Metagov News (April 2023)
Hi Metagovernors,
Welcome to our updated newsletter! You may remember that some of our previous newsletters were packed with information happening across all of Metagov, from project updates to community spotlights and community network news. It was always exciting to see the newsletter represent such a wide ranging and dense collection of activity happening across Metagov, but they were kind of long, both to read and to write.
We’re experimenting with breaking out the newsletter into multiple sections, each covering a domain previously covered in the general newsletter. We have:
Project Updates: this section, which is focused on project updates and Metagov-wide news
Community Features: a dedicated section featuring participants and members of the Metagov community
Research and Outputs: a section for longer form and research-specific pieces like what you can currently find on our Medium
A new, yet to be named section: Our previous Network News section will be newly entrusted to our new Metagov Community Membership Circle: Community Sense-Making + Newsletter Circle. The circle will collectively produce the section using sense-making tools and publish governance design consideration documents reflecting on the process of working with those tools.
So what does this mean for you, the reader? Well, our newsletters will be more digestible, but also more regular. If you’re already a subscriber, or if you subscribe today, you will subscribe to all of our sections. You can always change your subscription settings to receive emails for only the sections you want to follow.
With that out of the way, let’s get on to all of the exciting project updates happening across Metagov.
Project Updates
Membership Program
Speaking of that new Membership Circle, the Metagov membership has been busy laying the foundations for our membership since we announced it last February. Since then, we’ve gone through a metagovernance process to decide how we make decisions (consent), and how we conduct conversations (rounds and progressive stacks). We’ve also agreed on an animating purpose that will guide our activities as a membership:
The purpose of the Metagov membership program is to empower the Metagov community (both its participants and membership) by funding 1) opportunities for the community to engage in self-defined activities relevant to digital governance and metagovernance, and 2) support of the community's health, maintenance, and conviviality through operations carried out by groups or individuals of the community.
Aligned with this purpose, the membership has also agreed to trial two circles:
A Collective Sensemaking + Newsletter Circle, and
An IRL NYC Meetup + Governance Experiments Scaffolding Circle
The newsletter circle was described in the newsletter intro, and the IRL NYC circle will be focused on organizing 2-3 in-person events in NYC with the aim of developing scaffolding for governance experiments that other IRL-focused circles and organizations could trial.
The two circles are just getting started and invitations for the first meeting are being sent out this week. Now is a great time to and get the chance to participate in practical governance and convivial activities in our community of governance researchers and practitioners.
Groundwork Fellowship
In our last newsletter we announced our open call for the Groundwork Fellowship. We’re pleased to be able to now announce the results of our call.
Five fellows will participate in the Groundwork Fellowship program from May 1st to July 28th, during which they will produce an artifact that speaks to the fellowship’s theme of internet infrastructure design, governance, and marginalization. Our fellows include Ammar Manla Hasan, Wanjiru Ngure (aka [M]), Pumsuanhang Suantak (Michael Suantak), ngọc triệu, and Stacco Troncoso.
Ammar Manla Hasan
Ammar Manla Hasan is a journalist, media entrepreneur and researcher, who worked in the Middle East and North Africa’s diverse media, art and culture scenes for over a decade. Ammar is the co-founder of Taxir, an initiative working towards facilitating blockchain adoption in MENA, with particular focus on: financial inclusion, integration in the global digital economy, and advocating for more decentralized and horizontal governance in the fields of labor and social change activism.
Wanjiru Ngure / [M]
Wanjiru Ngure (aka [M]), is to be considered one of the most authentic entities of expression to emerge from Kenya. She is a sound artist, DJ, creative coder, tutor and community curator.
Through her time as an artist, she has actively taken initiatives to address issues within her artist community by creating platforms to expand opportunities for artistic development through The Rhealistic Collective such as TCHNO, a platform that gives artists an alternative space to explore slightly different approaches to techno music and culture, and BYTE, a platform for spreading the world of creative coding through Sonic Pi and Hydra.
Wanjiru has recently been exploring sonic research in the "Cycle of Peace", a piece derived from a concept of war, where her interest lies on figuring out how to escape the cycle: Peace to Tension, Chaos, Consciousness and Forgiveness, to achieve continual peace.
