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Governance of Distributed Organizations

Not a whole lot here yet -- throwing this together quickly for discussion at the Aug 2016 Nation of Makers session. As of this writing still scraping together code from various directories on my hard drive, most of which will land in the lab directory first.

Overview

A distributed-ledger system suitable for hosting smart contracts and running on IoT devices. A few example applications:

  • Organizational governance
  • Workflow
  • Source and document version control
  • Education, training, and certification
  • Accounting
  • Inventory control
  • Door access control
  • Machine lockout
  • Membership
  • Reservations
  • Data storage and backups
  • Operating system and disk image management
  • IoT

We accomplish all this using a (relatively) simple model: Distributed applications (dapps) running in Linux containers managed by a distributed ledger, hosted in a distributed version control system that performs content-defined chunking to store and ship around large blobs, including the container images themselves.

The development roadmap, then, is (relatively) straightforward: Implement things in reverse order of the above paragraph. Beg, borrow, and paste where possible, take advantage of existing code and libraries such as libcontainer, ledger-cli, and libgit2, and become self-hosting early.

Compared to e.g. Ethereum or HyperLedger, we'd like to target more of a git-like version control model, allowing forking and interbranch consensus, rather than a single linear blockchain. For turing-complete smart contracts, we simply use Linux containers -- this allows dapps to be written in any language executable on Linux.

We'll use test-driven consensus (proof of merge), where new blocks are tested by one or more dapps, rather than use a hardcoded proof-of-work algorithm. Not requiring a compute-intensive proof of work means single-board computers such as BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi can host full nodes.

Example

Maker space door access control, for instance, could be based on an existing open source project such as https://github.com/makeitlabs/doorbot, living in a container, with modifications to have it communicate with membership, accounting, and certification dapps, each in their own containers. Comms are via the blockchain, and all of this runs on localhost, as opposed to talking to a central SQL db on a server somewhere else. Each door can have its own Raspberry Pi-sized host. These will check and log access events as usual even during network outages, and the blockchain's distributed consensus protocol will resync records when the network comes back up.

References

Shares a few concepts with HyperLedger, Ethereum, Docker, Ledger-cli, git, and git-annex. Builds on earlier work and prototyping at github.com/stevegt/librabinpoly and github.com/stevegt/git-devops.

Open Questions

  • If forks are allowed (depending on dapp) and there can be multiple roots as well as multiple heads, then is this a "blockmesh" instead of a blockchain?