The technological infrastructures enabling the collection, processing, and trading of data have fuelled a rapid innovation of data governance models. We differentiate between macro, meso, and micro level models, which correspond to major political blocks; societal-, industry-, or community level...

Applications of algorithmically informed decisions are becoming entrenched in society,with data processing being their main process and ingredient. While these applications areprogressively gaining momentum, established data protection and privacy rules have struggledto incorporate the...

The concept of self-sovereign identity (SSI) describes an identity management system created to operate independently of third-party public or private actors, based on decentralised technological architectures, and designed to prioritise user security, privacy, individual autonomy and...

Trust can best be understood as a relational attribute between (1) a social actor and other actor(s) (interpersonal trust) and / or (2) actors and institutions (institutional or systemic trust) and (3) institutions and (trusting) actors (trust as shared expectations), where institutional...

The rapidly evolving blockchain technology space has put decentralisation back into the focus of the design of techno-social systems, and the role of decentralised technological infrastructures in achieving particular social, economic, or political goals. In this entry we address how blockchains...

Decentralisation as a concept is attracting a lot of interest, not least with the rise of decentralised and distributed techno-social systems like Bitcoin, and distributed ledgers more generally. In this paper, we first define decentralisation as it is implemented for technical architectures and...

The internet is the digital reincarnation of a Greek agora or a Roman forum. It works as a "place" for public and private life. As such, it requires reliable, trustful rules to govern the daily routine of its visitors/users. The governance of the internet has gone through a significant (if not...

Blockchain-based NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are uniquely identifiable digital representations of physical or digital items. Usually, the tokens are indivisible into smaller units. NFTs represent structured metadata referring to physical or digital objects. The tokens act as separate identifier...