compiled by: fredd
checked by: Thomas (FB)
date: 1-08-2019
source: out of one-pagers
v 0.1
CONFIDENTIALITY: FOR PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION
Accelerate clean energy access at digital pace and scale.
COMPANY NAME: Freeelio UG
APPLICANT NAME: Sebnem Rusitschka
TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities
WEBSITE: https://www.freeel.io/offer/electraseed-fund
[“Economy”,“Energy & sustainability”,“Open Innovation”]
[“Blockchain technologies”,“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Artificial intelligence”,“Internet of things”]
Freeelio develops an open source standard : Digital Energy Asset (DEA), to facilitate the digital representation of physical cleantech systems. The standard is first applied through Electraseed Fund (EF), which pools cleantech projects worldwide to offer a complementary instrument for climate finance. Suitable partners for the Electraseed Fund pilot pool have already been selected. By the end of 2019 we envision EF being incorporated in France, where the legislation is most suitable for such FinTech/IoT innovation. EF will have an impact on the academia, public to private ecosystem: DEA/EF will enable the ownership of energy data, which owners can choose to share, e.g. for research purposes. Our dialogue with public authorities (finance & energy regulators in FRA & DE) allows to gather shared experiences in designing frameworks for decentralized data governance. The open source DEA reduces market entrance barriers for new participants (such as prosumers, energy cooperatives, etc).
The EF target markets are energy off-grid in developing (424 mil. households, $922 mil.), renewable energy communities in developed countries (110 mil. hh) and Small Islands Developing States ($ 745 mil.). Target clients include cleantech project developers, asset owners & operators, energy users, impact investors & development organisations. EF aims to support the growth of investments under environmental, social and governance principles - currently at $22 trillion assets under management.
Each organization (Freeelio, EF) is built around a smart contract that does the actual coordination; the incentives of the organizations are aligned with the other resource contributors in the community (subscribers, as in users and impact investors; as well as asset owner/operators; other open source developers that co-develop the standard smart contracts, R&D partners, audit & security partners etc.) to the network of Digital Energy Asset standard worldwide by means of revenue share.
Sebnem worked at Siemens on Decentralized Energy Platforms since 2008, managing intl., multi-disciplinary projects. She founded Freeelio as an open R&D collective in 2016 and is a founding member of the Bundesblock since 2017. Armin joined Freeelio after an internship at UNIDO. He holds a M.Sc. in Energy Systems (2018) and gathered experiences with innovative sustainable energy solutions since 2012. He is in charge of Electraseed Fund (EF) production. Marie brings 12 years of corporate law and management experience in Energy Exchange Sector. She is a French Lawyer counselling EF wrt. the new PACTE Law for digital asset service providers. Joaquim joined in 2018 with his 15 years as SW Dev & Architecture in FinTech & Blockchain. Julian is a SW Engineer who started his own SW business at the age of 14. Torsten, Kalle, and Alain are executive producers of EF, w/ each over 20 yrs of entrepreneurship in FinTech, Solar Sector & Sustainability respectively.
We will implement an MVP that outlines the Digital Energy Asset (DEA) standard and its use in the Electraseed Fund (DEA) pilot pool. That requires integration with Secure Element of Riddle & Code with physical energy assets: smart mini-, microgrid, solar park, and solar social housing. We will design a Ricardian Contract Logic for DEA configurations and prototype in Zenroom. Design and prototype the UX for impact investors and asset owner/operators.
For off-grid energy systems in developing countries, the EF foremost relies on the benefits of financial pooling with cleantech asset in developed countries, to create equitable funding conditions off-grid regions. Thus, de-risking investments through enhanced transparency and aggregation of small-scale assets. In return, cleantech assets in developing countries help to attract impact investors in the target markets in developed countries by offering a high social & environmental return. For the scaling of renewable energy communities in developed countries, EF concentrates on Europe due to the large existing relevance & support for energy cooperatives. The EU Renewable Energy Directive II empowers decentralized, small-scale energy asset owners to actively participate in the market. EF focuses on these new market participants (prosumers) to achieve scale. The vast network (cleantech asset partners, executive producers, promoters, R&D community, Bundesblock & INATBA) is our channel.
Battling misinformation & social polarisation with collective web intelligence
COMPANY NAME: WorldBrain UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
APPLICANT NAME: Oliver Sauter
TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities
WEBSITE: https://worldbrain.io
COUNTRY: Germany
USER: worldbrain
PROJECT SECTOR: [“Open Innovation”]
CORE TECHNOLOGIES: [“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Others”]
At WorldBrain.io we are developing Memex, a privacy-focused, open-source & offline-first browser extension for web-research organisation and collaboration. Today, users can full- text search their web history and annotate, tag, bookmark and sort websites into collections. Our proposed LEDGER project aims to provide web users (students, academics, journalists, policy makers) with improved access to quality information by sharing, accessing and building on each other’s knowledge graphs. It extends Memex features as follows:
The current user group of Memex is individuals committing extensive web-research professionally and privately and already have habits of knowledge management. For example data scientists/developers, journalists, academics, students and entrepreneurs. The proposed features will enable Memex to be used for collaborative research, due diligence, peer-review and crowdsourcing in teams/communities as well as privacy sensitive environments like investigative journalism and enterprise customers.
The purpose of our Steward Ownership structure is to create a fairer economy where it’s possible to share profits with the community without minimizing investor/contributor ROIs. The business model is similar to Wordpress. People can self-host their cloud, or let it be hosted by us by paying a premium subscription.
We will offer 4 tiers:
WorldBrain is a distributed team working in 8 countries with diverse gender and minority representation.
Up to this point Memex has been built using only 65.000€. We intend to use LEDGER funds for: Research & Prototyping: 50k Project Management: 25k Production implementation: 80k Business development: 20k UX & UI designs: 15k Legal Consulting (FOSS license, trademark, ToS): 8k Advisory with LEDGER partners on pricing design: 2k Additional costs for business development and marketing are covered by existing funding. With the LEDGER funding we aim to focus on providing technical gains.
