Our team

The PeoplesWeb is led by the London School of Economics, where the project draws on the Departments of Mathematics and Economics. The principal investigators are Ehud Shapiro and Francesco Caselli. Shapiro’s work on grassroots distributed systems provides the project’s architectural and mathematical foundation. Caselli is author of the incentive-compatible cooperative model that underpins the project’s economics, and they are joined by Andrew Lewis-Pye (LSE Mathematics) and Idit Keidar (Technion University), who work on the consensus protocols at the heart of the governance layer. We are in discussions with several potential partners, including the University of Amsterdam, the European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives (CECOP), the bicycle-delivery cooperative federation CoopCycle, platform-cooperative organisations in Germany and Italy, and a worker-owned software cooperative.