Metagov’s 2024 Year In Review
Plus plans for 2025
Dear friends,
Metagov thrived in 2024. A new executive director, a kick-ass new website, new community knowledge infrastructure in our Slack, a new peer-reviewed journal, a new global research series on DAOs, a new lab focused on grant innovation, as well as a cohort of 20+ deliberative tooling teams growing an interoperable ecosystem for democracy tooling. Here are some of the highlights:
Metagov’s AI-powered Knowledge Object Infrastructure (KOI) has built “a synthetic approximation of our existing group, including our collective knowledge, practices, myths, interests and rules,” writes research director (RD) Ellie Rennie. Launched in 2024 in tandem with new policies governing data handling and privacy, you can now query and interact with KOI in our Slack to learn about Metagov’s initiatives, augment your onboarding process, and effortlessly surface critical prior discussions when a controversial topic crops up again. See #koi-pond.
To challenge the concentration of power in AI, we formed the Public AI Network in coalition with Aspen Digital, Open Future, Public Knowledge, Code for Science and Society, Chatham House, Mozilla, and individuals from many other organizations. In 2024, we hosted two seasons of the Public AI Seminar with guest talks from Lawrence Lessig, Yoshua Bengio, Julia Angwin, Diane Coyle, Aza Raskin, and many other luminaries. We also hosted a workshop with public AI model builders, including the LLM leads of national labs in the US, Sweden, Singapore, Denmark, Switzerland, and others. We also brought on Brandon Jackson this year as the product lead for our public AI work. Get involved at https://publicai.network.
We hosted AI Palace again this year as part of our broader effort to identify new business models for the AI economy. In collaboration with the royal family of Schaumburg-Lippe, this residency brought together a small, highly curated set of AI builders, entrepreneurs, hackers, artists, and researchers in an actual European palace to work on open-source, decentralized, and public AI. See https://aipalace.org.
Atlas Computing is focused on scaling humanity's ability to review AI by productizing AI systems with provably safe characteristics. In the last year, Atlas grew their team from 2 to 5, spun out Earendil.ai (an independently funded effort to build compute governance hardware) and began organizing events to bring together experts from the AI and formal verification communities. For more info, check these updates.
Metagov launched Interoperable Deliberative Tools to support and promote interoperability among new and existing tools for deliberation and governance. The basic interop standard was authored by RDs Aviv Ovadya, Amy Zhang, Joshua Tan, and Eugene Leventhal, along with Polis co-founder Colin Megill. Senior research engineer Daniel Carr has been leading work on process cards, flatfile interop, a data lake, a data commons, and a tool gallery designed for process designers and developers. Individually, cohort members have been steadily implementing and documenting new import/export functionality, and in October the cohort gathered at the Society Library in Berkeley to develop a shared ontology and spec out collaborative projects. We are actively fundraising for Interop2! See #deliberative-tools-and-interop.
To advance the state of resource allocation and impact tracking in web3 and beyond, in 2024 the Grant Innovation Lab (GIL) interviewed 20 individuals across 13 organizations and compiled the State of Web3 Grant Report 2024. This report was a followup to the original 2023 report. Additionally, the GIL team produced a Grant Maturity Index and 3 Case Studies of Retroactive Grant Programs, along with write ups on the Web3 Grant Summit 2024 from Denver and the Grant Operator Workshop in Brussels. Follow along at grant.metagov.org.
RD Amber Case launched the Calm Tech Institute, as well as Calm Tech Institute Kyoto, and Calm Tech Certified™, the first standard based on how tech products use attention. By measuring impacts on attention, periphery, robustness, light, sound and material use, Calm Tech Institute certified its first six companies. Wired Japan also published this excellent profile of Case. See #calm-tech-institute.
DAOstar, the standards body of the DAO ecosystem, launched three new standards (ft. DAO security, legal reporting, and taxes) and a global research series (ft. reports on DAOs in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and more). We also added three new team members: Joseph Low (research and analytics lead, 2021 ETH Denver hackathon winner). Josh Davila (a.k.a. the Blockchain Socialist, grants standard lead), and Sam McCarthy (growth lead + working on delegate incentives, formerly of Spartan Labs). Welcome!
Last but not least, Metagov took over the peer reviewed journal Cryptoeconomic Systems (CES) from the MIT Media Lab. A new call for papers is out now, timed to coincide with the Science of Blockchains Conference 2025. At Dweb 2024, a test print edition of “Issue Minus One” was distributed for user feedback towards a future, broader editorial project. See #metagov-journal.
This brings us to 2025. ✨
Metagov’s mission is to describe, support, and expand the possibility of self-governance on the internet. We are a laboratory. We are experimenters. We are a clanging skunkworks for the internet! And in 2025, we feel more urgently than ever that the world needs new experiments and new institutions that can match the challenges of our times. Here’s a bit of what we have planned:
Interop is holding seminars this week January 27-30, details are posted in #deliberative-tools-and-interop.