In knowledge management there is an extraordinary variety of individual work flows. We think that it isn’t possible to build a 1 billion knowledge sharing network by trying to develop one tool that fits them all. That’s why the biggest players only have 200m users. We believe that it requires the technological & economic framework from which many highly adapted, interoperable tools can emerge through innovation in the larger KM community. Memex 1.0 launched on April 17, 2019 and has ~10.000 users and 700 paying customers. The upcoming features enable large scale sharing, co-curation and crowdsourcing of knowledge repositories and will be our main driver for user acquisition. Through partnerships we will distribute key developments:
APPLICANT NAME: Antonio Tenorio Fornés
TEAM COMPOSITION: A group of natural persons
WEBSITE: https://decentralized.science/
COUNTRY: Spain
PROJECT SECTOR: [“Public services”,“Open Innovation”]
[“Blockchain technologies”,“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”] A distributed Open Science publication system, with Open Access infrastructure, a reviewer reputation network and transparent peer reviews
Academic publishing is key for science. However, it is controlled by an oligopoly of publishers, that profit from the free work of academics, and often impose unfair conditions. Our project aims to disintermediate science publication. Using emerging distributed technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS, we propose a decentralized publication system for Open Science, providing 1) an Open Access infrastructure, 2) a privacy-by-design review reputation system, and 3) transparent governance processes. We offer unique value to authors (fairer and faster reviews), reviewers (recognition) and editors (a network of reviewers). It will reduce the costs of science publication and provide transparency, accountability and quality to peer reviews. Our own research has been presented in international congresses [1,2,3], and has been implemented in a working proof-of-concept prototype. Currently, three PhD theses are contributing to its development 1 tiny.cc/02fs5y 2 tiny.cc/k7fs5y 3 tiny.cc/ebes5y
According to a recent European Commission report, the total market size of Academic Publishing and Open Access publishing are 10 Bn USD and 0.5 Bn USD per year, respectively. Our goal is to challenge a market of established oligopolies with decentralized disruptive technologies, offering a transparent decentralized publishing infrastructure. Our technology is free and open access. We will offer platform migration and support services, as well as infrastructure as a service for journals.
We offer cheap publishing and peer review infrastructure for open access journals, competing with traditional publishers. Additionally, we provide unique value propositions to authors (fast and accountable reviews), reviewers (recognition) and editors (network of reliable reviewers). Our technology is free, open source and decentralized. Thus, it enables the development of an ecosystem of services and open innovation, in which we will participate as a platform cooperative.
Our interdisciplinary team has successfully collaborated in research, entrepreneurship and development projects, including P2PValue and P2PModels European projects: C. Bermejo (F/T entrepreneur), ex-president Spanish Startup Assoc., European Startup Network Board Secretary, AI developer. A. Tenorio (F/T researcher), Researcher and developer, PhD candidate on decentralized governance. E. Pérez (F/T dev.), Mathematics & Computer Science BSc senior, Blockchain developer. E. Martinez (P/T des.), Fine Arts, UX and Product designer. Tatiana Nazarova (P/T des.), Arch. Env. Design Engineer & Graphic Designer gr. The PhD theses of V. Jacynycz (decentralized science), D. Llop (decentralized publishing) and A. Tenorio (decentralized governance) and their supervisors Dr. S. Hassan (P2PModels.eu PI, Blockchain), Dr. A. Sanchez (HCI, AI), and Prof. J. Pavón (AI, SE, RRI) contribute to the project. We have already built a working prototype, and presented it in Peer review and Blockchain conferences
The main purpose of the grant funding (75%) will be supporting the team members through their salaries, (a F/T business dev., a F/T blockchain dev. and two P/T designers). Our goal is to follow the program to develop a valuable product with a clear market fit and business plan, enabling the sustainability of the project. Additional expenses include travels (10%), equipment and infrastructure (5%), marketing & communication (5%), and others (5%) e.g. formation, Open Access publication costs, etc
There are other projects aiming to decentralized science publication with blockchain. However, they often aim to bypass or eliminate journals. Our proposal sees Open Access journals and their editors as potential allies and clients, to decentralize science publication while removing the abuses of traditional publishers. We would reach Open Access journals and conferences by direct contact and through partnerships with Open Access and Open Science communities, journals and institutions. Once our product is providing value to early adopters (authors, reviewers and editors) they will become channels to new clients through recommendation. Additionally, the perceived value of our publication and reputation infrastructure will grow with the participation in the system, as its decentralized nature enables a fast scalability. After reaching critical mass, the value of joining the network will be clearer to the wider and growing market of Open Access publishing.
the platform for the eco-centric economy
We facilitate the creation of social and economic ecosystems centered around caring for people, communities and nature.
COMPANY NAME: Merits Srl SB APPLICANT NAME: Roberto Sanlorenzo TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities WEBSITE: http://www.merits-system.com COUNTRY: Italy PROJECT SECTOR: [“Public services”] CORE TECHNOLOGIES: [“Blockchain technologies”,“Distributed ledger technologies”]
Merits is a web app that helps actors of society to develop an economy where financial prosperity is compatible with ecological sustainability and social harmony at local and global level. We empower individuals and firms in their will “to give back to society” and create partecipative welfare models. The system, now based on a centralized ledger, will evolve in to a blockchain based token representing a complementary currency used to reward corporate and individual social responsibility and to generate additional financial resources for the third sector, public organizations, families and real economy players. The impacts expected: increase of trust, new tools for the public administration to govern the resources of the territory, mobilize the underutilized ones and create synergy between all social actors, boost of fundraising efficacy for third sector organizations, injection of purchase power for SMEs and families, innovative and responsible marketing strategies for corporations.
Clients: Public administrations are buying from us solutions for new welfare strategies; Enterprises: buy innovative mktg solutions leveraging on social impact; SMEs buy a new generation Commercial Credit Circuit and marketing solutions; End users: Individual donors and companies which donate € to Third Sector Organizations (TSO) and get rewards in merits (M); TSOs: can create new fundraising strategies and social impact evaluation/reporting; Volunteers: rewarded with Merits.
Free for third sector organizations and their donors. We earn from project funds from public administrations and membership fee of businesses. Shared gains: for each € invested in mktg in the system will be generated 1 € of extra donation for non-profit organizations and up to 10 € of extra value exchanged in the local economy circuit; the reciprocating trading circuit is generating purchase power that stays at local level working as a buffer of the negative impact of global financial crises.
Merits:61 years of entrepreneurship, 27 years of top management, 38 years of consulting for Public Administration, and 30 years of software development, 14 years of service design. Age spans from 27 to 70, we have Italians, Portuguese and Chinese team members. This diversity is a source of creativity and resilience. Two years after starting we have our first customer, the Municipality of Milan, with a running project since the beginning of 2019. University of Torino Blockchain Initiative (UTBI) is an interdisciplinary group that since 2016 is working on Blockchain for Social Good, in Turin, Paris and Athens, supported by 4 EU projects (Co-City, CO3, ge.CO Living Lab, DLT4ALL). It counts 12 people: researchers, cripto economists, sociologists, PhD students, UX experts, developers. It is developing a blockchain to create and distribute Smart Contract based tokens representing local financial instruments to support the sustainability of urban commoning for welfare initiatives.
Integrate Merits as a token in the open source UTBI blockchain for social good platform as a further kind of local financial instrument and with a payment platform for donations. Upgrade Merits to the “phase 2” (see uploaded presentation) by doing market research, co-design, stakeholders interviews to refine service model and business plan and finally begin to expand the existing community, starting from Milan, involving all clusters of stakeholders.
