively based on our multiple-case study. Our study complements and extends the work of Baird and Maruping (2021) by expanding the focus of analysis of agentic IS artifacts to agentic IS platforms and considering facilitation as well as delegation. Our detailed findings about decentralized algorithmic management and decentralized management of algorithms in DAOs extend the literature on platform organizing, which thus far has paid only limited attention to the unique mechanisms at play in the context of conjoined agency.
Gerald B. Imbugwa, Manuel Mazzara, Salvatore Distefano
Abstract In this paper, we envision to illustrate the process to be used in developing a mobile application on the smart contract. We start by looking at what other researchers have accomplished and how we can improve on what already exists. The paper highlights the requirement gathering process, the methodology for data collection to streamline and validate the requirement, the architecture and implementation phase by analyzing the technological stack to achieve the business goal.
We outline the concept of an open technology platform which builds upon a publicly accessible library of fluidic designs, manufacturing processes and experimental characterisation, as well as virtualisation by a âdigital twinâ. Backed by the rapidly emerging Web3 technology âBlockchainâ, we significantly extend traditional approaches to effectively incentivise broader participation by an interdisciplinary âvalue networkâ of diverse players. Ranging from skilled individuals and more established research institutions to companies with their infrastructures, equipment and services, the novel platform approach enables all stakeholders to jointly contribute to value creation along more decentralised supply chain designs. Blockchain-enabled âWisdom of the Crowdsâ and âSkin in the gameâ mechanisms secure âtrustâ and transparency between participants. Prediction markets are created for guiding decision making, planning and allocation of funding; competitive parallelisation of work and its validation from independent participants substantially enhances quality, credibility and speed of project outcomes along the entire path from RTD, fabrication and testing to eventual commercialisation. This novel, Blockchain-backed concept can be led by a corporation, academic entity, a loosely organised group, or even a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). The proposed strategy is particularly attractive for highly interdisciplinary fields like Lab-on-a-Chip systems in the context of manifold applications in the Life Sciences. Rather than engaging in all sub-disciplines themselves, many smaller, highly innovative actors can focus on strengthening the product component distinguishing their unique selling point (USP). In this effort, system integrators access underlying commons like fluidic design, manufacture, instrumentation and software from a more resilient and diversified supply chain.
The predicted embracing of thriving knowledge societies is increasingly compromised by threatening perceptions of information overload and attention poverty, opportunity divides and career uncertainties. By integrating system dynamics, discrete-event, and agent-based modeling, this paper traces the roots of these symptoms back to their causes of information entropy and structural holes, invisible private and undiscoverable public knowledge which together characterize the sad state of our current knowledge management (KM) and creation practices. Looking forward, it proposes a decentralized generative KM approach that prioritizes the capacity development of autonomous individual knowledge workers not at the expense but as a viable means to foster a fruitful co-evolution with traditional organizational KM systems. As part of an ongoing design science research and prototyping project, this systems thinking and hybrid model perspective complements a succession of prior multidisciplinary publications on the subject.
To achieve software crowdsourcing, it is significant to develop a suitable framework for software development and quality control to motivate workers to participate and well-perform in crowdsourcing. Although the existing works have achieved some positive results, they do not achieve secure and efficient software crowdsourcing due to the âtrustâ and âefficiencyâ issues. For example, the existing centralized software crowdsourcing suffers from lack of trust, low reliability, and high costs. We first exploit blockchain technologies for software crowdsourcing and propose a blockchain-empowered decentralized framework for software development and quality control to achieve secure and efficient software crowdsourcing. Then we describe and analyze the blockchain-empowered decentralized framework for software crowdsourcing in detail. Ultimately, we analyze the security and efficiency performance of the proposed blockchain-empowered decentralized crowdsourcing framework.
Roman ZeiĂ, Anne Ixmeier, Jan Recker, Johann Kranz
Abstract One of today's grand societal challenges is to replace the current âtakeâmakeâwasteâ economic model with a circular economic model that allows a gradual decoupling of economic activities from the consumption of finite virgin resources. While circular economy (CE) scholars have long lauded digital technologies such as sensors, distributed ledgers, or platforms as key enablers, our own community has not fully explored the potentials of information systems (IS) for a CE. Considering recent technological advances in software and hardware and our history of helping address wicked challenges, we believe the time is ripe to mobilise IS scholarship for a CE. Our findings from an interdisciplinary literature review show that research has primarily examined IS potentials for increasing efficiency of isolated intraâorganisational processes while neglecting the larger sustainability potential of IS to establish circular material flowsâthat is, slow down and close material loops across entire product lifecycles. In response, we propose directions for IS research that develop our knowledge of how IS can help understand and enact circular material flows to intensify and extend use of products and components and recycle waste materials. Our directions offer pathways to building and evaluating the problemâsolution pairing that could characterise a prolific CEâIS relationship.