Wanjiru completed her first exploration, “Cycle of Peace: Security is The People”, through the Digital Informalities project, a contemporary art exhibition about the forms of security, reciprocity and trust necessary for a community to thrive in a world marked by digitalization. The work is hosted by MATZA Edgelands in collaboration with Wajukuu Arts Center.
Pumsuanhang Suantak (Michael Suantak)
Pumsuanhang Suantak (Michael Suantak) is a civic-minded social innovator who has made a significant impact in India and Myanmar. While born and educated in India, he has worked in Myanmar for decades and is known as one of the "Myanmar digital Tarzans from the Jungle of Chin State," where he built a community wireless network that connects 20 jungle villages with the MESH network in Chin State. This network serves educational content, including Khan Academy video content, local news, and infotainment, on local open-source servers, which are maintained by local communities.
Prior to this initiative, he was a founding member of the BIT team in 2002 and an organizational manager in New Delhi, India. He has since become a digital security trainer, raising awareness of digital security and digital rights with local and international experts. Pumsuanhang is also one of the 150-plus DeBoer fellows and is currently working with ASORCOM (Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities) as a Director. His current work includes leading research in digital and cybersecurity auditing for change agent organizations, cyber policy development in Asia, and integrating modern technology into the education system. His primary interests are digital and cybersecurity policy, law development, and enforcement in Asia.
ngọc triệu
ngọc triệu practices design and research as interventions to address and reform asymmetrical power relations through the lenses of decoloniality and decentralization. Her work focuses on the intersection of human-centered design, digital rights, and public-interest technology. ngọc is passionate about user advocacy, co-creation, and equal access to knowledge. Whether she is distilling data into insights that inform design decisions or developing a new UX pattern for distributed systems, ngọc collaborates closely with tech funders, designers, developers, and researchers to ensure usability, security, and safety for marginalized and vulnerable communities.
Currently, ngọc works as a design researcher at Superbloom, a design non-profit that leverages design as a transformative practice to shift power in the tech ecosystem. She's also a maintainer of Decentralization Off the Shelf, an initiative focused on creating resources and providing design support for practitioners in decentralization.
Stacco Troncoso
Stacco Troncoso is an avid synthesizer of information and a radical polymath working towards elemental, people-led change on a burning planet. Stacco lives, breathes, teaches and writes on the Commons, P2P politics and economics, open culture, post-growth futures, Platform and Open Cooperativism, decentralized governance, blockchain and more as part of DisCO.coop, Commons Transition and Guerrilla Translation.
DWeb Camp
DWeb Camp is just around the corner, June 21-25!
Last year, Metagov had the privilege of collaborating with RadicalxChange and The Internet Archive, with funding from Unfinished (now Project Liberty), to organize the Redwood Parliament, a governance convocation event that brought together a collection of interdisciplinary thinkers, artists, dreamers, and builders to discuss, role play, speculate, and workshop our way towards a governance layer for the internet. Check out this beautiful film that Dylan Reibling made for us documenting a snapshot of the gathering.
Building off the success of Redwood Parliament, and inspired by the like-minded community we found at DWeb Camp, we are partnering with DWeb this year to feature our Groundwork Fellows. Our fellows will collectively organize a workshop session during camp to prototype and test work-in-progress artifacts being developed for the fellowship.
We’d love to have as many readers of Metagov join us in person in Navarro, California to meet our fellows and participate in the unique experience that is DWeb Camp. And to help make that happen, DWeb Camp is offering readers of our mailing list a discount on tickets! Use the promo code “FriendsAndFamily” when purchasing your ticket to get a 25% discount. Offer available until May 8th.
And if you’re in the giving spirit after purchasing your discounted tickets, please consider making a donation to our fundraising efforts to support travel for our fellows to attend DWeb this year. More information on our Open Collective.
Gitcoin Rounds - Governance Research and More
Metagov will be running a featured grant round on DAOs and decentralized governance research as part of Gitcoin's featured rounds and following the release of the first draft of Open Problems in DAOs. We have already started taking applications and will continue to take more through May.
