Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative

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Starts at

$20 USD / month

One-time contribution

Volunteer

If you would like to volunteer to work on one of our projects, please select this tier.

Membership

Sponsorship: Silver Plan

Join us for $100.00 per year and support us

$100 USD / year

Projects

Support the following initiatives from Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative.

Project

Bikestream

To develop a product- and collective-model to support the cooperative sharing of mobility, person...

Project

Laplace

Develop expert graph and tools for empowering cognitive labor

Events

Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative is hosting the following events.

Past event

General Meeting

Dec 19 → Dec 20, 2020

05:00 PM UTC

General meeting to over changes in the cooperative and thoughts and ideas for the future

Past event

Ledgerback's October 4th Meetup

Oct 5, 2019

01:00 AM-03:00 AM UTC

An educational meetup on blockchain and cryptocurrencies

Past event

Ledgerback October 4th Meetup

Oct 5, 2019

01:00 AM-03:00 AM UTC

An educational meetup on blockchain and cryptocurrencies

Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative is all of us

Our contributors 4

Thank you for supporting Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative.

Charles Adjovu

Core Contributor

Ledgerback

Admin

joseph tobing

Core Contributor

Jack Smye

Core Contributor

Connect

Let’s get the ball rolling!

News from Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative

Updates on our activities and progress.

June Update

Requests For Collaboration · Recently, Charlie Fisher came to the LDCRC Slack asking fo...

Published on July 14, 2021 by Ledgerback

May 2021 Update

Author: Charles Adjovu Here are some updates from us over the past month.LedgerbackØDCRC is official...

Published on June 19, 2021 by Ledgerback

Introduction to Platform Cooperativism Mini-course: Part 1

Newly released Part 1 of our introductory mini-course on the platform cooperative movement covering platforms and cooperatvisim. You can find the slides for Part 1...

Published on November 1, 2020 by Ledgerback

About

What is the Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative?

The Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative (LedgerbackØDCRC) is a nonprofit cooperative. The LedgerbackØDCRC is a community of academicians, researchers, students, thinkers, activists, citizens and more collaborating together to operate and manage an independent education and research center.

Mission

Foster collaboration between stakeholders and unify the study of the internet and society (i.e., the network society).

Vision

A glocal society and infrastructure supported by ledgerbacked systems and thinking.

Name

Ledgerback is the combination of "ledger" and "back." The word is dervied from combining back from greenback and ledger.

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.

Logo

Our logo is of our mascot, Scout Stork.

Ledgerback Secondary Logo

Mascot

Scout Stork (the beautiful stork in our logo above and the visual representation of our cooperative) is our spiritual guide who helps guide us in finding the paths to flock together with industry, academia, movements, and citizens (or stakeholders and movements) to achieve the paradigm shifts needed to transition towards ledgerbacked systems (and towards a global technological commonwealth), and in making and disseminating knowledge to our members, interested parties, and the general public.

The name of our mascot, Scout Stork, comes from the fact we wanted an alliteration for the name, and that Scout can refer to someone who explores a new area to gain information, which we we are doing here at LedgerbackØDCRC within the network society.

Mottos

Where innovation meets community.

Flock together. Change together.

Flocking the transformational change.

Peering into the noggin.

Brief History

Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative (formerly Ledgerback) was started as a Cooperative Association in 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The founding members wanted to tackle issues in the blockchain industry that they felt were distracting from the growth potential for the blockchain industry, and for greater community and local acceptance of blockchain applications:

lack of educational resources for understanding the blockchain industry
rise of scams, theft, and unsavory practices in the blockchain industry
lack of local discussions on the blockchain industry other than financial and payments use cases

On June 6, 2018, the founding members adopted the Cooperative Bylaws, the rules by which the Cooperative operates and conducts business under.

During the months of September and December, LedgerbackØDCRC published the first edition of its Amalgam magazine on Medium, and Ledgerback published its first blockchain market review, A Preliminary Review of Blockchain in the Music Industry, on Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and Scribd.

Principles and Values

LedgerbackØDCRC's principles and values are inspired by open communities and cooperative-like organizations. In addition to the cooperative principles and values espoused by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), the following base principles and values that apply across the network are:

Decentralization is a spectrum, with our goal to continually decentralize our processes
Member Empowerment
No discriminatory behavior on the basis of race, sex, age, ethnicity, national origin, disability,
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
Egalitarianism is preferred when possible
Open and voluntary membership
Democratic member control
The Commons (knowledge, documentation, tools, etc.) should be freely accessible to members

Commons-driven: We are pushed by our collective nature and focus on collective action
Non-hierarchical Decision-making: Decision-making that supports individual autonomy and amplifies collective action
Diversity: We need and desire diverse people, methods, and approaches
Complexity: Complexity naturally arises in the DOTS space and should be kept in mind when evaluating topics.
Systems Thinking: Don't hate the player, hate the game.
FLEOSS: Support and grow FLEOSS technologies and practices
Open Science: Support and grow open access, open data, open scholarship, open peer review, and open publishing efforts, technologies, initiatives, and practices
Fairness

Our principles and values will continue to evolve as time goes on.

Inspirations

Sensorica
Ouishare
P2P Foundation
Nexus Mutual
Decred
Santa Fe Institute
Internet Interdisciplinary Institute
Tokens Agora Meetup Group (Defunct)
Russell Harkanson
Stephanie Asao
RChain
Resonate
MakerDAO
Althea Mesh
Matt Heck
Jessie J
CoinFlip
Ewa Fabian
Aragon
Cosmos
The Ready
The Co-oplaw
Enspiral
The Catalan Integral Cooperative
Nathan Schneider
Michael Bauwens
Backfeed
Elinor Ostrom
RadicalxChange
P2PModels
Max Planck Society
ConcourseQ
Mondragon Cooperative
Stanford Social Innovation Review
Morning Star
Open Source Drug Discovery
Stephanie Asao
Co-op Cincy
L'Atelier Paysan
UpSocial
FarmHack
Chôra Foundation
Citizen Cyberlab
Citizen Science Center Zurich
Co-operative College
Citizens and Technology Lab (CAT Lab) at Cornell University
Trustlines Network
Aleeza Howitt
MIDATA Cooperative
Corporation for Digital Scholarship
Coko
Radical Open Access Collective
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)
Gridcoin

More Information

For more information, please refer to the Docs, the Substack Newsletter, or chat with us on Discord or Reddit.

Our team

Charles Adjovu

Core Contributor

Ledgerback

Admin

joseph tobing

Core Contributor

Jack Smye

Core Contributor