CommonsHood: Blockchain tools for socio-economic interactions in local communities

Blockchain technology is generating interest in novel applicative fields such as co-production of publicservices. Our CommonsHood project is a “wallet app” that uses the Blockchain as a tool to support sus-tainability of the local economy. Its tokenization mechanism allows everyone to create new types ofcryptographic tokens on the Blockchain in order to digitalize assets, augment the availability of localliquidity, and incentivize cooperative socio-economic interactions. This article analyzes a concreteapplication of CommonsHood for innovating local development policies and service co-production inthe tourism sector. We examine this application using Linders’s analytical framework for informationand communications technology (ICT)-enabled co-production of services (2012). We show the advan-tages our project brings for local policies on tourism development, and we discuss the benefits andcosts of using the Blockchain in that context. We argue that the observed case study covers differenttypes of digitally enabled co-production of services, and that it can be defined as a case of Governanceas a Platform. We also argue that well-established analytical frameworks for ICT-enabled co-productionof services need to be expanded in order to account for the new affordances enabled by the Blockchaintechnology, namely the creation and transaction of digital values, which represent a paradigm changein how we understand the Internet and digital co-production.