We are seeking to feature researchers and academics with previous work on governance, with a focus on researchers new to DAOs and decentralized governance. We are working on setting up a $25,000 matching fund that will match general contributions via quadratic funding.
The current timing of the next featured round is likely to be in July. We will provide more updates as that gets clarified. If you’re interested in applying, fill out this typeform.
In the meantime, we have two rounds of active funding on Gitcoin at the moment, one for Metagov, and another for DAOstar. Consider making a contribution supporting public goods research.
Metagov Staff and Research Directors
We are excited to announce two new research directors joining Metagov: Philipp Zahn of 20squares / CyberCat Institute, and Amber Case of DAODAO and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center!
Philipp Zahn
Philipp is a computational economist, formerly a professor at St. Gallen’s University in Switzerland, who pioneered the theory of open games, a mathematical framework that makes game theory more compositional and more like a programming language. He currently leads work at 20squares, which is working with the Ethereum Foundation and other organizations applying his insights to the design of smart contracts.
Case
Case is a "cyborg anthropologist" and two-time successful startup founder now working primarily as an independent researcher in the area of Calm Tech; she is an author and a public speaker, as well as a consultant on the relationships between humans and tech. She is now in the process developing a new standards body specifically around her work on Calm Tech which emphasizes context-appropriate use of attention, and which fundamentally aligns with the sentiments embodied in Metagov’s attention-economy research thrust.
ETH Denver
Metagov House
As part of ETH Denver, Cent Hosten of Metagov organized a series of wonderful side events that we called Metagov House. These were a collection of intimate gatherings of 20-30 people, covering topics such as DAO constitutions and amendability (ft. Eric Altson, Theo Beutel, Gerrit Brügge, Nicolas Biagosch, and Retro), affinal kinship-logics for DAOs (ft. Anna Weichselbraun), attention economies and governance surfaces (ft. Nathan Schneider, and Ronen Tamari), and collective game design and governance (ft. Paul Gadi and Case).
From research fellow Isaac Patka: “Metagov House was perfect, I felt like I could relax and just let the best of ETH Denver come to my house.”
The events ranged from highly technical discussions of constitutionalism, design mockups of governance dashboards for a world where online governance was an everyday activity, bean and string diagrams of kinship crypto networks and guerilla infrastructures, and collective exercises in dissolving the subjectivity of individuality. The events were a testament to the wide range of approaches our community takes to governance research and experimentation and we’re excited to continue to host more in-person events like these at future conferences. Here are some photos from the gatherings.
The Noise of Democracy: Attention Economies and Attention Governance
Nathan Schneider and Ronen Tamari have started a research project on attention economies and governance. As part of that project they facilitated one of the ETH Denver Metagov House side events. Participants shared experiences and insights related to governance tools and practices, designed mockups of “dream governance dashboards'' (for some groups that meant no dashboards at all!) and brainstormed open questions to incorporate into our research. Join #attentionecon in the Metagov Slack (join here) to participate in the discussion.
Constitutions of Web3
We officially presented the Constitutions of Web3 project at ETH Denver in February! We shared some of the insights from our analysis on DAO constitutions as well as recommendations for future constitutions. Anna Weischelbraun and Joshua Tan presented on behalf of a larger team including Max Langenkamp, Ann Brody, and Lucia Korpas as well as our partners Jacky Zhao and Jasmine Wang at Verses. You can see the recording below and the slides here. Next up: cleaning up the data, adding new submitted constitutions from Q and Taxir, and submitting the essay for conference publication. Thanks to Filecoin and the University of Oxford / EPSRC for making this work possible.
SAFE for DAOs
Our amazing intern, Lance Davis, presented his summer project on a “SAFE for DAOs” on the main DAO stage at ETH Denver! The YCombinator SAFE, or “Simple Agreement for Future Equity'', is a standard vehicle for seed-stage startups to take on investment without the hassle of running a full financing round. DAOs, so far, have had to make do with far less secure and optimized instruments. In this project, Lance, Joshua Tan, and Philipp Zahn use compositional game theory to extend the YC SAFE to an equivalent smart contract. We had an incredible response from the audience from the presentation and are now looking at extending the model / contract with some ZK-powered private attestations (normal SAFEs are private by default). Take a look at the recording of the talk below and get in touch with Josh or Lance in the Metagov Slack if you’re interested in getting involved!
