D-CENT will accelerate innovation in the use of the Internet to help communities share data and collaborate to address major societal challenges. Despite its huge potential to transform everyday democratic decision making or to enable citizens to shape their own economic destiny, today's Internet is becoming highly centralised.D-CENT will accelerate the development of practical alternatives, through experiments creating useful new tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment, as well as research. It brings together world-class technological designers and academics with communities.D-CENT will create a bottom-up, decentralised, open platform for collective awareness based on integrating already successful open-source codebases. Its first practical experiments will address democratic engagement, building on Europe's largest experiments in direct democracy – the Open Ministry linked into parliament in Finland, and the involvement of the whole population in shaping a new wiki-constitution in Iceland – as well as one of Europe's most dynamic social movements and new political parties, in Spain. These will show how millions of citizens can become engaged in day-to-day deliberation, and decision-making.Its second cluster of experiments will connect these new approaches to empowerment to economic platforms. Freecoin, a new disruptive digital social currency based on the blockchain, will be deployed in Finland, Iceland and Spain. Freecoin will facilitate the usage and integration of cryptographic blockchain technologies for the social good, creating the building blocks for a sharing economy that links exchange to trust, deliberation, and collective awareness.The component should be easy to deploy and adapt in different scenarios where the function of distributed authentication is crucial to establish bottom-up trust in value circulation and decision-making systems.D-CENT will provide civil society with immediately useable digital tools for network democracy and bottom-up social innovation. But it will also grow longer-term alternatives to today's highly centralised platforms and power structures.