Orchestral

A group of ethical internet activists, members of the Pangea.org organisation, are co-developing an identity management system for marginalised and internet activist communities. The system is built by mature communities with their internet infrastructure and services organised as a commons. They want to self-manage their digital content and circular digital devices. The system should allow users of multiple organisations to manage their online identities and activate, access, manage, and share the costs (invoicing) of community-centred internet services and devices according to their identity profile. The system development uses and is open-source software. The system should be evaluated and disseminated to other communities. The system is designed to be trustworthy and to preserve personal privacy. It should be aligned with decentralised identity models, including considering EIDAS and building on existing and emerging digital identity technology solutions, but adapted to the target and other similar communities of practice. The software system should be co-designed by the end-user community and co-developed including a team of developers and researchers from Pangea and UPC. The system, extended with decentralised digital identity according to the community of practice needs, has the potential to significantly impact the lives of communities involving marginalised citizens working on digital services and circular devices. The system should also help to promote trust, decentralisation and privacy online in more efficient and scalable communities.

Website: Pangea.org/trustchain

Motivation for the project: Pangea provides internet and web services to their individual and organisational members in a cooperative cost-sharing model, with rack servers running open-source servers connected to the internet as part of the guifi.net community network. Service management and billing/cost-sharing are managed by an open-source service and server management backend system (django-orchestra) that Pangea has developed over the years and a self-service portal (Musician). This system can associate services and resource consumption by these for each individual or organisational member entity and automate internet services' setup, management and billing. The eReuse.org open-source services we have developed (DeviceHub) allows managing end-user devices as pools of second-hand computer devices that come from donations by public and private organisations, refurbished by social enterprises and reused by citizens, many from vulnerable groups in cities and schools. The permissions and granularity of functionality should depend on the user identity, their attributions, experience, qualifications and role in the participant organisations, which requires the management of high-quality and privacy sensitive identity attributes within each community organisation. We would like to explore and co-develop this area in this project.
Generic use case description: An integrated and meaningful platform for communities that rely on decentralised identity systems, with the required details to facilitate the governance, management and cost-sharing of digital and material service infrastructures.
Essential functionalities: A standards-compliant decentralised identification solution that works with the social/solidarity/circular/digital economy, including marginalised groups, that can bring lessons from an elaborate and established community in co-designing and adopting decentralised digital identification systems to manage and share costs of digital services and devices, that can be the basis for future experiments.
How these functionalities can be integrated within the software ecosystem: The aim is to extend the current open-source working services used by our community of organisations (the Orchestra accounting system, the Musician self-service user portal, the DeviceHub device inventory system). This will be combined with other elements (such as the DLT verifiable registry from UPC, the DID, VC and DLT experimental and mature tools from Alastria, IOTA, EBSI, Ethereum). The resulting system should provide decentralised digital identity solutions that different actors in the Pangea/eReuse community want and need. The system will consist on libraries, demo system with user interface, and documentation to adapt it to specific needs.
Gap being addressed: The needs addressed have to do with the decentralised identification of participants in different roles and capabilities, from multiple related organisations. The different actors involved are expected to benefit from using DID, potentially using verifiable credentials and DLTs. Their identity can serve the needs of communities working for an ethical internet (circular, digital, decentralised, not extractive; open, inclusive and cooperative) that manage their pool of ICT end-user and server devices, the services they provide, the cost-sharing/billing of these and the associated data.
Expected benefits achieved with the novel technology building blocks: Property regimes, community entitlement, cost sharing over services and data is an interesting area to explore and support in the co-design process. Community entitlement over data is the right of a community to have control over the data collected about it. The combination of operational services integrated with a flexible and user-driven identity system for the different stakeholder groups, integrated in their governance and cost-sharing procedures for information sharing, service activation, device allocation, etc. can result in viable solutions ready for replication.
Potential demonstration scenario: Our community includes more than 500 member organisations of Pangea and about 100 entities in eReuse. Many diverse services to integrate and over 1,200 devices circulate as shared property as part of our “servitised” business model.

Team

Leandro Navarro

Leandro is a professor at UPC.EDU, digital activist on the social and environmental use of internet and distributed ledger technologies for good if that were possible.

Lorena Merino

Lorena Merino is dealing with support and relationship with members, answering their questions, problem solving, advice, coordination, participation and consulting with them. In addition, she handles many administrative tasks for the entity.

Mildred Sarmiento

Mildred Sarmiento is a software engineer specialised in Agile software development and quality assurance. As Scrum Master I focus on helping the team to embrace and adopt the agile mindset, its principles and practices for ensuring effective outcomes, creating and evolving a culture of collaboration, responsibility and continuous improvement.

Jorge Pastor

Jorge Pastor is a Pangea technician who shares tasks with Noemí, responsible for solving the technical problems of the members, as well as designing, programming and/or implementing new applications and tools both to improve and expand Pangea's services.

Noemi Costa

Noemi Costa is one of the pangea technician who share the tasks of maintaining, designing, developing and implementing new solutions and tools to improve the experience of our members, and of course help them with the little technical problem that sometimes arise.

Santiago Lamora

Santiago Lamora Subirá is a Software engineer, specialist on developing webapps based on Django (Python).

Paco Cascón

Paco Cascón is Pangea’s president, expert in education for peace and conflict resolution, and informatics teacher. On a voluntary basis, he performs various tasks in the projects carried out by the entity and collaborates in some of the day-to-day work.

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Orchestral

Team

Entity

Pangea

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)