About

Mission

Our mission is two-fold:

1. foster collaboration between stakeholders, and
2. unify the study of the internet and society.

In doing so, we utilize open science, cooperativism, systems thinking, social innovation, crowdsourcing, hybrid intelligence, emerging technologies, pilot programs, toolkits, participatory models and collective action in furtherance of our activities and objectives.

Vision

Our vision is to innverate a global technological commonwealth by causing paradigm shifts through the socioal, economic, poltiical, scientific, technical and cultural spheres with sociotechnical systems that incoproate the technological design practices of:

• radically enabling democratic organizing,
• incorporating planetary boundaries
• modelling on natural biological ecosystems
• redefining what is considered valuable
• allowing for the growth of a cooperative commons

To better understand our vision, please read Dr. Sarah Manski's article, Distributed Ledger Technologies, Value Accounting, and the Self Sovereign Identity.

Research Themes

Our research areas are best understood by the following non-exhaustive list of themes:

• platform cooperativism
• complex systems
• decentralization
• digital identity
• data-centric technologies
• metascience
• digital infrastructure
• information security and privacy
• science, technology and society

Network

LedgerbackØDCRC is a nonprofit cooperative association based in the United States. Beyond this, we are a global pluralist network of groups and individuals working towards our shared vision in furtherance of our shared values, norms and principles. People who identify with the principles and inspirations of the LedgerbackØDCRC are encouraged to participate in our knowledge commons, and to add their voices to the LedgerbackØDCRC network by choosing one of the roles below.

Supporter

A supporter is someone who shares our work or donates to our efforts.

Member

A member is someone who has officially become a member of the cooperative association and actively participates in its business affairs.

Contributor

A contributor is someone who works on one or more of our projects.

Advisory Board

A non-legally binding, informal assembly that aids the members in running (e.g., advice on decision-making, strategy, research, and member-to-member affairs) the cooperative association. The role is non-intensive and punctual, including only 3 yearly online meetings with the members serving on the Core Team.

Core Team

Including the Board of Directors who oversee the administrative affairs and the cooperative association's infrastructure, there is also the Core Team that takes on leadership roles in each stream.

Name

Ledgerback is a combination of "ledger" and "back." Ledger comes from the term Distributed Ledgers (which is often used interchangeably with blockchain). Back comes from the slang term "greenback."

The word is meant to recognize that we are currently in a transitory period and identifying the paradigm shifts needed to move our current system to blockchain-based systems (though, this can be expanded to the global technological commonwealth).

We chose "Ledgerback" based on the history of the slang term "greenback." Greenback as a term arose in the mid-1800s during the US Civil War as the US Federal Government started issuing paper money on green-colored paper (hence the name greenback). There was major uncertainty at the time over whether greenbacks would be recognized as banks as legal tender, how much one greenback equated to a piece of gold, and so on.

Though this period caused some turmoil, it was a transitional period that has led to our current time where we accept paper money as money without a second thought.

We believe we are going through a similar transitional period, where we are moving from paper (physical) to distributed ledgers (digital), or to ledgerbacked systems, (i.e., systems that are built on top of blockchains and are backed and secured by the blockchain's inherent properties and a society pushed by blockchain values and thinking), and even greater than that, a global technological commonwealth.

Mascot

Our mascot is our super adorable and quick-witted stork you see in our logo, Scout Stork (SØS). Scout is scouting the world for fellow storks to flock with in gaining and disseminating knowledge to others by delivering ideas and causing paradigm-shifts across the land.

Aspects

The LedgerbackØDCRC currently consists of three different aspects:

• Legal: A formal cooperative association registered in the United States with 6 operational hubs dedicated to organizing, advocacy, research and the facilitation of a knowledge commons.
• People: A community of activists, scholars, technologists, citizens, and more working at different levels of engagement; a global core team handling daily operations, organizational strategy, and long-term sustainability; and numerous supporters engaging with and contributing to our information commons, including our blog, public Wiki and Loomio groups.
• Virtual: An ecosystem producing and sharing knowledge on the digital commons, the internet and society, and the emergence of a global technological commonwealth.

Social Charter

In accordance with our principles, any member, individually or as part of a collective, may create their own LedgerbackØDCRC local or regional or language-based spin-off, as long as it is in accordance with our mission, guiding principles, and our status as a nonprofit research institute.

Guiding Principles

Our four guiding principles are:

• Decentralization is a spectrum, with our goal to continually decentralize our processes
• We are in constant development
• Transparency and Openness is the default
• Complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity are natural occurrences
• One-size fits all approaches are unlikely to be helpful
• The Commons (knowledge, documentation, tools, etc.) should be freely accessible to members
• We should strive for egalitariansim
• Technology is a means, not necessarily an ends
• Technology and Society are not separable