Hi Metagovernors,
Welcome to our Project Updates newsletter! This is our roundup of project updates happening across Metagov.
Long Term Projects
Governance Transitions
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 engaged Robin Berjon in a potential collaboration to serve more OSS communities performing transitions. With Josh we recently secured Ford Foundation support for another prong of the project. Nick Vincent graduated from the project into a tenure-track position at Simon Fraser University. And we’ve got some exciting projects in process, including a set of notebooks for making computational policy analysis more accessible.
D20 Governance
We're excited to announce the soft launch of D20 Governance.
https://metagov.github.io/d20-governance/
D20 Governance is a Discord bot that gives online communities the opportunity to experience a diversity of governance structures, decision-making processes, power distributions, cultural dynamics and more – all within the channels of Discord. The soft launch features:
the "Build A Group Voice" Quest where players collaboratively define their group name, main topic of interest, and way of speaking. The answers to these questions form the basis for a new culture module that dynamically transforms the content of discord messages using a LLM
and the d20-agora channel where everyone can test the various decision-making and culture mode features
D20 was built by a group of researchers from Metagov. Whereas currently, most digital platforms limit communities to hierarchical admin-user models (“implicit feudalism”), Metagov aims to promote alternative governance structures (“modular politics”) through tools and resources such as PolicyKit, the Metagov Gateway, and CommunityRule.
In particular, the project is in part an interpretive implementation of CommunityRule.
The team is still at the early stages of developing D20 and would love to collaborate with online communities and builders. Come play the game with us, make a pull request in our Github repo, or leave a feature request in our Github issues.
The team working on the project includes: Case (Advisor), Janita Chalam (Developer), Val Elefante (Researcher), Hazel (Researcher), Cent Hosten (Developer), and Ellie Rennie (Advisor).
Thanks as well to our past play testers at DWeb Camp 2023 and CCC Camp 2023.
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/sSSRxWVuxE
Metagov Panel at WOW
Metagov is going to be well represented at WOW7, the Workshop On the Workshop (https://wow.indiana.edu/), an event hosted by the Ostrom community in Bloomington, Indiana every five years, to celebrate advances in interdisciplinary institutional scholarship. If everything is accepted, our contributions will include “Similarities of Structure: Systems Theory and the Bloomington School”, chaired by Jessy Kate Schingler, “The Internet as Governance Laboratory” and “Treasures from the Ostrom Papers” chaired by Seth Frey, and a fourth on the commons design possibilities within web3, chaired by Josh Tan. There’s likely to be a strong Metagov presence in Bloomington, and more community stuff happening before or after, there or thereabouts. If you’re interested in more Ostrommy stuff, join the #ostromnauts channel in our Slack (“Ostromnauts” is a funny pun, join our community for this and other puns).
The Governance of Collective Intelligence
In a collaboration incubated by Metagov, community members Ofer Tchernikovski and Seth Frey, along with neuroscientist Nori Jacoby and sociologist Dalton Conley, published: Tchernichovski, O., Frey, S., Jacoby, N., Conley, D. (2023) "Incentivising free riders improves collective intelligence in social dilemmas" Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) 120 (46) e2311497120 https://doi.org/k4cr
The upshot of the findings is a cruel irony: the folks least likely to participate for the collective good are the ones we most need due to their superior skills. Reach out to Seth Frey on our Slack if you want a copy of the paper. Alternatively, there are two tweet threads that get into it: thread one, thread two.
Calm Tech Standards
Calm Tech Standards is doing a lot behind the scenes. Branding and website drafting are under way. Also working on the evaluation flow and the scoring card, and making a database of initial contacts to reach out to as beta launch partners. December will see a review request to the community for these guidelines, scorecard and business model overview.
There are lots of little details going on, including making sure website addresses exist, emails route properly, and that things are in shape for launch. As this is a standards body, it could take until at least May for any sort of wide publicity to take place, as we want to be careful to set and test details before launch. Much like a plant, most of the growth in this stage is done underneath the soil, so that the roots can give life to a reasonably slow and impactful organization.
Case also just gave a talk on calm tech at the National Academy of Sciences in Vienna. She also quietly announced the creation of a calm tech standards body on stage at TMRE Denver.
PolicyKit, Gateway, and CollectiveVoice
CollectiveVoice is an application that enables Open Collective communities to conduct more diverse governance processes over their shared finances (powered by PolicyKit and the Metagov Gateway).
