Hi Soenke
I was hoping that my US based company could be part of the project. We could do Estonia but I would need to set that up.
I am interested to see what possibilities for what our participation might be.
Thanks .
Partners can join from associated countries outside the EU.
But: no proposal is likely to be successful if not led by one of the heavy hitters in the NGI space. @BlackForestBoi is aware of this.
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Have u been in touch with Mulgan?
Hey folks!
This is the first part of the proposal outlining the general direction:
1.1.1 Project Vision
Europe wants to become the leader in the field of collective intelligence and is uniquely positioned to do so. Its values of interoperability, privacy and decentralised power are foundational for an open web and the emergence of collective intelligence. It has credibility as a champion of the human-centric internet through its regulatory muscle flexing (the GDPR, Vestager, net neutrality). Now it has an important opportunity to take charge of also building technological solutions as well as new social and economic models that could support a human/community-centric alternative to compete with the dominant narrative of Big Tech and Venture funding.
Today, the space of knowledge management and social/collective media applications is dominated by organisations that have an economic incentive to continuously grow-at-all-costs to reward investors. With these reward models organisations losing users or profit directly influences the profit margin of investors and create a need for âinfiniteâ growth. This incentivises the creation of lock-ins, as well as exploitation of the environment, workers and users. Data and social lock-ins limit innovation, open markets, the free flow of information and the capacity for collective intelligence.
The web in itself is decentralised and interoperable, but still severely centralised in the past 30 years. New decentralised technologies like Blockchain will not solve these issue on their own. To really create an open web and collective intelligence it is of crucial importance to simultaneously tackle the economic incentives, software development paradigms and methods of collaboration. Problems like trustworthy information sharing, problem solving and enhanced social inclusion are directly dependent on our societyâs capacity for collective intelligence.
The Next Generation Internet initiative, with its broad and ambitious scope, provides us with an incredibly powerful opportunity to shape new economic dynamics from the ground up, experiment with new approaches and provide boilerplate models that can be replicated across Europe and in other industries.
The goal for the WISDOM initiative is to grow a community of economically sustainable organisations that co-develop the technological, economical and social infrastructure for increasing the capacity for collective intelligence.
WISDOM aims to do so by establishing an incubator program & co-development community for Open Source & P2P knowledge and collective intelligence tools using ethical business models & investor reward models with capped returns (like âSteward Ownershipâ. See chapter 1.3.3) that give them the economic freedom to:
- align themselves with the principles data portability & ownership, social interoperability, privacy, as well as human & community centric innovation
- collaborate on shared infrastructure & research, and overcome the tragedy of the commons
- act socially responsible by improving value chain sustainability and working conditions
- sustainably grow together as a community/market, instead of growing-at-all-costs as individual organisations
The incubator members and its partners are world-class experts in individual, group and organisational facilitation using battle tested on-and offline methods to:
- co-develop and articulate an ambitious vision for what we want the Next Generation Internet to be, involving diverse thought leaders and domain experts in the process
- increase intra and inter organisational alignment and shared directions to avoid scattered deployment of funds
- surface areas for co-development & co-research and increase impact of deployed NGI funds
- increase sharing of industry specific knowledge, and peer-learning in organisational design & leadership
The consortium, its partners & supporter network bring together deep expertise about the internet and related technologies. Our varied backgrounds as entrepreneurs, data scientists, digital humanities experts, policymakers, activists and civil society actors allows us to take a multidisciplinary approach to developing this vision and its values. Our strong standing and experience as current partners in the NGI ensures we can rapidly build and iterate upon the exciting work we have already been doing in the past.
1.1.2 Project objectives and key performance indicators
Objective 1:
Increase the webâs capacity for collective intelligence through a holistic approach of supporting interoperability & human/community centric service design, sustainable investor reward models and business models, and facilitation methods to optimise for maximum cross-organisational collaboration.
Objective 2:
Grow a value & purpose-aligned community of independently economically sustainable organisations that co-develop the technological, economical and social infrastructure for increasing the capacity for collective intelligence.
Objective 3:
Create a replicable boilerplate of technological concepts, open-source software modules, facilitation methods and economic reward models that can be used by other governments to kickstart local and national collective intelligence efforts, and show success metrics to convince the larger market to invest in these companies and ecosystems.
