Building net-native agreement systems

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.