Governance Transitions Project
The governance transitions project is an NSF-funded collaboration between Amy Zhang, Nathan Schneider, Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Josh Tan, and Seth Frey. It is interested in how communities such as open source projects and DAOs transition from benevolent dictatorship. We’ve been actively engaging with DAOs, open source projects, and other online communities to understand their needs and challenges. We’re recently back from PyCon, the major Python community conference, where we convened an open space on governance, and attracted major players in the space, including representatives of NumFOCUS, Jupyter, ReadTheDocs, Astropy, vmware, plone, and the Python Software Foundation.
One major takeaway from this gathering was that good governance documents may be a cause, not an effect, of a community that has succeeded in funneling users into contributor and eventually maintainer roles. Next steps are to start a practitioner conversation around the challenges of growing a project from a single founding contributor through bona fide community governance.
Governance.md
As part of the Governance Transition Project, Metagov researchers Amy Zhang and Seth Frey have published a paper titled “GitHub OSS Governance File Dataset”, with co-authors Yibo Yan, Vladimir Filkov, and Likang Yin. Open-source Software (OSS) has become a valuable resource in both industry and academia over the last few decades. Despite the innovative structures they develop to support the projects, OSS projects and their communities have complex needs and face risks such as getting abandoned. To manage the internal social dynamics and community evolution, OSS developer communities have started relying on written governance documents that assign roles and responsibilities to different community actors.
To facilitate the study of the impact and effectiveness of formal governance documents on OSS projects and communities, we’ve presented a longitudinal dataset of 710 GitHub-hosted OSS projects with \path{this http URL} governance files. This dataset includes all commits made to the repository, all issues and comments created on GitHub, and all revisions made to the governance file. We hope its availability will foster more research interest in studying how OSS communities govern their projects and the impact of governance files on communities.
Compositional Game Theory For Humans
We have a new paper out in the journal PLOS ONE titled “Composing games into complex institutions” by Seth Frey, Jules Hedges, Joshua Tan, and Philipp Zahn. This is a general audience introduction to compositional game theory, a design framework for computational institution design that comes with a CAD-like software for governance.
Just as you simulate a bridge to understand the unexpected natural pressures it undergoes, from wind and traffic, there is a comparable need to understand the social pressures that will stress and change a social system. With formal computational design of social systems, we can test and plan for those pressures, and accomplish many other tasks: high-level comparison of social systems, forking, clear language for talking about a design, and even easier onboarding. The paper introduces to a general audience one of the major developments in this area.
Calm Tech Standards
There is now a Calm Tech Department at Metagov! #calm-tech-department in the Metagov Slack (join!)
Our world is made of information that competes for our attention. What is necessary? What is not?
When we design products, we aim to choose the best position for user interface components, placing the most important ones in the most accessible places on the screen. Equally important is the design of communication. How many notifications are necessary? How and when should they be displayed? To answer this, we can be inspired by the principles of calm technology.
Current research in the Calm Tech Department is on attention, how to focus the standards body, and where to start. If you’re interested in contributing, connect with Case in Slack, or in the channel itself. Also consider contributing to the calmtech.com redesign doc!
If you’d like to learn more about Calm Tech, you can check out a few foundational articles.
Keep on the lookout for new materials and resources as the year progresses! We expect that in July or later these materials will really start shaping up. Then we will start to fundraise in earnest for the department.
PolicyKit, Gateway, and Collective Voice
Collective Voice, our no-code PolicyKit and Metagov Gateway integration with Open Collective, is just weeks away from an MVP launch! Thanks to Nick Vincent who is working on the implementation. The tool aims to help communities with decision-making over group finances. We are planning to run a month-long pilot program with a handful of communities to test the tool. If your community uses OpenCollective and Slack for communication, and might like to participate (or you want to learn more), email Val Elefante at val@metagov.org.