The coordination of developing various complex and large-scale projects using computers has been well established and is the so-called computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Collaborative software development requires similar technologies and tools to handle the coordination among participating teams. Development of complex and large-scale software systems can be largely improved by effective collaboration among participating software development teams at both component and system levels, which depends on trusted coordination among the participating teams for sharing, processing, and managing information on various participating teams, which are often operating in a distributed environment, even if they are in the same organization. Existing approaches for coordination in collaborative software development are based on using centralized repository and tools to store, process, and retrieve information on participating software development teams during the development. These approaches use centralized authority, have a single point of failure and restricted rights to own data and software. Although there are approaches for collaborative software development using blockchain, they only verify blockchain transactions using customized agreement techniques, and do not address the coordination in collaborative software development. In this paper, it is shown how private blockchain is used to provide trusted coordination in collaborative software development using smart contracts. This is due to the properties of immutability, auditability, and transparency of the blockchain.
Crowdsourcing refers to a distributed problem-solving mechanism that solves complex problems which are difficult for a single individual to solve by integrating the unknown free and voluntary masses on the Internet. In the existing crowdsourcing systems, requesters and workers are usually required to use the crowdsourcing platform as the trust center, and the payment of the fee depends on the third-party central payment institutions. This centralized service mechanism has a large security risk. Once these centers are attacked, or the centers are doing evil, it will bring greater losses to the crowdsourcing parties. Based on the blockchain technology, we propose a new and decentralized trusted service mechanism for crowdsourcing system. The crowdsourcing service process is divided into nine stages, and the smart contract controls the execution of each step in each stage. In addition, the payment is completed by transferring within the blockchain. Finally, we develop smart contracts to conduct experiments based on Ethereum, and conduct comparison experiments. The experimental results show that the effectiveness and applicability of the service of the crowdsourcing system service mechanism without the central institutions.
Makoto Yano, Chris Dai, Kenichi Masuda, Yoshio Kishimoto
The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry regards the process of incorporating new information technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and big data analysis into society as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This view is reflected in the Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan. The plan advocates Society 5.0, in which cyber space and physical space are integrated to support an affluent and human-friendly society.
Cryptocurrency development has continuous escalation in the past years and holds its presence significantly in open source development. Online collaborative software development platforms such as GitHub offer us an opportunity to observe developer effort, activity and software growth. Cryptocurrency has enabled various applications such as smart contracts, electronically decentralized payments, etc. Since, prices of each cryptocurrency are driven by many factors, we are interested in investigating how various characteristics of cryptocurrency's codebase development affect market capitalization price. Thus, we conduct a study on a panel dataset containing nearly a year of daily observations of development activity, popularity, and market capitalization for over two hundred open source cryptocurrencies.
Naoki Kobayakawa, Mitsuyoshi Imamura, Kei Nakagawa, Kenichi Yoshida
Open source software (OSS) has become indispensable to our society. The success of OSS depends on the participation of a large number of developers or maintainers (contributors). Shedding light on the mechanisms of their participation has been an important academic and practical matter. One aspect to decide participation is the future prospects of a project. However, the causal mechanism behind participation has yet to be studied exhaustively and remains unclear. In this study, we used cryptocurrency projects, many of them were developed on GitHub, to better understand this mechanism. Both GitHub and cryptocurrencies are highly transparent, i.e., information is fully disclosed; we can analyze relevant information on a project, such as the contributors' activities, financial information, and development status. We adopted market capitalization as the substitution index of future prospects and the number of contributors and analyzed the relationship using time series analysis techniques, such as the Granger causality test and regression. We found that the number of contributors increases two months after market capitalization increases. This quantifies the impact of the future prospects of the project, i.e., of the market capitalization of a cryptocurrency, on the participation of contributors.
The main goal set in this monograph was to create an economic and legal model for financing long-term and capital-intensive investment projects utilizing the potential of DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) so that the new solution is an effective alternative and is adapted to existing legal possibilities (compliance-by-design approach). The monograph is the most important result of the work carried out as part of a grant financed by the Polish National Science Centre, and contains a proposal for such a model (see Chapter 7 ).
