D-CENT’s Social Currency Freecoin Nominated For ISOC Internet Award
The Internet Society of the Netherlands (ISOC) has nominated D-CENT’s Freecoin project for the Internet Innovation Award 2016.
Freecoin, one of the free and open-source pieces of software part of the Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies (D-CENT) project, is a set of tools that lets users run reward programs in a transparent and auditable manner.
The blockchain-enabled digital social currency was designed for participatory and democratic organizations that want to incentivize participation.
Led by Denis Roio, a researcher and software developer who has been involved in Bitcoin since the early days, Freecoin aims to leverage the use of social digital currencies in a reliable, simple and resilient way.
Roio, better known as Jaromil of Dyne.org, the D-CENT partner who has been designing and developing Freecoin, said that his team was honored by the nomination. “We are happy that our work on digital social currencies is being recognised already in such an early stage of development.”.
The ISOC Internet Award is an annual event that aims to reward the most innovative new Internet initiatives. On January 14, 2016, the ISOC, an international, non-profit organization that provides leadership in Internet-related standard, education and policy, will reward one of the ten nominees during the Internet New Year‘s event held in Amsterdam.
The D-CENT project is a Europe-wide experimental initiative that seeks to provide civil society with digital tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment.
More specifically, D-CENT aims to create a set of tools using open source and distributed technology to allow people to discuss, share content and engage in mass scale deliberation.
The project has received €1.905 million from the European Commission to support the development of a distributed, federated and privacy-aware social networking platform where citizens would be able to engage in deliberation, collective judgments and voting.
D-CENT’s codebase will be described by open specifications and released under an open source license so future developers will be able to easily write API-based apps on top of the codebase and add new modules.
Last week, D-CENT showcased some of its tools in London in an event hosted by Nesta. The event aimed to explore the potential for digital democracy in the UK and featured live demos of the technology with key insights learnt from four pilots experimentations in Barcelona, Reykjavik, Helsinki and Madrid.
These pilots include the ‘Social Kronas,’ a blockchain-powered reward system for political participation in the Municipality of Reykjavik, a decentralized social remuneration system to reward the contributions of the members of Helsinki Urban-Cooperative Farm, and a decentralized currency for the cultural sector called Commoncoin in Milan.
