We’ve spent a little time working on the Decentralization page in the CommerceNet Labs wiki. Here’s a snapshot of what we have so far:

Decentralization in Commerce means the freedom to do commerce the way you want, rather than the way your software wants.

We believe that to build software that works the way society works, that software design must reflect the principles of decentralization.

An agency is an organization with a single trust boundary. One way to think about decentralization is that it allows multiple
agencies to have different values for a variable.

See also:

Update. Allan Schiffman notes that Webster’s has a fine definition of decentralization as well: “the dispersion or distribution of functions and powers”. I’ll add that to the wiki as well…