EO1

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.

— EO1 collective

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.

The work included translating the collective's ethos into a record structure and participation model, designing the distinction between the shared register and self-governing clusters, implementing the interfaces through which works and their relations are inspected, and producing the documentation and starter tools through which others can develop the prototype further. The register is a research prototype built on established components — the Ethereum Attestation Service on Celo, IPFS for content-addressed storage, and standard web technologies. It does not introduce a new blockchain protocol.

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, and the site's development is recorded in the changelog.

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.

Two clusters are in the directory. amicus is formed around the Amicus Curiae special section on Law and Cultural Production; its call has closed and papers are in progress. commoning holds the site itself in common — its practice, its sources, and its maintenance — and carries the site as its edition.

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.

Blockchain identity

The register is not a database on a server. Its records are attestations on a public blockchain, and the site you are reading is served from content-addressed storage. The record does not depend on this site remaining online. If the site disappears, the attestations remain.

Each entry links to its on-chain attestation, where the record can be inspected independently. The chain is the reference for what was attested; this website presents a maintained catalogue linked to those attestations. The catalogue is not (yet) automatically reconciled against the chain.

Contact

Amy Kellam · amy.kellam [at] sas [dot] ac [dot] uk
Gavin Keeney · gwk7 [at] cornell [dot] edu

Colophon

The site is a set of static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, hosted on Filebase (IPFS) and resolved by the domain eo1collective.org and by the IPNS name k51qzi5uqu5diotabludzb89z890ruuioxbka8r64qkmnja3xcradfalzdex0o. 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. Attestations are recorded on Celo using the Ethereum Attestation Service.

The application uses static files and a JSON catalogue, without a custom application server or database service. Content is loaded from this site's own origin; the pages themselves do not contact third-party analytics, advertising, or font services. Cluster pages generated by the wizard are separate artefacts and currently request fonts from Google Fonts; that dependency should be replaced when those pages are adapted for production use.