Hi all I am pleased to sponsor a new member for the JoPP editorial board, Francesca Musiani. I saw Francesca in Paris recently and she told me she would be interested in working on the P2P currency/value issue that Nate has been working on. After some back-and-forth between Nate, Francesca and I it is all OK and going forward. In the course of the conversation Francesca presented some of her research interests and suggested that I forward this to the list, so I'm posting an abridged version below. If after a week no-one opposes then the nomination will be effective. cheers Mathieu -------- Original Message -------- (snip) Something more about me and my interest in JoPP/this issue project more specifically. I am having somewhat of a nomadic academic year between Washington, DC (where I have my "primary affiliation" as this year's Yahoo! Fellow-in-Residence at Georgetown U), Cambridge, MA (where I'm affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society) and Paris, France (where I defended my PhD a couple of weeks ago and where I have an ongoing research project at Ecole des Mines - and other stuff). The common basis of all this is an interest in alternative, decentralized architectures/infrastructures for Internet services and platforms. My website is painfully in need of an update, but a more recent profile of me is here: http://isd.georgetown.edu/233483.html. This project of a journal issue on distributed currency (or, as both Nate and Mathieu suggest, on P2P and "valuation" of exchange, more generally, of which distributed currency platforms would be an important strand) is very interesting for me as I believe that very recently, it is perhaps the area in which decentralized/P2P systems (where decentralization is also in the technical infrastructure) has shown the most interesting developments. Within the frame of my French research project, ADAM (adam.hypotheses.org), we have done some preliminary "mapping" work on distributed currency platforms and we plan to make Bitcoin one of our three case studies for the work package that is centered on users. A lot of my PhD work has been on the "new intermediations" in alternative P2P services, so this is yet another declination of the "P2P valuation" that we might consider when drafting the call for this issue. A suivre, as we adopted-Parisians would say... :) kind regards Francesca PS: Mathieu - I realize that I basically just wrote what I would have written on the mailing list after your introduction - feel free to forward it right away if you see it fit :)