Objective 4:
Create an economic space with increase service competition and maximum potential for collaboration on shared infrastructure to solve the tragedy of the commons.
1.2 Relation to the work programme
Indicate the work programme topic to which your proposal relates, and explain how your proposal addresses the specific challenge and scope of that topic, as set out in the work programme.
âShape a more human-centric evolution of the Internet.â
To shape a more human-centric evolution of the Internet it not only requires a focus on privacy and data ownership, but also to provide great services for individuals and groups. In the current server-client model powered by companies whoâs investor models incentivise growth-at-all costs, user data is centralised in a few big companies that offer the exact same services for billions of users. To generate this growth companies often rely on providing free/cheap services for users that then sell user data or advertisement in return, thus violating privacy and data ownership.
To retain this growth, organisations create lock-ins that reduce service innovation because users canât easily move to services that serve their needs better, and new service have troubles entering existing markets with innovative products.
The incubator focuses on organisations with investor rewards models that are not incentivising growth-at-all costs, like Steward Ownership, as well as software products that provide data portability and social interconnectivity. With the cohort of companies in the incubator we aim to grow a nucleus for a small economy of knowledge software products to recreate the free market dynamics that lead to the explosion of innovation and human/community centric services of the early web and early modern economy.
âPromoting interoperability and strengthening the role of Europe in international standardisationâ
In the currently dominant reward models where investors make profits through the increase of speculative value, or get indefinite profit dividends by holding shares, every user or profit lost means less profit for investors. Interoperability however would make it possible that services loose users more easily, therefore those investor reward models strongly disincentivice interoperability and collaboration on shared infrastructure like standardisation efforts.
To promote interoperability it is important to not just develop interoperable products but change the investor rewards models too.
The incubator focuses on organisations with investor rewards models where organisations can loose profits and users without reducing investor returns. This gives those organisations the economic freedom to be interoperable. With our strong focus on faciliating collaboration between the teams of the incubator we aim to increase co-development on shared infrastructure like standards or software modules. By having 10-20 successful organisations with potentially millions of combined users developing shared standards, it could lead to a strong role of Europe in driving the open and human centric development of international standardisation.
"Service models for community services building on collective intelligence and novel approaches for connecting people and smart objects/agents to stimulate use of collective intelligence [âŚ] develop new community-based service models on social networks that exploit collective intelligence to provide enhanced community services,
The lock-ins created by the services people use today, innovation on novel approaches to connecting people is heavily limited. Those lock-ins make it hard/impossible to migrate to other services, extend services with new technologies (like using different p2p protocols in the browser or messengers), or freely connect different people, services, devices and smart objects.
Because collective intelligence needs needs the free exchange of information, these lock-ins severely limit the potential for collective intelligence.
The incubatorâs concept of an open-source, interoperable, steward-owned economy is designed to incentivise innovation for human/community centric service models, enable the free flow of information and as a result the emergence of collective intelligence in the magnitude of the early web.
"developing approaches for scientific understanding and technology-based stimulation of collective intelligence on social media and the internet to foster trustworthy knowledge and information sharing, and to enhance social inclusion. [âŚ] Increase the availability of trustworthy content
The problem of a lack of trustworthy knowledge and increase in misinformation is not only about the availability of quality information, but people experiencing information overload. It takes time and skills to understand a topic or piece of content well enough to not be misinformed. So it is easy to be misinformed given the plethora of topics and facts people are exposed to today.
However everyone is doing online research and gathers trustworthy knowledge useful to others. Due to the existing data and social lock-ins people can only share a fraction of the cognitive process, the quality content they read, background information they find or thoughts they have. If people could share a more complete picture of their subjective research and memory, they could help each other to find trustworthy information and understand more topics deeper, faster and with more perspectives.
Every person stores, processes and communicates such knowledge in different formats and apps. It is critical that applications helping users to sort, evaluate, curate and share this knowledge are adapted to the individuals workflows, provide algorithmic freedom and communicate with interoperable protocols. Creating such a diversity of services with a high degree of social inclusion can neither be achieved by a single company nor the current investor reward paradigms that incentivise organisations to build services with as many users as possible.
To solve this problem it is fundamental to have a human/community centric, interoperable network of many independent knowledge services that are highly adapted to individualâs needs. To increase the availability of trustworthy content, users need flexibility to innovate on new models to information through algorithmic freedom.