Volunteer rewards: the maturity of the market is low, with two operative startups in EU. Our approach is to replicate the Milan’s pilot in other cities in IT and in EU. Donations reward: few platforms are available but none of them is integrated in a Complementary Currency Circuit. Our approach is to engage TSOs and social responsible businesses to crowd our platform. Company welfare business: we already received a few requests for application. Scaling strategy is to run local projects with national/international organizations and scale up with them. Our token can help organizations in rewarding positive individual and group behaviours. In the future, besides implementing innovative strategies of webinar mktg to reach key prospects in corporations, third sector organizations and public administration, we will make use of vendors to involve the small local businesses.
Reuse electronics ensuring final recycling: transition to a collaborative and circular consumption of electronics
COMPANY NAME: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
APPLICANT NAME: Leandro Navarro
TEAM COMPOSITION: People fromone or two legal entities
WEBSITE: http://ereuse.org
COUNTRY: Spain
[“Economy”,“Energy & sustainability”,“Open Innovation”]
[“Blockchain technologies”,“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Internet of things”,“Others”]
Ereuse.org is dedicated to the transition to a collaborative and circular consumption of electronics. Ereuse members are business that refurbish and resell used devices such as mobiles or laptops. To put the second-hand first we offer an open-source SaaS to store second-hand devices quality reports, share it with potential buyers and ensure chain of custody until final recycling. But to persuade the reverse supply chain a public decentralized a Deposit Refund System is required.
Our adressable market is around 7000 world wide second-hand refurbishers/resellers. As of today, we are mainly present in Spain (15 business: ereuse.org/members), UK (computeraid.org), USA (good-point.net, techreuse.com, tradeloop.com) and new members in Argentina (tau.org.ar), Kenya (cfsk.org) and Switzeland (itopie.ch). Our software has been selected for obada.io - The Open Blockchain for Asset Disposition Alliance, and this going to increase our presence in USA, China and Australia.
Ereuse.org provides a SaaS device mgmt platform where business can track devices along their lifespan. We also provide development, consultancy and integration to 3rd party solutions for asset mgmt. Our target market is ~300 worldwide 2nd-hand device refurbishers & sellers for the SaaS, avg. fee 2000€/year. We estimate at least 500k devices processed needing traceability and guarantee of return at ~2€/device. In total in 4 years 0.5M€ for SaaS + 1M€ for traceability & deposit refund service.
The core team includes Mireia Roura (environmentalist, project management, marketing), Xavier Bustamante (main software developer), David Franquesa (director and business developer), Lorena Merino (support to members, volunteers, admin and coordination), Maite Antolinez (accounting, administration), and Leandro Navarro (distributed systems & blockchain researcher).
UPC started in the nineties in the collection & donation of computers to development organizations and projects. Each year volunteers collect, repair and donate hundreds of computers. eReuse, started in 2015 by Pangea, builds on that experience. Pangea is a private, independent non-profit organization, founded in 1993 as a federation of organizations including UPC, to promote the strategic use of ICT, Internet/Web services for development and social justice, and provide services to its members, 200 individual and 350 social entities, several involved in eReuse. UPC leads research in distributed systems and sustainability.
Consolidate the technology to be scalable Replication in other regions Marketing Usability Sustainability of the business model Assessment of the DLT/blockchain solution(s)
In the first quarter of 2019 ereuse.org members have refurbished 1750 devices. We estimate that around 75% are reused by otherwise excluded segments of the population such as schools, social entities, economically and digitally excluded population, with around 30% requesting traceability, as they come from public sources. We are in 6 countries with 25 member organizations. We have two formal, scalable and sustainable reuse platforms in Barcelona and Madrid, that offer traceability until recycling. Our strategy is to help our members to build their own collaborative reuse networks that could need our SaaS and global device traceability service. We also offer consultancy, software subscription, or ecosystem-level support. Our dissemination channel are business conferences, research publications and word of mouth from users sharing their stories. The introduction of DLT token deposits linked to devices is going to help spread, scale, and ensure the economic sustainability our ecosystem.
COMPANY NAME: SYNETAIRISMOS ERGAZOMENON SOCIALITY
APPLICANT NAME: Antonis Faras
TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities
WEBSITE:
COUNTRY: Greece
USER: sociality
PROJECT SECTOR: [“Economy”]
[“Blockchain technologies”,“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Others”] A toolkit, running on a distributed ledger, providing financial services for cooperatives: micro-funding, loyalty, transactions
In recent years many cooperatives have started operating in Athens, Greece but their lack of financial means limits their growth and therefore their social impact. Our goal is to provide financial services to these coops while enhancing cooperation between them. To achieve this we plan to develop a financial toolkit based on a community cryptocurrency. Utilizing the distributed ledger, Synergy will be able to provide advanced financial services, such as micro-funding, loyalty programs and instant exchanges within the community, while undertaking a privacy-by-design approach. Our end-goal is an added- value currency that would economically empower the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE) community, while also carrying an ethical value. Finally, we will undertake privacy-first approaches such privacy awareness loyalty and analytics while working on a cryptocurrency community governance model.
There are 847 coops in Greece, 45% in Athens, according to the latest report form the Secretary for Social & Solidarity Economy (SSE) in 2016. Most of the coops are service oriented (cafe,restaurants,grocery shops) and have a broad base of daily clients which we will target with our loyalty and micro-funding schemes. Our goal is to build a strong network of coops in Athens and later expand in the rest of Greece. Of course the toolkit be will open to anyone to use and develop new communities
We will follow a non-for-profit model with cooperative governance. Our goal is to create a self-sustainable community with small operational costs. Skills and services will be shared within the ecosystem contributing to it’s preservation. For example a printing coop could provide the loyalty membership cards and earn tokens to use in the system to buy groceries. Complementary approaches include selling services, such as consultancy or marketing to members of the community and external funding.
Sociality | Digital Communications Cooperative is a seven-member worker’s cooperative that operates from 2014 in Athens. Our areas of activity include empowering online presence, developing user-centered digital tools, educational activities on open source frameworks and participation in research projects. We have created over 150 websites, several digital tools and organized over 40 educational workshops. We have worked with organizations, coops and private clients in Greece and abroad. We are teaming up with George Theofilis, an experienced blockchain developer from Synaphea and Matina Dimitropoulou a researcher and PhD candidate in Athens University of Economics and Business on innovation management and SSE. Our extended network of collaborators include designers (Designature), marketers (No Problem), researchers (Open Lab Athens, Nethood) and SSE experts (Dock). Our robust experience and expertise along with our community engagement equipes us to successfully materialize our plan.
