SoG Tech for Trust
The Personal Knowledge Container (PKC) is both a scalable personal library and a data wallet, a self-administered knowledge management solution that addresses the problems caused by information asymmetry as defined by the Science of Governance (SoG). PKC is a Domain-Driven Microservice to avoid a monolith application, reducing unnecessary entanglement of functionality in a modular way. It can transfer a large amount of digital rights at little cost. PKC was created to show how technically feasible and economically viable it is to enable individuals and small organizations to process data in a timely, accountable, and observable manner in ways that are similar or equivalent to systems only affordable by large-scale organizations. This means that individuals can process a potentially infinite amount of data. Large-scale organizations would also benefit from PKC as they would save large costs of transferring terabytes of data by simply using the tool. It can be trusted as it is open, transparent, and most importantly, operated and owned by people who generated the data from the source. PKC chooses currently known technologies that allow data providers to contain the right to govern at the origin of data, so that its technical architecture is trustworthy.
PKC is a technical solution that addresses the political problem of data ownership. By making data processing technologies available to the masses through Open-sourced and freely distributed PKCs, this instrument should help reduce technologically and economically induced information asymmetry, and therefore build trust amongst society participants.
As Blockchain and Smart Contract related data infrastructures become increasingly mature, the features of a geographically-dispersed collaborative workflow as promised by the “Web3.0” programming model has already been incorporated into PKC.
The increasing adoption of digital payment systems and publicly registered Data Assets, commonly known as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), shows that Internet-scaled marketplaces could be designed and deployed by grassroot startups. Since the public deployment of Ethereum in 2015 as a “programmable blockchain,” many of the highly publicized online economic events have been conducted by rules encoded in machine executable contracts. This also gave birth to the field of Cryptoeconomics, an area of digitally transformed economic activities that are usually associated with Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications. The lack of an Internet-scale regulatory framework to govern these economic activities is another kind of information asymmetry that favors communities with better access to data processing technologies. By bundling Blockchain-compatible services and Smart Contract deployment capabilities in PKCs, the container reduces this unfair advantage. PKC as a general-purpose data and computing service container also allows more people to participate in these online marketplaces with a wider range of asset classes. To contextualize the design intent, it is not just a specific data manipulation tool designed for Information Technology professionals, it is a stack of governance technology that addresses the evolving needs of large-scale online interactions.