“To create a better world, we need to first imagine it—and the work required to get there…”

Submissions open May 1st, 2026. Join us for our launch event on April 22nd.

About the Prize

The Protopian Prize Fiction Contest invites artists, storytellers, and dreamers to share their vision of people working toward liberatory futures, meeting obstacles, and making real change. “Protopian”—a word coined by Kevin Kelly, one of our contest’s judges—means an achievable, optimistic future characterized by continuous, incremental progress rather than revolutionary leaps or a static, perfect state. Protopian stories imagine a future that is neither flawless nor catastrophic, but instead workably better than today. It’s about plausible progress rather than perfection or collapse.

In 2026, our inaugural year, we will present prizes in two categories:

• The Protopian Prize for Public AI: Imagine AI development, policy, and tools, built for—and following basic principles of— public benefit. Stories might address ethical training, sustainable maintenance, creator-friendly implementation, collective rather than corporate ownership, and/or new uses that complement rather than replace human strengths.

• The Protopian Prize for Democratic Futures: Imagine institutions, tools, and organizational methods that expand and enhance public autonomy and shared control over societal futures. Stories might address inclusive community-building, decision-making processes, better delivery of public goods, and/or new techniques for combating disinformation, surveillance, and authoritarian constraints.

Judging Panel

We are convening an incredible panel of judges from the worlds of storytelling, AI/Political Science, and policy including:

• Gideon Lichfield (journalist, former EIC of MIT Tech Review & WIRED, writer of Futurepolis, fellow at Harvard University’s Allen Lab)

• Ruthanna Emrys Gordon (cognitive psychologist, science fiction writer, author of A Half-Built Garden)

• Kevin Kelly (co-founder & Senior Maverick at WIRED, book author, coined the term “protopia”)

• Arati Prabhakar (President Biden’s Science and Technology Advisor, former Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy)

• Karl Schroeder (science fiction writer, futurist, author of 12 published novels)

• Annalee Newitz (science journalist, Nebula Award nominated science fiction writer)

• Ida Yoshinaga (speculative media scholar, Assistant Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology)

• Deji Bryce Olukotun (science fiction author, attorney, and social impact leader, His novel After the Flare won the 2018 Philip K. Dick special citation award; head of social impact at Sonos)

• Hannu Rajaniemi (science fiction author, mathematical physicist, and biotech entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Helix Nanotechnologies)

• Henry Farrell (SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies)

Join us for a launch event on April 22nd 🚀

Register for our launch event here on Luma! And be sure to sign up for our email list (on our website) for contest updates.

The KOI team would like to announce that we will be sunsetting our current implementation of the KOI-GPT chatbot within Metagov’s Slack workspace.

Launched on August 28, 2024, KOI-GPT was the community’s first interface into Metagov’s Knowledge Organisation Infrastructure (KOI) -- an open-source system architected by BlockScience to improve the coordination, discoverability, and usability of shared knowledge. The purpose of the KOI-GPT was to provide a conversational interface that allowed community members to query Metagov’s knowledge base directly within Slack.

Over the past three years, Metagov contributor Brooke Ann Coco has conducted ethnographic research on the development and implementation of Metagov’s KOI as a part of her PhD. Through this research, patterns of engagement with KOI-GPT were closely observed throughout the community, revealing a diverse range of uses. For some, it served as an interlocutor for playful and creative encounters -- a partner in metaphorical conversations, songwriting, poetry, and whimsical exchanges that tested the boundaries of the chatbot’s capabilities. Others used KOI to learn more about Metagov itself and, in particular, Metagov’s KOI Pond project. Some even turned to it for practical support with operational tasks such as grant writing, drafting event announcements, and planning meeting agendas. We want to thank everyone who engaged with KOI-GPT. Your interactions offered valuable springboards for reflecting on its strengths, limitations, and the possibilities for the next iterations of KOI.

The decision to retire KOI-GPT from Metagov’s Slack was made for several reasons. First, given the broader public hype around generative AI, KOI-GPT’s presence as Metagov’s only visible interface into KOI has at times led to confusion -- conflating the chatbot with KOI’s underlying knowledge infrastructure. To clarify: KOI is not an LLM, nor is it a chatbot. Rather, it is designed to act as the “duct tape” that connects an organisation’s heterogenous knowledge sources, making them more discoverable, interoperable, and dynamic.

Second, the chatbot sometimes produced misleading or inaccurate responses. This can partly be attributed to challenges with permissioning and consent, which meant that KOI-GPT was only given access to a small sub-set of Metagov’s knowledge base. This included posts from opt-in members in select Slack channels (including #govbase-labs, #koi-pond, #board, and #attentionecon), Metagov Substack articles, and a curated list of resources about Metagov’s KOI Pond project itself. With this limited scope of knowledge, KOI-GPT often lacked the context needed to respond accurately to some queries. This was compounded by the fact that Metagov’s current instantiation of KOI reflects an earlier iteration of the architecture, which has since undergone refinement and improvement.

Finally, usage of KOI-GPT within Slack was relatively low and inconsistent. This was partly due to its limited access to organisational knowledge, which constrained its usefulness for most community members. Combined with occasional inaccuracies, engagement naturally declined over time.

We’re excited to carry forward the lessons from KOI-GPT as we design future interfaces that better embody KOI’s mission -- to build adaptive, transparent, and participatory infrastructures for organizational knowledge.

New Implementation Release

Although KOI-GPT is being retired, the KOI Pond team is now coordinating with the Metagov Community team to leverage KOI to support community building. To this end, the KOI development team is creating the Ask Metagov workflow -- a simple tool for surfacing questions, ideas, and prompts that invite community feedback. The goal of this initiative is to elevate and empower the community by helping members discover relevant resources, connect with others, and contribute to collective knowledge production.

Community members can access the bot by using the command /ask-metagov within any Slack channel. The bot then creates a new message thread where other members of the community can respond and discuss. The responses within these threads will then be stored as knowledge objects within Metagov’s KOI, meaning every contribution helps curate and expand Metagov’s collective knowledge base. Over time, these contributions will form a shared community knowledge base from which future tools, developments, and research can grow.

As Metagov’s knowledge base grows, it will support new ways of engaging with community knowledge -- such as search, visualization, and auto-generation. In the meantime, all Ask Metagov threads will be collected in a read-only #ask-metagov channel, where community members can browse or search previous prompts and jump directly to those discussions. These messages act as “signposts” at knowledge “trailheads”, inviting the community to explore and join ongoing conversations.

Question Types

One of the aims of the Ask Metagov bot is to “lift the floor” of the community by making it easier to ask questions, share insights, and surface collective answers. Therefore, we encourage posts that fall into one of the following two categories:

1. Practical Community Questions: This category includes focused, actionable questions about how the Metagov Community operates or how to participate more effectively. These may include queries such as:

   1. How do I propose a topic for a community call?

   2. Where can I access recordings of past seminars?

   3. How are Research Directors chosen?

   4. Which community projects are looking for contributors?

   5. How do I become a Community Navigator?

   6. What is PolicyKit?

   7. Are there regular calls for the Grants Operators?

2. Metagov Research-Related Questions: This category includes open-ended prompts that invite lived experiences, opinions, and resources related to Metagov research. These may include prompts such as:

   1. What are some active projects people are tracking/know about in the domain of community currencies or mutual credit systems?

   2. What guidance exists for choosing between governance mechanisms (e.g. majority vote vs. consensus)?

   3. Are there ways to formalise and visualise DAO or corporate governance operations?

   4. What are leading technologies for community “town halls”?

   5. What’s the current state of the “Wisdom of the Crowds” discourse?

Tagging, Subscriptions, and Response Ranking

Community members can categorize prompts and responses to particular topics using emojis (e.g. 🪙 - community currency, 🏛️ - governance, ⚖️ - law). They can also subscribe to specific topic areas with a /join-group command to receive notifications when new threads appear, and unsubscribe with a /leave-group command.

To highlight high-quality responses, the system will use three ranking mechanisms:

1. Community Votes: Surfaces responses most voted on by the Metagov community. Community members can choose their favorite response by reacting with a 👍 emoji.

2. Metagov “Editor Picks”: Surfaces responses that Metagov administrators and leadership want to prioritise.

3. Prompter Accepted Answer: Surfaces the response that best addresses the OP’s query. OPs can select the respose that best answers their question by using the ✅ emoji.

These are just some of the initial features of the Ask Metagov workflow. Going forward, the tool will continue to be refined and further developed to better support the collective co-curation of Metagov’s knowledge commons and strengthen the community’s research ecosystem.

Come Test!

If you’re interested in seeing the new features at work - join us on March 5th for our KOImunity Kove Call. We’ll get everyone in the slack playing around + spend some time brainstorming how Ask-Metagov can better serve the Metagov Community!

Sign up here!

It’s hard work - and we’re ever working towards building better ways to do that. This post is an update and an invitation to join us as we continue to grow this research area.

For those who are new here, here are the Interop plot points:

• May 2024: the Mina Foundation (THANK YOU) allowed founding Research Director Aviv Ovadya to distribute $200,000k through a Metagov grant program for Open Source Deliberative Tools that prioritized interoperability.

• July 2024: We gathered 21 teams to approach interoperability questions together.

• September 2024: we posted a midterm report.

• October 2024: we hosted an on-site where each team demonstrated its individual work towards meeting minimum viable interoperability standards defined as an exportable flat file with a defined data structure. Thereafter, we shifted our priority from individual work to collaborative work.

• January 2025: our five-day online symposium celebrated the progress made during Interop1 and launched six working groups to grapple with the gnarly details of making functional interoperability among open-source, deliberative tools a reality.

• May 2025: We announced the activities and impacts from the 1-year funded program.

• June 2025: the six working groups came together for a mid-year Research Area Roundup to brief each other on their progress and check alignment. This post captures their ways of working, achievements, and explains how new contributors might get involved.

• August 2025: The data mesh team got together in Denmark to build the first draft of an ontology!

• June - December 2025: The AI Facilitation team had seminars with 7 facilitators + researchers to better understand how AI fits in facilitation and the different facilitation methodologies in Deliberative Facilitation.

• October 2025: The Data Mesh team assembled a prototype across multiple tools to test at the Foundations for the Digital Commons event in Maine.

• November 2025: The AI Facilitation team was joined by Maria Milosh - and she opened a collaboration with Oxford focused on researching the effect of cross-pollination.

• January 2025 - the working groups gathered again! And this is the report from that conversation :)

The Interoperable Deliberative Tools Research Area

This research area is bubbling with working groups, each focused on pushing forward critical components of the mission we described above. Working groups are how we organize work at Metagov and are the places where individuals, early-stage tools, mature technologies and organizations can work together to achieve fundamental R&D of benefit for all, issued as digital public goods. In all of our research areas, Metagov strives to be “hub-shaped.” By holding the center, the coordination, and the institutional logistics needed to move forward collectively, each working group is fundamentally modular and free to define its own scope, pursue funding, and work towards the needs of those who join.

The figure above shows how the research area on interoperable deliberative tools has emerged into two themes, which we colloquially refer to as “Hard-line values” and “Feel-good Standards” (thank you, Audrey Tang, for the framing :).

From there, each theme splits into working groups, which further subdivide as the work becomes more defined. Each working group has membership boundaries and a lead. Lee DeSota is Lead Facilitator and Project Manager for the entire research area. The research area is directed by Liz Barry, with occasional essential support from Metagov RDs Aviv Ovadya, Amy Zhang, Eugene Leventhal, and Josh Tan.

⭐️ If you have an interest in this topic generally, the place to get started is the lobby channel in Metagov Slack: #deliberative-tools-and-interop

Table of Contents:

The Interoperable Deliberative Tools Research Area

Standards

• Data Mesh

• Open Facilitation Library

• Reference Architecture

Values

• Participation Ethics

• Theory and Practice

• Democratic Cultures

  • Conversa: exploring Polislike tools and practices

  • Democracy Innovators Podcast

Conclusion

Standards

This theme standardizes a sociotechnical vocabulary and ontology for deliberative tooling

Data Mesh

Purpose:
We are building an ontology that allows deliberative tools across the governance cycle to translate their data, enabling easy communication between many tools.

We see an open-source ecosystem that is resistant to capture by corporate entities, where the tools we use to govern ourselves are themselves governable.

Scope leads: Stuart Lynn

Updates:

• Deliberative Tooling Ontology: This group is building a data mesh model where each tool maintains control over its data + ontological structure while also aligning with collective standards to promote interoperability between many tools without needing to create pairwise integrations for every tool.

  • Github here.

  • Ontology here.

• Public Presentation + Feedback: Authored a Work-In-Progress publication on the model above for data exchange between deliberative platforms and was accepted to Aarhus 2025. Presented a poster at the conference.

  • Publication

  • Poster

• In-person events: in-person events that convene semi-monthly and rotate regionally around the world as opportunities arise in partnership with other events / conferences that bring people together.

  • Aarhus 2025 Event Denmark

  • Attended Foundations for the Digital Commons in Maine

• Implementations: StartinBlox + Open Source Politics already implemented the Ontology in the primary implementation of their Democracy Data Space, and we’re excited to hear more on how that system is working!

Upcoming Work:

• Crownshy, Maggie Hughes, and Iswe Foundation are co-authoring another upcoming paper.

• The Data Mesh working group is focused on expanding the ontology to better fit different tools, including incorporating pre-existing ontologies with Simone Vagnoni.

Call for Participants:
Looking for participants who are either

1. Managing or building a governance process that requires interoperability between several open source tools.

2. Working with an open source tool they want to make it interoperable with other tools in the context of a governance process.

To see the work + stay updated when we’re inviting new participants, join #data-mesh on the Metagov Slack.

Open Facilitation Library

Purpose:
Build a shared library and synthesize standards that can train human and machine agents to better facilitate discussion towards our collective shared goals.

We want collective intelligence, self-rule, and human cooperation at scale to be both possible and commonplace.

Scope leads: Artem Zhiganov, Maria Milosh, and Cecile Green

Updates Work:

• Open Facilitation Library Synthesis: This scope is led by Cecile Green and the Commoning Standard team and is working to synthesize various contributions including deliberative facilitation frameworks into the current version of the Commoning Standard.