As described in the sections above, to achieve this kind of development and implementation of "new concepts for connecting people and smart objects/agents/AI on social media" it is required to change the economic incentives for organisations to enable the free flow of information and increase of service innovation.
The incubatorâs concept of an open-source, interoperable, steward-owned economy is designed âGenerate new business opportunities and new Internet companies with maximum growth and impact chances.â to create the needed diversity of services.
The aim is to grow an initial nucleus of an economy where organisations have the maximum innovation, growth and impact chances as an interoperable ecosystem/market not as single internet companies. We believe it will be virtually impossible to grow a single ethical knowledge/social media organisations that can compete with Facebook/Google/Twitter, by trying to play the same winner-takes-all game. Even Google+, with $600m in funding, Googleâs network effects and financial resources failed.
Create a European blockchain ecosystem integrating research and innovation communities.
Through our network of community partners like IPFS, Dat, Ethereum and Holochain we are integrating international research and innovation communities in the advisory process. Their European community members are invited to apply with their blockchain based projects
The main focus of the incubator is more broadly P2P and offline-first applications, not only blockchains, as they are only one of many options in the P2P toolchain that can be used to achieve data ownership, privacy and interoperability. Using also requires careful consideration that is highly dependent on the specific use case. Only limiting applicants on blockchain based technologies would severely limit the opportunities for impact of this initiative and incubator.
One of the evaluation principles of the incubator is the degree of user centric adaptability that enables users/developers/entrepreneurs to experiment with different transport protocols to power communication and storage of applications outside of a single companyâs control. User centric adaptability also enables services to gradually migrate their infrastructure to blockchain technologies as they become more market ready.
1.3. Concept:
In order to bring a large scale shift in societyâs capacity for collective intelligence & collaboration, it requires the simultaneous work on the technological, economical and social paradigms. The goal is to maximise collaboration on shared infrastructure, human/community-centric innovation and competition on services.
WISDOM is an incubator program with a unique combination of principles capable of creating a human-centric European internet economy that becomes a fertile ground for collective intelligence and collaboration at scale.
To do so we combine the four elements of interoperability, open-source software, Steward Ownership economics and facilitation of individual, team and community growth.
1.3.1. Interoperability
The incubator has a special focus on organisations that provide and add research on data portability, social interconnectivity and human/community-centric adaptability. Implemented correctly, it creates an environment where users can move to other services without frictions and still communicate with peers using other tools (Example: SMTP/email).
Human/community-centric adaptability enables users/developers experiment & upgrade to state-of-the-art technologies, protocols & data-models outside of a single serviceâs control. (Example: Wordpress plugins). Users being able to adapt according to their needs creates a way for emergent interoperability & standardisation that is born out of the real world use cases of communication, instead of top-down standardisation. This adaptability could also express itself in the ability for users to get algorithmic freedom which can democratise peopleâs ability to control their information diet and foster trustworthy knowledge and information sharing.
Such interoperability creates an open market with an increase in service competition & consumer choice on better and more ethical services. Interoperability also naturally limits the maximum individual growth of organisations because they will only be able to hold as many customers as they are the best services for. This creates external pressure for organisations to be service-oriented, not to dominate markets. Not even Google managed to overtake SMTP with Gmail.
The incubator is working together with leading individuals and organisations in the field, like IPFS, Dat, SSB community, W3C, Hypothes.is and the NGI teams.
1.3.2. Modular Open-Source-Software
Enables developers to easily innovate on existing services without reinventing the wheel and thus more easily start profitable businesses and increase service-competition & consumer-choice.
A modular development approach ensures that the developed components can be reused not only by the organisations funded by the incubator, but also in the larger ecosystem. The developed components also offer a great focal point for collaboration and the ability to drastically reduce development costs.
1.3.3. Steward Ownership:
Steward Ownership is an economic reward model for organisations that gives them economic freedom to be interoperable, service oriented and socially responsible, not to lock people in, exploit the environment or workers in order to grow-at-all-costs to reward investors.
Steward Ownership companies cannot be sold on the open-market because of non-profit foundations that either fully own the company or have a golden share to veto a sale. People taking risk in investing time or money are rewarded with a capped profit share. These mechanisms remove greedy behaviour for growth-at-all costs while still incentivising growth and rewarding taking risks and entrepreneurial crafts.