We will use the grant to locate two members of Sociality to work full-time on the project and Theofilis and Dimitropoulou to work part-time. We will also use the grant for marketing material, and hire collaborators to work on member onboarding. Moreover, we will require the services of legal and accounting experts. The consulting services of LEDGER will be useful in the field of business development and product positioning while technologies provided could be used when necessary.
In a 2017 British Council research on SSE in Greece, it was reported that the three most important issues coops face regard financing, while proposals are made for micro-credit and crowdfunding to tackle them. Sociality as a member of this community will engage with both the coops and their clients to overcome these obstacles. Vital will be the role of the regional “Attica Coordination of SSE” which it’s members can be early adopters of the system. Our toolkit will be co-designed by the community in order to better reflect their needs and establish mutual relations. The expertise of Sociality will be used to run a broad marketing campaign for coops which will operate as an onboarding mechanism. The engaging features of our application, the gamification elements we aim to incorporate, the social value and the scalable nature of the adopted technology will all contribute to the growth of the system.
COMPANY NAME: Mesensei Oy, Finland
APPLICANT NAME: Tuukka Ylalahti
TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities
WEBSITE: http://www.unifiedscience.eu
COUNTRY: Finland
[“Economy”,“Public services”,“Open Innovation”]
Academic collaboration platform for empowering researchers to boost their impact, get rewarded for contributions, and control privacy.
Unified Science is business, technical, and governance framework to enhance academic collaboration. It features a DLT (distributed ledger technology) -based mutual credit - based local economy, high-quality user experience, and privacy control for individual researchers on their contributions, rewards, and reputation. The concept is created in collaboration with Universities and Research Institutions required to be EU GDPR-compliant, and academic researchers who are reluctant to use services fuelled by advertisement revenue and data sales to 3rd parties.
2014: 28,000 active scientific journals, 2.5M published articles, total of 55M articles in scientific history. Global R&D expenditure €1.6 trillion with 92% being spent in North America, Asia and the EU. Segmenting an estimated 10% of the overall market to ICT expenses within this sector, the addressable market amounts to €19.2bn in the EU and €160bn globally. “A renewed agenda for Research and Innovation: Europe’s chance to shape the future (Europa. EU)”
Certain transactions in Unified Science network, such as issuing and verifying mutual credit tokens, will incur a transaction fee to provide enough revenue to sustain the infrastructure services. In addition, revenue will be gained from developing added value services on top of the open source frameworks. Unified Science will also hold, as a founder’s reward, a certain part of the tokens which can be later converted to units-of-value in the unified system (and thereby, sold to the users).
The proposed project team has been working together on the Horizon SME Phase 1. Tuukka Ylälahti: CEO & Co-founder of Mesensei, strategy and project implementation. Dr. (tech) Ville Eloranta: Postdoctoral Researcher from Aalto-University, a long term advisor of Mesensei and research specialist on platform economies. Jani Niinimäki, CTO of Mesensei: veteran builder of decentralised platforms with a global reach, him being the architect of cabforce.com and Mesensei platforms among others. Eeva-Liisa Ylälahti is a veteran entrepreneur, mentor and chair of Mesensei; senior level relations management to universities; decades of experience in market research, analytics, marketing and entrepreneurship. Claudia Treuthardt, an award winning designer, responsible for the user experience of our solution and the token economy itself. Niina Simonen, senior deployment and operations expert with two decades of IT deployment experience in multi-service provider environments.
The project team is capable of managing the project and has all the necessary know-how needed for the execution. Most of the project budget would be allocated for the core team member’s full time allocation toward producing and deploying the MVP. However, due to the complexity of the challenge external resources will be sought to provide coaching, mentoring and expert consultancy to supplement the team’s core competencies.
Mesensei is currently providing commercial private social network solutions for higher education institutions, with University of Cambridge being the lead customer. Existing customer base among the universities enables Mesensei to expand its current technology and introduce a local economy model powered by Holochain to provide a novel incentive model to boost academic collaboration. Unified Science -concept would introduce holistic business, technical, and governance framework which serves the needs of all stakeholders in the academic value creation chain. Pilot cases would be run in collaboration with University of Cambridge, Aalto University, University of Vaasa, and University of Ghent, which have participated in the Horizon SME Phase 1 feasibility study and expressed their interest toward becoming co-creation partners in the project. If successful, the prestige of said universities and their endorsement should generate interest for other institutions to join in.
COMPANY NAME:
APPLICANT NAME: Santiago Saavedra Lopez
TEAM COMPOSITION: A group of natural persons
WEBSITE: https://heimdall.cloud
COUNTRY: Spain
PROJECT SECTOR: [“Energy & sustainability”,“Open Innovation”]
[“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Others”] Providing a self-hosted privacy-focused cloud alternative by decentralization of services
Heimdall is a trust-enhancing platform that enables the use of decentralized and auditable applications that provide a self-hosted alternative to the widespread usage of third-party cloud services for users who care about their privacy. Our initial offering will be a small device that users can connect in their home and start using their own fully-owned cloud-like services such as email, calendar or storage without third parties hosting any private content. It will include a marketplace to install applications and keep them updated. Apps must be only free software, in order to ensure privacy and third-party auditability. Our goal is to make a self-hosting appliance for home use that is easier and more convenient to use than managed services. A decentralized network that allows encrypted communication between Heimdall devices will allow seamless integration with the Tor network and further value-added services, such as a trustless P2P backup system.
Our initial target is privacy-concerned people; e.g., activists that needs privacy protection, lawyers and journalists that need to be cautious because they manage sensible data; and developers because they know how SaaS manage our data and they are concerned about it. The market is growing very fast: e.g., ProtonMail has grown from 2 to 10 million users in 2018, DuckDuckGo queries are growing exponentialy close to 500K monthly and there are more than 2 million users in Tor everyday.
Pablo and Santiago have been working together since 2009 as hacktivists in FOSS technologies and both founded VACmatch, sports startup. Pablo is actually running Arengu, another startup; both have a lot of experience running businesses. They work with Sofia, an experienced designer, in Trackula project to raise awareness and to show how web pages are tracking users and they have been awarded by Spanish Data Protection Agency in the “Personal data protection investigation” category by their work in Madrid MediaLab-Prado. They were invited to Data Commons Lab and SummerLab2018 in Tabakalera (San Sebastian) to research about privacy, where David joined the team with his large experience in hardware technologies. Trackula presented its work in FOSDEM 2019 and started to work with Cliqz to integrate it in another tool to identify data leaks in webs and at the same time we are working with a group of international partners to use Trackula to investigate and report GPDR infractions in webs.
Mainly the LEDGER grant will be used to cover salaries to allow co-founders to work full time in this project. The remaining of the budget will be used to develop the hardware device, including the cost of prototypes to test this project in a real environment; to invest in different marketing approaches, like using digital marketing or running physical actions to raise awareness around privacy issues and data leaks, including travel to attend and talk at privacy-related events.