CollectiveVoice has been implemented to support the mutual aid group MAMAs (Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville), which distributes about $7,500 per month of groceries to their local community. CollectiveVoice allowed MAMAs members to set up a simple emoji vote process in their Slack workspace, allowing more members of their community (including non-admins of Open Collective) to participate in the decision-making over expense reimbursements.
enables the group to conduct a voting process in Slack
After three months of “piloting” the tool, representatives from MAMAs say that CollectiveVoice has managed to help them distribute workload among leadership, increase transparency, democratize decision-making, boost collective responsibility /participation, and spur creativity in governance.
The team presented research findings on CollectiveVoice at a recent conference hosted by Sociocracy for All titled “Power, Purpose, and Pay: Ways to Decide About Money Together.” Stay tuned for the recordings to be made available online.
The team is still looking for communities who would like to join the pilot program and try CollectiveVoice. If this sounds like you, please reach out to val@metagov.org.
Also, front-end development for the new no-code PolicyKit (aka “Pika”) system is underway with plans to be complete by the end of the year (thanks to Jack Murray-Brown)! Shoutout to the entire team: Amy Zhang (Project Lead), Nick Vincent (Developer), Val Elefante (Project Manager/UX Research), Jack Murray-Brown (Frontend Developer), Julija Rukanskaite (UX Design), Leijie Wang (Backend Developer), and Cent Hosten (UX Research).
Membership Program
The Metagov membership has resolved to restructure the membership program to better signal intended levels of engagement with the membership program. Alongside this restructuring we have resolved to produce clearer documentation of how the membership operates, how funds are in- and out-flowed, and how the membership governs itself. Our next newsletter will link out to this documentation.
Groundwork Fellowship Update
All of our Groundwork Fellows have presented their artifacts as part of the Metagov Seminar. A website with links to artifacts, seminar presentations, and brief descriptions of the artifacts is being prepared and will be shared in this newsletter in the new year. In the mean time, here are links to the seminar presentations, featuring Wanjiru Ngure, Michael Suantak, Ammar Manla Hasan, and Stacco Troncoso.
AI Research
Public AI
Can governments build AI as a public good? Public AI describes publicly accessible AI models funded, provisioned, and governed by governments or other public bodies. In the small, public AI represents both an alternative and a complement to standard regulatory approaches to AI. At a large scale, public AI represents an alternative vision to both private AI—the status quo of AI owned and operated by large corporations—and open-source AI, which has sparked concerns over safety and more subtle concerns about corporate influence. Learn more at our new website https://publicai.network.
Public AI (and the Public AI Network) is a large, open effort, involving individuals from Creative Commons, Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, and many other institutions. Since we first started working on it at Dweb Camp and AI Palace, we’ve hosted related events at NYU, Chatham House, and Newspeak House. Metagov Research Directors (RDs) Josh and Nick, with collaborators David Bau (Northeastern) and Sarah Schwettmann (MIT), also recently had a paper accepted at the RegML workshop at NeurIPS. Brandon Jackson, Metagov’s new product manager attached to the project, has put together an interim website along with a fabulous new logo that riffs off of the classic logo of the (publicly-owned) British Rail.
Public AI is a new project, currently led by Metagov (RDs Joshua Tan and Nick Vincent), Public Knowledge (Nick Garcia), Code for Science and Society (SJ Klein), Chatham House (Alex Krasodomski), and Harvard (Bruce Schneier, Nathan Sanders). We will likely be starting a new Slack or Discord to organize activities; look out for more news and sign up for the Google Group at https://publicai.network!
LLM Project
Discussions regarding Metagov’s LLM project have evolved into a collaboration with BlockScience. The short summary is that Metagov will create an instance of BlockScience’s existing system (Project Goldfish), which combines a knowledge management system (KMS) with a localized LLM using Chat GPT 3.5’s foundational model. The system will hopefully enable communication across the two organizations while providing both organizations with the agency to determine how a knowledge object is defined, utilized and governed internally. We hope that the Metagov community will actively engage in the infrastructure by developing governance processes or tools and sharing knowledge about how they use it. We are beginning to plan how this might happen, with an expected launch in early 2024. The project also applied for and received $10,000 from Metagov DAO, which will be used to support the development of the instance and related tools. See the #govbase-labs channel for notes and updates and please jump in if you are interested in being involved (join our community)!