Steward Ownership companiesâ ability to be interoperable and socially responsible exists because the capped profit-share allows organisations to lose users/profits without lowering the total returns of investors. This also gives those organisations the economic freedom to be socially responsible so there is less need for regulation of bad actors that exploit users, employees or the environment because of unlimited profit interests.
With the current investor reward models, organisations often tend towards growing as fast as possible with free/cheap services where ads and exploiting user data are often the only remaining business models.
SO organisations need to make profit in order to reward investors. It additionally creates incentivises for those companies to become good at providing human/community-centric services instead of growing-at-all-costs.
Invented by Zeiss/Bosch, it is a model that exists for over 125 years and is used by companies like Mozilla, Ecosia, Buffer, Carlsberg & John Lewis. In Germany Steward Ownership organisations employ ~1.2 million people and in Denmark there are over 1000 SO companies which control a quarter of the 100 largest corporations. Historically SO organisations have a 600% higher survival rate and thus create a more stable economy.
Promoting Steward Ownership structures is currently getting on the agenda of major funds and governmentâs agends (CDU in Germany) and a shift away from a purely shareholder-value driven focus has entered the mainstream conversations, like at the WEF.
Investing in Steward Ownership organisations is also in the interest of the European Union because organisations that have been funded by the EU cannot be sold outside of the EU. It not only keeps the economic potential inside the EU, but also prevents the data of citizen being owned by other companies without their consent as part of an acquisition, like it recently happened with Fitbitâs health data and the sale to Google.
1.3.4. Facilitation:
We consider facilitation of individual growth, team governance and inter-organisational collaboration as an often underdeveloped, but crucial aspect of collective intelligence.
In order to have effective collaboration you need leaders and team members that possess emotional intelligence and shared purpose.
Arriving there inherently means working through frictions stemming from different expectations, goals and personality traits that requires careful facilitation by professionals, and education of people in the process.
By facilitating these interactions their is great gain to be made.
- It allows to to uncover areas for potential collaboration on shared infrastructure like software modules and standards which can increase the impact of the funds deployed by NGI
- it increases the shared direction & vision of the community and creates focus for the funds deployed by NGI
- it increases the relationships and connections in the community
- it increases social inclusion because facilitations integrate individualâs needs
1.3.5. An economy where it is more profitable to collaborate than to dominate
We believe the above mentioned 4 components create a positive feedback loop that fosters the emergence of an economy where:
- it becomes more profitable to collaborate than to dominate
- the tragedy of the commons can be solved
- organisations mindset shifts from individually growing-at-all-costs to growing together as a community
This is because interoperable organisations need to focus on creating great services to a smaller audience (or lose them as customers) and therefore donât directly compete anymore against 90% of the market. As Steward Owned organisations they need to lower costs to return money to investors faster and thus have a financial incentive to collaborate with similar services on developing shared/public/open-source infrastructure (e.g. p2p modules or feature libraries like annotations). Since they can give away profits without lowering investorâs total returns they can also be socially responsible by investing in public good infrastructure without profit interests.
Facilitation in individual leadership, team management and inter-organisational collaboration can help increase the shared direction, uncover areas for co-development of infrastructure (software modules, data standards), create deeper relationships inside the community, and increase the impact of the funds deployed by H2020.
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@lylycarrillo Yes we set the time for Friday 6pm you can come into this zoom call. Launch Meeting - Zoom
@daveed It might be a bit more complicated to join as a technology partner given that you are in the US and the time sensitivity on setting up an Estonian company (without a track record)
But not being a consortium partner does not mean you canât be a network partner that is involved in the process.
Would be great to have you jump on that call with us and learn a bit more about how you see an involvement from your perspective. If you have anything to share beforehand thatâll be awesome.
@soenke âDev for the other call first, but sth that links p2p tools with machine translation should not be too far off.â
yeah but that is definitely not a proposal we would like to go for. Itâs too specific on the solution/direction, so it doesnât make sense with our general idea.
@alberto. Yeah thatâs definitely a challenge. We are in the talks with some organisations that may be âheavyâ enough. I feel like even if we donât get that grant, there are a couple of other sources where we can raise the money for the proposal.
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Who is Mulgan?