There is no easy to use alternative to SaaS clouds, there are some competitors as The Helm (not open source/not easily auditable) and FreedomBox (not focused on energy-efficiency, lack of usability and integration, complex auditability). Other alternatives could be NAS-based segment as MyCloud but these kind of devices are too technical for an average user and they lack integration with privacy-enhancing technologies. We will sell online using a strategy based on high quality content creation, running physical events to rise awareness about privacy and contributing to communities, giving talks, participating in citizen labs and partnering with NGOs and activist groups. We are already participating in events because our goal is to be a reference in the privacy world. Heimdall will be an easy to use privacy and self-hosted cloud, adding community projects and allowing users to deploy decentralized applications to help distributed and federated services as Tor or Matrix in its growth.
Decentralizing chronic disease management with a community based human centred platform that motivates healthy living & self-care.
COMPANY NAME: iBreve Ltd
APPLICANT NAME: Flavia Wahl
TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities
WEBSITE:
COUNTRY: Spain
USER: flaviaw
PROJECT SECTOR: [“Health”]
[“Blockchain technologies”,“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Artificial intelligence”,“Internet of things”,“Immersive Media”]
According to the WHO chronic diseases are the leading cause of deaths globally although a staggering 80% of cases can be prevented by behavioral & lifestyle choices. Chronic diseases, such as hypertension, must be managed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Community care is a more logical approach for chronic disease management because it allows for more continuous care, rather than episodic interventions that only occur when a patient visits their formal care provider. iGive2 is moving health care from traditionally centralized institutions to the community. iGive2 is an open & decentralized health care platform to help better manage & prevent chronic diseases by bringing together patients, their families & local communities. As trust & privacy are key in healthcare, iGIVE2 combines a human centered approach with privacy by design to empower patients’ control over their health data with new technologies like AI based realtime monitoring with wearables & blockchain.
The global chronic disease management market is valued at 4B€ in 2018 & is expected to double by 2024 Initial target market: Hypertension Globally over 1.3B people suffer from hypertension, which is the leading preventable cause of death worldwide End-user: has to monitor blood pressure daily, eat healthy, avoid stress & get sufficient physical activity Community: family supports patient with joined activities & health challenges Research: get real world data for better treatment & prevention
Platform Cooperativism built on 3 pillars 1) Citizens: free
- monitor health & build support hubs
- choice to participate in research projects & donate or get reimbursed in exchange for anonymized data
2) Open research platform: pay-for-use model
- access real-time monitoring data
3) B2B: donation type platform fees
- brands can offer sponsored health campaigns
- cities can incentivise healthy behaviors with vouchers
integration of health insurances to incentivise healthy behaviors
We are a diverse and multidisciplinary team combining entrepreneurial expertise with digital health, software development & human centred design.
Entrepreneur & Project Lead: Flavia • iBreve: CEO & Co-Founder| • Google: Legal & Privacy Lead for Germany & Image Search| • Ireland’s Best Young Entrepreneur Dublin City| • Master in Business & Psychology
Researcher: Dr. Jordi Pons • UniversalDoctor: CEO| • WHO: Health & Innovation Consultant| • Top 50 Healthcare IT Leaders in EU| • General Practitioner| • MD Family Medicine
Developer: Jacob • iBreve: CTO & Co-Founder| • Google: Mobile Lead Germany| • IBM: HR & Well-Being Manager| • Master in Int. Business & Psychology
Android Developer: Montse • UniversalDoctor: Software Engineer| • Specialist in computer applications development (CFGS)
UX & Design: Jenny • iBreve: UX & human centred design • Fabricademy: Material Designer| • MSc in Biology Developer: Ricky • UniversalDoctor: Project Manager| • Abona Health: Founder| • MSc Biotechnology
Objective: Build & demonstrate the iGive2 MVP in operational environment, TRL 7-8 Deliverables: Work Plan; Mock ups; Functional MVP; Test Results; Business Plan Ledger support
Technical • Identify ideal DLT technology • Access & integration of software stacks (like freecoin) Business • Refine business model • Access to early adopters, key experts in decentralized tech & investors Costs structure: Personnel €184500 Equipment, materials & manufacturing €8500 Project management & travel €7000
Status quo of market • No existing open source platform for community based prevention & management of chronic diseases • Existing health platforms are dominated by large US players like Google & Apple • Defragmented wearable platforms with limited research access • Global market of blood pressure monitoring devices is 1.8B€ by 2024 Alternative solutions • Clinicians & health institutions > only episodic interventions • Fitness club & gym memberships > usually not for the whole family or across generations • Home blood pressure monitors > not very user friendly & usually closed systems with inaccessible data • Apple health, Google fit, Fitbit etc > data ownership outside EU Route to market • Online advertising • Partnering with patient foundations (e.g. European Heart Network) • Health brands to support health challenges Main features & scalability • Easy scalable to other chronic diseases • Online & offline integration • Easily adaptable for other target groups, e.g. employees
A knowledge validation engine combining blockchain and AI technology
COMPANY NAME: Iris AI AS APPLICANT NAME: Jacobo Elosua TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities WEBSITE: https://projectaiur.com/ COUNTRY: Bulgaria USER: jet PROJECT SECTOR: [“Open Innovation”]
[“Blockchain technologies”,“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Artificial intelligence”]
We envision a world where the right scientific knowledge is available at our fingertips. Where all research is validated and reproducible, with immutable scientific consensus tracked over time. Where interdisciplinary connections are the norm. Where unbiased scientific information flows freely. Where research already paid for with our tax money is freely accessible to all. Where massive R&D budgets also benefit contributors to core scientific breakthroughs.
Our research assistance premium software products currently cater for university library and research institute use cases. From that toe in the water, our commercial efforts are expanding into corporate R&D, with chemistry as the initial (highly attractive but currently underserved) beachhead market. We believe the proposed Knowledge Validation engine presents an opportunity around R&D automation, a $14bn yearly revenue opportunity (11m R&D researchers and $138bn spent on digital enablers).
The token economics proposed display an ecosystem of different profiles of Contributors and Users incentivised to drive the Knowledge Validation Engine forward. Essentially, from a business model perspective we plan to create a circular token economy. Contributors generate tokens via the provision of value added activities to the Aiur system (training, code commits, research publishing, QA). Users will include R&D personnel, academic consortia, software developers and individual researchers.
Iris.ai is a seed funded, Singularity University, 500 Startups, Founders Factory, German Technology Entrepreneurship Centre and Creative Destruction Lab backed, three year old international startup developing an AI to democratize access to scientific knowledge. Since founding Iris.ai in 2015 we have focused our efforts on developing a machine that can read and understand scientific text. Our initial trajectory has been covered by Fast Company, TechCrunch, Wired, Science Magazine or the World Economic Forum, among others.
