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D-CENT Project

D-CENT was a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment. Together with citizens and developers, we created a decentralised social networking platform for large-scale collaboration and decision-making.

The abbreviation D-CENT refers to Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies. Besides the platform, the project explored how communities might manage common goods and facilitate online exchange with Bitcoin-style digital social currencies. The project started in October 2013 and run until May 2016. We had a multidisciplinary partnership from seven countries.The code of D-CENT apps was release under open source software licenses.

Building on existing experiments

Pilots in Finland, Iceland and Spain gathered use cases and knowledge from people who had already used online tools for direct democracy. D-CENT built on Europe’s largest experiments in direct democracy, showing how millions of citizens can become engaged in deliberation, and decision-making:

  • Spain: 15M citizen movement, one of Europe’s most dynamic social movements
  • Iceland: Citizen Foundation, Better Reykjavik, and Better Iceland Participation democracy websites
  • Finland: Open ministry Crowdsourced lawmaking site linked to Parliament