Governmentality is a concept first developed by Michel Foucault. He often defines governmentality as the “art of government” in a wide sense, i.e. with an idea of “government” that is not limited to state politics alone, which includes a wide range of control techniques, from one’s control of the self to the “bio-political” control of populations. The notion is linked to other concepts such as bio-politics and power-knowledge.

The concept of “governmentality” develops a new understanding of power. Foucault encourages us to think of power not only in terms of hierarchical, top-down power of the state. He widens our understanding of power to also include the forms of social control in disciplinary institutions (schools, hospitals, psychiatric institutions, etc.), as well as the forms of knowledge. – Wikipedia

In OSG, we follow Foucault’s view of empowering the public with knowledge to enable them to govern themselves. We believe that the passivity of the local communities in their participation for their own sociopolitical issues has a lot to do with the lack of power-knowledge.

The most important part of the implementation of the project relies on the collective and crowd relations. The crowd possesses a wisdom that will only be revealed in a collective and interactive situation. The wisdom of the crowd lies within the notion of the average (see example). The same way as the birds form a murmuration, or the same way a school of fish suddenly changes direction in the ocean to avoid predator attacks, the Homo sapiens use their wisdom of the crowd to form organization among themselves.

One way to simply explain this regarding the decision making is that in a crowd the extreme always cancels the other extreme. Therefore, the average is always more reliable and accurate than the individual. This is of course very simply put. But it is important to mention that the crowd’s intelligence, is one of the most essential expertise within this project.

Together with guests from multiple disciplines, the project is planning on researching crowd behavioral recognition algorithms to complete the design of the blueprint. This can for example be looking into existing advertisement strategies and user tracking systems.

(also known as pure democracy) is a form of democracy in which people decide (e.g. vote on, form consensus on) policy initiatives directly. This differs from the majority of modern Western-style democracies, which are representative democracies.
– Wikipedia

Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. Open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort, where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community. – Wikipedia

A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange wherein individual coin ownership records are stored in a ledger existing in a form of computerized database using strong cryptography to secure transaction records, to control the creation of additional coins, and to verify the transfer of coin ownership. It typically does not exist in physical form (like paper money) and is typically not issued by a central authority. Cryptocurrencies typically use decentralized control as opposed to centralized digital currency and central banking systems. When a cryptocurrency is minted or created prior to issuance or issued by a single issuer, it is generally considered centralized. When implemented with decentralized control, each cryptocurrency works through distributed ledger technology, typically a blockchain, that serves as a public financial transaction database. – Wikipedia

A blockchain, originally block chain,is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree).

By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of its data. This is because once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without alteration of all subsequent blocks. For use as a distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for inter-node communication and validating new blocks. Although blockchain records are not unalterable, blockchains may be considered secure by design and exemplify a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. The blockchain has been described as “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way”.