This document is an introduction to the project we're currently developing. Its purpose is to highlight why Arcadia is important and how we might actually be able to build it. After we receive enough feedback from the community, detailed technical documentation will follow. For the time being, we'd like to encourage the community to join the discussion.
You can contact us at hello@seemplr.com
A public open-source infrastructure for the creation, visualisation and control by users of data-driven knowledge. Arcadia, which ultimately seeks to put people back and first into the digital economy equation, is the initial and most important ongoing project of AlterEgo.
Based on the assumption that data will provide a large portion of the raw material the economy of the 21st century will consume, we believe it is worth thinking of data beyond simply being a by-product of our online activity. In this new paradigm, we envision the technology-driven emergence of new fundamental rights around personal data such as privacy, social inclusion and economic participation.
Data is ubiquitous, is generated everywhere, 24/7, and can mostly be used and reused, without losing its intrinsic value, in different situations and for different purposes. Yet as users, we have few to no rights over the data we generate. Not because data has no value -on the contrary- but because no appropriate digital infrastructure that respects the above-mentioned new fundamental rights currently exists. With such an infrastructure in place, an inclusive market could develop, a market that would fairly reward all participants for their contribution in the creation of value derived from their data.
It is also important to recognise that our data footprint has become a very large source of information about our personality, our desires and feelings as human beings and our interests and intentions as consumers. It is a gold mine from which inferences are being made about who we are, what we believe and what our next move will be. And so began the battle for our attention. To get more information, companies started to reverse engineer our activity based on the kind of content we are being fed. That gave them significant influence on the emerging collective behaviour by shaping their platform in ways that focus and maximise user attention on content or information they choose to present.
The time has come to reverse the tendency of companies to promote their interests above ours. By enabling new roles for users, companies can be incentivised to stop capturing innovation for the sole purpose of maintaining the number of active users at its highest, and instead focus more on the economic and non-economic needs of the individual and society at large.
Data should be treated as a new digital asset. This new asset class has an inherent latent economic value based on the richness of the data and remains entirely under the control of the person who created it, i.e the user. To establish the data's value, a process of tokenisation will take place. After filtering and cleaning the data, an appropriate number of tokens will be created, based on the estimated income the data could generate were the data to be shared in Arcadia's digital economy. At any time, the user can withdraw her tokens to retrieve the underlying economic value of the data, although in doing so she stops benefiting from the economic activity her data generates.
The foundation of Arcadia's new digital economy is built on the principles of rightfully recognising the ownership of data and establishing a value for it. This new digital economy is an economy of choice. It is based on the recognition that every individual has a unique relationship to his or her data, with privacy and anonymity carrying different levels of importance for different users. Economic activity derived from personal data is a feature, not a requirement; it should be incentivised, not mandatory; it must be open to a variety of behaviours, not restrictive to what only generates profit.
Arcadia is a stack of technologies that allows the user to orchestrate the management of her data under a strict default set of privacy and anonymity rules. When offered to share her encrypted data, the user will decide if the conditions under which her data is to be used meet her requirements before giving her consent. The incentives to share encrypted data are not necessarily exclusively economic in nature. They are primarily used as a proxy for the usefulness of user's data without compromising their privacy and anonymity. Increased usefulness will be achieved by attracting developers who will produce ever more elaborate algorithms designed to provide additional insights to users. Incentives are also the mechanism by which users will be incentivised to be proactive and adopt a new role vis-à-vis their data - generating economic activity in the process if they so choose.
Arcadia's framework is built on the blockchain so that it doesn't belong to anybody and no central authority can decide how it should be managed, not even us at AlterEgo. Arcadia brings a radical new value proposition that differentiates itself from other players in that, compared to conventional players, Arcadia puts the user in charge of her data and, regarding new players, Arcadia sees data less as a sellable asset and more as a means to get to greater individual consciousness. However, achieving these objectives will require the design of a new economic model in order to make them a reality. Blockchain also embeds the key element of trust between the infrastructure and its users into its very architecture. Arcadia is the base layer of a new digital economy: an open-source, neutral and self-sustainable public infrastructure from which no profits can be derived, except by redistributing them amongst its participants.
Every user who joins Arcadia is able to upload data. Without any membership or other fee required, Arcadia privately displays for the user a visualisation of his digital profile in a novel and interactive format, giving him the opportunity to access a new level of consciousness: emerging patterns, collective behaviours, learning processes, time well spent.
Arcadia is free to its users thanks to the work of its data scientists, who are able to analyse the data without violating users' privacy, learn from it and provide insights to users. Data scientists will join Arcadia because of economic rewards (or other non-economic rewards such as reputation) they will be able to claim for their work on encrypted data.
Service providers like AlterEgo will then be able to aggregate the work of all of Aracadia's data scientists and develop and sell services to clients, attracting users to participate in the new digital economy.
Clients, such as companies or organisations, will be notified of the available services they can buy or subscribe to. So long as users agree to the terms they are presented with each time a client is interested in interacting with their data, they can choose to enter into a service agreement whereby they privately and anonymously allow clients access to their data.
Everyone gets rewarded the moment a client pays the service provider, as results can only be extracted from Arcadia by synchronously paying for data scientists' work and users' data. In fact, as long as their work is being used in a commercial context, services providers, data scientists and users will continue to receive compensation for their work.
Arcadia will be economically self-sustainable because part of the economic activity that it generates will pay for the infrastructure it requires. By default, Arcadia redistributes all income to participants once its operating expenses have been met, and the transparency of the blockchain will ensure that Arcadia as a platform does not generates any profits.
The major macroeconomic effect of Arcadia's new digital economy is the creation of an open digital space where jobs are created, interactions are promoted, meritocracy rules, money is not always the end goal and most importantly: it is choice-based. Individuals choose the appropriate amount of involvement in the digital economy they feel comfortable with according to their own prerogatives as well as the set of incentives proposed to them.
Thanks to @axion69 for editing this introduction and for his valuable support.
To get a general overview of the concepts behind Arcadia, we recommend to start by reading our Public Reach Out. If you are interested in the economic aspects of Arcadia, consider reading the New Digital Economy.
To build Arcadia, a list of expected requirements and functionalities has been laid down in four separate files. As progress is made, these list will be turned into a formal specification type of files.
- The Data Warehouse is about how data is uploaded and stored.
- The Knowledge Machine is about extracting knowledge from the data.
- The Digital Profile is about visualising and sharing the data.
- The Underlying Economics is about pricing the data and building the new digital economy.
Thanks for your interest in contributing! There are many ways to contribute to this project. Get started here. You will find where we need your help and how you can do it.