EO1 is a collective developing a framework for attribution without ownership.

Edition of One (EO1) is an international, borderless agency for collectivist-based, subjectively inflected literary-artistic scholarship. The project includes BLACKBOX, an experimental methodology for producing multimedia dossiers utilizing DAO and blockchain. EO1 embraces a “No Rights” status for works, i.e., a step beyond OA into the wild blue yonder. The EO1 agenda, through its elective abolition of intellectual property rights, is, thus, meant as antidote to the travesties of the debauched neoliberal-capitalist knowledge commons. The ethos of the EO1 agenda is the commons as the common good.

The collective

EO1—Edition of One—is an existing project with a Web 2.0 presence of its own. Its ethos was established by the collective and its founding members before the Web 3.0 work described here began. The project emerged from multimedia works developed under the auspices of the OOI-MTA collective, established in India in 2017; a portfolio of those transmedia-based works is available in EO1’s Archives.

This site

The site below is one realisation of the agenda above. Its architecture, code, and design are the work of Dr Amy Kellam, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, developed through sustained conversations with Dr Gavin Keeney of the EO1 collective. It is a first public Web3 implementation of the BLACKBOX venture, not the whole of the venture.

Where the collective’s statement describes the aspiration, this site attempts implementation architecture. The reasoning behind each design decision is set out on the Structure page.

What is here

The site has four parts. The Ethos page states the argument for “No Rights.” The Structure page sets out the seven principles behind the design and what each one forecloses. The Register records works and their relations. The Clusters directory lists the bodies of practitioners who produce them, and the wizard lets anyone form a new one.

The first demonstration is the cluster afterlives, formed around the Amicus Curiae special section on Law and Cultural Production.

A note on governance

EO1 will establish a DAO to manage its own projects: funding, endorsement, editioning, and the decisions the collective makes about what it is working on. The DAO’s authority extends to EO1’s projects. It does not extend to the register, which records every contribution without gatekeeping, and it does not extend to the BLACKBOX method, which has been ceded to the commons and is open to any cluster to adopt or replace.

Contact

Amy Kellam · [email protected]
Gavin Keeney · [email protected]

Colophon

The site is a set of static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, hosted on Filebase (IPFS) and resolved by the domain eo1collective.org. The domain is a conventional DNS name. It is imported into ENS, so it also carries an on-chain identity—usable for wallet resolution and for the DAO work to come. In the final deploy attestations will use the Ethereum Attestation Service. There is no server, no database, no third-party requests and no tracking. The design follows the principles it describes: minimal, non-discretionary, open to all.