The AI Action Summit in Paris will bring people from around the world to discuss, among other topics, public AI. The Public AI network is coordinating multiple events around the February 10-11 summit including the Public AI Congress, one of the official side events. More info in #public-ai!
The Governable SpaceMakers Fellowship, supported by a generous grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, will bring together a trio of artists, technologists, and researchers to explore governance in a creative, technical, and theoretical collaboration. The application deadline has been extended to February 20, check it out and share!
Starting February 23, find us at ETH Denver where we will be hosting many events on governance, DAOs, small business, and research at the Metagov House. Updates in #irl-ethdenver-2025.
Metagov Community Lead, Val Elefante will be at RightsCon 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan (Feb 24-27) along with some other community partners such as GLIAnet and Community Privacy Residency. If you plan to be there, send her a message at val@metagov.org.
DAOstar will soon be publishing a report on the state of DAO M&A, as part of its efforts to help the DAO ecosystem develop more mature financial infrastructure. This work is in collaboration with Areta, a Web3 investment bank, and Jillian Grennan of Emory University.
If you know industry leaders, particularly in the insurance or consulting spaces who would be interested in formalizing policy to scale human review of AI outputs, we recommend emailing leslie@atlascomputing.org as Atlas is setting up a consortium this quarter!
The next season of the Public AI Seminar will center on the impact of AI on the creative and entertainment industries. Confirmed speakers include Kim Stanley Robinson and Ted Chiang.
AI Palace is coming back as AI Renaissance this year. Organization of the 2025 event is being led by Chatham House with support from Metagov, Aspen, and others.
The Cryptoeconomic Systems (CES) journal’s 2025 call for papers is now open!
Liz is working on a revised 2025 strategy for all of Metagov—look out for an announcement in the near future.
Other news from the Research Directors
Following an extensive search process, Metagov hired Liz Barry to be our new Executive Director! Liz hails from the Computational Democracy Project, an organization she co-founded with the creators of Pol.is. Her experience includes augmented deliberation and participatory action research in social movements. Among other things, she will be taking the reins of the Interoperable Deliberative Tools project. We are also deeply grateful to Eugene Leventhal for his service as ED in 2024, and look forward to his continued involvement as an RD.
Rounding out the new Metagov leadership is Nathan Hewitt, our new Financial and Operations Lead, who most recently led operations at Open Collective. Welcome to both Liz and Nathan!
Metagov welcomed Aviv Ovadya of AI & Democracy Foundation as a new RD, to establish and co-direct the Interoperable Deliberative Tools project.
Metagov also welcomed Evan Miyazono, co-founder of Atlas Computing as a new RD. Evan brings expertise in AI governance and will lead a private seminar series in 2025 tackling targeted research challenges over several weeks. More info to come soon!
RD and Board President Nathan Schneider’s latest book Governable Spaces was published in July, exploring democratic design for online life.
RDs Ellie Rennie and Josh Tan together with institutional economics professor Jason Potts published a new paper on the Validator Commons project, making the case for impersonal rules that constrain the power of elites in blockchain governance processes
RD and founding Executive Director Joshua Tan was appointed a Chatham House Associate Fellow.
RD Seth Frey and several Metagov community members Ofer Tchernichovski, Nori Jacoby, Qiankun Zhong (who met through Metagov Seminars!) were awarded a $750K NSF grant: Designing smart environments to augment collective learning & creativity. www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2421385
Events
Metagov consciously gardens its communities, and as part of that we organize a lot of events. Here are some highlights:
The NSF-sponsored “OSS Growing Pains” workshop at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy was a standout event hosted by RD Seth Frey, Robin Berjon (W3C), RD Joshua Tan, and Benjamin Mako Hill (UW). People with leadership roles in 12 projects including W3C, Haskell, and OpenStreetMap were in attendance along with RD Nathan Schneider, Tara Merk, Juan Caballero, Liz Barry, and other Metagovernors and colleagues.
With the generous support of the International Centre for Mathematical Science, RDs Josh Tan, Philipp Zahn and Seth Frey hosted the Mathematics for Governance Design workshop at the University of Edinburgh.
We again helped host and curate the AI Think Tank at Dweb Camp, sponsored by the Internet Archive and OpenAI.
Metagov House manifested at ETHDenver 2024 in February, at ETH Istanbul in July (where we co-hosted Schelling Point Istanbul with Gitcoin), and at Devcon Bangkok in November. We hosted many events as part of these gatherings, including our annual Foundations & Nonprofits Dinner, the DAOstar brunch (f.t. Josh’s famous shakshuka), a chuan’r BBQ with our friends at GCC, and various workshops.
Sincerely,
Liz, Eugene, Josh
Metagov Executive Director Avatar State
Did we miss something? Reach out to team@metagov.org to alert us to your initiatives.