Denna studie undersöker huruvida avsiktligt implementerad friktion inom interaktionsdesign kan minska antal anvÀndarfel vid insatsprocessen för blockkedjor med Proof-of-Stake teknik. Friktion som avsiktligt implementerats har tidigare visats kunna leda till fÀrre anvÀndarfel. Det spekuleras i att blockkedjor kan komma att anvÀndas i större utstrÀckning i framtiden. Eftersom fel i insatsprocessen för en blockkedja med Proof-of-Stake teknik kan leda till att pengar gÄr förlorade valdes det omrÄdet för att undersökas nÀrmare om friktion kan leda till fÀrre anvÀndarfel. Studien avgrÀnsas till en typ av avsiktlig friktion som kallas design for pauses som syftar till att fÄ anvÀndaren att tillfÀlligt stanna upp med sin interaktion. I studien skapades tvÄ versioner av en prototyp pÄ en insatsprocess till blockkedjan Ethereum som testades pÄ tvÄ olika testgrupper. Ena versionen av prototypen innehöll avsiktligt implementerad friktion och i den andra versionen adderades ingen friktion avsiktligt. Deltagarna i testet ombads utföra insatsprocessen i prototypen dÀr deras interaktioner granskades och statistik fördes pÄ antal anvÀndarfel. AnvÀndarfelen delades upp i tvÄ kategorier: slarvfel och misstag. Resultaten frÄn testerna visar pÄ att avsiktlig friktion av typen design for pauses minskar antal anvÀndarfel av typen misstag. Ytterligare forskning krÀvs för att besvara om design for pauses kan bidra till att minska antal anvÀndarfel av typen slarvfel.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is an emerging technology, which allows for the creation of novel applications, services, and business models by enabling innovative collaborations among organizations and individuals. Although DLT arose from the idea of a self-regulated and publicly usable infrastructure, permissioned distributed ledgers (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric) are organizationsâ predominant choice for the design and use of DLT applications due to their higher confidentiality-preservation, better maintainability, and higher throughput compared to permissionless distributed ledgers. Nevertheless, the use of permissioned distributed ledgers holds new uncertainties for organizations and their collaboration. In this work, we aim to lay the foundation to overcome such uncertainties by, first, conceptualizing the actors in permissioned distributed ledgers and, second, identifying the uncertainties between these actors regarding certain characteristics of distributed ledgers. We contribute to practice and research by providing detailed information on the causes, manifestations and consequences of prevalent uncertainties, and by deriving a multi-actor uncertainty conceptualization that disentangles hierarchical relations and interdependencies between actors. In this study, we form the foundation for future research and practice to mitigate these uncertainties and foster DLT diffusion.
Yury Zhauniarovich, Yazan Boshmaf, Husam Al Jawaheri, Mashael Al Sabah
Web-based hosting services for version control, such as GitHub, have made it easier for people to develop, share, and donate money to software repositories. In this paper, we study the use of Bitcoin to make donations to open source repositories on GitHub. In particular, we analyze the amount and volume of donations over time, in addition to its relationship to the age and popularity of a repository. We scanned over three million repositories looking for donation addresses. We then extracted and analyzed their transactions from Bitcoin's public blockchain. Overall, we found a limited adoption of Bitcoin as a payment method for receiving donations, with nearly 44 thousand deposits adding up to only 8.3 million dollars in the last 10 years. We also found weak positive correlation between the amount of donations in dollars and the popularity of a repository, with highest correlation (r=0.013) associated with number of forks.
Rijnard van Tonder, Asher Trockman, Claire Le Goues
Cryptocurrencies are a significant development in recent years, featuring in global news, the financial sector, and academic research. They also hold a significant presence in open source development, comprising some of the most popular repositories on GitHub. Their openly developed software artifacts thus present a unique and exclusive avenue to quantitatively observe human activity, effort, and software growth for cryptocurrencies. Our data set marks the first concentrated effort toward high-fidelity panel data of cryptocurrency development for a wide range of metrics. The data set is foremost a quantitative measure of developer activity for budding open source cryptocurrency development. We collect metrics like daily commits, contributors, lines of code changes, stars, forks, and subscribers. We also include financial data for each cryptocurrency: the daily price and market capitalization. The data set includes data for 236 cryptocurrencies for 380 days (roughly January 2018 to January 2019). We discuss particularly interesting research opportunities for this combination of data, and release new tooling to enable continuing data collection for future research opportunities as development and application of cryptocurrencies mature.