  • Current integrations in process with Rosa Zubizarreta, Andy Paice, Greg Cassel, several researchers in Germany, and Metagov’s own Liz Barry!.

  • Looking to build more group processes to expand the integration.

• Primitives of Agentic Facilitation: This scope is led by Artem Zhiganov and focuses on designing AI-readable facilitation “primitives” that build off of the synthesized facilitation standards above.

  • This scope is paused as we search for funding

• Open Facilitation Stewards: This scope focuses on developing a sustainable business model that adequately and consistently prioritizes and compensates facilitation knowledge, technical contributors, and standard creators for this knowledge.

  • Built a first draft of a business model

  • Focusing on writing grant applications + searching for funding

• Cross-Pollination Research: This scope is working with Oxford to build a systematic study of the effects of cross-pollination of ideas in an asynchronous deliberation process on participant voting choice.

  • Designed an experimental flow

  • Defined a needed budget

  • Developed Synthetic participants to evaluate and test the study flow

  • Working on updating Harmonica with Artem Zhiganov to allow it to properly implement the study conditions.

Call for Participants:
Open Facilitation Library is actively synthesizing facilitation practices and standards. Facilitators, AI/Knowledge Engineers with relevant practices or methodologies, are encouraged to contribute.

To see the work and introduce yourself, join #ai-facilitation on the Metagov Slack.

Reference Architecture

Purpose:
To collaboratively diagram the world’s largest and most complex workflows in civic engagement and democratic innovation. We are establishing generic graphic conventions useful for representing multi-stage, hybrid in-person/online deliberative processes.

We wish to compare implementations of deliberative processes to speed learning for those who design these processes.

Scope leads: Liz Barry and Audrey Tang

Current Work:

• Developing a collaborative workbook of visual process diagrams by co-authoring with process designers from initiatives such as Taiwan’s AI Alignment Assembly, Germany’s “Forum Against Fakes,” Brasil’s Participiva, and Tokyo’s AI participatory mayoral campaign.

  • Each process is mapped using a template that includes phase of deliberation, mode of outreach and sampling, number of participants, mode of connection (in-person, online synchronous/asynchronous), degree of interaction, type of input, type of transformation (technology not namebrand), and outputs.

  • The focus is on tracking participant health and information health throughout the process.

Call for Participants:
The group invites:

• If you are a process designer who has run a large process - please reach out to liz@metagov.org with diagramming in the subject line to become a coauthor on this workbook by collaboratively diagramming your process!

• Tool developers who support those processes.

• Architects and urban designers who have expertise in diagramming abstract machines; please note that this is different from data viz or storyboarding.

Participants are welcome to contribute their projects to the collaborative workbook and help improve shared understanding of participatory workflows across tools and cultures. All process designers who contribute their implemented process design become co-authors of this collaborative workbook.

Values

This theme advances core democratic values and articulates the rights of participants

Participation Ethics

Purpose:
We estimate >1M people have already experienced tooling environments created by <1k developers, and anticipate that another million+ will have such encounters in the next 12 months. And as a result, we build legal infrastructure that centers participant ownership over their data instead of participant consent to data right loss.

We want participant rights and ethical data practices to be centered across the ecosystem large-scale deliberation and digital governance—beyond compliance + consent—to ensure people know, understand, and can exercise their rights in participatory contexts.

Scope leads: Liz Barry (Current), Matt Victor (2025 H1)

Current Work:

• Working to coordinate a convening to support deliberative democracy specific Identity solutions that ensure participant rights throughout the process.

• Building a participant bill of rights for Polis that can be used across different tools, in light of the Polis fork built specifically to meet the European Union’s ethical standards.

• Matthew Victor is working on the underpinnings of having a network and data cooperative.

Call for Participants:

Looking for ethics-minded designers, legal thinkers, and framework builders to help make participant rights real, practical, and empowering.

Join the #participation-ethics Slack channel on the Metagov Slack.

Theory and Practice

Purpose:
To bridge the gap between democratic theory and the design and implementation of emerging participatory tools—so that academic theory informs practice and practitioner insight informs theory.

We work so that the scaling of participation through digital means advances the promise of massively deliberative democracy without fueling technocracy.

Scope leads: Joseph Gubbels (2025)

Current Work:

• See the project page for the overview.

• Look for our next theory reading group in March - follow (ask val what she wants to do and fill in w details!)

Call for Participants:
See the discussion at #theory-practice channel in the Metagov Slack.

Democratic Cultures

This theme is made up of several working groups focusing on bringing in more tool builders and citizens into democratic participation.

Conversa: exploring Polislike tools and practices

Purpose:
To build a peer-to-peer learning and support network for practitioners who use Polis and similar bridging tools—focused on facilitation, re-imagined interfaces, and algorithmic innovation.

Our vision is to foster a space for experimenting with Polis-like tools, so that these tools can support the massively intersectional culture that results from stabilizing as much difference across as many boundaries as possible.

We aspire to help Polis process stakeholders of all backgrounds in learning to understand, to explain, and to defend the methods and trade-offs of Polis-like tools. New exploratory interfaces will support new forms of curiosity-driven “perspective cartography”, helping users to build intuitions around navigating complex topics. Thoughtful and accessible metaphors will allow all of us – curious participants and facilitators alike – to make sense of not only the subtle hidden dimensions of our fellow citizens, but of the very algorithmic processes that reveal us to one another. This emerging and wider field of practitioners – platform maintainers, conversation facilitators, interface designers and data scientists – will openly iterate together on the technical underpinnings of this new class of democratic tool.

Scope Leads: PatCon

Current Work:

• Hosting weekly, lightly structured drop-in calls for practitioners. We welcome all silly questions, roaring successes, last-minute demos & hare-brained ideas.

• Compiling a comprehensive list of 360+ known Polis conversations and a directory of 700+ people with Polis-related experience.

• Cultivating a Discord community (~170 people) for ongoing exchange.

• Building and sharing libraries and prototypes: red-dwarf algorithm library, opinion landscape painter, data pipeline explorer, Awesome Polis directory

• Crafting thoughtful and accessible metaphors to ground user and facilitator intuitions.

• Building + supporting several tools, including Red Dwarf, Perspective Explorer V2, and Valency Anndata.

Call for Participants:
This group is welcoming to folks interested in running Polis conversations, experimenting with new interfaces, and exploring improvements in its algorithmic pipeline.

Join the Polis User Group Discord, drop into a call, read our past call notes, or visit the #polislike Slack channel in Metagov.

Democracy Innovators Podcast

Purpose:
The democracy innovators podcast works to build a platform that gathers inspiration and gives public recognition to democracy innovators. The podcast supports civic tech builders in staying updated and finding collaborations in the civic tech space, and allows the public to discover civic tech and find hope in the work being done.

Scope leads: Carlo Michaelis and Alessandro Oppo

Current Work:

• Recording a civic tech podcast called the democracy innovators podcast

  • 10 months

  • 35 interviews (37 videos)

  • > 3200 listeners (Youtube + Podcast)

  • > 3300 hours listening time (Youtube + Podcast)

  • > 160 LinkedIn Followers, > 80 Youtube Subscribers

Call for Participants:
Go subscribe and listen to all the episodes :) If you want to be interviewed, volunteer, or fund the project, reach out to @alessandrooppo or @carlomichaelis on the Metagov Slack or via email to democracyinnovatorspodcast@gmail.com or alessandrooppo@gmail.com.

Keep an eye out for:

DRI in Polis is currently paused - but you can join the #dri-in-polis channel and chat there if you’re interested in this experiment!

The Democratic Cultures group is currently growing, and we’ll announce those projects you see in the working group diagram as they emerge!

Conclusion

Over the past two years, we have consistently worked towards building alignment across the Deliberative Tooling ecosystem through these working groups. There is still a huge amount of work so if you’re a builder, a funder, or a citizen. Come join us!

We’ll be back again to keep you updated as we continue to build towards a modular, governable, and capture-resistant ecosystem.

Last Tuesday, Jan 27th was the official kickoff of the gov/acc (Accelerating Governance Innovation in Web3) project led by Metagov Research Director Eugene Leventhal. If you missed the kickoff call, you can watch it back here!

​This livestream provided an overview of the initial activities for the gov/acc research program.

• ​Eugene from Octant and Metagov outlined the general roadmap for gov/acc between now and EthCC (The Ethereum Community Conference on March 30th-April 2nd, 2026).

• Artem Zhiganov from Harmonica introduced their tool and the specific session to start capturing data for this research program.

• Martin Karlsson from Coordination.Network discussed the mapping infrastructure that will lead to the project’s leaderboard.

• Spencer Saar Cavanaugh from OpenCivics presented the initial website they are building for the project.

The next discussion will be a Twitter/X Space on Fri, Feb 6th at 11a EST.

​Special thanks to Metagov and Octant for their funding support in getting gov/acc off the ground!

What is gov/acc exactly?

You can read the full blog post introduction but the tldr is that gov/acc (governance acceleration) is a time-bound research program that showcases how and where decentralized governance can help achieve a community’s goals. It is a focused effort to coordinate research, experimentation, implementation, and knowledge-building around decentralized governance between now and Devcon 2026.

The name is a spinoff of a philosophy coined by Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, called d/acc or “Defensive (or decentralization, or differential) acceleration.” The quick summary is that d/acc is a balanced approach to technological development between panic-driven technological stagnation and unrestrained, elitist accelerationism.

In his own blog post, Eugene writes on the relationship between Buterin’s d/acc and the project of gov/acc:

"I see gov/acc as a subset of the d/acc movement. To achieve the vision Vitalik articulates — where defensive, decentralized, and democratic technologies help humanity flourish — we need to accelerate the tools and processes that improve governance, as well as the culture and desire to engage in the communities we care about most actively.”

The gov/acc project is planning to host workshops around major ecosystem gatherings, as well as some academic conferences, include, but are not limited to:

• ETHcc (March 30-April 2, 2026)

• DAWO (July 6–7, 2026)

• Stanford’s Science of Blockchain Conference (July 27–29, 2026)

• Devcon Mumbai (November 2026)

So if you’re going to be at any of these events, be sure to connect with Eugene!

How to get involved

There is a “Gov Geeks” Telegram channel where web 3 governance folks are connecting and coordinating around these research projects. We recommend jumping in there and catching yourself up on some of the latest messages before introducing yourself and then asking where and how you can get involved. You can also reach Eugene by direct messaging him on the Metagov Slack, which you can access by filling out our community Typeform.

If you’re a decision-maker on a web 3 project that wants to:

• Run governance experiments

• Commit to progressive decentralization

• Improve your existing governance systems

→ Reach out to coordinate experimentation and share learnings!

If you’re looking for governance talent:

• Let Eugene know, and he can connect you with excellent researchers and practitioner (he’s building a network of people who want to work on these problems full-time) 💪🏽💥

If you’re a researcher or practitioner interested in:

• Collaborating on governance research

• Consulting with communities on governance design

• Coordinating experiments across multiple ecosystems

→ Join the “Gov Geeks” Telegram channel and/or Metagov community

If you’re building governance tools:

• Let’s coordinate to ensure we’re solving real problems

• Help us map the tooling landscape

• Connect with communities ready to experiment

For the Meme: Spread the Culture

• Create and share gov/acc memes that make governance feel exciting, not boring

• Learn and teach about governance mechanisms and why they matter

• Make art that visualizes coordination challenges and solutions

• Build tools that support experimentation and implementation of impactful tools

• Signal your support by adopting gov/acc in your bio, posts, or projects

If this resonates with you in any way — whether you have general thoughts, see specific collaboration opportunities, or want to chat — please reach out. The only way we make progress is by working together.

Some More Research Updates from Eugene

Eugene also leads Metagov’s Grants Innovation Lab (GIL), which is a collective dedicated to advancing the effectiveness of grant programs (in Web 3 and beyond), exploring topics such as operations, mechanisms, decentralization, transparency, and impact measurement, amongst others.

• Last summer, senior Researcher at Metagov Mike Cooper published & distributed The Web3 Grant Impact Handbook, designed to standardize and professionalize how Web3 ecosystems plan, implement, and evaluate grant programs. It emphasizes evidence-based, transparent, and decentralized approaches to funding aimed at building resilient and public-good-oriented blockchain communities.

And lastly, if you haven’t yet listened to Eugene’s new Governance Futures Podcast… you mustttt 🔥🔥🔥 The podcast is co-hosted with Jamilya Kamalova (PhD Researcher on all things Blockchain, Governance & Dispute Resolution) and it explores how governance works (and fails) in Web3 and beyond.

“From DAOs to ancient constitutions, Wikipedia mods to protocol politics, we talk with builders, researchers, organizers, and rebels who are shaping how power is distributed - and who gets to decide.”

If you need a starting point, I recommend the episode with Amber Case, another Metagov Research Director and Founder of the Calm Tech Institute (about which we wrote our last project updates newsletter 👀 … icymi).

Eugene and Jamilya are currently working on Season 2, which will include 6 episodes focused on deliberation and democratic technology—including an interview with Metagov’s very own Executive Director, leader of the Interoperable Deliberative Tools project, and expert in international deliberative technology, Liz Barry. We can’t wait to learn more from these deeply insightful conversations. Thank you Eugene and Jamilya for this gift to the governance research world!! 🌐

In this newsletter, we are proud to share updates from what Case and Calm Tech Institute has been up to this past year. You can stay updated and get involved by joining the #calm-tech-institute channel in the Metagov Slack. And be sure you’re subscribed here on Substack for periodic updates from across our various research projects. Thanks for being here!

Subscribe now

Announcing the full list of Calm Tech Certified™ products for 2025!

Case’s organization, the Calm Tech Institute, ranks products on their use of attention, periphery, robustness, light, sound and material use in an 81 point specification process using registered trademarks: Calm Technology® and Calm Tech Certified™.

