Decentralised architectures and networks are slowly embedding themselves into the technological and societal landscape, empowered by communities of like-minded people who strive to alter the existing socio-economic order by leveraging peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies.
In this article, we discuss one such initiative, Swarm, by drawing relations between its developed set of community-centred, bottom-up Fair Data Principles and the incumbent, top-down, principles-based frameworks that govern today’s existing data-sharing economy, with a focus on data protection. We also introduce the idea of the commons along with a set of “commons design principles”. We highlight how the Swarm community might simultaneously implement principles flowing from existing data protection frameworks and the commons to guide the development of robust design strategies to manifest the communicated goal of a fair and just data-led society.
