The Solid Ecosystem: a Polycentric Approach to Fostering Intention Economies

Abstract

The Internet and the World Wide Web were born and grew from polycentric workgroups and remain governed by standards bodies that are polycentric as well. Open-source software development, newer than both the Net and the Web, is now just as widespread and normative. It too is comprised almost entirely of polycentric and self-governed groups. Today two relatively new open-source projects are working, in their own polycentric ways, toward creating a more equitable economic commons that Doc Searls describes in The Intention Economy: one based on full customer agency and better forms of engagement between customers and companies. One is the Solid Project, which was created by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, and equips people with a new and better way to organize and control access to valuable personal data. The other is IEEE P7012, a new standard that puts people in full control of their privacy online by making them first parties in binding privacy agreements with companies, rather than dependent second parties who have little reason for faith in corporate privacy promises. Both these projects also work on the same polycentric model and may prove as revolutionary and important as the three polycentric graces on which they will operate and depend.