P2P Petition Drives and Deliberation of Shareholders

We introduce protocols for a fully decentralized synchronization of data items among equal peers in an argumentation framework (for applications such as debates in petition signature drives, and deliberation among shareholders). Here, an argumentation is a structured exchange of justifications around issues (or motions). The motions are relevant to organizations, and the organizations are rules for constituents. A constituent has a certain voting weight (e.g., based on her shares in the organization). A peer is a group of agents representing a user. Each peer separately stores all the data items of interest to her. To achieve data coherence at convergence for connected sub-graphs in such a framework we introduce a method for generating unique identifiers for peers, organizations and their constituents, as well as for data items generated by them. This avoids conflicts between semantically distinct data. Social networks are very successful applications but few have proven or even formalized their properties. Our proposal is a framework and protocol for a new type of P2P Social Network, where peers can congregate into fully decentralized virtual constituencies mirroring externally existing organizations. The membership in such organizations is based on constituents witnessing about each other. A reference implementation in Java is made available and can be used to validate claimed basic functionality.