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Metagov New #8 (February 2023)

Cent
The Metagovernance Project
Published in
11 min readFeb 9, 2023

Hi Metagovernors,

Welcome to the eighth edition of our community newsletter!

Project News

New

  • Membership Program. Metagov has set up a membership program for the Metagov community. The program is designed to give participants in the Metagov community a way to generate resources that support the facilitation and development of the community. The membership is also actively engaged in the process of self-organizing to determine their purpose and decide how they will govern the resources they pool together. Learn more about the membership and become a member to support or participate in this process.
  • Groundwork Fellowship. We are excited to announce the Metagov Groundwork Fellowship, a community-grounded research fellowship on internet infrastructure design, governance, and marginalization.

The way the internet is structured shapes the way communities gather, organize, and share resources, both on and offline. In other words, internet infrastructure structures how communities make decisions and self-govern. But who is part of the process in designing this infrastructure, and who is left out? How could online governance be different with more inclusive design processes?

The Groundwork Fellowship is a three month online fellowship hosted by Metagov meant to bring community-based researchers into this design process.

Read our Open Call to learn more, and attend an informational Q&A on February 23.

Updates

  • Digital Ethnography in Blockchain and Governance Reading Group. Tara Merk at BlockchainGov, Kelsie Nabben at RMIT’s University Blockchain Innovation Hub, and Cent Hosten at Metagov finished their initial three-session pilot of this reading group. All of the sessions where recorded as part of Kelsie’s podcast, Mint and Burn, and include discussion of Wassim Alsindi’s (Mis)adventures in Crypto-Governance (recording); Quinn DuPont’s Experiments in Algorithmic Governance (recording); and a preview summary of Black Swan’s governance LARP, The Modules (recording), written by Black Swan (Laura Lotti & Calum Bowden), Kola Heyward-Rotimi, and Ellie Rennie.
  • Telescope. Ellie Rennie, Amber Case, and Matthew Green have begun designing a new instance of Telescope called the Wormhole. The Wormhole will function a lot like the Telescope in that it will allow people inside a Discord server to add an emoji to a post, which will trigger the bot to ask permission from the author to use that comment in a qualitative research dataset. The difference is that Wormhole is being designed to work across a number of DAODAO DAOs, enabling members of those DAOs to co-curate inputs into a shared dataset, visible in a bridge channel with DAODAO DAO. We hope to use the Wormhole in ways that help DAODAO DAO gain insight into cross-DAO dynamics and concerns. Metagov’s Luke Miller is developing the code for the Wormhole instance.
  • Govbase Labs. Govbase Labs continues to give Metagov researchers a venue to share their on-going research with other Metagov participants. Most recently, Val Elefante and Cent Hosten shared their research on a governance primer game, in collaboration with Janita Chalam and Amber Case, which explores how online communication platforms structure group coordination and organization. To attend a lab, join our community and introduce yourself in the #govbase channel.
  • PolicyKit, Gateway, and Collective Voice. Our “Metagov + Open Collective No-Code Integration” project has a new name! It’s now known as the much simpler “Collective Voice” project. Val Elefante has been leading a fabulous interview series focused on how collective governance can (and cannot) be woven in the current financial practices of online communities. We also recently brought in Julija Rukanskaitė as a product designer on the project, who will be focusing on improving the PolicyKit frontend, as well as Nick Vincent, a current Metagov research fellow, who will be helping us finalize and launch the project. Welcome Julija and Nick!
  • 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. Additional conversations are scheduled in the next couple of months with a BIPOC youth group, a veteran community, and a local LGBTQ+ community.
  • DAOstar. In Q1 of 2023, DAOstar will be focusing on three things. First, we launched a new working group, Millennium Falcon, focused on developing regulatory interoperability — a.k.a. how compliance can be come a DAO superpower — led by new research fellow Joni Pirovich. Second, we’re working with a group of companies including Gitcoin, DaoLens, OpenQ, and Solana to pilot a grants management standard for DAOs. Third, Ivan Fartunov and Hazel Devjani are working on a new membership “season” for DAOstar One members. On the core engineering side, Metagov research engineer Tucker McLachlan, research fellow Isaac Patka, and product designer Jenny Fan recently launched a new DAOstar website, including updated content, more documentation, and an app to facilitate new DAOstar registrations. Our first proposal to a “big” DAO, shepherded with the help of Harry Bridge, just went live on Aave’s governance forums. We’re also launching the new DAO Improvement Proposal system at ETH Denver to support more permissionless involvement from the entire ecosystem of builders and DAOists. Come visit our table next to the DAO main stage at ETH Denver!
  • Governance Experience Design. Stewards of the GovEx Design Manifesto participated in the recent Our Networks programming to author a conference program for the year 2047. Kelsie Nabben, Greg Cassel, and Nathan Schneider conducted a co-writing session that asked participants questions about the present and future of governance experiences, and made additions to the manifesto using the CrowdWrite software that hosts the document. Here is a document with a record of the co-writing session. Thanks to Our Networks and everyone who participated!