On-Chain Governance and DAO Research
Open Problems in DAOs
We finally finished Open Problems in DAOs, now available on arXiv! Featuring an all-star cast of researchers, the paper covers a wide range of frontier research topics in DAOs across law, computer science, organization science, economics, and more. It’s the easiest and most comprehensive resource for researchers looking to get into DAOs. To help catalyze more research, we’ve also launched daoscience.org, which hosts the problems listed in the paper in an interactive form, and partnered with the Metagov Governance Research Round (see below).
We have a launch plan coming up, including several podcasts, an article in CoinDesk, an official Twitter thread, and various talks and presentations. The goal of the project is to bring more researchers into DAO science, and to do that we need to make some noise. Any tips or connections appreciated! Leave us a comment in our Slack in the #dao-science channel (join our community).
Grants Report
We released the State of Web3 Grants Report, authored by Eugene Leventhal and Mashal Waqar, in late September. You can find a PDF of the takeaways from the 70+ page report here. The report covered 13 different programs in web3, exploring their history, operations, and how they measure impact.
After the positive reception of the report, we are now exploring three general threads of activities - research, standards, and community. In terms of research, we are interested in conducting research on the grantee experience as well as a literature review of academic work on innovation, research funding, and grant funding broadly. In terms of standards, we are working on a grant metadata standard, a shared database of approved grants, and a grant common app, all to help both increase the transparency of grant programs and to streamline the experience of applying for grants. Finally, with community, we are looking to bring together grant operators, grant infrastructure providers, and grantees to maximize the amount of coordination and shared learning pertaining to grant programs.
Validator Commons
Back in September, Ellie presented a report on validator governance at a forum organized by A41 (All For Staking) during Korean Blockchain Week and the video is now available to view. Or you can read the full report here. She also published a blog post on the governator concept this month, which arose in the context of this work.
DAOstar
DAOstar received a grant from the Arbitrum Foundation! This grant will support an ambitious project which leverages existing work on EIP-4824 to build a regulatory interface and tax standard for DAOs. It is incredible to see major stakeholders like the Arbitrum Foundation and Optimism Collective embracing EIP-4824 and infrastructure being built on it. We will soon start the EIP-4824 adoption drive through DAOs and protocols on Arbitrum.
In other news, both DAOstar and Metagov have qualified to receive funding through the Optimism Retroactive Funding Round 3 (RPGF3). Voting for this round is from November 6 - December 7, 2023. If you are a badge-holder, consider supporting here: https://vote.optimism.io/retropgf/3
Gitcoin Rounds – Governance Research and More
After being initially conceived back in April, Metagov is proceeding with sponsoring a grant round as part of Gitcoin’s GG19. If you are a governance researcher, you are welcome to apply here. Join our slack and jump in the #governance-round channel with any questions.
This round is meant to support governance researchers broadly. Funds will be raised in crypto though your research does not need to be focused on web3 topics per se. Any research that may be applicable to the governance of decentralized ecosystems will be deemed relevant for this round.
Upcoming and Past Seminars
Upcoming
Joel Chan, Sociotechnical Infrastructures for Interdisciplinary Scholarly Synthesis
Ehud Shapiro, On Grassroots Digital Architecture
Janita Chalam, Val Elefante, Cent Hosten & Hazel, On D20 Governance
Bryan Seeman, "How Do You Quantify How Racist Something Is?": Color-Blind Moderation in Decentralized Governance
Recent
Aashka Tank, On Governance Archeology
Kelani Nichole & Nuno Chainho Amiar, Metagov Short Talks
Tara Merk, Laura Lotti & Nick Houde, On Working Conditions in web3/DAOs
Ori Shimony, On Mechanism Institute
Camille Canon, Designing a Constitution for a Community
Brian Muhia, Causal Influence Diagrams for AI Governance
Aimee Burnett, Work for Stake: Reimagining Ownership & Work in the Emerging Internet
Cent Hosten & Seth Frey, Metagov Short Talks
Luke Thorburn, Probabilistic Foundations of Partisan (Un)Sorting
Vaughn McKenzie-Landell & Alex Hajjar, Crypto Utilities: Moving Beyond Coin Voting Governance
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.
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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.
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🌱
Cent
w/contributions by Tara Merk, Ellie Rennie, Eugene Leventhal, Case, Aman, Jenny Fan, Seth Frey, Josh Tan, Val Elefante