PolicyKit is also in the middle of a revamp✨ with a new-and-improved backend data model thanks to Leijie Wang and a new frontend UI/UX web interface thanks to Julija Rukanskaite! Keep on the lookout in Slack for future user testing opportunities - and thanks to everyone who has provided your valuable feedback already.
We’re also hiring a new front-end developer to work on the new PolicyKit UI/UX. Check out our job description and send us a short message if the idea of working on collective governance tools excites you.
Designing Just Governance
The Designing Just Governance research project, led by community research fellow Marcel Minutolo, has been speaking to a range of members from a historically-marginalized BIPOC community in order to understand their current “governance” practices and the use-cases of new community technologies in local entrepreneurship. We are looking for support from the community for two projects. The first is for a volunteer to develop a DAO for BootUp. A non-profit program that teaches youth from a BIPOC community about technology. The intent is to support the educational program and provide incentives for the participants to complete activities. The second is to prototype an instance of Decidim to support governance of Community Forge. CF is a nonprofit organization that provides support services to a BIPOC community and the entrepreneurs that come out of it. The intent is to have a beta version that the board can use and later rollout for the community.
Cryptopolitics
Lucia Korpas, Seth Frey, and Josh Tan have published a paper on “Political, Economic, and Governance Attitudes of Blockchain Users” using data collected as part of the Cryptopolitics survey.
Based on nearly 4000 responses, they find that the mean respondent is libertarian leaning but with liberal beliefs, including concern about fairness and power; overall, respondents hold a wide range of opinions on the distribution of economic and governance power, external regulation of blockchain technologies, and personal attitudes towards crypto.
These findings point the way for further economic, political, sociological, and anthropological research into how people are using blockchain. Obtaining an accurate understanding of the economic functions that blockchain fulfills for its users and the extent to which users are polarized on key issues of blockchain governance could help developers, lawmakers, and regulators of blockchain technology act more effectively.
DAO Harvard
Metagov helped organize DAO Harvard, a three-day conference that brought together practitioners, policymakers, and academics to engage in conversations regarding DAO research, legal frameworks for DAOs (with a focus on DAO Model Law by COALA), and policy responses to DAOs. The gathering was co-hosted by Harvard Belfer Center’s Technology and Public Purpose Project and Harvard University’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, with planning support from Metagov, Blockchaingov (led by research director Primavera De Filippi), and the DAO Research Collective (led by advisor Connor Spelliscy). We want to thank Tally and Uniswap for helping sponsor the receptions for the Research Summit, and we especially want to thank co-organizer Sarah Hubbard of the Harvard Kennedy School for pulling everything together. Thank you!!
DAOstar
DAOstar has been hard at work.
We launched the new DAOIP system and discussion forum at ETH Denver.
DAOstar fellow Joni Pirovich, lead of the Regulatory Interoperability Working Group (a.k.a. Millennium Falcon), recently presented her work on a standard compliance interface for DAOs to an audience of policymakers, regulators, and researchers at DAO Harvard.
We announced the grants standard at Schelling Point, which was a collaboration involving Gitcoin, OpenQ, DaoLens, KycDAO, and Solana.
We recently launched a new working groups: Delegations, led by Mahesh Murthy of Karma and Raf Solari of Tally with support from Agora, Uniswap, and Optimism.
We’re supporting Governor-specific standards with OpenZeppelin, Tally, ScopeLift, NounsDAO, and JokeDAO.
For a summary of our activities this season, take a look at https://github.com/metagov/daostar/discussions/53
DAOstar Travels
DAOstar has stops planned at many upcoming ETH Global and Web3 events. We’re looking to onboard more DAOs and companies to DAO standards.
Aman, the community lead at DAOstar, recently represented DAOstar at DAO Tokyo and ETH Tokyo. He spoke at multiple panels and side events, including the DAO Tokyo panel “Building DAOs and Governance Systems” joined by friends at DAOlens and Curve Labs. DAO Tokyo gave insights into the unique challenges faced by web3 communities from countries like Japan, South Korea and China. DAOstar would like to thank initiatives like HanDAO, Plancker, AkiyaDAO, SporeDAO etc. for the great conversations!