Used as a lever, pooled with other investor money to make the project a reality.
We have fundamentally modelled the AIUR token as: (1) the sole instrument available for the community to tap into Aiur directly via an Application Programming Interface (’API’); and, at the same time, (2) a potential voucher, i.e. a digital right to purchase products built on top of Aiur at a discount. Our primary goal distributing AIUR tokens is to align long term incentives with a large and fast growing base of existing community members and early backers, acting as individuals, corporates or institutions. Our secondary goal is to maximize breadth of holders, in particularly among target Aiur users. Besides rewarding existing relationships, the project’s marketing efforts will target allocating tokens in advantageous terms to early backers, and in particular both existing and aspiring scientists, via mechanisms including airdrop and/or bounty campaigns. The Aiur token sale will also target maximizing breadth of holders through expansive social media communications.
COMPANY NAME: APPLICANT NAME: Harm van Beek TEAM COMPOSITION: A group of natural persons WEBSITE: https://www.the- equitable-project.org COUNTRY: Netherlands USER: harmvanbeek EXTERNAL EVALUATION: 13/15. RANKING: 21 PROJECT SECTOR: [“Economy”]
[“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Others”] A turnkey cooperative to regain control of our housing.
Urban centers in the EU are facing a housing crisis; the lack of affordable housing is locking entire demographics out of economic opportunities. So, more than a housing crisis, this is a societal crisis, accelerating wealth inequality. Housing cooperatives are a tested and proven solution to this problem through collective ownership and self governance. So why aren’t we seeing more housing coops? Coops are not easy to found and manage. It often requires a group of inexperienced volunteers to manage a complex project with many legal, financial, regulatory and communal challenges. House.coop is a decentralised service that lowers the barriers for communities to organise themselves and regain control of their housing situation. Tools for governance, accounting, equity management come embedded with your instance of the service. House.coop helps streamline member collaboration, regulatory compliance, and provide privacy friendly audits to financiers. We take the coop mainstream.
The market for House.coop consists of EU urban households (HHs) overburdened by rent. We look at rates of overburden (RoO) as an indicator of both a demand for more affordable housing as economic leeway. Within the EU we focus on markets with above average RoO: EL, DK, DE, BE, CZ, UK, NL; a total of ± 10M HHs. We assume 2% to be open to our proposition, at a 500 €/yr, we estimate the addressable market of 100M €. Future opportunities include direct collaboration with cities and project devs.
All House.coop software is available as F/OSS and maintained by the House.coop foundation primarily funded by the corporation. Anyone can use the software to found and manage their coop. The House.coop corporation provides a Coop-as-a-Service, utilizing the House.coop software. Coops pay the corporation a yearly fee to maintain their turnkey instance, provide localisation (language & legal), aspirants vetting, and is operated as a cooperative of local agents. Similar to sustainable energy coops.
The team consists of Gijsbert, Harm and Marcel.
Gijsbert ran several ventures. He was NL’s leading expert in crowdfunding and helped bring 100s of grassroots projects to market, which makes Gijsbert the ideal person to work on both the community and business side. From 2012, Harm (researcher) and Marcel (developer) ran a design studio doing R&D in the field of emerging tech for startups, larger orgs, & academia. In 2014, they shifted focus to ethics + tech, and created the award winning Transparent Charging Station and a bike sharing service Fairbike, a DOA on the ethereum blockchain. Realising true impact does not come from doing things right, but from doing the right things, they teamed up with Gijsbert to take on more audacious domains, like housing. We have yet to build expertise in the real estate market, but we have two experts from the housing market on board of advisors to guide us. Also; we bring a fresh designer’s perspective to solve challenges insiders can’t solve.
The grant will be mostly spent on running the team: salaries and overhead (office rent, small materials and travel costs to visit coops). Computers, office inventory etc are already on site from previous businesses. We want to reserve a part of the budget for activities around finding first customers. In the Ledger program we can build our solution in a context aligned with our values and with the provided services we can further grow our technical and business expertise. Looking forward!
A high demand for housing combined with inaccessible ownership creates an investor driven market that focuses of ROI instead of reasonable housing costs. Cooperatives created with House.coop make ownership a viable alternative. We can learn from existing coops what makes them successful but also what stops them from scaling. By creating a turnkey platform cooperative we take away many of the barriers of housing coops. Scalability then depends on the recruitment of customers from the large pool of renters overburdened by housing costs. The main channel will be the House.coop website, marketed via social media, meetups, publications and perhaps mailings in neighbourhoods with rental properties. We will also target existing and starting housing coops and municipalities that (want to) support housing coops. The growth drivers are the minimum effort needed to start and run a coop, the increased eligibility for financing and the fact that anyone can start their own coop (inclusive).
oneHEALTH will the challenge of proprietary health data of apps and wearables by unifying them via a blockchain based interoperable registry
COMPANY NAME: Eurob Creative APPLICANT NAME: Roberto Giménez TEAM COMPOSITION: rgimenez_eurob WEBSITE:=http://www.incitytogether.io/ COUNTRY: Spain PROJECT SECTOR: [“Health”]
[“Blockchain technologies”,“Internet of things”]
oneHEALTH aims at creating a personal, private and interoperable health data registry for eHealth users, tackling the wide variety of data coming from wearable devices and mHealth apps (sleep, physical activity, nutrition, etc). Its key functionalities will be its interoperability for any type of mHealth app/wearable and its privacy by design. Current health applications/wearables are not interoperable among themselves: i.e. it is not possible to process and store data that has been created across different sources. Moreover, user health data is processed and stored in the provider’s central servers many times without ensuring any type of data protection or encryption and being accessible to third parties or company employees. oneHEALTH will allow for users to switch from any wearable provider and ensure it data integrity, confidentiality and trust. This will also open the gate to new services providers (health data analysis, prediction, etc) building on the data generated by the users
The market targeted is that of wearable devices and mobile apps. European citizens using wearable technologies as by 2019 ascend to a total of 42 M people, with a predicted increase of 2.5 M by 2023, with more than 300 M devices sold in Europe. In turn, the personalized medicine and nutrition markets are predicted to hold a crucial lead on the healthcare industry in the years to come, with a forecasted CAGR of 11% and 9.1% and markets valued at USD 194.4 and USD 24.9 billion, respectively.
