Call for contributions: Glossary of decentralised technosocial systems
Special section: “Glossary of decentralised technosocial systems”
Call for contributions
The Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab (University of Amsterdam), in collaboration with the P2P Models (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Trust in Distributed Environments (Weizenbaum Institut, Berlin) and Blockchain Gov teams (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris), invites you to contribute to the Glossary of decentralised technosocial systems, an interdisciplinary glossary aimed at building a common vocabulary for research on peer-to-peer, user-centric and privacy-enhancing decentralised technologies.
Much academic research in law, social sciences and technology is focused on scrutinising the adverse effects of the platform model and the current structure of the information economy on individual rights, existing social, cultural, political structures national sovereignty, and the global balance of power. Users’ enclosure within platform ecosystems is functional to the economic exploitation of personal data, and the logics of data accumulation create the conditions for power asymmetries and abuses. Thinking critically against such a heavily centralised, data-intensive digital economy implies—besides scrutinising the current dominant practices—imagining possible alternatives.
Based on the view that technological, legal and societal aspects of the information sphere are interlinked and co-dependent from each other, decentralised, privacy-enhancing, non-profit, communal solutions emerge as tools for individual and communal emancipation and resistance. Concepts such as ‘data sovereignty’, ‘user-centric’, ‘commons based, ‘peer produced’ and ‘privacy enhancing technologies’ are part of a narrative which sees technological design choices as means by which to achieve individual/communal autonomy. Central to this narrative is the concept of “decentralisation”: a normative goal and a design option in stark opposition to the dominant enclosed systems of ‘BigTech’. Technological decentralisation hopes to achieve the decentralisation of social, economic, political forms of power, and it is the enabling condition for individuals’ meaningful involvement in the knowledge and value creation processes entailed by datafication.
The recent hype around blockchain technology fits within this concept. The term “blockchain” has become a signifier for technologies that are expressly designed to ensure the distribution of data and access points, impeding unilateral censorship and decision-making asymmetries among network participants. Driven by many misconceptions, the short and controversial popularity of blockchain demonstrated how the intertwinement of technological and political visions risks melting into a short-sighted techno-solutionism fated to solve nothing more than the problems that itself created.
Even if particular configurations of technosocial constructions have a short life-span and limited reach, the ideas, imaginaries and technological advances they produce inform the ways we think of the technologies we have and of those we might want to create. Situating the terms emerging through technology development in the wider context of multidisciplinary scientific, policy and political discourses, this glossary provides a conceptual tool-kit for the study of the various political, economic, legal and technical struggles that decentralised, strong encryption-based, peer-to-peer technologies bring about and go through.
The goal of this Glossary is to build a shared vocabulary on the social, technical, economic, political aspects of decentralised, distributed or sovereign technologies: artefacts which seek to challenge the techno-social status quo by, for example, circumventing law enforcement, resisting surveillance, or being participative.
We invite contributions on the emancipatory, counter-hegemonic, subversive potential of digital technologies at the intersection of computer science, law, philosophy and social sciences.
We accept proposals in the form of abstracts (max. 200 words) to be developed, upon approval, into a short glossary entry (max. 2,000 words). The entries will be collected and freely accessible in a special section of Internet Policy Review.
The Glossary is a long-term collaborative project which will keep evolving over time, enriched periodically with more terms and open to new contributors.
Scope of the Glossary
Technologies are the product of multiple and diverse needs, discourses, interests. Technology-related terms are generated and interpreted among various groups and contexts; their meaning changes over time, they can quickly become obsolete or suddenly enter common vocabularies. Choosing relevant technology-related terms and understanding them is, therefore, to investigate their affordances within a given ecosystem of actors, discourses and systems of incentives. This requires an interdisciplinary, multi-layered approach that is attentive to the interlinkages between technological design nuances and socio-political, economic implications.
