COALA benefit from a wide range of advisors from multiple disciplines that contribute as members of the Scientific Committee to help the network grow and operate in line with basic principles of ethics and cooperation.
Scientific Committee
Scientific Commitee
Elaine Shi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Her research combines theory, programming languages, and systems techniques to design computing platforms that are efficient, easy to program, and provably secure. Elaine Shi’s research has been recognized with several awards, including an NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Award, a UMD Invention of the Year Award, and an ACM CCS Best Student Paper Award. Shi is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship (2014), Google Faculty Research Awards (2013 and 2014), and winner of the IJCNN/Kaggle Social Network Challenge (2011). Elaine is on the board of the Cryptocurrency Research Group (CCRG). She obtained her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Prior to joining Maryland, she was a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and UC Berkeley.
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and was formerly the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. Lessig serves on the Board of Creative Commons, MAPLight, Brave New Film Foundation, The American Academy, Berlin, AXA Research Fund and iCommons.org, and is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award and being named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries. Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale. Lessig is a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. In 2001, he founded Creative Commons, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon and to share legally. He is a former board member of the Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center; the Washington, D.C. lobbying groups Public Knowledge and Free Press; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Joichi “Joi” Ito has been recognized for his work as an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom. As director of the MIT Media Lab, he is currently exploring how radical new approaches to science and technology can transform society in substantial and positive ways. Soon after coming to MIT, Ito introduced mindfulness meditation training to the Media Lab. Together with The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, founding director of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, Ito is promoting the contribution that awareness and focus can bring to the creativity process. Ito has served as both board chair and CEO of Creative Commons, and sits on the boards of Sony Corporation, Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The New York Times Company, and The Mozilla Foundation. In Japan, he is executive researcher of KEIO SFC, and he was a founder of Digital Garage, and helped establish and later became CEO of the country’s first commercial Internet service provider. He was an early investor in numerous companies, including Flickr, Six Apart, Last.fm, littleBits, Formlabs, Kickstarter, and Twitter. Ito’s honors include TIME magazine’s “Cyber-Elite” listing in 1997 (at age 31) and selection as one of the “Global Leaders for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum (2001). In 2008, BusinessWeek named him one of the “25 Most Influential People on the Web.” In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2013, he received an honorary D.Litt from The New School in New York City, and in 2015 an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Tufts University. In 2014, he was inducted into the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame; also In 2014, he was one of the recipients of the Golden Plate award from the Academy of Achievement.
Urs Gasser is the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. He is a visiting professor at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and at KEIO University (Japan), and he teaches at Fudan University School of Management (China). Urs Gasser serves as a trustee on the board of theNEXA Center for Internet & Society at the University of Torino and on the board of the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. He is a Fellow at the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. Dr. Gasser has written and edited several books, and published over 100 articles in professional journals. He is the co-author of “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives” (Basic Books, 2008, with John Palfrey) that has been translated into 10 languages (including Chinese), and co-author of “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems” (Basic Books, 2012, with John Palfrey). Urs Gasser’s research and teaching activities focus on information law, policy, and society issues. Current projects – several of them in collaboration with leading research institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia – explore policy and educational challenges for young Internet users, the regulation of digital technology (currently with focus on cloud computing), ICT interoperability, information quality, the law’s impact on innovation and risk in the ICT space, cybersecurity, and alternative governance systems. He graduated from the University of St. Gallen (lic.iur., Dr.iur.) as well as Harvard Law School (LL.M. ‘03) and received several academic awards and prizes for his research, including Harvard’s Landon H. Gammon Fellowship for academic excellence and the “Walther Hug-Preis Schweiz”, a prize for the best doctoral theses in law nationwide, among others. Before returning to the Berkman Center as Executive Director in 2009, Urs Gasser was Associate Professor of Law at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), where he led the Research Center for Information Law as Faculty Director. Prior to his St. Gallen appointment, Urs spent three years as a resident fellow at the Berkman Center, where he was appointed Faculty Fellow in 2005. During his first stay at the Berkman Center from 2002-2005, he was the lead research fellow on the Digital Media Project, a multi-disciplinary research project aimed at exploring the transition from offline/analog to online/digital media. He also initiated and chaired the Harvard-Yale-Cyberscholar Working Group, and was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School in the 2003/04 academic year. Dr. Gasser frequently acts as a commentator on comparative law issues for the US and European media. He is also an advisor to international technology companies on information law matters.
Nick Szabo is a computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in Computer Science. The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” was developed by Szabo with the goal of bringing what he calls the “highly evolved” practices of contract law and practice to the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet. Smart contracts are a major feature of cryptocurrencies and the E programming language. Szabo influentially argued that a minimum granularity of micropayments is set by mental transaction costs.
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by The Economist. He is the author of 13 books — including Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World — as well as hundreds of articles,essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter “Crypto-Gram” and his blog “Schneier on Security” are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularlyquoted in the press. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Chief Technology Officer at Resilient Systems, Inc.