In this LinkedIn newsletter post, Case announced the full list of Calm Tech Certified™ products for 2025! Including the following:

• Digital Signage: Dorysign

• Picture Frames: Aura Home, Inc.‘s Carver, Aspen and Walden Frames

• Notebook/Productivity: reMarkable‘s Paper Pro Move

• Meditation and Mindfulness: Luma³ Essential and Premium

• Mobile Phone: Mudita Kompakt

• Premium Audio: DA 256 by Henry Audio

• Alarm Clocks and Sleep Aids: Ambient‘s Dreamie; Mudita Harmony 2 & Mudita Bell 2

Get details about these products in The Complete Calm Tech Certified™ Product List for 2025 (A Guide to Products That Are a Joy to Use!).

The Calm Tech Institute at CES 2026

Calm Tech Institute partnered with Kyoto-based mui Lab, Inc. at Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a massive, annual electronics show showcasing emerging products in multiple categories in Las Vegas, Nevada.

mui Lab, Inc.’s flagship product, mui Board, Gen II, was one of the first products to be certified by Calm Tech Institute. Their booth at CES this year showed off the mui board Gen II as well as their new Calm Sleep Platform.

• mui board Gen II is an expertly designed smart home controller made of wood that has a disappearing screen, control lights, thermostats, and smart locks effortlessly through the Matter platform.

• While the mui Board Calm Sleep Edition is a mui Board Gen 2 variant that includes sleep tracking features and sensors built into the device.

The booth was a great success garnering mainstream press coverage in The Verge, Yanko Design, and Yahoo Tech.

Events & News Featuring Calm Tech Institute

• Case will be a keynote speaker at this years INCOSE System’s Engineering Conference in Torrance, CA, Jan 31 - Feb 3rd! If you are in the LA area, check them out and be sure to message in #calm-tech-institute Slack channel.

• The Calm Tech Institute has been featured in recent issues of Kyoto Journal and UK’s Idler Magazine!

Looking Ahead

Goals: Calm Tech Institute plans to certify 50 products in 2026!

Case is framing 2026 as the “Year of the Analog” as people seem to be increasingly getting sick of attention-draining technology and looking for alternatives. She wrote this piece, “What companies can learn from past products we love — an alternative gift guide for retro tech” about these trends so be sure to follow her there as well.

And finally, Case will present these updates and more at our very own Metagov Seminar on Wednesday, February 11th! Register on Luma here, and prepare any questions, feedback and/or ideas for this special opportunity to chat with Case directly.

We are so proud of RD Case!!! And all the progress she (and the team at Calm Tech Institute) has made since last year. Read last year’s project update for the story of how the Metagov Community Contributes to Calm Technology® Standards by offering early-stage feedback and diverse perspectives that significantly improved the certification draft.

This is exactly the type of relationship between Metagov’s research and community pillars that we’re striving for—where the community can serve as infrastructure for cutting edge research and development of pro-social, democratic, calm, rights-respecting technology.

If you’re not already part of our community, join us here. And if you are, thanks for being part of this journey!

Subscribe now

Full Fellowship Documentation

What is Small Hassles Court?

Small Hassles Court is a conflict resolution space where players can address minor interpersonal issues with friends or partners in a playful environment. Located in Viewfinder Valley, part of Twisterland — an online game world designed by Plot Twisters that fosters self-reflection and emotional literacy — this space welcomes discussions about miscommunications, hurt feelings, and other “small hassles” that often go unaddressed.

The project explores what the fellows posit as the smallest, most fragile, and vital scale of self-governance: emotional co-regulation. Unlike traditional courts, Small Hassles Court has no judge or jury — how players negotiate their conflict lies entirely with them. The Small Hassles Court was designed not to adjudicate, but to attune. It is a tool for micro-governance, a space to rehearse fairness, tend to emotional needs, and to play together.

Project Documentation

Visit the documentation page on Metagov’s website to explore the complete fellowship outputs:

• Play Small Hassles Court — Interact with the open-sourced digital game and experience emotional governance firsthand

• Watch the Seminar Presentation — View the team’s Metagov seminar where they discuss their process and findings

• Read the Speculative Ethnography — Dive into “The Court is Adjourned (For Now),” a report that traces both what was built and how it felt to build it, moving between analytical design decisions and imagined futures

The Small Hassles Court subverts the paradigmatic idea of a courtroom as institution-upholding and carceral: instead, it is an ironic and playful environment that serves the shared culture between claimants, where the “laws of the land” are mutually discussed and decided rather than imposed by an institutional power system. Through this project, the team aims to model how to navigate emotional and social needs as a form of healthy self-governance from the bottom up using digital means.

As Governable Spacemakers, the team has framed conflict mediation as a self-governance exercise that prioritizes fairness, respect, and collaboration by design. In a time when online interactions often take advantage of manipulative heuristics, digital experiences like Small Hassles Court help users get to know themselves and others better in mutually respectful ways. Conflicts—even the smallest hassles—can teach us a lot about our values, and how nurturing them are social endeavors that never exist in a vacuum.

Explore the Project

Visit the documentation page on Metagov’s website to interact with Small Hassles Court, watch the seminar presentation, and read the full speculative ethnography report.

Acknowledgements

• Technical Support: Kyle Thompson and Annie Litherland

• Trailer Music: Jake Conder

• Fellowship Coordinator: Cent Hosten

• Fellowship Research Director: Nathan Schneider

• Special thanks to the Metagov and Plot Twisters communities who participated in playtesting.

The Governable Spacemakers Fellowship is a Metagov project with grant support from the Center for Cultural Innovation - AmbitioUS and the Henry Luce Foundation.

We are very excited to share with you our latest community-driven collaborative artifact, a digital zine we call “Collective Governance for AI: Points of Intervention.”

With this digital zine, our goals included:

1. breaking AI into distinct tech stack layers (i.e. model design, data, training, tuning, context, hosting, user experience, and more)

   “The best way to solve a hard math problem is to break it up into smaller, easier problems. Similarly, as we better understand AI systems in their social and technical particulars, we can recognize them as involving a sequence of smaller operations. Those can start to seem more approachable for our communities to manage. Interventions start to seem possible.”

2. describing ways to insert collective governance structures and processes at each layer

   “We understand collective governance as an emergent and context-sensitive practice that makes structures of power accountable to those affected by them.”

3. pointing to existing, real-world projects that are working to steer that layer toward meaningful collective governance.

The project was initiated and edited by Nathan Schneider, with contributions from Cormac Callanan, B Cavello, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Val Elefante, Cent Hosten, Joseph Low, Thomas Renkert, Julija Rukanskaitė, Ann Stapleton, Joshua Tan, Madisen Taylor, Freyja van den Boom, Jojo Vargas, Mohsin Y. K. Yousufi, Ian G. Williams, and Michael Zargham.

Check out the digital zine at metagov.org/cg-ai/ and let us know what you think!

How the Zine Came to Be

In case you don’t know Metagov, we call ourselves “a laboratory for digital governance” that cultivates tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age. As a laboratory, we try to provide researchers, technology builders, and organizations with infrastructure to support their experimentation with different structures and processes of governance for the projects they’re working on.

Many of Metagov’s research outputs—i.e. academic papers, technology tools, zines, blog posts, and other creative artifacts—are the result of collaborations between various community members. And many of them start like this one did—as a post in our community Slack Workspace.

In October, Nathan Schneider, one of Metagov’s Research Directors and founding members, posted in the #community channel inviting contributions to an early prototype document on platform called Crowdwrite.

Due to some bugs and ongoing development of the Crowdwrite platform, he switched over to Google Docs and enabled anyone with the link to comment or suggest edits and additions to the draft. He also tagged a few members of the community working on research and implementation of more collective governance of artificial intelligence to motivate contribution.

As the contributions began flooding in, Nathan reached out to me (as Metagov’s Community Lead) about proposing and hosting a Community Call for the project. Community Calls are one of the two virtual call formats Metagov community members can leverage. They are more informal calls well-suited for collaborative co-working, peer-learning, or playtesting as opposed to the Metagov Seminar, our weekly research presentation which takes a slightly more formal format.

On the hour-long call, which took place in November, Nathan introduced about 15 community members to the project and invited synchronous co-working on the document followed by some deliberations about structure, voice and tone, publication formats/locations, and what to include/not include in the zine. During the call, we decided to make a dedicated Slack channel (#collective-governance-ai-zine channel) for the project so that we could continue to share ideas and updates especially as Nathan took the lead on editing everyone’s contributions.

Finally, Nathan built the online zine with an open source tool called Astro, which provides web frameworks for content-driven websites, and also created a Github repo. Another community member made a DWeb version of the zine which can be opened in the Peersky Browser.

So when we say this project is a “community-driven collaborative artifact,” this is exactly what we mean. Over the past 5 years of Metagov, we have been developing all of these very intentional and specific aspects of community infrastructure which our members can leverage to support their work:

• Our Slack Workspace consists of over 1,700 people from around the world and is an amazing resource for sourcing high quality, values-aligned, experienced contributors/ collaborators for projects.

• Our two distinct call formats (Community Calls and Metagov Seminars) can be used to formalize presentations, invite feedback, test hypotheses and assumptions, playtest new tools, and more.

• Our social media accounts (X - 4K followers) as well as our Substack newsletter (1.2K subscribers) can help to give your projects visibility and reach beyond Metagov’s immediate contributor community.

For information about how to leverage this community infrastructure for your projects, be sure to join a monthly orientation call (the next one is January 14th), read our detailed Guides for Proposing & Hosting calls, and/or message me @Val Elefante on Slack for more ideas, advice, or feedback about ways we can support your work. We want to hear from you!

Support Community Infrastructure Development at Metagov

Unfortunately, community infrastructure is severely undervalued in just about every field, but we know it’s absolutely core to what we want to offer the world. Our community infrastructure is a key differentiator between us and other online communities—and we believe its our superpower! But continuing to support and develop it takes time and resources. It requires deep relational work, emergent design, moving at the speed of trust, iterating and experimenting based on feedback, and many other techniques that our Community Team has beem cultivating over the past few years.

Looking ahead to 2026, we have big ideas and high hopes for growing our community infrastructure including:

• Launching a Metagov 101 syllabus, peer-learning course, and/or podcast

• Supporting more IRL meetups and conference attendance for community members

• Sending more consistent and periodic newsletter and social media research and community updates

• Implementing systems for recognizing (and perhaps somehow compensating) community leaders who volunteer their time and effort in:

  • becoming community mentors, or as well call them “Community Navigators,” showing up to orientation calls and helping new community make sense of Metagov

  • proposing and coordinating high quality seminars and community calls within the community

  • providing thoughtful and constructive feedback as playtesters of Metagov tools and/or peer reviewers of research

  • completing “Chores” in our #jungle-gym channel which helps distribute the responsibility of the maintenance of our immaculate community vibes✨

  • and much more!

So if you feel excited about the work we’re doing, please consider contributing to our core funding which will bolster our ability to continue to expand our community infrastructure.

Here is where you can make a donation. And if you’d like to make a one-time donation, our team is happy to help. You can reach us anytime at finance@metagov.org, on Slack, or visit metagov.org/support.

As we close out the year, we want to say a huge thank you to everyone supporting the work we do. Whether you are newsletter subscribers, individual or organizational donors, community members, research directors, or straight up lurkers. We appreciate you!

Beyond community infrastructure, if you’re curious about what other work we do, check out our one pager with some of our proudest accomplishments to date. We believe that through practicing self-governance, our communities will be better equipped to meet these challenging times. We hope Metagov community members can be leaders of a cultural shift. It’s time to govern or be governed.

Thank you for reading! And happy holidays.

Our Progress

This project began during the Interoperable Deliberative Tools offsite in Berkley, CA, in October 2024. We brought together 21 deliberative tools to implement a sort of minimum viable interoperability by sharing flatfile exports with each other. By the end of the cohort in February, the teams had compiled all their terms into a Miro, mapped the connections between each one, and determined that the clearest next step was to build an ontology that could bridge the gap between the different tools.

A new working group picked up the baton in April. In collaboration with CrownShy and Metagov, the brainstorming board from the cohort redesigned the concept as a Data Mesh, granting each tool autonomy over its own data products, and built an ontology. Since we submitted a work-in-progress paper detailing the beginnings of our method + presented a poster with an overview of our work (shown above) at the Computing X Crisis Decentennial Conference in Aarhus.

The ontology represented our minimum viable understanding of the type of information that would need to transfer from tool to tool in the case of an integration between those tools. To achieve this, we started with a base ontology and a set of terms commonly used in Polis. We then added to, edited, and iterated on this set by reviewing important terms in Voice 2 Vision, Iswe’s Citizen Assembly Process, Evocracy’s collective proposal process, and W3C ontology for social activity online called Activity Streams. You can view our first set of terms in this spreadsheet here.

Between our first meeting in Aarhus and our gathering at the Foundations for the Digital Commons event in Maine, USA, CrownShy developed the first end-to-end integration between Polis, Voice2Vision, and Talk to the City, utilizing the ontology. This first test case pushed the ontology, clarified what we were missing, and provided a demo to represent the type of connections we might be able to build between our different tools.

Over the next several months, we’ll integrate the changes to the Ontology from our own experiment and from at least two other communities and projects working to build ontologies for deliberative tooling and release a public version for continued iteration.

Why an Ontology?

At the core of our collaboration is the premise that to actualize trustworthy self-rule, we must be able to govern the tools that we use to govern ourselves and to do that, these tools must be open-source. As demonstrated so clearly by Twitter’s transition to X, any closed-source corporation has the ability and right, as a private entity, to both support our will to govern our digital spaces and, upon arbitrary leadership changes, take it away just as quickly.

Only supporting governable tools is a challenging requirement to maintain. Open-source software has yet to establish a successful model for sustainable development, and this presents a host of limitations. Open-source tools have limited capacity for projects outside their direct purview; these tools often lack the marketing reach or funds to support efforts that private companies might easily achieve. Open-source software will also almost certainly not build an all-in-one platform that can be delivered in a neat box; it builds modularly, requiring local adaptation.

In this complexity, the Data Mesh team is pushing to transform the challenge of fragmentation into a rich opportunity to unlock local creativity and civic action through composable deliberative tools. Fragmentation redesigned as collective modularity and constrained by increasing human self-rule should mean communities have the resources to self-infrastructure, autonomously govern, and federate. An all-in-one platform can never meet the needs of all localities. Building modularly is the very power of open-source, but only if we can make it easy to string these modules together into a process representative of the needs of the self being governed.

