At the NGI Forum 2018 in Porto, a session was led by Marta Arniani (futuribile / curating futures) on behalf of the NGI Move project on the topic of "A secure, decentralised Internet".
The following priorities for a decentralised Internet emerged from the session.
- Openness and security: the infrastructure must ensure fair data handling and trust
- Decentralised business models (distributed, not leveraging massively data extraction): for instance, most Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs, propose in another format the walled garden pattern from which blockchain technology was supposed to take us away from.
- Pertinence assessment: the appropriateness of decentralised infrastructures has to be proved case by case and where positively evaluated, tailored to the specific needs of entire industry verticals. Blockchain isn’t a one-size-fits-all tool.
- Sustainability: environmental, economical and political sustainability has to be designed in such systems from day 1.
- Capacity building: more literacy on the topic means more expert people able to maintain the system decentralised and innovate on top of it, as well as better awareness at citizens’ level.
