Samer Hassan
Bio
Samer Hassan is Principal Investigator of the P2P Models project:
"Samer Hassan is an activist and researcher, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University) and Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Focused on decentralized collaboration, he received a 1.5M€ ERC grant to build blockchain-based democratic and sustainable organizations for the collaborative economy (P2P Models). Coming from a multidisciplinary background in Computer Science and Social Sciences, he has more than 50 publications in those fields. In the P2Pvalue project (http://p2pvalue.eu), he coordinated building decentralized web-tools for collaborative communities and social movements, such as SwellRT and Jetpad. Engaged in free/open source projects, he co-founded the Comunes Nonprofit and the Move Commons webtool project. He's an accredited grassroots facilitator and has experience in multiple communities and grassroots initiatives. His research interests include the Collaborative Economy, Commons-based peer production, decentralized architectures, blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations, online communities, grassroots social movements & cyberethics. Follow Samer on Twitter: @samerP2P "
A selection of recent works he co-created are:
- A report for the European Commission Joint Research Center (JRC), mapping the DLT/Blockchain ecosystem of social good projects, and analyzing 130 of them, in an effort he did with his team and the JRC: "Scanning the European Ecosystem of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Social and Public Good"
- An analysis of the potentials of blockchain for the governance of commons-oriented communities: "When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance"
- Several works analyzing the ecosystem of blockchain-enabled Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) communities, both exploring their state and evolution, and empirically validating novel governance models.
A selection of projects he has helped push forward with his team and collaborators are:
- A spin-off from his project P2P Models, focused on facilitating Open Science relying on decentralized technologies: Decentralized Science. Led by Antonio Tenorio-Fornés
- A software to quantitatively analyze wiki communities, to better understand their internal dynamics: Wikichron. It generates graphs on 60+ metrics, comparisons and network analysis on wikis from Fandom (former Wikia). Co-led by Javier Arroyo
- A software to quantitatively analyze DAO communities (i.e. blockchain-enabled decentralized autonomous organizations): DAO-Analyzer. It generates 15+ graphs from DAOstack, Aragon and DAOhaus DAO platforms. Co-led by Javier Arroyo
In the past, he was lead of the technical team in the European project P2Pvalue, which built:
- The backend-as-a-service for collaborative apps SwellRT (in Wikipedia), whose codebase was adopted by the Apache Foundation
- The app for collaborative communities Teem (featured by P2PF), which was used by a diversity of social collectives
- The real-time collaborative editor JetPad, which aimed to provide a fully-fledged free/open source alternative to Google Docs, but privacy-aware and decentralized/federated.
Since 2012, he teaches a course on Ethics & Law of Computer Science at UCM, with its own wiki co-created by the students () and its own Github with open-licensed materials.