History
Decentralized Governance Design (DGD) is founded in 2022 by the Computer Science department of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and is chaired by F. Kaya, PhD Computer Science Candidate. DGD is created with the aim to build a dedicated community to stimulate innovation for designing disruptive IT ecosystem enabled by blockchain technology. We are specifically interested in advancing the research on DeFi & Web3 Governance structures. The first edition of DGD in 2022 was part of the IEEE Business Informatics Conference. The second edition 2023, is part of CAiSE a Tier 1 European Conference.
Decentralized Governance Design: DECENT
DGD is also established based on the invention of DECENT: A Domain Specific Language to design blockchain governance structures. DECENT is co-founded by F. Kaya, as part of her PhD dissertation. DECENT is developed in the philosophy that we as society have the responsibility in creating transparency in how rules of engagement are decided. Decentralization is an important aspect in promoting transparency and trust. Blockchain technology did not live up to the hype of true decentralization. Mainly because ecosystem design is still to a large extent centralized and decision making is not transparent nor decentralized over multiple actors. DECENT is a computational language that allows for designing an ecosystem in which decision making is not centrally but rather decentralized over multiple actors. We refer and coin to that field in understanding and creation of rules in engagement between several actors as Decentralized Governance. DECENT is developed through industry strength cases and studied through the lens of decentralized ecosystems with a strong focus on Decentralized Finance: digital currency creation and fractional reserve banking. We study the topic by taking a conceptual modeling approach, as our vision is that a conceptual modeling approach (machine processable formalization) will lead to the long-term research goal: computational governance.