Our business model relies on two aspects: a) the liberalization of mHealth data and the repercussion for our InCity Together health service (higher number of users without painful transition, new services offered through our app thank to the wealth of Health data) and b) the direct exploitation of oneHEALTH concept that will occur via consultancy/development services for entities wishing to implement/work with oneHEALTH technology for their products TEAM EXPERIENCE People from one or two legal entities
LEDGER resources will be destined to cover the team personnel costs in order to make oneHEALTH a reality. This will encompass technical works, such as design works (i.e. architecture), implementation, testing, validation, etc. It will also include design and business development related activities. Services provided by LEDGER related to business mentoring will be devoted to design a strategy of successful implementation and use. Both elements will ensure proper market acceptance and launching.
The market we want to approach has a considerable potential, given that currently there are no personalized interoperable health data registries. This is due in part to the interest of the manufacturers in maintaining captive their clients with their solutions while others do not find the tools/incentives for making their health data interoperable. By providing the means for early adopters to capitalize/build on the concept of oneHEALTH we will create market attractiveness for the user/incoming service providers that will itself build towards creating momentum and easily reach the tipping point where the most recalcitrant wearable manufacturers will have no other option than adopting oneHEALTH approach if they want to continue in the market. At any moment oneHEALTH is a complete benefitting feature/characteristic for the user that, as soon as one provider starts to offer it as its differentiating point, the rest will have no other choice than to follow the same approach.
Data privacy powered by Humans for Humans.
COMPANY NAME: Georepublic UG (haftungsbeschränkt) APPLICANT NAME: Daniel Kastl TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities WEBSITE: https://consento.org COUNTRY: Germany PROJECT SECTOR: [“Health”,“Public services”,“Open Innovation”] CORE TECHNOLOGIES: [“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”]
Consento defines a new era for data privacy. The Cloud can not be fully trusted to keep personal and other highly confidential data! Consento is developing a decentralised digital vault technology to help small businesses manage confidential data with their customers, using p2p encrypted storage & authenticating by consent given by trustworthy humans, not computers. Consento is a democratic and human-centric solution that overcomes the trust issue of distant p2p networks, by requiring human-to-human interaction. In detail, Consento builds on DAT technology to keep data quickly & securely replicated encrypted, and adds a layer of Shamir’s Secret encryption to provide a peer-to-peer identity check feature. Because its process remains open, Consento is the vehicle for local institutes to effectively support humans of the digital 21st century. The ability to become “digital trustee” will give new relevance to local lawyers, personal accountants and health professionals as a start.
Consento is a B2B2C model. Its service is free for end users. Revenue comes from businesses who want to extend their customer base by offering new privacy compliant services. Local, security-sensitive professions such as lawyers, doctors and accountants, will be able to be listed as certified ‘professional digital trustees’ in the Consento trustee directory. For large public or private organizations we will offer integration of Consento technology into their existing services and platforms.
Daniel is a geographer and software developer, long time advocate and contributor to Open Source projects such as pgRouting. He has co-founded Georepublic in Germany and Japan and employs over 20 people. Martin is an amazing and handsome developer, extremely active as a DAT community leader and contributor of many Open Source projects.
Tanja is a young and agile UX/UI designer, stretching from user requirements, to pixel perfect mockups up to easy to implement wireframes.
Marc is an experienced service designer, involved in collaborative communities and platform economy projects, master of user testing, and experienced in early stage startup projects (HABx.fr, apricity.life). The team is global-minded and located in Europe and Japan.
We are planning to use the financial support for 1 Core technology R&D, contributions to OS projects 2 User research 3 UX/UI design for the mobile/desktop app 4 Technical documentation 5 Open Source publishing (ie. Github) and community 6 Promotional materials (website, etc.) 7 Presenting at (international) conferences/events LEDGER fund service, that we would like to ask for 1 Marketing & Sales advice 2 Coaching for market/biz dev 3 Legal consulting 4 Finance & funding advice
Digital data privacy is a ubiquitous topic. For industries to take part in the digital transformation data security is crucial, but requires significant costs and effort to comply with digital regulations, not to mention risks and responsibilities that come with the use of external services. Too often trust in anonymous cloud services have proven wrong. Consento’s strategy is humanity in digital privacy, using real-world networks and relations. Security greatly depends on how technology is used in practice. Consento intends to certify small businesses and consultancies into ‘digital trustees’ to jointly provide a “more human” solution of digital trust. Because of its decentralised nature, scalability is not a technical issue for Consento. Our solution offers privacy by design and enables to easily turn any device into an encrypted data vault and a potential human-to-human authentication interface. In fact as more users participate as more useful it becomes.
The first interoperable protocol for a decentralized, sustainable and human-centric energy sector COMPANY NAME: Prosume SRL APPLICANT NAME: Alessia Borge TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities WEBSITE: http://prosume.io/ COUNTRY: Italy PROJECT SECTOR: [“Energy & sustainability”] CORE TECHNOLOGIES: [“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Artificial intelligence”,“Internet of things”]
The Energy Commons Protocol (ECP) leverages DLTs to break data silos and centralisation in the energy sector. ECP completes our offering by allowing the interoperability (between them and with the energy infrastructure) of so far fragmented services: P2P energy production and consumption by prosumers; smart billing and settlement procedures; carbon credits tracking. The decentralised pool of data will primarily allow empowering prosumers to contribute to grid balancing, gaining agency over big centralized players. Secondly, the availability of (almost) real-time data on individual consumption allows smart billing and the cut of intermediaries and bureaucracy in the settlement procedures. Finally, the registration of carbon credits certificates in the ledger will impeach their illegal exchange/reuse, as well as allow communities of prosumers to receive them. Hence, ECP will optimise the whole sector while promoting renewables (prosumers’ main production) and sustainable behaviors.
Market 1: renewable energy. Client: prosumers aggregators (need: gain power over monopolies). End users: prosumers (need: billing corresponding to their contribution) and big energy companies (need: put more renewables in circulation; savings in energy distribution and balancing effort) Market 2: standard energy. Client: classic energy distribution companies (need: savings on settlements; savings on double-claim of certificates). End users: consumers (need: savings on bills).
We sell our products in a custom way to Utilities, Aggregators, TSO/DSO and Technology Providers. Most of the time the approach is: advisory/workshop + Proof of Concept + Project. Pricing can be made with a monthly fee for each node or with a monthly fee for the entire system.
The success of the team comes from the blend of skills: professionals in energy markets, professionals in technology, developers, project managers. The ECP MVP project will be managed by Alessia, joined by Mattia in business aspects. Mattia (who is also the GM of PROSUME) will work hand-in-hand with the developers to support them with valuable know-how in the Energy sector, as well as with Alex D’Elia (PROSUME Innovation Officer, previously Dajie CTO), the initiator of the concept. Alessandro is the main architecture developer and will be supported by PROSUME CTO. Francesco is an experienced developer and researcher working on algorithms and machine learning. Together they can have peer programming sessions.