The core question we were left with was how to leverage the modularity of open-source development to support customizable, self-specific governance processes with ease.

The Data Mesh hypothesis is that we need a way to easily communicate information across multiple tools and systems. And so we’re here building an ontology that allows deliberative tools to communicate their inputs and outputs to each other, facilitating easy translation and handoffs between various tools.

Where we’re going

If you want to stay updated about what we’re doing, check out this GitHub Repository and follow the #data-mesh channel. When we open up new calls for participation, we’ll drop the information there!

If you have a tool to integrate with the ontology, or a process designer building an open-source governance process, let us know in Slack or reach out directly to datamesh@metagov.org. We’d love to have you on board :)

Why do YOU work on interoperability?

We asked the question “Why do you work on interoperability in deliberative technology?” to the team at our kickoff in Denmark, and here’s what they said in their own words.

Photo Credit - Adversarial Interoperability

The Interoperable Deliberative Tools Cohort (IDT, or “Interop”) is one of Metagov’s largest and most active research areas. Check out our first post (May 2024), mid-term report (September 2024), and recent update (May 2025). This post contains updates from early summer 2025.

For those who are new here, here are the Interop plot points:

• May 2024: the Mina Foundation (THANK YOU) supplied funds for founding Research Director Aviv to kick off the Interoperable Deliberative Tools grant program with the Metagov team, and distribute $200,000k for Open Source Deliberative Tools to prioritize interoperability.

• July 2024: we gathered 21 teams to approach interoperability questions together.

• October 2024: we hosted an on-site where each team demonstrated its individual work towards meeting minimum viable interoperability standards defined as an exportable flat file with a defined data structure. Thereafter, we shifted our priority from individual work to collaborative work.

• January 2025: our five-day online symposium celebrated the progress made during Interop1, and launched six working groups to grapple with the gnarly details of making functional interoperability among open source, deliberative tools a reality.

• June 2025: the six working groups came together for a mid-year Research Area Roundup to brief each other on their progress and check alignment. This post captures their ways of working, achievements, and explains how new contributors might get involved.

Before we dive in, I want to bring you into WHY we do this work.

The mission of this research area is to make today’s collective intelligence tools more open, modular, and interoperable, laying the groundwork for a capture-resistant ecosystem of deliberative tooling in which process innovation thrives and local creativity blossoms.

Our vision is the empowerment of ever more people to self-rule, and the development of capacities to self-rule.

To keep ourselves accountable to those ends, we prioritize tools that upskill humans over machines, because participating in our own governance is inherently valuable. We prioritize open source because the tools we’re using to govern ourselves must be governable themselves. We prioritize building sustainable business models because otherwise, the people building tools and the communities using them would exhaust their energy and capacity to be self-governing. We prioritize modularity and interoperability because governing ourselves is a collective process as varied as the combinations of humans on this earth, and simplifying that process into a monolithic governance system is insufficient to realize self-rule.

Here’s how we’re moving towards a deliberative tools ecosystem resistant to corporate capture and supportive of creativity.

The Interoperable Deliberative Tools Research Area

This research area is bubbling with working groups, each focused on pushing forward critical components of the purpose we’ve described above. And it is in itself as modular as we hope the tools themselves to be. The figure above shows how we’ve organized the research area into two themes, which we colloquially refer to as “Hard-line values” and “Feel-good Standards” (thank you, Audrey Tang, for the framing :).

From there, each of these themes splits into three working groups, which further subdivide as the work becomes more defined. Each working group has membership boundaries and a lead. Lee DeSota is Lead Facilitator and Project Manager for the entire research area. The research area is directed by Liz Barry, with occasional essential support from Metagov RDs Aviv Ovadya, Amy Zhang, Eugene Leventhal, and Josh Tan.

⭐️ If you have an interest in this topic generally, the place to get started is the lobby channel in Metagov Slack: #deliberative-tools-and-interop

Table Of Contents

The Interoperable Deliberative Tools Research Area

Standards

Data Mesh

Open Facilitation Library

Reference Architecture

DRI and Polis

Values

Participation Ethics

Theory and Practice

Conversa: exploring Polislike tools and practices

Conclusion

Standards

This theme standardizes a sociotechnical vocabulary and ontology for deliberative tooling

Data Mesh Working Group

Purpose:
We are building an ontology that deliberative tools from across the governance cycle can translate their data into to allow for easy communication between many tools.

We see an open source ecosystem that is resistant to capture by corporate entities, where the tools we use to govern ourselves are themselves able to be governed.

Scope leads: Stuart Lynn, Maggie Hughes

Current Work:

• Building a deliberative tooling ontology: This group is exploring a data mesh model where each tool maintains control over its data + ontological structure while also aligning with collective standards to promote interoperability between many tools without needing to create pairwise integrations for every tool.

  • Working on translation scripts to convert tool-specific data into a shared format.

  • Synthesizing several independent ontologies into a high-level standard.

• Public Presentation + Feedback: Authored a Work-In-Progress publication on the model above for data exchange between deliberative platforms and was accepted to Aarhus 2025. Presented a poster at the conference.

• In-person events: in-person events that convene to iterate on the ontology and rotate regionally around the world as opportunities arise in partnership with other events / conferences that bring people together.

  • Just hosted one August 22-23 in Aarhus, Denmark, blog post forthcoming!

Call for Participants:
Looking for participants who are either

1. Managing or building a governance process that requires interoperability between several open source tools.

2. Working with an open source tool, they want to make it interoperable with other tools in the context of a governance process.

The next big call for participation is on the 30th - 31st of October at the Foundations for the Digital Commons event in Maine, USA. Register here!

To see the work + stay updated when we’re inviting new participants, join #data-puddle on the Metagov Slack.

Open Facilitation Library

Purpose:
Build a shared library and synthesize standards that can train human and machine agents to self-govern/rule/organizeto better facilitate discussion towards our collective shared goals.

We want collective intelligence, self-rule, and human cooperation at scale to be both possible and commonplace.

Scope leads: Artem Zhiganov, Cecile Green

Current Work:

• Open Facilitation Library Synthesis: This scope is led by Cecile Green and the Commoning Standard team and is working to synthesize knowledge and practices from self-governance researchers and practitioners, including the deliberative facilitation frameworks, into the current version of the Commoning Standard.

• Primitives of Agentic Facilitation: This scope is led by Artem Zhiganov and focuses on designing AI-readable facilitation “primitives” that build off of the synthesized facilitation standards above. This includes:

  • Structured facilitation patterns using web standards.

  • Building training datasets of facilitation processes.

  • Developing evaluation (eval) prompts.

• Open Facilitation Stewards: This scope is focused on articulating clear operating agreements, including making a sustainable business model such that the facilitation knowledge, technical contributors, and the standard creators are adequately and recurrently prioritized and compensated for this knowledge.

• Open Facilitation Demos: This presentation-oriented meeting invites experienced facilitators + researchers to share knowledge and work towards a synthesized facilitation standard to act as the base of the Machine Actionable Framework.

Call for Participants:
Open Facilitation Library is actively synthesizing knowlege and facilitation practices into and standards. Researchers, Facilitators, AI/Knowledge Engineers with relevant practices or methodologies, are encouraged to contribute.

To see the work and introduce yourself, join #ai-facilitation on the Metagov Slack.

Reference Architecture Working Group

Purpose:
To collaboratively diagram the world’s largest and most complex workflows in civic engagement and democratic innovation. We are establishing generic graphic conventions useful for representing multi-stage, hybrid in-person/online deliberative processes.

We wish to compare implementations of deliberative processes to speed learning for those who design these processes.

Scope leads: Liz Barry and Audrey Tang

Current Work:

• Articulating a governance loop: metagov.org/files/govloop.pdf

• Building a gallery of open source deliberative tools organized by the phases of deliberation: metagov.org/delib-tools

• Creating a reference architecture for combining in-person and online processes

• Developing a collaborative workbook of visual process diagrams by co-authoring with process designers from initiatives such as Taiwan’s AI Alignment Assembly, Germany’s “Forum Against Fakes,” Brasil’s Participiva, and Tokyo’s AI participatory mayoral campaign.

  • Each process is mapped using a template that includes phase of deliberation, mode of outreach and sampling, number of participants, mode of connection (in-person, online synchronous/asynchronous), degree of interaction, type of input, type of transformation (technology not namebrand), and outputs.

Call for Participants:
The group invites:

• Designers of large-scale public engagement or collective intelligence processes

• Tool developers who support those processes.

• Architects and urban designers who have expertise in diagramming abstract machines; please note that this is different from data viz or storyboarding.

Participants are welcome to contribute their projects to the collaborative workbook and help improve shared understanding of participatory workflows across tools and cultures. All process designers who contribute their implemented process design become co-authors of this collaborative workbook.

DRI and Polis Working Group

Purpose:
To adapt and test the Deliberative Reason Index (DRI) within the Polis platform to measure the quality of deliberation—not by consensus, but by consistency between participants’ values and their policy preferences.

We're aiming to bring political science into the development of e-democracy tools, in order to improve both the tools and academic understanding of them.

Scope leads: Joseph Gubbels and Jonathan Warden

Current Work:

• Implemented early experiments using public Polis datasets.

• Identified challenges due to Polis not distinguishing between values and policy preferences.

• Initiated collaboration with the academic authors of the DRI metric to address validity issues and modify the metric for better use in Polis.

Call for Participants:
The group is especially interested in collaborators who can help with adapting DRI in Polis and refining the methodology, and connecting with academic political scientists.

To see the work, join #dri-in-polis channel on Slack.

Values

This theme advances core democratic values and articulates the rights of participants.

Participation Ethics Working Group

Purpose:
We estimate >1M people have already experienced tooling environments created by <1k developers, and anticipate that another million+ will have such encounters in the next 12 months. And as a result, we build legal infrastructure that centers participant ownership over their data instead of participant consent to data right loss.

We want participant rights and ethical data practices to be centered across the ecosystem in large-scale deliberation and digital governance—beyond compliance + consent—to ensure people know, understand, and can exercise their rights in participatory contexts.

Scope leads: Matthew Victor (2025 H1)

Current Work:

• Created a Terms of Service template for organizations that need participant-facing data policies.

• Shifted from “radical consent” (opt-in for everything) to prioritizing clear, actionable rights and ownership that reduce participant fatigue.

• Developing frameworks for handling redacted participant contributions and their downstream impact on decisions.

Call for Participants:

Looking for ethics-minded designers, legal thinkers, and framework builders to help make participant rights real, practical, and empowering.

Join the #participation-ethics Slack channel on the Metagov Slack.

Theory and Practice Working Group

Purpose:
To bridge the gap between democratic theory and the design and implementation of emerging participatory tools—so that academic theory informs practice and practitioner insight informs theory.

We work so that the scaling of participation through digital means advances the promise of massively deliberative democracy without fueling technocracy.

Scope leads: Joseph Gubbels

Current Work:

• Published an essay on values in governance tooling in a series alongside authors Audrey Tang + Lawrence Lessig.

• Hosted seminars on participation and deliberation.

  • Introduction recording.

  • Participation: reading list.

  • Deliberation: reading list.

• Developing a research guide for self-directed learners curious about political theory.

• Conducting interviews with practitioners to understand how theory could better serve real-world democratic tooling.

• Supporting cross-project collaborations like the DRI & Polis work (see next Working Group).

Call for Participants:
Open to both practitioners and theorists. If you're interested in making sense of democratic theory in the context of practical tool-building—or want your work to be more grounded in political philosophy—join the Slack channel and participate in upcoming seminars or research.

See the discussion at #theory-practice channel in the Metagov Slack.

Conversa: exploring Polislike tools and practices

Purpose:
To build a peer-to-peer learning and support network for practitioners who use Polis and similar bridging tools—focused on facilitation, re-imagined interfaces, and algorithmic innovation.

Our vision is to foster a space for experimenting with Polis-like tools, so that these tools can support the massively intersectional culture that results from stabilizing as much difference across as many boundaries as possible.

We aspire to help Polis process stakeholders of all backgrounds in learning to understand, to explain, and to defend the methods and trade-offs of Polis-like tools. New exploratory interfaces will support new forms of curiosity-driven “perspective cartography”, helping users to build intuitions around navigating complex topics. Thoughtful and accessible metaphors will allow all of us – curious participants and facilitators alike – to make sense of not only the subtle hidden dimensions of our fellow citizens, but of the very algorithmic processes that reveal us to one another. This emerging and wider field of practitioners – platform maintainers, conversation facilitators, interface designers and data scientists – will openly iterate together on the technical underpinnings of this new class of democratic tool.

Scope Leads: patcon

Current Work:

• Hosting weekly, lightly structured drop-in calls for practitioners. We welcome all silly questions, roaring successes, last-minute demos & hare-brained ideas.

• Compiling a comprehensive list of 360+ known Polis conversations and a directory of 700+ people with Polis-related experience.

• Cultivating a Discord community (~170 people) for ongoing exchange.

• Building and sharing libraries and prototypes: red-dwarf algorithm library, opinion landscape painter, data pipeline explorer, Awesome Polis directory

• Crafting thoughtful and accessible metaphors to ground user and facilitator intuitions.

Call for Participants:
This group is welcoming to folks interested in running Polis conversations, experimenting with new interfaces, and exploring improvements in its algorithmic pipeline.

Join the Polis User Group Discord, drop into a call, read our past call notes, or visit the #polislike Slack channel in Metagov.

Conclusion

There is a huge amount of work to be done towards building a more modular, governable, and capture-resistant ecosystem, and we’re just barely getting started. Many of these groups are looking for participants either right now or sometime in the future. If they are interesting to you, please join the Slack channels, lurk, learn, and let us know how you’d like to contribute.

