5th International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good

20 July, 2025, Glasgow

Colocated with ICDCS 2025

About

The DICG'25 workshop is co-located with IEEE ICDCS 2025, which takes place on July 20th - 23rd, 2025 in Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

This workshop is focused on distributed infrastructures that enable human interactions and economic activity in general with a focus on the common good. Daily life is transitioning to digital infrastructures, including friendships, education, employment, health-care, finances, family connections, and more. These infrastructures can contribute to the common good enabling us to work together to improve the wellbeing of people in our society and the wider world.

Call for Papers

Private ownership of infrastructures does not seem to solve the traditional problems of Tragedy of Commons: pollution (spam and bot network on social media), over-exhaustion of resources (net neutrality), and fairness (gig economy). Privatization of digital commons also introduces the potential for monopolistic abuse, such as: stifled innovation, price discriminations, and distorted market knowledge discovery. We aim to explore within this workshop viable alternatives to 'winner-takes-all' platform ecosystems. Failure of market mechanisms to address these issues suggest that such infrastructures could be treated as commons. We recognize the promising avenue of research build on Nobel laureate Ostroms idea that commons is the third way to organize complex human cooperation, beyond capitalist regulation or governmental regulations.

Scientific challenges include, but are not limited to: the Tragedy of the Commons in such shared-resource systems, fake identities with Sybil attacks, robot economy, trustworthiness in general, self-organizing machine learning, market infrastructures in cashless society, and governance issues in decentralized systems.

This workshop focuses on the tools, frameworks, and algorithms to support the common good in a distributed environment. Both theoretical work and experimental approaches are welcomed. Reproducibility, open source and public datasets are endorsed. Each submission must clearly contribute to the middleware community, to facilitate the development of applications by providing higher-level abstractions for better programmability, performance, scalability, and security.

Scope:

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Distributed algorithms
  • Trust and reputation systems
  • Fault tolerance
  • Decentralized machine learning
  • Self-sovereign identity
  • Peer-to-peer networks
  • Solutions to tragedy of the commons
  • Decentralized markets, mechanism design
  • Incentives for participants
  • Fairness in market systems
  • Decentralized governance
  • Local-first Software
  • Collaborative Systems
Important Dates:

  • Paper submissions: March 10, 2025 (AOE)
  • Notification of acceptance: April 2, 2025 (AOE)
  • Camera-ready version: April 16, 2025 (AOE)
  • Workshop: July 20, 2025

Submission Guidelines:

All paper submissions should follow the IEEE 8.5" x 11" two-column format using 10pt fonts and the IEEE Conference template (downloadable by selecting "Conferences" in the IEEE-Template Selector. Each submission can have up to seven (7) pages (including figures, tables, appendices, and references). All submitted papers will be judged through single-blind reviewing.

Please submit your manuscripts here.

Publication of Accepted Papers:

All accepted papers will appear in an ICDCS 2025 companion proceedings, which will be available in the IEEE Digital Library prior to the workshop. At least one of the authors will have to register for the workshop and present the paper.

Organization

General Co-chairs:

Organization Chairs: Organization Chairs:

Program Committee (tentative):

  • Ittai Abraham (Intel Labs)
  • Jérémie Decouchant (TU Delft, The Netherlands)
  • Vero Estrada-Galiñanes (EPFL, Switzerland)
  • Pierre Fraigniaud (Université Paris Cité and CNRS, France)
  • Matt Garnett (Ethereum Foundation)
  • Thomas Hardjono (MIT, United States)
  • Can Umut Ileri (IOTA Foundation)
  • Hans-Arno Jacobsen (University of Toronto, Canada)
  • Leander Jehl (University of Stavanger, Norway)
  • Erick Lavoie (University of Basel, Switzerland)
  • Amir H. Payberah (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
  • Yvonne-Anne Pignolet (DFINITY, Switzerland)
  • Rafael Pires (EPFL, Switzerland)
  • Jan Rellermeyer (Leibniz University Hannover, Germany)
  • Claudio Tessone (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
  • Florian Tschorsch (TU Berlin, Germany)
  • Christian Tschudin (University of Basel, Switzerland)
  • Andreas Veneris (University of Toronto, Canada)
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