A Full-Stack Platform Architecture for Self-Organised Social Coordination

TL;DR

This paper presents an open-source full-stack platform architecture designed to empower local communities and facilitate self-organised social coordination through customizable, easily distributable platforms with supporting toolchains.

Contribution

It introduces a novel open-source architecture supporting self-organisation, with a meta-platform, plugins, and toolchains for easy customization and deployment.

Findings

Successful implementation of two case studies: sports association and group study platforms.

Demonstrated ease of platform instantiation and customization.

Validated self-organisation through supporting architecture and toolchains.

Abstract

To mitigate the restrictive centralising and monopolistic tendencies of platformisation, we aim to empower local communities by democratising platforms for self-organised social coordination. Our approach is to develop an open-source, full-stack architecture for platform development that supports ease of distribution and cloning, generativity, and a variety of hosting options. The architecture consists of a meta-platform that is used to instantiate a base platform with supporting libraries for generic functions, and plugins (intended to be supplied by third parties) for customisation of application-specification functionality for self-organised social coordination. Associated developer- and user-oriented toolchains support the instantiation and customisation of a platform in a two-stage process. This is demonstrated through the proof-of-concept implementation of two case studies: a platform for regular sporting association, and a platform for collective group study. We conclude by arguing that self-organisation at the application layer can be achieved by the specific supporting functionality of a full-stack architecture with complimentary developer and user toolchains.