We’ll be back sometime in January 2026 with a new update :)

Vision

Since 2020, Plot Twisters has been developing Twisterland, an online game world fostering self-reflection and emotional literacy through therapeutic minigames. Our design collective, made up of mostly women and POC from diverse walks of life, identity backgrounds, and skill sets, has spent five years conducting trauma-informed and interdisciplinary research, developing concept art, and designing game mechanics. Through the Governable Space-Makers fellowship, the three of us are representing the broader Plot Twisters team to build our team’s first minigame, the “Small Hassles Court,” which will explore how to playfully emerge governance in an online space.

The Small Hassles Court is a conflict resolution space where players can address minor interpersonal issues with friends or partners in a playful environment. Located in Viewfinder Valley, a part of Twisterland dedicated to exploring our social roles and relationships, this space welcomes discussions about miscommunications, hurt feelings, and other "small hassles" that often go unaddressed. By reframing these as opportunities to both explore wellbeing needs and bridge shared values, the Small Hassles Court helps build emotional literacy in relationships.

We believe that this minigame can help frame the activity of governance design as an accessible first-principles project, where the values of the individual participants consensually decide the collective resolutions. The gameplay itself will be a process of defining and inhabiting the roles of claimants, judges, and observers in the space: first, the playful fictional setting will help diffuse emotional barriers to the hassle from the outset, then participants will engage in embedded learning of their different roles and perspectives through turn-based activities. In this way, the project can encourage participants to tap into different approaches to learning about a conflict, from practicing narrative self-reflection firsthand to compassionately mediating the conflicts of others.

The Small Hassles Court subverts the paradigmatic idea of a court room as institution-upholding and carceral: instead, it is an ironic and playful environment that serves the shared culture between the claimants, where the “laws of the land” are mutually discussed and decided instead of imposed by an institutional power system. In this way, we hope our project can model to players—particularly young people—how to navigate their own emotional, social, and spiritual needs, and the needs of others, as a form of healthy self-governance from the bottom up. Conflicts—even the smallest hassles—can teach us a lot about our values, and how nurturing them are social endeavors that never exist in a vacuum.

The Small Hassles Court is intended to pilot solutions to bridge diverse perspectives online in consensual, emotionally-sensitive, and values-driven ways. How people manage their values in close relationships—while extremely important in our increasingly digital societies—is severely under-explored in online communities. As Governable Spacemakers we aim to frame conflict mediation as a self-governance exercise which prioritizes fairness, respect, and collaboration by design. We believe digital experiences should help users get to know themselves and others better in mutually respectful ways, especially in a time when online interactions often take advantage of manipulative heuristics.

Artistically, the Small Hassles Court will build upon mechanics Plot Twisters has already explored in our Storytelling Cards and design research (see our public bibliography for more). For example, users may be able to see avatars that reflect their emotional valence or escalation of the conflict—e.g. water orbs vs. dragons—or modify a “pettiness” dial to set the tone of their courtroom proceedings. The rest of the experience is being explored collaboratively through the fellowship. Though a version of this game will be accessible in Twisterland, we expect the fellowship output to live standalone on its own domain to allow the public to explore emotional governance on their own.

The Governable Spacemakers

Jenny Liu Zhang - The Digital Artist

Jenny is an American digital designer and artist who specializes in using speculative art practices to create meaningful participatory experiences online. In addition to working as a full-time product designer, she has been leading Plot Twisters since 2020, a game design collective creating a digital game world for journaling and self-reflection. This game, Twisterland, explores the language around emotions, wellbeing needs, and values in consensual social relationships, and how playful worldbuilding can encourage the accessibility of these topics. Her current focus, "Small Hassles Court," is a conflict resolution minigame within Twisterland and the subject of the Governable Spacemakers fellowship. Jenny holds a B.S. from the University of Southern California in "Arts, Technology and Business of Innovation" and will complete an MSc in "Narrative Futures" from the University of Edinburgh in 2025. She loves bright colors and dark chocolates.

Amanda Nicole Curtis - The Speculative Digital Ethnographer

Amanda is a researcher and games enthusiast. Her work explores how immersive technologies and digital play shape meaning making. She is particularly interested in using research to understand and empower young people’s digital futures. Amanda designs research projects which treat people not just as participants but as active collaborators. She is currently completing her doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she researches how playing video games reconfigures the ways people think, create knowledge, and make meanings in their everyday lives. She was previously a Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo. She has worked in industry as a user experience researcher, with companies such as Adobe and Sony. Amanda currently runs the Oxford Games & Technologies group, is an ambassador for Women in Games, and is a Limit Break mentor. Amanda holds a Master’s from the Oxford Internet Institute and a Bachelor’s from the University of Southern California. Her creative stamina is powered almost entirely by bottomless matcha lattes.

Joanna Rivera-Carlisle - The Digital Governance Engineer

Joanna is an interdisciplinary researcher, developer, and designer. Her work focuses on the intersections of technologies with culture, heritage, and co-creation. She specialises in spatial technologies (Extended Reality), data taxonomies, and gamified interactions in the context of decolonial theory and cultural heritage. Joanna has worked with young people in various capacities, from universities to NGOs, to private and public sector projects. She is particularly interested in how emerging technologies can be shaped to allow for self-governance by a diverse variety of users, especially where histories of exclusion and disenfranchisement shape digital agencies. Joanna holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, as well as degrees from King’s College London, Potsdam University, and the University of London. She would trade all of her degrees for a freshly baked croissant.

The Governable Spacemakers Fellowship is a project of Metagov, with grant support from the Center for Cultural Innovation - AmbitioUS and the Henry Luce Foundation.

Over the past seven months, we at Metagov have been privileged to explore that question in collaboration with 21 teams of governance tool builders from around the world. Supported by a grant from the Mina Foundation, “Interop” set out to make today’s collective intelligence tools more open, modular, and interoperable, laying the groundwork for a capture-resistant ecosystem of deliberative tooling.

Goal of the Interop Program

Back in Fall 2023, Aviv Ovadya imagined a program to foster a deliberative tooling ecosystem that is resistant to capture by single private entities, and suggested Metagov run it. That meant starting small, with open-source licensing, shared flat-file formats for importing and exporting data, and a cohort model designed for maximum collaboration.

What We Did

• Granted $169,245.56 to 14 projects to advance interoperability

• Supported 7 additional teams with participation stipends

• Brought together 21 teams in total for the program from July 2024 to January 2025

• Hosted two major gatherings: a 2-day offsite in Berkeley and a 5-day online Symposium

• Launched 6 collective workstreams focused on shared infrastructure and frameworks

What We Built

From technical integrations to shared values, the cohort made huge strides. Some highlights:

• Decidim added the import / export of open data, and wrote their documentation here

• Stanford PB filed a pull request to implement the Method of Equal Shares algorithm, and export into the .pb standard

• Chore Wheel was modularised into Power Ranker, and made the underlying PowerRanker class available as an NPM package. This update made Chore Wheel usable outside of Slack and implementable into any platform that wishes to use the Budget Box algorithm for continuous participatory budgeting - a great example of how to modularise a deliberative tool for use in another platform.

• Polis created a read-only API available on all conversation reports, for data export, and pushed it to production on pol.is. Announcement here.

• Deliberative Canvas created a visualization platform for exploring results from Polis using Kumu, and documented it well.

• Hypha implemented and excellently documented its open-source governance dashboard

• Discourse Graphs implemented their flat-file export format and were able to use these outputs as a Proof of Concept to apply for and receive funding from Chan-Zuckerberg.

• Constituency Listening built a system from scratch. Documentation.

And that’s just the beginning.

A growing collection of outputs — including an AI Facilitation Library, a shared values statement, and a GitHub of flat-file standards — show how this group of builders is co-creating the plumbing for a more open deliberative future.

From Tools to Ecosystem

At our October 2024 in-person offsite at Society Library in Berkeley, the cohort gathered along with RDs Aviv Ovadya and Josh Tan, and new support and direction from Liz Barry who had just joined as Executive Director of Metagov. Instead of 21 isolated projects, we began to see ourselves as a cohort — collaborating on shared vocabularies, common data standards, and mutual governance values.

Leaving the in-person offsite, we formed 6 teams that were aimed at doing the collective work that it took to build interoperability between each team.

These teams worked together for several months after the offsite to build the foundations for interoperability from organizational and social infrastructure to technical infrastructure.

At the end of the program, we hosted a distributed Symposium where each of these groups presented the work they had been doing over the past several months. By the end, we capped off the program with over 60 participants documenting collaborative work done across the 21 project teams in 6 sessions: Vocabulary and Road Map, Data Commons, AI Facilitation, Participant Rights, and Values for the Deliberative Tooling ecosystem (a conversation which led to this essay on values in governance technology published in a series alongside pieces by Metagov friends Larry Lessig and Audrey Tang), and Meta-collaboration which informing a podcast + deliberative tooling gallery for broader discoverability.

What We Learned

Two big lessons emerged:

1. Collaboration works best when grounded in clarity. A flat-file format gave teams a shared starting point, but real cooperation came when we added focused goals, good facilitation, and in-person trust-building.

2. Tool builders are ready for more. Beyond interoperability, this ecosystem is hungry for aligned values, shared infrastructure, and better tooling for AI, consent, and governance modeling.

What’s Next

This cohort wasn’t the finish line, it was the foundation. Our working groups are moving forward on both values and standards. Keep an eye on these projects and channels for ongoing opportunities for collaboration:

• A Theory + Practice project to speed exchange among delib-tech builders and political scientists.

• #deliberative-tools-and-interop – This is the public channel for collaborating with Metagov members beyond the cohort. See this channel’s Slack Canvas for a list of all related channels, including:

  • #ai-facilitation – The goal of this workstream is to standardize terms used in facilitation to both train AI agents to facilitate as well as educate humans to facilitate. This group is looking for input on facilitation strategies, large datasets, and ways your tool might use the library.

  • #data-puddle – Add your data model to our GitHub! This is key to keeping our processes open and fostering collaboration. We’ve already got contributions from 4 different teams including a large public dataset from Make.org. We’ll also use these contributions to explore routes to training Public AI, in collaboration with:

  • #participation-ethics – Lawyers created a draft Terms of Service that emerging tools can adopt to interact ethically with their participants. If your workflow, data needs, and/or respect for the rights of participants in your process could inform the composable Terms of Service template, join the discussion!

Thanks to all our collaborators, advisors, and friends who showed up to imagine new ways to govern together. If you are excited about this work, please get in touch as we are fundraising for Interop2 and seeking partners for the next residency.

Let’s keep building,

The Interop Team

• Power Ranker - Power Ranker is a technique for producing probability distributions (“budgets”) over sets of items using pairwise-preference inputs. The goal is to enable large groups to collectively allocate resources. It uses the “power method” for finding eigenvectors, hence the name.

• Constituency Listening - A data analysis and visualization tool to scaffold transparency, justification, and rigor in voice-to-decision processes for community decision makers.

• Iswe Foundation - Digital platform for scaling global community deliberation. Supports community scale deliberations globally, aggregates data, and curates insights for local and global impact.

• Moral Graph Elicitation - Repurpose tool built specifically for OpenAI Democratic Inputs into a standalone, open-source product usable for arbitrary topics (like Pol.is).

• Open MicroPublishing - Enable researchers to micropublish — from their lab notebooks — evidence-based knowledge graphs that can interoperate with evidence-informed deliberations in online platforms

• The Deliberative Canvas - Enables importing of qualitative data from deliberative tools onto a digital canvas for dynamic data visualizations - enhancing deliberative processes via human exploration and discovery of (hidden) patterns/relationships.

• CSV Interoperable Exports/Imports - CSV interoperable exports/imports for participatory objects like Assemblies, Meetings, Debates, Initiatives, Proposals and Participatory texts on the Decidim platform

• Go Vocal (formerly CitizenLab) - A collective dialogue system to scale online deliberation and build group recommendations based on common ground​.

• Policy Craft - An online platform that supports collaborative, bottom-up policy development through case-grounded deliberation.

• Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform - Platform used by cities for the voting phase of Participatory Budgeting.

• Global Brain Algorithm - An algorithm to debunk misinformation.

• MAPLE - MAPLE standardizes the public testimony process for the Massachusetts state legislature, provides a public archive, and fosters a deliberative space centered on legislation.

• Talk to the City (T3C) - Extending T3C to map areas of common ground and controversy, and suggest root causes of disagreement

• Pairwise - Pairwise was designed to make voting to distribute RetroPGF simple and fun. Pairwise is an open-source, off-chain voting dapp (like Snapshot) that streamlines community signaling by letting users select between just two options and then aggregating their choices into a quantifiable result.

• Second Dimension - Project exploring the application of AI-powered systems to support collaborative investigations, harnessing the power of collective intelligence in high-stakes environments to collectively solve problems.

• Ize - Ize is a collective attention and action platform. Ize allows groups to co-create and evolve collaborative workflows that span across tools, organizational boundaries, and online identities.

• Harmonica - AI-powered chatbot that streamlines group deliberation by synthesizing opinions submitted through 1:1 dialogues into predictable output. https://harmonica.chat/

• Swarm Check - Swarm Check is computer assisted argumentation platform with reusable, structured argumentation and decision support (e-Delphi, fact-checking weighting, voting, comprehension etc.) Improves critical thinking 2x better than academic courses on critical thinking.

• Ethelo - Ethelo empowers groups to solve complex problems, by collaboratively analyzing all possible scenarios to find outcomes that will maximize support while also minimizing inequality.

• Evocracy decision-making protocol - Efficient and scalable decision-making protocol based on a hierarchical selection and integration process.

• Interoperable Co-operative Governance - Repurposing commonly-used collaborative and development tools into an interoperable dashboard that streamlines democratic decision-making processes for small organizations.

Since our last update, we reviewed 51 applications and selected 21 incredible projects to participate in the RFP cohort. 14 projects were given direct grants, while seven additional project teams were invited to participate in the cohort.

Thanks again to the Mina Foundation, which made this grant possible. 

Workshop in San Francisco

We will also be conducting an in-person workshop this fall in San Francisco for all of the cohort members to convene and collaborate.

This workshop and other cohort activities aim to foster connection among teams, reduce duplicated efforts, and foster a community around innovative deliberative tools. We hope this will create a precedent among the deliberative tooling community to effectively integrate and advance their work together.