@BlackForestBoi I think being a network partner totally makes sense. I have ideas around structured annotation formats specifically designed for building shared context and developing collective intelligence. These formats aggregate into a universal online knowledge graph which can then serve as a platform-agnostic context engine, which I see as essential for helping build shared understanding.
This is good work, Oliver. I salute you.
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Thanks so much. Happy to be hear and hope to contribute 
@BlackForestBoi thx much for this. I meant Geoff Mulgan, NESTA. But maybe NESTA is already on your list. Agreed re ICT-57, it would be quite a stretch. The discussion about property design as key vector of organizational development has picked up quite a bit in Germany (Eigentumskonferenz 2018 - Eigentumskonferenz, https://verantwortungseigentum.com/), extremely exciting and timely to see the question of steward ownership featured so centrally here. One question: how do you feel about the platform coop discussion in relation to SO? Imo the âcooperative renaissanceâ (also see this on distributed cooperative organizations) is part of the move toward a different sense of ownership and a way to broaden the public value discussion we have been having (whatever the limitations of refocusing innovation narratives to give state actors a larger role, the adoption of mission-oriented research by the EU is a key dev). In fact the coop discussion is a possible WP I could see us contribute to. In this context I am also curious about edgeryders relationship to mydata - I have seen it mentioned here but am not sure how this relates to other edgeryders projects (also b/c I am still catching up on open care etc). But if steward ownership is to be a focus of the proposal it seems to me that cooperative data governance frameworks may play a role.
@soenke
No have not had contact with him. I only know Katja Bego and contacted her.
She seems very busy though.
If you have a good connection to Geoff, I think it would be great if you can show him this thread (and specifically my last update) and see if they are interested to join as a consortium partner, as we are still looking for a strong operational partner, like NESTA.
Glad you mention the Eigentumskonferenz. We know the folks from Purpose a while already and they are our mentors. They helped me with the presentation at the EC recently too.
But if steward ownership is to be a focus of the proposal it seems to me that cooperative data governance frameworks may play a role.
Re platform coops: Fully agree. I had them in the initial briefing more prominently positioned, but not in the recently sent update which was more focused on the general dynamic, less on the implementation. The next section I am working on is âmethodologyâ, where specific examples of Steward Ownership, like Platform Coops should be included.
Glad you also mentioned the mission focused approach of the EC, will see how I can incorporate those.
In fact the coop discussion is a possible WP I could see us contribute to
Iâd be great, if you can formulate a rough work package for that. Would help to get a better sense of what you have in mind there.
Meaning: Objectives, Tasks and Deliverables across a 36month time frame (given only 30 months are incubation period)
Also important to note for the proposal is why your organisation would be uniquely positioned to provide value to that area.
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Ok I pinged Mulgan re NESTA involvement. And will work on WP description.
I set up a zoom room for you guys tomorrow (Friday 6th) 18:00 Brussels time:
Edgeryders Team is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Applying for the H2020 collective intelligence call
Time: Dec 6, 2019 06:00 PM Brussels
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 366 865 057
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Look interesting. You may find this post and the source materials it draws from useful 5 New Principles for Justice in the age of AI (and other networked technologies)? - #3 by nadia
Possibly also @teirdes @markomanka @sedyst might be interested in ^^.
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Who are these institutions?
One of the questions I have, from an outsider looking in, is the requirement to have an Operational Partner. Iâm just curious if there is any willingness on a project basis to build this capability up in edgeriders, or otherwise instead of having a third party manage this. It is a bit like the business rational of subcontract versus do hiring internally â is this so specialized that it negates taking this on internally?
Or are there expectations from the funding organizations that a third party âaudit and controlâ how things are executed? In the longer term, Iâd see an organization that can both execute and manage their projects, capacity building⌠â could be a feature that is compelling to the funding organizations.
Please take this question in kindness where I am not questioning prior decisions, but simply seeking to understand.
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Try the Death Star of Horizon 2020:
But NGI has its own high level, that does not necessarily coincide with Horizon 2020 as a whole.
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No. Thatâs administration. We are lousy at it, and have no interest in becoming better.
Also, you cannot subcontract it, because the Commission frowns upon subcontracting key functions (rightly).
The coordinator of the NGI Forward consortium is NESTA â well funded, super well connected, large.
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I can talk to colleagues at Fraunhofer, if that makes sense. Letâs discuss these options in the call later.
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