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
- Gossip-based learning and behavioral models
- Self-sovereign identity
- Peer-to-peer networks
- Game-theoretic approaches to tragedy of commons
- Markets, mechanism design, and incentives
- Computational social choice
- Incentives for participants
- Fairness in market systems
- Decentralized governance

Important Dates:
Paper submissions: September 3, 2021 (AOE)
Notification of acceptance: September 28, 2021 (AOE)
Camera ready version: October 15, 2021


Submission Guidelines:
Full papers can have a maximum length of 6 pages in the standard, 10pt ACM SIGPLAN format. The page limits include figures, tables, and references. All submitted papers will be judged through double-blind reviewing. Submissions will be handled through HotCRP.

Publication of Accepted Papers:
All accepted papers will appear in a Middleware 2021 companion proceedings, which will be available in the ACM Digital Library prior to the workshop. At least one of the authors will have to register for the workshop and present the paper.