Future Internet technologies

This gitbook documents a mini-workshop that took place at the end of 2015 at the Global Brain Institute with Weaver and Viktoras as participants. 2015 was a year when it became apparent that a broad family of new technologies is emerging with a high potential to disrupt the foundations of the Internet ecosystem as we know it with far reaching repercussions to social, economic, legal, and governmental systems.

We call this family of technologies distributed IT governance systems. This is a very diverse and dynamic technology space where new paradigms, models and large scale implementation projects appear at an increasing rate. Clearly, it becomes rather difficult to get a clear picture of the current evolutionary trends of the Internet. While specific technologies are highly informative and provide a faily clear view of the shape and direction of developments, they also manifest certain more general and foundational ideas behind them and we are yet to see which of these will be adopted and at what scale. We decided therefore to review the emerging technology space of distributed IT governance systems from a more conceptual perspective. We feel that such conceptual perspective is often missing from the common technical discourse. Additionally, the highly experimental character of many projects is often further distorted by hype, whether substantiated or not, that makes it even more difficult to position them in a wider, more balanced, perspective.

Considering the current dynamics of the technology space and the high level of uncertainty involved, this review is a work in progress. We hope to update and improve it as new technologies ideas and paradigms arise (and become obsolete). We believe that this review can be greatly enhanced by open discussion and collaboration. Please add comments, thoughts, suggested topics, and new technologies that we might have missed using Hypothes.is annotation system provided here.