CommonsHood: Participatory design of token economies in local communities

We introduce a participatory design approach to blockchain-based tokenization for local communities. Blockchainbased systems for the social economy, such as Community Currency Systems (CCS), have different requirements from decentralized finance applications in terms of incentive mechanisms, governance and scale. For this reason, we aim to address the lack of methods and tools enabling social economy stakeholders to represent and transfer tokenized assets. In order to do so, we developed the CommonsHood web application. This is a walletapp based on the Internet of Values 2.0 concept, whereby each user can easily deploy tokens representing assets and rights based on a no-code approach. We adopted co-design with local stakeholders both in the definition of the concept of the application and in the modeling and design of the specific functionalities supporting token economies of local stakeholders. This work is considered as an essential step towards a comprehensive sociotechnical infrastructure facilitating civic engagement in smart cities