To pay 2 FTE and 2 PTE to research, analyze, develop and test the ECP system as a MVP. We will make use of the technical support offered by Ledgers especially to bullet-proof the privacy-by-design aspects of ECP.
State of the market: fragmented. Prosumers companies waiting for new EU regulations to be in competitive position. The protocol would favour that. Energy providers are looking at blockchain as means to optimize the settlement (i.e. the recent partnership Wien Energie with blockchain firm Riddle & Code), but this happens in the vertical of the energy provider. The ECP is the missing building block to optimize the sector towards sustainable production and consumption. The scalability potential of ECP is global because thanks to open source the solution can be tailored on limitless use cases. The EU legislative framework is increasingly supportive. In order to attract clients, we will leverage our existing partnerships with cities owning their energy infrastructure (Barcelona; Carloforte and Berchidda in Italy) and prosumers companies (Evolvere, with 40000 prosumers in Italy), and our contacts with similar cases across the EU.
Inclusive Data Marketplace for Sustainable Food Production, Equal Distribution of Gains and Digital Sovereignty of Citizens and Farmers
COMPANY NAME: Prospeh d.o.o. APPLICANT NAME: Žiga Drev TEAM COMPOSITION: People from one or two legal entities WEBSITE: https://tracelabs.io COUNTRY: Slovenia PROJECT SECTOR: [“Energy & sustainability”,“Open Innovation”] CORE TECHNOLOGIES: [“Blockchain technologies”,“Distributed ledger technologies”,“Peer to peer technologies”,“Artificial intelligence”,“Internet of things”,“New connective infrastructure (as 5G)”]
Food Data Market (FDM) is an open-source infrastructure fostering new economic models for sustainable food supply chains based on data. It leverages key benefits of DLT (trust, neutrality, inclusiveness) while keeping the key advantages of participants intact by employing privacy-by-design approach. FDM enables a new wave of data marketplace platforms connecting data suppliers and consumers in food supply chains. In our MVP, we will show how farmers easily become data suppliers by making available any data created in their farming process under the conditions they deem fair. Utilising relevant technologies, all data-sets will have integrity through immutability and will be structured for interoperability. Amongst data consumers we find businesses and end-consumers alike. They can search for relevant farm data-sets and obtain them directly through smart contracts, protecting their anonymity. Same infrastructure can be used to include them also as data suppliers.
The decentralised backbone of FDM will be open-source and free to use by anyone. Our business model starts only on the data marketplace platform for farm data. For handling the complexities of making data available on the FDM platform (data modelling, nodes provisioning, holding crypto-currencies for public networks), we will charge farmers a monthly subscription and a percentage of the income from data-sets that get sold. Business model will be constantly iterated based on market feedback.
The team has been working together since 2014 and accumulated more than 20 years in management and technical experience respectively. Ziga has been managing projects improving data exchanges in supply chains for nearly a decade and has been leading implementations of blockchain related solutions in China and Europe. Vladimir (also Msc in Psychology), being one of the earliest adopters of internet in Serbia in the early nineties has deep understanding of the technology and proficient use of several program languages. Prior to joining the team in 2017, he was the Head of Department for Web Programming at SAE Institute Belgrade. Aleksander (joined the team in 2014) is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade and is the author or co-author of several research papers. He is in charge of developing advanced cryptography, predictive algorithms and game theory models used in decentralised solutions. Ana has been in charge of managing diverse projects since joining the team.
LEDGER grant will be used in a 9 months MVP sprint to develop and test the FDM. 60% of the efforts and resources will be placed directly in developing and auditing the smart contracts and other parts of the open-source infrastructure. The rest of the resources will be aimed at finding the first users of the platform to validate our approach and usability of the technology. Researcher in Residence and other auxiliary services of LEDGER partners will be used to accelerate achieving results.
Market is saturated with data sharing approaches where one large actor tries to obtain as much data as possible. Interoperability amongst such systems is low and vendor lock-ins are the desired outcome. Smaller stakeholders are unable to reap the value of data sharing, what creates frustration and sparks debates on data governance. In contrast, FDM is utilising the key strengths of DLTs to create a neutral, interoperable and trusted infrastructure that can serve as an enabler for fair data sharing in the food supply chains. In our implementation we will focus farm data, a sector in which we have years of experience. The key growth engine lies in the fact that modern farms already have relevant data siloed in their IT systems. Top-down approach to access it will be in connecting with Farm Management Systems providers, while bottom-up approach includes targeting Agricultural Cooperatives for first customers. Initial contacts with both have already been established in the SEE region.
Coops often rely on proprietary services for managing their data, which do not reflect their cooperative principles or business practices. CoBox is an innovative suite of open hardware and software providing accessible governance tools for organisations and networks. It comprises a human-centric plug and play server with pre-installed privacy enhancing coop software designed to promote members’ data sovereignty. CoBox seeks to build on the historic tendency for networks of coops to collaborate. CoBox brings a cooperative approach to hosting, treating data as a common good owned by citizens. Leveraging the benefits of self-hosting combined with peer-to-peer technologies to share responsibilities of maintaining data availability. As well as serving internal organisational governance needs these simple to use tools provide the infrastructure for governance of the CoBox network, to manage, research and guide the ecosystem, providing a state of the art alternative to corporate models.
Europe has over 170.000 cooperatives with an annual turn-over of more than €1000bn (Cocolina, 2016). Many already collaborate within sector-specific networks of trust. Targetting the data management needs of existing networks - starting with CoTech and Networked Archives - provides a base from which to grow the community of P2P self- hosting and access to the cooperative cloud, ultimately contributing towards the digital sovereignty and autonomy of cooperative groups and organisations in Europe.
CoBox will itself be constituted as a platform coop with two primary income streams: sales of the physical CoBox and a SaaS model for provision of training, customisation and features. Drawing on Ostrom (1990) and Benkler (2006), CoBox will accumulate shared gains for the ecosystem by offering a hashbase alternative for search and discovery, collectively governed as a commons service by its stakeholders. Basic membership dues will support operational costs for the network governance structure
Our team has been working together across a range of projects for over ten years. The past two years have been spent developing a related component tool, darkcrystal.pw, which is built on the p2p protocol secure-scuttlebutt and has recently gained positive attention within the PETS community from Briar, Tella, DeltaChat and Cryptpad. All social research and software development has been 100% open source. Individually, we have long histories in social, environmental, economic and technological decentralisation movements, including project coordination, financial administration, research, design and software development for collective and collaborative projects including Loomio, CoBudget, Radical Routes Coop Network, Mietshauser Syndikat, Agorama Server Coop, Secure Scuttlebutt, CoTech, Robin Hood Cooperative Hedge Fund, London Social Centers Network and MayDay Rooms London. We have also participated in the successful EU-funded D-CENT, DECODE, NEXTLEAP and Panoramix H2020 consortiums.