DAOstar is actively working on a broader Asia-Pacific outreach strategy, to encourage the adoption and development of DAO standards. We are working with PlanckerDAO to develop a NFT-based voting standard as a DAOIP. Research assistant Hazel Devjani is in conversation with organizations such as SeeDAO, LXDAO, and g0v da0 to explore alignment.
We are also applying to Gitcoin’s Global Chinese Community beta round, which will go towards supporting DAO standards in the region.
DAO Creative Universe
DAO Creative Universe is an open-source creative experiment at producing narrative content for the DAO ecosystem. We are working to build a mythos around DAOs, highlight non-financial DAO use-cases and stories, and coordinate narratives for the entire industry. Towards this end, we are building a Miro Board mapping out DAO ecosystem players (such as DAOs, Tooling, Frameworks, Research Organizations). We are also experimenting with decentralized narrative content creation, with liberal uses of generative AI, such as GPT and Midjourney. If you are interested and would like to get involved, drop a message to hazel@daostar.org.
Open Problems in DAOs
A first draft of the Open Problems in DAOs survey paper was launched during DAO Harvard 2023! Open Problems in DAOs is a cross-disciplinary initiative, intended to:
establish and publish key problems and research opportunities in DAOs,
communicate those problems and opportunities and their relevance to researchers not already familiar with DAOs, and
collect and cite existing research works and projects related to DAOs.
We are sourcing some final additions and plan to finalize the draft in May, with plans to send out for journal review shortly after.
Govbase Labs
Govbase Labs continues to give Metagov researchers a venue to share their on-going research with other Metagov participants.
Most recently, we’ve had Kelsie Nabben share her research on digital self-infrastructuring, Tara Merk present on governance transitions happening in the DADA collective, Nathan Schneider share an early draft of his upcoming book Governable Spaces for feedback, and Joshua Tan present on the topic of algebraic governance.
Mike Price has shared his work on making tools for using large language models (LLMs) to understand text datasets such as Reddit and conduct digital ethnography. His first first test case has been to identify changes through time in how people define DAO. He has also shared a drafted series of essays exploring human history, evolution, artificial intelligence (AI), and distributed governance.
Coming up in May, Ellie Rennie and Matt Green will share their ongoing work using Obsidian to do ethnographic coding of comments collected through Telescope, a bot for ethical digital ethnography.
To attend a lab, join our community and say hi in the #govbase channel.
Metagovernance Seminar
Upcoming
Han Tang, Introducing SeeDAO Governance
Recent
Benjamin Henretig, Zachary Schlosser, Corey Cleland, Screening: (N)ever (F)orget (T)his
Case, How Design is Governance: Shaping Effective Governance Landscapes
Daniel Kronovet, Chat-bot boarding house: applications of digital governance to physical communities
Arnau Monterde, Decidim: Public-common democratic governance for a free software project
Sofía Cossar, Jamilya Kamalova, Tara Merk, Ethnographic Study of Proof of Humanity DAO Community Fork and Governance
Simon Pek, Deliberative democracy, deliberative mini-publics, and member participation in large cooperatives
Manon Revel, Liquid Democracy in Practice
Anna Lenhart, Public Engagement in Social Media Policy Through Game Play: A Citizen Panel Case Study
Metagov Short Talks, Melvin K Oxenreider III (mel.eth), on "Democracy and Republic: Testing, Adjusting, and Automating the Ancient Balance of Power"
As always, a full archive of our seminars can be found on our Internet Archive page. Visit our Research Seminars page for the full schedule.
And that’s it for this edition of Metagov News. As always, if you’re not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up below.
If you’d like to join the group of metagovernors discussing these topics, you can visit our community website and complete our survey.
Thanks for reading!
🌱
Cent
w/contributions by Aman, Case, Hazel Dev, Val Elefante, Eugene Leventhal, Seth Frey, Tara Merk, Marcel Minutolo, Ronen Tamari, Josh Tan, Amy Zhang