Don Tapscott, is one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, and the economic and social impacts of technology. He is CEO of the Tapscott Group, a think tank that regularly advises business and government leaders. Don is also the Founder and Executive Director of Global Solution Networks, a multi-million dollar program investigating networked models for cooperation, problem solving and governance which among other things defined a global governance network for Bitcoin. In its latest ranking in 2013, Thinkers50 listed Don as the 4th most important business thinker in the world. Don has authored or co-authored 15 books, including most recently, The Digital Economy Anniversary Edition: Rethinking Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (October 2014); Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet (2012); Grown Up Digital (2008); and, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006). He is an Adjunct Professor of Management at the Rotman School of Management and the inaugural fellow at the Martin Prosperity Institute. In 2013, Don was appointed Chancellor of Trent University. He also plays the Hammond B3 organ in the band Men in Suits, which has raised millions of dollars for charity.
Harald Stieber is a financial market analyst at the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Internal Market and Services in Brussels. Within his areas of responsibility he follows structural and institutional developments in the EU’s single market for financial services. His current interests include capital structure choices of non-financial companies, measurement of financial integration/fragmentation, modelling of financial networks, big data, crowd funding, bankruptcy regimes’ impact on financial risk, institutional features of housing equity release systems, financial market instruments and longevity. Harald Stieber received his master’s degree in economics from the University of Vienna and his doctorate in economics from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
Dan Boneh is a researcher in applied cryptography and computer security. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He teaches three massive open online courses on the online learning platform Coursera, namely Computer Security, Cryptography I and Cryptography II. Born in Israel in 1969, Boneh obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1996 (under the supervision of Richard J. Lipton).
Niva Elkin-Koren is the founding director of the Haifa Center for Law & Technology (HCLT) and the former dean of the University of Haifa Faculty of Law. Her research focuses on the legal institutions that facilitate private and public control over the production and dissemination of information. She is currently focusing on studying the legal challenges arising from crowd management, exploring the changing nature of online intermediaries, and developing a comprehensive approach to user rights under copyright law. She is the coauthor of The Limits of Analysis: Law and Economics of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age (2012) and Law, Economics and Cyberspace: The effects of Cyberspace on the Economic Analysis of Law (2004). She is the coeditor of Law and Information Technology (2011) and The Commodification of Information (2002) Niva Elkin-Koren received her LL.B from Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law in 1989, her LL.M from Harvard Law School in 1991, and her S.J.D from Stanford Law School in 1995.
We live in a knowledge economy, a world where value creation is shifting away from moving atoms around, to moving bits around. The value in this economy comes from ideas, which are —by their very nature— inherently intangible. Intellectual Property (IP) laws provide a set of legal tools by which authors, artists and creators can manage rights over their intellectual creations. Managing IP includes claiming rights in a particular idea or expression, and transferring these rights to a third party, through an outright assignment or licensing of rights. The goal of this working group is to identify key areas in which blockchain technologies may be applied for the management of intellectual property, including the deployment of digital rights management systems, micropayments, and peer-to-peer content discovery or compensation systems. The working group also aims to investigate how blockchain technologies can be used to create alternative business models and viable structures to promote innovation and creativity without increasing artificial scarcity on digital assets.
This working group investigates the ways in which blockchain technologies can enable new organizational structures and distributed governance models, and how these could be used to “regulate” or “govern” the deployment of blockchain-based applications. This working group focuses on exploring and developing sense-making and decision-making tools, to building new paradigms of organizational structures and social system design. 
COALA’s Regulation Tech Working Group 
The COALA Institutional Governance Working Group explores the spectrum of ways in which we can leverage blockchain technologies to address the growing deficit of accountability and trust in both public and private institutions by creating incorruptible systems. This can be done in two ways:
COALA’s Crypto-equity Working Group investigates the technical implementation and legal viability of new governance structures based on the issuance and distribution of digital tokens. Blockchain technologies provide new ways of issuing secure and tradable digital tokens on a distributed network. Although these tokens are often described as cryptocurrency, they have many other potential applications, ranging from traditional stocks and securities, claims to an underlying property title, proof of ownership over specific assets, voting rights or other privileges within an organization, and many other use-cases. As a general rule, these digital tokens can be classified into the following categories:
The Blockchain Economics Working group is composed of economists, cryptographers, and protocol architects. As an interdisciplinary group, it aims to develop thought leadership in the emerging field of “cryptoeconomics” —a formal discipline that focuses on the design of blockchain-based protocols for the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in a decentralized digital economy.
As their name indicates, DAOs are not controlled by any given entity; they rely on smart contracts to establish a set of blockchain-based rules for the governance of an organization, along with a system of tokens that represent some kind of equity (or crypto-equity) in these organizations. As such, DAOs make it possible for people to benefit from pooling resources into a centralized system, without the traditional drawbacks of centralized institutions and hierarchical decision-making. Their governance structure obviate the asymmetrical power dynamics characteristic of centralized institutions, thus significantly reducing the potential for corruption, while increasing transparency and accountability of the organization.
The decentralized space continues to grow rapidly, enabling new organizational structures, power dynamics, social interaction and human coordination. It is a new frontier, at the forefront of which we have a responsibility to facilitate the growth of a culture of healthy social and ethical norms that foster individual and collective responsibility. This working group focuses on the following macro issues: