D-CENT is bringing together citizen-led organisations that have revolutionised democracy in Europe in the past years, and developing the next generation of open source, distributed, and privacy-aware tools to transform democracy.

Tools.dcentproject.eu

We've just launched a new website to showcase the democracy tools we have developed and tested that will be showcased at Nesta during our event on digital democracy in the UK next Tuesday 15 December.

What does D-CENT do?

Our main technological outputs are implemented as a modular federated platform and tested in three European countries with thousands of citizens through an on-going and iterative process. The D-CENT tools promote meaningful political participation in the digital age.

The tools help citizens to be informed and get real-time notifications about issues that matter to them; propose and draft solutions and policy collaboratively; decide and vote on solutions and collective municipal budgeting; and finally implement and reward people with blockchain reward schemes.

D-CENT in action

The D-CENT Democracy pilots are engaging large-scale democratic organisations ranging from citizens assemblies, emerging political parties, and citizen-led coalitions such as Ahora Madrid and Barcelona en Comù in Spain; Open Ministry and the City of Helsinki in Finland, and the Citizen Foundation in Iceland.

These tools have been tested with thousands of citizens across Europe:

• Decisions: Citizens gets secure, real-time notifications on decisions made in their City Hall based on their interest. Tested in the City of Helsinki.
• Objective 8: A tool for collaborative policy drafting.
• decide.madrid.es: Open democracy platform for the City of Madrid.
• decidim.barcelona: Citizens debated and voted policy programme before the Barcelona municipal elections that led to the victory of the Barcelona en Comù coalition.
• yourpriorities: Participation platform for the City of Reykjavik and participatory budgeting tool.
• agoravoting: Secure online voting system, used by Podemos in Spain.
• freecoin: Blockchain-based complementary currency toolkit and distributed trust management system.
• Mooncake: Secure notification system.
• Stonecutter: Open authentication and identity management.

One of our most important achievements so far has been contributing digital tools and insights to the bottom-up democratic processes that led to the victory of citizen-led coalitions in the Spanish municipal elections last year. The political programme of Barcelona en comù and Ahora Madrid was written with inputs from thousands of citizens, using tools developed in the D-CENT Ecosystem. As today the City of Madrid and the City of Barcelona are using digital tools to engage citizens in determining policy priorities, in the allocation of municipal budget and in the decision-making process of the city.

Another line of our research investigates the use of community complementary currencies for economic justice and the possibility of using a blockchain-based architecture to create a Bitcoin for the social good. The blockchain-based complementary currency toolkit has successfully been completed and received much interest in the media.

Why use D-CENT?

D-CENT has brought together the largest European community of open-source democracy tool developers, hackers, grassroots citizen movements and policymakers.

As an alternative to closed and centralised internet platforms whose business models rely on monetising the identity and social lives of their users, we aim to create a uniquely European open and decentralised approach aimed at empowering ordinary citizens to take action for the common good. We value privacy and security, and our tools are built on open-source code and open standards. D-CENT federate these tools, but they can be combined in many ways to support specific democratic processes.

Open standards for the social Web and federation

D-CENT builds on open standards for a distributed identity management system that gives people control over their own social data. The foundation for this system is a privacy-aware OAuth-based system called “Stonecutter”. This system is designed to be easy for community groups to set-up and host, allowing users to authorize access to their data for use in various applications from an easy-to-use dashboard without resorting to centralised platforms.

D-CENT has achieved very good progress towards the development of open social web standards. The W3C is advancing this process within the Social Web Working Group that has published a first Public Working Draft of the ActivityStreams 2.0 standard and in the future will produce a unified Social API. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and Director of W3C, has taken a personal interest and is currently focussed on his own design for re-decentralizing the Web called “CrossCloud.”

Multidisciplinary research on democracy, citizen movements and the commons

An integrated techno socio-economic analysis has been carried out on organisational models of emerging social movements, new economic models based on knowledge commons; alternatives to data marketplaces; distributed identity systems; new models for citizen control of personal and social data, privacy and security by design.

All D-CENT research reports are available to download from our website.