Join the community

The Metagov #interop community is open to everyone. We’d love to have you join the conversation! You can join the metagov slack to access our deliberative tools and interop community channel.

We’ll submit updates as this work continues so stay tuned for future updates! 

Join: Metagov Community

This program would not have been possible without the contributions of

• Daniel Carr - Technical lead

• Ellie DeSota - Non-technical cohort lead

• Nitin Mariserla - Project manager

• Eugene Leventhal - Program manager

• Josh Tan - Advisor

• Aviv Ovadya - Advisor

• Amy Zhang - Advisor

• Colin Megill - Advisor

- Nitin Mariserla & Ellie DeSota

Welcome to another Metagov Project Spotlight. In today’s spotlight, we are excited to announce the release of the first public prototype of the Exit to Community (E2C) Calculators.

Try The calculators Now

The project is led by Tara Merk, Josh Tan and Seth Frey. The team is looking for open source communities to get in touch to take part in an action research workshop to test the tool. 

Please get in touch if: 

• You contribute to building an open source software project 

• Your project is thinking about changing its governance structure to include more stakeholders than before 

• You are still in the ideation stages of the transition

Get In Touch

Why did we make this?

Open Source Software (OSS) has become a critical component of most apps and programs used by individuals and organizations today as well as underpinning much of our current critical digital infrastructure. However, many open source projects continue to be governed by their founder-leaders (referred to as Benevolent Dictators for Life aka BDFLs) others are dependent on a single organization. Given the criticality of OSS, there is a growing concern that centralized governance is a key risk to OSS security and sustainability. For example, the recent XZ hack shows how BDFLs can become bottlenecks or single points of failure. 

To increase the resilience and robustness of OSS, especially when it is widely used, OSS projects need to transition towards well structured and transparent community governance.

However, any governance transition comes with its own risks. Periods of change interrupt tried and tested processes. For example, opening a code base to more contributors can come with unexpected security risks when quality checks are decentralized. Transitions can also increase the potential for conflict or lead to change-fatigue amongst contributors. Furthermore, creating well structured and resilient multi-stakeholder governance structures for a project may also require new legal arrangements or the involvement of external consultants. 

In short: open source governance transitions are incredibly important for the sustainability of a project, but they’re hard and they can also be expensive.  

The E2C Calculator is an online tool that helps companies and BDFL governed communities decide if they’re ready to embark on a transition towards more community governance.

How we envision the Calculator being used 

We envision the tool to be used both by individuals, curious to understand their readiness to exit to community, as well as for stakeholder groups to come together to make a decision. The calculator can be used as a tool that helps to anchor the group’s conversation, focus attention where it matters and ultimately help all stakeholders come to a collective decision that everyone feels comfortable with. 

We are particularly interested in experimenting with the E2C Calculator as a tool that anchors a conversation within a particular group and would like to optimize the tool for this use case. To support that vision, we are organizing pilot workshops to test the tool with interested communities. 

Get in touch if:

• You contribute to building an open source software project 

• Your project is thinking about changing its governance structure to include more stakeholders than before 

• You are still in the ideation stages of the transition

Participate In Our Action Research

Note: Anyone can use our first iteration of the calculator. We offer the option for you to leave an email address and a member of our team may contact you to schedule a follow up conversation and user testing.

Try The Calculators Now

How it works

The calculator is ultimately a tool intended to help a group of people make the decision to transition their project to community governance. Consequently, we suggest you use the calculator in a group exercise where everyone required to make the decision to transition is seated around a (virtual) table and takes 10 minutes to click through the calculator adding their own subjective inputs. Then, it’s time for everyone to reveal their scores and the team to discuss where results diverge. These might be the areas where you need/ want to build more capacity before feeling fully confident to go ahead with the transition. 

1. Select if you’re a community grown project with a centralized governance style or an open source project developed within a company 

2. As you click through each section, answer each question from your own subjective opinion. Make sure that you’ve answered all the questions before you hit ‘next’.

3. Once you’re done, your results will be displayed in a radial chart with a percentage readiness score for each section. 

4. Scroll down to learn more about your results and how to contextualize them. Now it’s time to bring it back to the group and discuss where you stand overall! 

5. If you’re interested in giving feedback on your experience we’ve added a way for you to leave your email address at the end of the page. If not, no data will be collected or stored from you using the site.

Contact Us

How did we build it?

We started with the insight that OSS E2Cs are a subset of E2C, which itself is a specific type of exit strategy. As such, we started by extrapolating a general framework for E2C readiness from existing exit readiness criteria and then adapting it to the specificities of OSS. 

We grounded our tool in the most common comparable tool that exists in industry today: IPO readiness assessment tools. Our template became Deloitte’s IPO Scanner, which guides companies through a questionnaire and issues results in terms of a ‘readiness score’ indicating how well prepared they are to begin filing for an IPO, the process by which privately held companies sell shares to the public market. Exit to Community and IPOs are similar in that IPOs expand governance to financial shareholders and E2C expands governance to contributors, users and stewards.

Because there are similarities, we were able to draw inspiration from some of the key assessment categories used by IPO readiness frameworks (a well understood industry, employing vast numbers of lawyers, bankers and consultants!) to inform our E2C calculator. 

We started here because we believe that deciding to E2C should be a more widely available option for organizations seeking alternative business models, and be taken with as much consideration as deciding to IPO. Our calculator builds on the frameworks of IPO assessment to enable organizations to make this pathway more viable. 

Sourcing questions iteratively  

Our second step consisted of reviewing literature on cooperative conversions, steward ownership conversions and DAOfication in Web3, in order to discern more E2C specific criteria. Again, we grouped these and added them into our tool as questions.

Third, we reviewed criteria put forward by the open source community, such as the Apache Foundation Incubator graduation criteria and CHAOSS metrics to tailor our questions specifically to the maturity of open source software projects. From our large set of questions we began to iteratively filter out the most important ones.

Figuring out the importance of different questions

We began adding weightings to the importance of the answer to each question in order to begin understanding to what extent different aspects contribute towards the readiness of an organization to E2C. The initial weightings were determined through discussion between the three of us, drawing on prior knowledge and experience. We then ran a number of rounds of pairwise voting between different questions and opened up this voting mechanism to a number of OSS experts. If you want to contribute to update the weighting of each question, you can do so here. 

Testing our calculator with communities & future outlook

Finally, we’re hoping to refine the framework with various communities who are currently in the process of doing an E2C to assess its usefulness in a given context - that’s what this public prototype is for! Please reach out if you think your community could benefit from one of our guided research workshops. In the next version, we would like to include more tradeoff calculations within the calculator to help projects make an informed decision as to whether the costs of transitioning are justified. Specifically, we are working towards incorporating a model that approximates the costs of a transition in a given context and plots them against the project’s valuation. 

- Tara Merk

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful to Cent Hosten for helping us bring this first prototype to life and to Jenny Fan for her thoughtful review. We are grateful for the support of the National Science Foundation and the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund (Ford Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, Mozilla Foundation, and Open Collective) for funding our work. 

In today’s special edition of Project Spotlights we are excited to share our documentation of the Metagov Groundwork Fellowship, an initiative that brought together community-based researchers to explore and reshape the landscape of internet governance.

Read the full report

Overview of the Fellowship

The Groundwork Fellowship, a year-long online fellowship with a three-month development period, hosted by Metagov with support from the Henry Luce Foundation, was designed to address the challenges faced by under-represented communities in internet governance. By inviting four community-based research fellows to explore how internet infrastructure design affects the ability of these communities to self-determine their gathering, decision-making, and resource-sharing practices, the fellowship aimed to foster more inclusive and responsive online governance.

Contributions and Artifacts

To illustrate the impact of the fellowship, we have documented the artifacts and reports that fellows produced as part of the fellowship. Each fellow has addressed not only the specific governance processes, needs, and practices of their communities but also contributed to broadening the discourse on digital governance. The following artifacts highlight the diverse approaches taken by the fellows:

Ammar Manla Hasan tackled the challenges within decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) by developing the Dynamic Partnership Protocol, which emphasizes labor contributions over capital.

Wanjiru Ngure / [MONRHEA]  developed Shuffle, a software tool that aids in the organization of events for Kenya's underground music scene, aiming to make the curation process more equitable and efficient.

Pumsuanhang (Michael) Suantak focused on creating a secure and private communication system for communities in Myanmar, enhancing their ability to communicate securely despite their challenging circumstances and internet shutdowns.

Stacco Troncoso worked on refining the DisCO Governance Model, which prioritizes mutual support and collective care within organizational structures.

Seminars and Community Engagement

Throughout the fellowship, our weekly seminar series provided a platform for fellows to present their work and engage in dialogue with the Metagov community and other experts. These interactions enriched the fellows’ projects with diverse perspectives and critical feedback, helping to refine their approaches and broaden their impact.

Watch the seminars at Metagov.org

Reflections and Future Directions

As we reflect on the past year, we recognize the significant strides made towards understanding and improving the governance of digital spaces. The fellowship has highlighted the importance of diverse voices and approaches in shaping internet governance frameworks that are truly inclusive.

Each fellow brought unique insights to the fellowship and developed transformative projects during the fellowship that make rich connections with their communities as well as the broader field of internet governance.

Here are some reflections from our fellows.

Ammar Manla Hasan:

The fellowship encouraged me to think about internet governance from the lens of accessibility, and introduced me to several approaches that seek to broaden the scope of governance to include previously excluded or marginalized groups. The feedback I received from the Metagov community on my own research highlighted the complexity of our governance and ownership model at Taxir, and encouraged us to explore ways to streamline it and develop a better UI around it.

Wanjiru Ngure / [MONRHEA]:

My participation in the fellowship empowered me to engage with my topic of interest outside the circle of people I already had access to. For example, I organized an impromptu discussion with curators who I met at an international festival, inviting them to talk about their thoughts on the topic of organic curation and how they go about curation themselves. This gathering contributed to the development of my project and has been integrated into my research findings.

Pumsuanhang (Michael) Suantak:

The fellowship connected me with experts in internet governance, digital rights, and technology, refining my approach and making my research more practical for Myanmar. I'm expanding my research to develop robust communication systems in Myanmar using sBitx v3 and HERMES due to political instability, natural disasters, and limited infrastructure. sBitx v3 is an open-source SDR transceiver for long-distance HF communication, adaptable for remote regions. HERMES is an open-source digital system using HF radio signals for secure, resilient communication, transmitting text, audio, images, and GPS in infrastructure-limited areas.

Stacco Troncoso:

The fellowship has been key in advancing DisCO Governance and has brought up many more questions and discussions around the topic. Many of these will be reflected in the DisCO Pink Paper and other platforms

The Full Report

Detailed documentation of the fellows' work, including seminar presentations and reflections, is available in our comprehensive fellowship report. This document not only captures the outcomes of the fellowship but also serves as a resource for ongoing and future initiatives in the realm of internet governance.

Read the full report

Looking Forward

We are grateful to the fellows, partners, and all who contributed to the Groundwork Fellowship. As we move forward, we remain committed to exploring and supporting initiatives that empower communities and promote fair governance in digital and physical spaces alike.

If you want to see more of these kinds of fellowships, reach out to hello@metagov.org to explore potential collaborations.

For more on the range of other online and digital governance research that fellows were able to engage with through their fellowship with Metagov, as well as to stay engaged with our future projects, please visit www.metagov.org and consider joining our community of researchers, practitioners, and activators of digital governance.

We look forward to continuing these important conversations and collaborations in the field of internet governance.

Thank you for your interest and support in fostering a more inclusive digital future.

- Cent

In this spotlight, Metagovernor and KOI Pond contributor Brooke Ann Coco introduces KOI Pond, an initiative that unites the complementary expertise of BlockScience—a complex systems engineering, research and development, and analytics firm with a history of architecting information infrastructures—and Metagov’s range of self-governance research and experiments developed in its laboratory for digital governance.

The partnership of these two organizations will facilitate experimental research into the self-governance of Knowledge Organization Infrastructures by online communities in support of Metagov’s mission of “cultivat[ing] tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age.” 

This spotlight introduces the project, details the history of its development, and includes information about how to participate in the project—in particular our Koimmunity Cove Calls, a community call kicking off today, June 13th at 8-9pm UTC, where we will demo, discuss, and steer the KOI Pond project.

RSVP: Koimmunity Cove #1 - June 13, 2024

Introduction

Since its inception in 2019, Metagov has evolved from a small group of researchers into an expansive network of researchers, practitioners, and activators of digital governance. Together, they collaborate around a shared vision: "working toward a governance layer for the internet that is empowering, creative, interconnected, and accountable." As Metagov has expanded, its research activities have flourished, creating a knowledge commons that serves as an open resource for the benefit of all.

While Metagov has celebrated this growth, this expansion has not come without challenges. As the organization's community and research outputs have become more varied, Metagov has had to grapple with issues associated with scaling.1 These include defining its shifting identity, establishing clear boundaries for its geographically dispersed network, and organizing its burgeoning knowledge base. To this end, several community initiatives are actively working to address these challenges. These efforts include the launch of Metagov's redesigned website, along with revamped mission, vision, and value statements developed through co-design workshops and community feedback. Metagov has also been experimenting with various approaches to community membership as well as improving orientation materials and processes to better assimilate new and prospective members.

In this post, we are excited to introduce another such initiative aimed at addressing these challenges - KOI Pond.

The Origin Story: BlockScience’s KMS

Frustrated by the fragmented state of digital data management and its contribution to problematic attention economies, BlockScience built a locally aggregated search tool that could retrieve contextually relevant data when and where it was needed. Known internally as the Knowledge Management System (KMS), the in-house tool integrated all of BlockScience’s internal non-proprietary data to streamline knowledge retrieval within the organization. However, despite its utility, the KMS saw minimal adoption within BlockScience. Although the KMS could locate relevant information within the organization’s ecosystem, it introduced yet another platform that team members had to incorporate into their daily routines.

As large language models (LLMs) had increasingly captivated the global zeitgeist, one team member off-handedly suggested integrating an LLM interface to enhance the system's usability. Within days, the interface was operational, sparking excitement throughout the organization. Team members flocked to the tool, eager to engage with the newly dynamic knowledge system.