Conversations on issues that lay at the intersection of technology, law and social sciences are often hampered by a lack of shared semantics between highly specialised fields of knowledge. The meaning of concepts gets lost in interdisciplinary translations, resulting in superficial, misguided or misleading associations between technological designs and social, economic, and political issues. Unlike BigTech-generated terminology, terms that originate in peripheral, subversive, resistant parts of the internet remain obscure, unheard-of or misunderstood by most people. If discourses are performative, the obscurity of these terms means that the alternative visions of the future they propose are always already in the past.
This Glossary builds a foundational vocabulary for academic (and non-academic, policy oriented, or otherwise normative) discourse on technologies, sociotechnical systems and practices of decentralisation. Converging efforts of experts from various fields, it constitutes a conceptual tool-kit and source of reference for researchers and makers of decentralised technologies. To this aim, it captures terms that are relevant in the discussion around peer-to-peer applications, privacy-enhancing technologies, user-centric approaches to technological design and strong encryption-based solutions.
Entries
The Glossary entries will constitute a reputable, accessible (in terms of interdisciplinarity), and interdisciplinary source of reference for academic and non-academic researchers, journalists and bloggers working and writing on decentralised technologies. The entries are meant to define terms and idioms rather than criticising or selecting among conflicting visions. They should include a brief description of the origins of the concerned term, its subsequent stages of semantic development and an account of current coexisting meanings and interpretations with proper contextualisation (a template is provided to authors when entries are commissioned).
Entries are commissioned upon approval of the abstract from the editorial board. Each compiled entry then undergoes editorial review, peer review and an open peer review process on the Internet Policy Review website (see: https://policyreview.info/glossary) before publication. To ensure a thorough deconstruction of each term, entries (and proposals) should ideally be co-authored by two people from different institutional and disciplinary backgrounds.
The members of the Glossary editorial board identified a starting set of relevant terms that - arisen from public and scientific conversations on distributed technological systems and adjacent areas - constitute the building blocks of the terminological and conceptual framework in which such technologies are discussed. However, proposals submitted in the form of an abstract can also refer to terms not yet included in the list.
Proposed entries
accountability; ~ in decentralised systems
anarcho-capitalism; ~ technological manifestations of
anonymity; ~ in technological systems
asset tokenisation;
consensus protocol; ~ in distributed ledger technologies
crowdsourcing; ~ via decentralised technologies
crypto-anarchy;
crypto exchanges; ~ decentralised
cryptography;
data intermediaries;
data sovereignty;
decentralised finance;
digital activism;
digital identifiers; in distributed systems
digital wallets; for storage of crypto-assets
dispute resolution; ~ in or via distributed systems
distributed network topologies;
ethereum; ~ protocol / network
federated; ~ networks / protocols
gamification;
illicit market; technologically mediated
immutability; ~ as technology design principle
initial coin offering;
liability vs accountability; ~ in decentralised systems
libertarianism; ~ as a technological design principle
nodes; ~ of decentralised networks
openness; ~ as a technological design principle
peer-to-peer networks;
personal information management systems; ~ personal data stores
privacy-enhancing technology;
public key infrastructure; ~ decentralised
regulatory technology; ~ decentralised
self-regulation; ~ as technological governance option
social media; ~ decentralised
token; ~ digital
TOR;
user-centric technology;
voting-systems / decision-making; ~ decentralised
zero knowledge proof;
Managing editors
Valeria Ferrari, Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam
Andrea Leiter, University of Amsterdam
Morshed Mannan, Leiden University
Maricruz Valiente, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Florian Idelberger, European University Institute
Editorial board
Balázs Bodó, Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam
Primavera De Filippi, National Center of Scientific Research and Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Björn Scheuermann, Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
Samer Hassan, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Aron Fischer, Colony
Important dates
Release of the call for abstract: 16 February 2021
Deadline for expression of interest and abstract submissions (directly to Valeria Ferrari): 21 March 2021
Feedback/Invitation to submit a full entry: 31 March 2021
Online roundtable on Glossaries, Encyclopedias and Academic Terminology Management: 8 April 2021
Full entry submission deadline: 30 June 2021
Peer review and open-peer review process: 1 July – 5 September 2021
Publication of entries’ final version: 30 September 2021
Contact person
Valeria Ferrari: v.ferrari@uva.nl
