The Collaborative Economy, an umbrella covering from peer production (like Wikipedia) to crowdfunding (like Kickstarter) and the sharing economy (like Blablacar) is an emergent paradigm where communities of people collaborate mediated by an online platform, while harnessing the network effects of the Internet.
We perform social research to study how these communities operate (their functioning, governance and economic models), in order to build free/open source tools that facilitate their work and boosts this paradigm. We specially focus on the commons-oriented initiatives, and we use decentralized technologies to build our web tools.
In this frame, we have the P2P Models project, an ERC Grant of 1.5M€, to work on Blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for bootstrapping a new type of Collaborative Economy. In the past, we have pushed forward the P2Pvalue project, which researcher commons-based peer production communities and created the Teem app for collective organization, the SwellRT backend-as-a-service to build collaborative federated apps, and the Jetpad web collaborative editor.
Responsible: Samer Hassan
