An annotated collection on shared resources, democratic ownership, participation and the rules through which decisions become actions.
These are real works supporting the educational studies. They come from different traditions and often disagree. A proposal, a working practice and a technical model provide different kinds of evidence.
The collection follows ideas from commons governance and systems thinking into early Ethereum experiments and later work on contribution, care and citizen data. Each entry includes a question to take back to the original argument.
Return to the eight studies28 of 28 sources
Institute for the Future
A livelihood depends on access to private, public and open assets, as well as money.
What remains yours if the monthly payment stops?
This is a framework for widening access, not a proposal that everyone automatically owns an equal share of every asset.
Backfeed / P2P Foundation archive
A community evaluates contributions and issues rewards; the model explores tokens as equity, access and currency.
Who evaluates the evaluators?
Peer consensus about value is an assessment. It can reproduce status hierarchies and does not establish a universal basic income.
SourceCred
A contribution graph links people and work so recognition can flow through dependencies.
Does the person preventing a crisis leave a trace?
The chosen data sources and weights shape what becomes visible. Cred is an attribution model, not an objective measure of social worth.
Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel
Distributed cooperatives bring paid work, commons production and care into their governance and accounting.
Who makes everyone else’s participation possible?
Recognising care still requires situated judgment, negotiation and time; a single universal score would lose much of that context.
D-CENT consortium
Reports and civic pilots connect deliberation, collaborative policy, participation and social digital currency.
What can a participant actually change?
Different tools and pilots test different pieces. They do not establish one proven global governance system.
D-CENT
A design for complementary currency and trust-management systems, including the Freecoin toolchain.
Does the ledger record an action, a judgment, or both?
A transparent reward record does not establish whether the reward is deserved, adequately funded or fairly distributed.
Democracy Earth Foundation
A vision for borderless political participation, liquid democracy, identity and a recurring allocation of vote tokens.
Can political equality survive transferable influence?
Its allocation of votes should not be confused with a guaranteed cash income or ownership of productive assets.
Decidim community
Democratic guarantees include traceability of decisions, access, transparency and accountability.
Can you trace a suggestion into a decision and an action?
Software can expose a decision process; the institution must still give that process authority and resources.
Sherry R. Arnstein
Participation differs according to how much power citizens have over the outcome.
Were you invited to decide, or to endorse?
The ladder is deliberately provocative. Real arrangements mix forms of power and depend on context.
Participatory Budgeting Project
Practical guidance for communities deciding how to spend a defined public budget.
What happens after your proposal wins?
The amount, eligibility rules and implementation obligations determine the real scope of the decision.
Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl
Quadratic funding uses a matching pool to respond to contributions from many people.
Who funds an essential service with very few advocates?
Results depend on assumptions about identity, collusion and funding. Popular support is not evidence of realised impact.
Commons Stack
Tools and practices for funding and governing commons, including conviction voting and contribution recognition.
Who may alter the mechanism after it starts?
Financial mechanisms operate inside social institutions; their parameters and membership rules remain consequential choices.
DECODE consortium
Amsterdam and Barcelona pilots explored citizen data commons and privacy-preserving data sharing, including sensors.
Can residents refuse data collection and still receive services?
These are bounded pilots, not evidence that a whole city can be governed automatically.
DECODE consortium
The final report gathers lessons from the data-commons pilots and considers their wider implications.
Who controls the purpose for which shared data is used?
A project’s own evaluation is valuable evidence of implementation, not independent proof of all its claims.
Kazım Rıfat Özyılmaz and Arda Yurdakul
A concrete architecture connects sensors, distributed storage and blockchain-based data-access management.
What happens when the recorded observation is wrong?
Reliable transport and access control cannot establish that a sensor reading is accurate or that a policy is legitimate.
Jacque Fresco / The Venus Project
A systems vision connecting resources, settlements, technology and human needs.
Who decides what the system should optimise?
This resource-based vision differs from income and dividend economies. It should not be read as a proposal for contribution rewards or asset dividends.
cjdew
An early synthesis of Fresco, IoT, shared resources, DAOs and basic income.
Which of its promises requires a political choice?
A broad speculative essay, useful as a record of an imagined future rather than a validated implementation.
Elinor Ostrom
Multiple centres can coordinate the governance of shared resources under appropriate institutions.
At what scale can this decision be made responsibly?
Local control can still exclude people or export harm. Membership, conflict resolution and coordination require design.
Kelsie Nabben and Michael Zargham / BlockScience
Organisational cybernetics connects local autonomy with the coordination needed to remain viable.
What must be coordinated, and what can stay local?
A useful diagnostic vocabulary does not determine democratic legitimacy or prove a global deployment viable.
Donella Meadows
Changing information, rules and goals can matter more than adjusting a target’s numerical value.
Are you improving the score, or changing what success means?
A framework for thinking about intervention, not a formula that guarantees the effect of a policy.
Jo Freeman
Informal power persists when groups deny that they have a structure; explicit responsibilities make it more contestable.
Who controls the agenda without holding an office?
The essay arose from a particular movement context. Its application to DAOs here is an analogy.
Jeffrey Wilcke / Ethereum Foundation
A primary record of the choices surrounding The DAO fork and the role of community judgment.
Who may change an irreversible rule when it causes harm?
One contemporaneous account of a disputed event. It does not prove that either chain’s choice settled legitimacy.
Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries, editors
An open collection on monetary experiments, cooperatives, UBI, financial surveillance and blockchain criticism.
Does the new infrastructure redistribute power or rename it?
Contributors disagree. Treat the disagreement as part of the collection’s value.
Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez and Akseli Virtanen / ECSA
A detailed proposal for networked economic agency and collectively defined value, including social and environmental outcomes.
Can shared financial stakes coexist with meaningful exit?
Its mutual stakes and performance concepts are not proof of universal ownership or a guaranteed income. This is later work, not a 2016 paper.
Trebor Scholz
Democratic ownership of digital platforms by the people working through and depending on them.
Does ownership include a usable decision right?
A cooperative still needs viable finances, representation rules and a way to resolve conflicting member interests.
Dmytri Kleiner
Venture communism connects peer production to a shared stock of productive assets.
Who owns the machines behind a supposedly open network?
An explicitly political proposal; distributed infrastructure does not itself resolve distribution or exclusion.
Metagov
A catalogue of governance projects, organisations, concepts and primary documents.
What can one community learn from another’s rules?
Inclusion is a discovery aid, not an endorsement or proof that a project remains active.
CommunityRule / Metagov
Templates make a group’s governance choices explicit and editable.
How would your group remove a trusted decision-maker?
Writing a constitution cannot ensure that people will follow it or have equal capacity to use it.