This was a powerful concept. But why?

Like most algorithmic systems, LLMs are designed with scalability in mind. They are trained on massive data sets to identify syntactic patterns in human language. Utilizing this knowledge, LLMs perform advanced calculations to determine the most probable sequence of words in response to given prompts. Therefore, despite their extensive knowledge base, LLMs lack semantic nuance. As a result, they require a well-defined context to generate useful, rather than generic, responses. This explains the surge in educational resources focused on prompt engineering. For this reason, some experts, such as Ethan Mollick, suggest treating these tools as if they were enthusiastic interns - confident, hard-working, and eager to please, yet needing clear expectations, close guidance, and frequent verification of their work.

The introduction of an LLM as an interface to BlockScience's KMS effectively addressed the challenge of providing an LLM with a definitive context space. As one of KMS’s lead developers highlighted, “LLMs as an interface are only as good as the underlying data structure” (Orion Reed in Nabben 2023, p16). With direct access to the KMS, the LLM was capable of delivering highly contextual information tailored to BlockScience’s knowledge environment (as pictured below). Michael Zargham, Metagov Research Director and founder/CEO of BlockScience further observed, “The introduction of [an] LLM interface… brought the information in the KMS to the user instead of making the user go to the data.” This user-friendly interface transformed the KMS from an intellectually stimulating but operationally limited initiative into one of BlockScience's most exciting and engaging projects. Ultimately, the team opted to allocate internal resources to integrate the system more permanently into BlockScience's technical infrastructure.

Discussions and Applications of LLMs in Metagov

Meanwhile, as BlockScience was building out its KMS, discussions surrounding LLMs were becoming more prevalent within Metagov. Notably, Metagovernors within the #attentionecon Slack channel exchanged examples of where LLMs were being used in governance. These conversations helped inform this case study on Valory’s Governatooorr. An expanded version of this case study was later included in the working group’s forthcoming article entitled “Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies”. Others had begun incorporating LLMs into Metagov's D20 Governance project, in which Metagovernors built an interactive environment where communities could actively learn about basic governance concepts then engage with them in a playful, hands-on manner.

Faced with the ongoing challenge of defining Metagov’s cultural and organizational identity, another Metagovernor proposed the use of LLMs as an ethnographic tool to help address this identity crisis. Subsequent discussions about how to employ an LLM in this way continued to unfold in the #govbase-labs Slack channel, where Metagovernors began to brainstorm potential research designs. Early discussions considered fine-tuning a foundational LLM on Metagov Slack data. Recognizing the relevance of BlockScience’s concurrent KMS project, Michael Zargham encouraged key KMS developers to engage in these discussions. He further initiated the idea of a potential collaboration between Metagov and BlockScience on this research as an expansion of our past collaborations which have included work on tools for participatory digital ethnography and theorizing computer aided ethnography.

Metagov’s Partnership with BlockScience

In line with their core values, BlockScience eventually decided to open-source the technical architecture of its internal KMS-GPT system. However, originally developed for in-house use, the infrastructure requires retrofitting to enhance accessibility and adaptability for diverse use cases. Therefore, before the system could be fit for external use, BlockScience needed to identify a test case sufficiently different from their own operations to refine the architecture for broader application. Due to its expertise in digital self-governance and its explicit interest in experimenting with LLMs, Metagov was a logical choice for this collaboration. In exchange, BlockScience's KMS-GPT infrastructure seemed poised to help Metagov manage the dynamic, distributed knowledge environment it had been grappling with.

To reflect the broadening scope of BlockScience's KMS-GPT infrastructure, the improved architecture was renamed Knowledge Organization Infrastructure (KOI), while Metagov's experimentation with the infrastructure became known as KOI Pond.

Indeed, Metagov acts as an effective foil to BlockScience. As a firm, BlockScience operates with a more centralized corporate governance structure, where decision-making is often constrained by business policy. It is characterized by a smaller, technically proficient team that benefits from tight feedback loops on its projects. In contrast, Metagov, a nonprofit, has a more distributed operational structure. Metagov has a larger and more diffuse membership with varying levels of technical proficiency. Because many Metagov-affiliated research projects involve a mix of volunteers and contractors, the feedback loops on these initiatives are comparatively looser.

Furthermore, BlockScience and Metagov operate within vastly divergent knowledge environments and use cases. As a small, private engineering and R&D firm, BlockScience leverages its KMS-GPT system to enhance the organization of non-client confidential data for internal use. Consequently, external data access and participatory governance tools were deprioritized. By contrast, Metagov handles a wide spectrum of data that ranges from public to private. As an open community, Metagov must be much more vigilant in attending to the governance of its knowledge objects. For this reason, Metagov appeared to be an ideal candidate to pilot the Reference Identifier (RID) system, a new feature set that BlockScience began developing in mid-2023. Integration of the RID system to the KOI architecture is anticipated to improve the flexibility of community data curation by enabling knowledge objects to be organized dynamically without the constraints of a fixed data structure. In affording greater plasticity, the RID system allows the KOI to be tailored to specific operational contexts.

Metagov’s KOI

Over time, a working group took shape from the weekly Govbase Labs calls to discuss the logistical, analytical, and operational details of implementing a KOI into Metagov's ecosystem. During the initial stages of the project, as lead developer Luke Miller prepared the architecture for integration, discussions centered on formulating research questions, enhancing our understanding of the system's functions and capabilities, designing research experiments, and addressing ethical considerations. As Metagov's KOI has become more operational, discussions have increasingly been directed towards funding and community engagement.

See these images for a preview of the system in development:

____

Want to join the conversation? Join Metagov's Slack and visit:

• #koi-pond to participate in project discussion

• #koi-tank to participate in infrastructure testing

• #govbase-labs to join our weekly meetings (meeting information is in a pinned post to the channel)

____

We are also planning an ethnographic component to this research to examine how the Metagov community navigates the adoption, integration, and maintenance of its KOI. Of particular interest to this research are the digital governance tools and collective governance frameworks that the community employs to better align the KOI with its desired outcomes. Brooke Ann Coco, a fellow Metagovernor, is leading this portion of the research. The findings will contribute to her doctoral dissertation, which is being completed under the guidance of Professor Ellie Rennie and Distinguished Professor Jean Burgess. The ethnographic research has received ethics approval after successfully passing standard ethical review processes. More information about the ethnographic component of this project will be posted in future project updates. 

Get Involved!

Now that Metagov’s KOI is nearly ready for user testing, we welcome the broader community to play a more active role in the project. We invite the community to attend our Koimmunity Cove Calls, a bi-weekly KOI community call where we will discuss and steer the KOI Pond project.

RSVP Koimmunity Cove Call #1

The inaugural Koimmunity Cove Call is scheduled for June 13, 2024 8-9pm UTC. This hour-long session will include an introductory overview of the proposed research experiments and current project documentation, a brief demonstration of its capabilities, a discussion of short-term goals and future aspirations, and a Q&A session. During this session, Meatgovernors can also sign up to receive updates on future contribution opportunities. The call will be recorded for those who are unable to attend.

Subsequent Koimmunity Cove Calls will be 30 minutes in duration every second and fourth Thursday of the month at 8:30-9pm UTC (unless stated otherwise). One of the early objectives of these sessions will be to establish community practices that encourage active involvement from the broader Metagov community. Activities may involve tasks such as prompting our KOI in #koi-tank, responding to polls about which data to have observed next, or participatory workshops to evaluate the quality of Metagov’s KOI. These practices are intended to be light touch actions to build practices around KOI, while enhancing collaboration and communication between system engineers, research directors, project contributors, and the broader community. 

- Brooke Ann Coco

Brooke is a contributor to KOI Pond — see the full list of contributors on the project webpage.

In this spotlight, we delve into the ongoing Interoperable Deliberative Tools RFP (Request For Proposals), an initiative supported by a grant from the Mina Foundation. This is a $200,000 grant program, with grants ranging from $5,000 to $100,000, with the aim of enhancing and integrating deliberative tools within digital governance ecosystems, creating more composable workflows for deliberative governance.

RFP: Interoperable Deliberative Tools

What exactly do we mean by deliberative tools?

We have in mind digital tools that facilitate the discussion and careful debate of various options confronting an organization. These are tools that go beyond basic voting and commenting, and when taken together are able to provide new and composable governance capabilities. The processes these tools enable may be used for online community governance, AI governance and alignment, cooperative governance, citizen town halls or assemblies, or other kinds of institutional policy-making or decision-making.

Deliberative tools may support any part of the governance and decision-making process, going from opinions to decisions, including but not limited to:

• identifying tradeoffs

• drafting policies

• editing policies

• identifying scenarios and cases

• mapping a problem space, solution space, or stakeholder space

• identifying/routing expertise

• navigating conflict, identifying and overcoming ‘cruxes’

• coming to decisions

• evaluating evidentiary justification for decisions

• reconciling conflicting versions of policies

• executing on policies

• adjudicating using policies or cases

• determining budgets

• creating agendas or priorities

• etc.

Some examples of deliberative tools include:

• Pol.is

• Remesh

• Decidem

• Decide Madrid

• Loomio

• Consider.it

• Stanford Online Deliberation Platform

What do we mean by interoperability?

A key condition of the grant is that all grantees must support interoperability — the ability for data to be shared and exchanged between and across tools. Projects are expected to meet this requirement by incorporating a process to publish their data in a flat-file format such as JSON, JSON-LD, or CSV.

Our vision is that increased interoperability between these tools will lead to more opportunities for the use of deliberative decision-making tools, and ultimately advance more collective governance. Interoperability requirements are described more fully in the draft specification and rationale accompanying this RFP. 

The grant program is tech-agnostic — we do not expect applicants to utilize any specific technologies or tools. 

Key details

Deadline for the RFP: May 31st

Our RFP was announced April 1st and has since facilitated two FAQ sessions. To continue supporting prospective applicants we are conducting one final FAQ session this week, on May 15th, and encourage all potential grant applicants to register for the session. We are also maintaining a document of FAQs.

RSVP: FAQ session May 15, 2024

As part of the initiative, we are also looking for a Senior Research Engineer to lead the development of digital infrastructure and standards designed to support the interoperability of deliberative and governance tools. This position represents a unique opportunity to shape the future of deliberation and governance tools. 

Apply: Senior Research Engineer Role

We encourage readers to actively engage with this initiative by joining the #interoperability channel in our Slack and engaging in the conversation there.  Whether you are a long-time community member or not yet part of Metagov, please feel free to apply to the RFP and/or join the community Slack if this is of interest to you. The #interoperability channel is also a place where applicants can ask questions about the RFP, meet other prospective applicants, and begin to form collaborations. 

Join: Metagov Community

If you know of individuals, projects, or communities working in and around deliberative tooling, please share our RFP website within your networks to ensure a diverse range of applicants and innovative ideas are submitted and enabled to interoperate with each other.

Apply & Share: RFP

We are looking forward to seeing the applications and the types of decisions that will be empowered by this cohort of developers, researchers, and practitioners working together to make their work interoperable with each other.

- Nitin Mariserla

The Interoperable Deliberative Tools RFP would not be possible without the work and contributions of:

• Aviv Ovadya - AI & Democracy Foundation

• Joshua Tan - Co-Founder/RD, Metagov

• Amy Zhang - University of Washington

• Colin Megill - Pol.is

• Eugene Leventhal - ED, Metagov

• Nitin Mariserla - PM, Metagov

This spotlight features a case study we conducted with our new community self-governance application, CollectiveVoice. The study is a follow-up to Shauna Gordon-McKeon’s guest blog post on the Open Collective blog titled “Govern your Collective with Metagov Gateway”. In that post, Shauna detailed how she worked closely with two Open Collective communities to help them set up unique, collective governance policies across different platforms using Metagov’s tools.

Metagov Refresher

If you’re here and don’t already know who, or remember what, Metagov is: Metagov is a laboratory for digital governance, with a mission to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age.

For many communities today, online platforms play a key role in how they communicate and coordinate. Additionally, the platforms that communities use have effects on how they are able to self-govern themselves. Many platforms, in fact, are designed in ways that undermine self-governance. In particular, communities using platforms that perpetuate the admin-user model, also described as "implicit feudalism," face a common but critical issue:

• Admin-user models grant administrators disproportionate power over users by opening the potential for an admin to exploit key technical infrastructure or systems in ways that may be known or unknown to users.

Metagov’s tools give communities ways to prevent, respond to, and hold accountable this typically absolute admin power. This is done by introducing governance practices into the operation of shared digital infrastructure. Communities can automatically link executive administrative actions with collective decision-making processes, including juries, term limits, deliberative assemblies, consensus, and more—making transparency possible and accountability automatic.

And while, in principle, this intervention enables and expands much-needed governance capabilities, particularly when using admin/user-modeled platforms, it hasn’t always been very easy to write and maintain the policies (programs or scripts) necessary to link and automate these governance practices. Since Shauna’s initial blog in 2021, we have worked on improving these tools to make them easier to use and understand for online communities. CollectiveVoice is one example of this work and brings us one step closer to governance-enabled models of online platforms. We are excited to share the latest developments in this work with you here.

Introducing CollectiveVoice

CollectiveVoice is an application that enables open collective communities to choose from a more diverse set of governance processes to make decisions about shared finances (powered by PolicyKit and the Metagov Gateway).  In case you’ve found this blog but haven’t heard of Open Collective, Open Collective is a platform for transparent money management for organizations such as co-ops, nonprofits, mutual aid groups, and open-source software groups.

On Open Collective, admins have decision-making power to approve or reject submitted expenses, while non-admin members do not. For communities with decentralized or democratic governance as a pillar, these types of technological restrictions can be misaligned with community values and work against operations.

For example, administrators can find themselves in a position where they may need to make decisions without all the necessary information or on behalf of other group members—perhaps without ever being explicitly granted that authority. For administrators, this can lead to micromanagement, duplication of work, slowdowns, and burnout. For non-admin community members, this can lead to mistrust, overdependence, bias, and exclusion.

