Building net-native agreement systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces agreement paths and an open-source Agreement Engine to facilitate the development of digital agreement systems, demonstrated through crowdfunding and social media applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel model for digital agreements and provides an open-source tool for building net-native agreement systems, with practical examples.

Findings

Successfully built crowdfunding and social media agreement systems

Demonstrated the flexibility of Agreement Engine in different contexts

Provided a new framework for understanding digital agreements

Abstract

Agreements and contracts are everywhere, but they are built on layers and layers of legal and social institutions. Software is slowly entering into this stack. In this article, we introduce agreement paths, a general model for understanding and decomposing digital agreement systems, and Agreement Engine, an open-source software service for building net-native agreement systems. We demonstrate Agreement Engine by building two example agreement systems: Scarce Knowledge, an app for crowdfunding essays, and Twitter Social Capital, a bot that allows users to form and enforce Twitter agreements.