Governance and Discovery in Decentralized Food Delivery: Designing and Building a Multi-Registry System for OpenCourier

Abstract

This thesis builds upon the OpenCourier project, a protocol that aims to create a decentralized and community-driven food delivery alternative. We investigate governance and discovery through the registry—a directory for registering and discovering instances. We design and integrate a novel multi-registry system for OpenCourier which upholds decentralized governance and prevents vendor lock-in, while providing reasonably efficient discovery. In this system, we argue that curation is mandatory. Moreover, this model allows anyone ("registry creator'') to create a registry with its own way of curation and sorting of instances. Instance administrators can then register with any registries while couriers can search across registries, though use of registries for both parties is optional. Through interviews with decentralization and protocol experts, we found that it is clear this system benefits couriers, but its real-world utility and the power dynamics it introduces were debated heavily. Participants also presented mechanisms to increase trust in the registry, drawing on metrics and data, leading to the idea that multi-stakeholder systems like the registry require two-way, transferable, and algorithmic trust. Our results also suggest that the flexible and open-ended structure in the protocolization of the registry is a key feature and should be leveraged. Furthermore, although introducing the registry creator as a new stakeholder adds new power dynamics, it is a justified tradeoff for maintaining social curation. This multi-registry system can be ultimately generalized to other domains such as the Fediverse, though there remains much to be discovered by deploying this project in practice.