On the design of trustworthy compute frameworks for self-organizing digital institutions

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the Open Mustard Seed (OMS) project that seeks to develop a social interaction platform to facilitate group affiliations based on Reed's Law [1]. Reed posits that the value of a network soars when users are given the tools for free and responsible association for common purposes. The OMS as tool for common association supports the ability for people to form self-organizing groups following the notion of the data commons put forward by Elinor Ostrom [2]. The data commons in OMS consists of various personal data which the owner has agreed to contribute into what Ostrom calls the common-pool resource, and which is to be managed by the self-organized group or institution. This paper discusses some design considerations of the OMS platform from the perspective of the privacy and security of the personal data that participate in the common-pool resource. The technical core value of the OMS lies in its construction of the Trusted Compute Cells, which are intended to be recombinable and embeddable units of logic, computation and storage. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.