In the midst of coronavirus pandemic hitting Europe, both uniting and socially isolating us all, we caught up (virtually) with Stacco Troncoso, a Commons advocate and a project lead for the Commons Transition. We talked about the DisCO Manifesto, a novel approach towards forming Distributed Open Cooperatives providing guidelines for collectives of self-organised people on how to incorporate and become empowered through more distributed forms of governance. We also talked about the role of decommodification, return to the commons and radical workplace democracy, in practice.

Hi Stacco, what are your key research interests and issues you’ve been exploring?

I was…

Magenta Ceiba is the Executive Creative Officer of Bloom Network, a global community of regenerative culture leaders that gather online and in-person to collaboratively envision a brighter future. Magenta is also a classical pianist and calls herself an imagination healer, trying to help people change their reality where imagination is suppressed by a hierarchical distribution of power, focusing instead on creating alternative societies, business networks, and creative communities in harmonious relationship with the Earth. In this interview we talk about how Bloom Network fosters and scales regenerative culture practices and solutions globally.

Bloom Network is a global community of regenerative…

Gemma Copeland is an interdependent digital designer building digital tools that facilitate and empower grassroots movements and organizations. She is part of a London-based nonprofit workers cooperative of software engineers, designers and organizers called Common Knowledge. In this interview, I talked to Gemma about the ins and outs of running a grassroots activism focused co-op, about the nature and best practices for contemporary protest and political organizing, as well as about saving ourselves from a dystopian future.

Are you running a co-op, an open source project, a non-profit or simply exploring non-hierarchical, democratic ways of coordinating work around your project…

Nathan Schneider is a journalist and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was among the first journalists to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement, and more recently he authored the book Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy, in which he looks at how cooperatives can become the basis of a democratic economy. We caught up with Nathan in August in Berlin, asking him to share his views on the existing cooperative model, how can they be modernized and applied in the digital economy. We also talked about the concept…

When the Bitcoin Foundation fell apart and funding for Bitcoin core development was needed, the MIT founded the Digital Currency Initiative to step in. In the years since, the DCI has evolved into a vibrant center of cutting edge research on some of the most difficult challenges around blockchain technology. DCI Director Neha Narula joined us on Epicenter to discuss the DCI’s position between academia and industry, and their most fascinating research topics.

During her PhD in Distributed Systems and Databases, Neha Narula became interested in how to effectively scale systems. Soon after, the challenges of scaling Bitcoin — largest…

Before founding what is now one of the most successful companies in the cryptocurrency industry — Ledger, Eric Larchevêque and his co-founder opened La Maison du Bitcoin, a Bitcoin education center and co-working space in the second district of Paris. It was through chance encounters in this space that Ledger was born in the basement of 35 rue du Caire, where the company also operated a Bitcoin exchange desk and a handful of crypto miners. Eric joined us on Epicenter to discuss the rise of Ledger from a ten-person team to now nearly 150 people across three continents.

How did…

Managing and securely storing your cryptoassets — spread across ledgers, wallets, exchanges and various third party services — can be a daunting task. How to pass them on in case of one’s death is even more of an uncharted territory in the nascent cryptocurrency space, and it’s rarely on people’s mind. Lawyer Pamela Morgan has been helping people and organizations build solutions to safely store their cryptoassets and has recently turned her attention to inheritance planning. In this Epicenter episode she presented a simple plan on how to tackle this issue.

Pamela Morgan is an attorney, educator and entrepreneur, passionate…

In the past few years we witnessed the development of multiple smart contract languages — each of them requires resources for building formal verification toolsets, compilers, debuggers and other developer tools. Grigore Rosu is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose dream for the blockchain space is to see all smart contracts formally verified — and he has a tool to that purpose. The K framework is mathematic logic and language that enables language developers to formally define all programming languages, which has massive implications for smart contract programming language development and the formal verification…