Digital Civilisation: The Next Step

I wrote my digital civilisation manifesto three years ago.  Since then the world has been horribly disrupted, firstly by covid and, as write this, by the war in Ukraine. Both have, in their own ways, turned accepted norms upside down and reminded us that the values we all rely on cannot be depended on. Both have emphasised, in different ways, the importance of digital connectivity, the need for dependable information and the dangers of fake news and other forms of misinformation. The pandemic pushed virtually the whole of society online, young and old, whether willing or not.

At the same time these have emphasised the dangers of leaving the construction and management of technology to the tech giants or over-assertive government.  We need a worldwide community to stand up for the rights and interests of individuals and ordinary businesses.   Our Digital Civilisation DAO is a prototype for this which we hope can evolve into a community-led force for good.

Introducing DC-DAO

The DC-DAO team

The digital civilisation manifesto introduced the challenges we are facing and good principles we should follow in order to maintain the ethics and rules of a well balanced digital society. There is a strong motivation to experiment on how to create practices that could best demonstrate the concepts of digital civilisation and attract more people to join our community. The Digital Civilisation Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (The DC DAO) is the vehicle created to serve this purpose.

The DC DAO promotes verifiable transparency and trust technologies that can bridge the gaps of trust in technology.  One example is resolving the conflicts of exporting software to a third-party proving it has no malicious purpose hidden while leaving the code secret.  This makes the value of software visible to a wider range of audiences and therefore lowers the threshold of understanding and investing in technology.  We expect it to create a balanced blockchain infrastructure with stronger security and compliance capabilities that could be used to support dynamic digital assets like data, algorithms and computing power.  To achieve mainstream status it must adopt and implement a common core of standards and regulation: attracting those who live by civilised standards and making it easy to prevent those who do not.

The DC DAO adheres to the principles set out in the Digital Civilisation Manifesto. It is a free, fair and technology-oriented community that welcomes not only programmers and computer scientists, but also researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and freelancers from all backgrounds. It will create an open-source platform that encourages making contributions: one’s efforts can be turned into tradable and computationally verifiable NFTs, the value of creations becomes accountable and measurable, and the roles for contributors are made more objective and traceable. The task of converting code into assets is now carried out by the Committable project: www.committable.io

The DC DAO incubates technologies that are urgently needed in the space of blockchain applications. It is open to cooperations and partnerships through community. It obeys local laws and rules. It will set up events and workshops that bring people together. It will publish rules and standards passed by the community through voting processes. The DC DAO promotes open-source projects and upholds the concept of “Code is Law”.

We will publish the DC DAO activities in our posts and look forward to having your feedback.

Written by

• Bill Roscoe (University College Oxford Blockchain Research Centre)