Over the past few months, we conducted 15 interviews with leaders and stewards of self-governing communities to learn more about the challenges they face conducting governance over shared finances. We spoke with representatives from a variety of Open Collective communities, including mutual aid groups, open source software projects, social justice organizations, co-living communities, and more based across the U.S. and Europe. We wanted to know what decision-making procedures and digital tools they were already using and what types of features would be most supportive of their working processes and structures.

Key Takeaways from Interviews

From these interviews, we learned that

• communities are distributed across several digital tools and platforms, and

• communities need context-aware decision-making procedures based on expense types

Communities expressed the need to be able to define qualities for specific types of expenses, say, based on expense amount, title/description, or tag in Open Collective, and then match that expense type to a specific voting template or policy that gets sent to a digital tool of the community’s choice, typically a platform where the majority of the community gathers to communicate.

This is the type of automated governance interoperability that CollectiveVoice is able to support by embracing decentralization and modularity. CollectiveVoice embraces decentralization by using Metagov Gateway to connect existing platforms (i.e., Open Collective, Slack, Discord, GitHub, etc.) and modularity by using PolicyKit to write platform- and integration-specific policies that bi-directionally expand the set of governance features available to a set of linked platforms and tools.

To illustrate this automated governance interoperability in concrete terms, consider the following example, where CollectiveVoice deploys different decision-making procedures based on the type of expense submitted to Open Collective:

Example: A community wants to establish unique decision-making policies for two types of expenses:

1. Small, recurring, and essential expenses: Submitting these types of expenses triggers a quick and easy “peer-approval” process requiring the approval of the expense from any one other person in the community, and

2. Larger, one-off, and nonessential expenses: Submitting these types of expenses triggers a larger, four-person jury deliberation.

3. In both cases, the results of a decision-making procedure are sent back to Open Collective and trigger the approval or rejection of a submitted expense.

The image below represents how CollectiveVoice handles these two different expense policies by watching for Open Collective expense submissions, triggering the appropriate decision-making procedure on the community’s linked Slack (the platform we focused on for this pilot), and sending results from Slack back to Open Collective to either approve or reject the submitted expense.

In this demo video, you’ll see that we’ve built CollectiveVoice to accommodate a wide variety of different expense types that communities may want to account for and enable the creation of different policies that pair with those expense types. Down the line, we want to expand the types of voting templates available by default. If you have a policy you’d like to try, please get in touch with us!

Another insight from our interviews was the need from communities for the following additional features from tools for collectively self-governing funds:

• Transparency over shared money

• Easy, low-bar participation

• Community knowledge of rules and policies

• Social capacity building and education

• Ability to experiment

Pilot Program with MAMAS

In May 2023, we onboarded a mutual aid group called MAMAS (Mutual Aid Medford & Somerville) to CollectiveVoice. MAMAS distributes groceries to their local community, with costs for groceries averaging around $7,500 per month. Members buy groceries for distribution and submit their receipts to MAMAS’ Open Collective for reimbursement.

A representative from MAMAS used CollectiveVoice’s no-code UX to set up a custom policy for making decisions about grocery expense reimbursements. They configured an emoji-voting process in their Slack workspace, which allowed more members of their community (including non-admins of Open Collective) to participate in the decision-making over expense reimbursement. Each time an expense reimbursement was posted to Open Collective, the decision-making processes would be triggered by sending a post to their Slack with information about the request and the option to approve (up-vote) or reject (down-vote) the request. The policy set a threshold of upvotes necessary for an expense to be approved and trigged the automatic approval of the reimbursement request on Open Collective if that threshold was reached. Otherwise, if the threshold was not met (or there had been downvotes), then the expense was automatically rejected in Open Collective.

After three months, we caught up with Skyler Karzhevsky, one of the lead organizers of MAMAS, for feedback on how CollectiveVoice had changed their expense reimbursement decision-making processes. Although the policy was quite simple, it still managed to accomplish some of the key goals we were targeting, including distributing workload among leadership, increasing transparency, democratizing decision-making, boosting collective responsibility and participation, and spurring creativity in governance.

Conclusion and Further Research

Our pilot with MAMAS demonstrated the capacity for our tool to support communities with cross-platform self-governance, but there is more work to be done.

One driving question we are continuing to explore is: how does resource allocation look different in a community under different financial governance models or decision-making structures? There are many diverse governance processes a community could choose from when designing their governance models. See the table below for some of the possibilities.

We’d love to work with you to implement and trial these processes. Currently, CollectiveVoice only works for Slack, but if you use another communication platform, please reach out. We are actively seeking support to improve integrations with Discord, GitHub, and other platforms.

If you would like to try out CollectiveVoice or contribute to its development, please reach out to us at val@metagov.org. You can also reach out to our team in the #metagov-gateway channel of the Metagov Slack.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to hear from you and your collectives soon!

Val Elefante, Nick Vincent, and Skylar Karzhevsky

Special thanks to the rest of the CollectiveVoice team (Amy Zhang, Leijie Wang, Julija Rukanskaite, Cent Hosten, and Josh Tan), MAMAs organizers and community, and Open Collective for all your support.

More links and information about Collective Voice:

• Val Elefante and Nick Vincent presented CollectiveVoice as part of Sociocracy for All’s Power, Purpose, and Pay Conference in September 2023.

• CollectiveVoice is an app built out of a larger project called PolicyKit, which was featured in a recent New_Public newsletter.

• PolicyKit’s website is currently getting a makeover; stay tuned👀–but for now visit PolicyKit.org or the PolicyKit Github to learn more and contribute.

• Similar projects to CollectiveVoice on our radars include Papertree and FundDrupal.

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We are excited to announce and feature our upcoming Metagov seminar series: On and Off Responsibilities in Governing AI.

This is a four-week series running from January 31st through February 21st, 2024, with seminars taking place on Wednesdays from 12-1pm Eastern Time. 

The series will be led by Metagov community participant, Harvard Fellow, and Responsible AI Institute Research Scientist, Manon Revel, and is conducted in collaboration with the Responsible AI Institute. 

🌐 Ready to join right away? 

Registration for all four seminars is now open and accessible through our Luma. Click the image above or button bellow to register.

Register Now

Background

Since the founding of Metagov, we have hosted over a hundred seminars featuring research and projects from our community and guests. Seminars explore a diverse range of topics in online and digital governance. The seminars have long been a cornerstone of the organization, serving as a regular Schelling point for the community to gather and exchange ideas, a venue for the general public to be introduced to contemporary research in online governance, and a means of exercising collective self-governance with seminars proposed and voted on by the community using PolicyKit. 

Over time, we’ve seen an increase in the number of people in our community proposing seminars, as well as increases in capacity as more people from the community contribute to the seminar by becoming a seminar facilitator. These increases in capacity and the gradual decentralization of the seminar’s maintenance and operation has cultivated a more defined sense of community ownership over the seminar program.

Reflections and Development

In 2023 we reserved a handful of seminars for the community to reflect on the past and future of the seminar. During those discussions, we thought about the ways the seminar had served us well so far, and what ways we might like to see the seminar progress in 2024.

In general, reflections tended to focus on ways of approaching the seminar that could increase shared knowledge exchange and community collaboration. In particular we discussed:

1. Duration and Depth: The way the seminar was structured tended to optimize for topic variability. On the one hand, having a high degree of variability is aligned with Metagov’s interest in decentralization, and also presents more opportunities for our research and community to connect with new audiences. On the other hand, constantly high variety can sometimes make it harder for a community to develop shared connections and ways of sense-making together. By returning to the same topic over an extended period of time, diverse ways of thinking about that topic are able to find common ground with each other, resulting in the development of more integrated and cohesive forms of collective intelligence. Noticing this organizational tendency, proposals began to emerge to balance the stream constant variety with an occasionally longer stretch of seminars focused on a specific topic. 

2. Collaboration and Co-production: Proposals to experiment with topics spanning multiple seminars were also complimented by voices from the community excited by the potential to engage in more community collaboration and co-production. By making more space for a given topic to unfold, a more multi-modal model of the seminar started to emerge, one where theory and practice could come into productive dialogue with each other. For example, one week might feature a lecture and discussion, while the next could feature an experimental governance workshop followed by collective writing and debriefing exercises. 

In addition to these reflections on format, we also discussed ideas for topical framings. We came up with thirteen potential framings and posed them to the community as an approval voting poll. Here are the results of the poll, ranked from most to least votes. 

• Online <> Offline Governance: How might online governance integrate more closely with in person interactions? (+15)

• Alternative Infrastructures: What alternative infrastructures exist for online governance, and how do they affect how we govern ourselves? (+13)

• Data Governance and Solidarity: What models and practices exist for collectively governing our data? (+13)

• Practical Governance & Communication: How do we communicate the practical applications and impact of online governance to friends who are not very online? (+12)

• Comparative Governance: How do different cultures and communities relate to and implement rules and governance across history, place (digital and physical), and scale? (+9)

• Automated Governance: What role does automated decision making and agents play in governance? (+9)

• Psychology & Governance: How do mental models of governance intersect with individual behavior? How are these complementary or at odds? (+8)

• Challenging Assumptions: What do we hold true, and how can we change our perspective? (+7)

• Internet Governance Layer: What does it mean to build a governance layer for the internet? (+6)

• Politics & Governance: Where do governance and politics intersect? (+6)

• Governance Study & Research: How can we expand our understanding of governance “research” and "study" through engagements with various fields of study like black studies, digital humanities, music studies, performance studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and more? (+6)

• Internet Governance & Climate: How do internet governance and aspects of climate and ecological study inform the way we think about the future and sustainability of governance more broadly? (+5)

• Governance Transitions: What are people’s first-hand accounts of online governance transitions? (+5)

Series Overview and Registration

On and Off Responsibilities in Governing AI is our first attempt at organizing a seminar series that reflects the expressed interests of the community both in terms of form and framing. 

In terms of framing, the series aims to bring into conversation an interplay between perspectives on governance methods, models, and innovations initially developed to respond to the particularities of governing online and offline resources and structures. In particular, we are using this interplay to consider contemporary developments in AI governance and how different perspectives on governance can productively come together to shape our sense of responsibility to these developments. This framing is also, in part, where the title of the series draws its name from. 

To give a sense for the formal implementation, the following week-by-week, high-level overview of the series is instructive. We have attempted to combine a set of interactive, co-productive, and experiential activities with theoretical explorations and expert presentations in a way that dynamically brings us closer to a shared perspective on the series topic. For convenience, a registration link for each seminar is included after each week’s description:

• Week 1: participants meet each other, make introductions, and collectively establish individual and common intentions/alignment. Registration Link

• Week 2: participants take part in an interactive governance experiment designed to surface a collective imaginary for how we might approach the governance of AI. Registration Link

• Week 3: Var Shankar, Executive Director of the Responsible AI Institute, joins us to give a guest lecture on approaches to responsibly governing AI. Registration Link

• Week 4: volunteer participants present lightning talks that take a thread of discussion from the previous three weeks and elaborate it to offer one future direction that they could imagine this conversation continuing. We conclude with group co-writing and discussion reflecting on the series as a whole. Registration Link

Connecting With Us

We’re excited to run this experiment, and want to take this opportunity to invite you to join us for not only the series, but to also join us in our community on the Metagov Slack where we will have async discussions on this and other topics related to online and digital governance.

Joining is easy. 

All you need to do is complete a short community survey, and you will be sent an invitation to the Slack along with an welcome email orienting you to the community.

Complete this short survey to join today

We look forward to meeting you and seeing where this conversation leads us.

-Cent

Here’s the link to the presentation deck.

The Grant Innovation Lab is meant to capture all of the related activities at Metagov and DAOstar under a single project umbrella. The vision of this effort is to help improve the understanding and tooling related to grant issuance to make it as easy as possible for those applying for grants while maximizing the impact of the work done. The mission of the effort is to conduct research, technical work, and community building to create actionable advances for grant programs. 

While we are starting with a focus on granting in the Web3 world, our goal is to broaden the scope of our work to collaborate with any organization that is working on improving how grants are issued, how impact is measured, what kind of open source infrastructure needs to be in place to support these advancements, and to build the social networks needed to ensure lasting and sustainable change. 

The first focus area for the Grant Innovation Lab is on research. We have applied to grants at DFINITY and ENS to support a potential V2 of the State of Web3 Grants report and we are exploring a grant to produce a State of Retroactive Funding in Web3. From there, we are interested in conducting research such as: 

• An assessment of Web3 Grants Tooling options

• Grantee assessments within and across different ecosystems 

• A literature review of best practices in granting and research funding 

• An exploration of what a Grant Maturity Index can look like

• Working with specific granting organizations to dive deeper into what impact means in their ecosystem, how to best measure it, and then conduct impact evaluations across grantees

• What are best practices when it comes to conflict of interest disclosure in more decentralized granting environments 

This is by no means an exhaustive list - it’s more of a starting point. Depending on who we collaborate with and what research funding is available, we hope to cover any potential research projects that can help improve how granting is conducted. 

The second focus area for the Grant Innovation Lab is technical development, starting with standards. We are currently looking to get feedback on the current proposed Metadata Standard with the intention to start getting the standard applied in various ecosystems early in 2024. We see this as an important part of enabling more interoperability across grant programs. With that in place, we will be able to explore ideas such as a shared database of approved grants (ideally to integrate with Karma’s Grantee Accountability Protocol), a common app for grants, ideas for impact measurement improvement, and other ideas that emerge from the community. 

We also want to explore what kind of resources can also help the ecosystem such as lists of available grants, data on grant programs (that will be added to our Govbase dataset as a new view), and other ideas that can help both potential grantees and funders navigate the space better. 

The third focus area for the Grant Innovation Lab is community. This will include having a single space for grant program operators to chat, a separate space for the technical working groups, and a mix of virtual and in-person events. We are currently planning a virtual call for operators in January and a 2 day summit in Denver in late February with one day focused on grant operators and one day focused on grantees. 

Calls to action

• Give feedback on our proposed standard

• Fill out the interest form

• Reach out to me if you want to get involved (or if you’re interested in funding research/technical work or to sponsor the Summit in Denver) 

- Eugene Leventhal