Metagovernance Seminar

Upcoming:

Recent:

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.

Research Network News

New

  • Joshua Tan was recently appointed an Innovator-in-Residence with the Unfinished Network. He will be hosting office hours and leading a research project on limited equity for nonprofits with Unfinished’s network of nonprofit affiliates.

In The Field

Here are some events were Metagov researchers will be in attendance. Send us an email at hello@metagov.org if you’d like to connect in person.

  • ETHDenver. We’ll be running some side events at the Metagov House. More information to be shared once the schedule is confirmed.
  • Primavera De Filippi and Joshua Tan are organizing a small saloon / unconference on decentralized science at Feytopia outside of Paris on March 17–18. DM us on the Slack if you’re around town!
  • Sarah Hubbard, Joshua Tan, Connor Spelliscy, Primavera De Filippi, and Tara Merk are organizing DAO Harvard, an 3-day workshop in early April exploring the research, legal, and policy aspects of DAOs.
  • Our friends at the Cooperative AI Foundation (ref. Lewis Hammond’s talk at a recent Metagov Seminar) as well as research director Divya Siddarth’s recently-launched Collective Intelligence Project are organizing a CI + AI conference at Oxford. Watch out for the public announcement soon!
  • Seth Frey will be participating in a panel on “Transitioning resource systems from benevolent dictatorship to community management” at the IASC 2023 in Nairobi, Kenya, June 19–24

Writing

Demos

Video

Audio

On Our Radar

Writing

Video

Events

Opportunities

Metagov, Groundwork Fellowship

  • Deadline: March 10, 2023

Center for Democracy and Technology, Policy Analyst or Counsel, or Senior Policy Analyst or Counsel, Disability Rights in Technology Policy

  • Deadline: Rolling basis starting on January 17, 2023

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, Fellows and Storytellers Programs

  • Deadline: Review begins February 13, and continues until all spots filled

Open Lunar Foundation, Innovation Program Coordinator and Research Fellowship

  • Deadline: End of February 2023

Mathematics for Humanity, Call for Applications

  • Deadline: April 15, 2023

Metagov, Open Positions

  • Metagov has open positions for a part time intern
  • Deadline: Rolling until filled

Community Features

We’ve been running the community-focused Metagov Short Talks series for almost a year now. In celebration of the continuously inspiring presentations and discussions, we’re piloting a community interview where the public can get a chance to learn more about some of the participants of our community who present at Short Talks.

For our first feature we are sharing interviews with Val Elefante and Blaine Hansen who presented as part of January’s Short Talks. Watch the video on the Internet Archive.

Val Elefante

Presentation: “reState Future of Governance Toolkit”

Metagov Community Profile
Presentation Deck
Project Link

MG: Tell us a little about yourself.

VE: I am a feminist researcher and writer building communities and technologies that empower women, non-binary, & LGBTQIA+ folks around the world. I am a founding member of Lips, a social media platform for women & LGBTQIA+ creatives, and Reliabl, an inclusive and participatory moderation system that powers Lips. I also conduct research on participatory governance with the reState Foundation and work on various projects within Metagov.

MG: Give a brief description of your Short Talks presentation.

VE: The Future of Governance Toolkit is a living library of participatory governance practices from around the world. The database is designed for communities of all types and sizes to browse and learn about the processes and tools that have helped other communities do governance — including manage resources, define values, and make decisions — in a more participatory way.

reState hopes to make this database easily searchable with entries that are detailed and story-oriented. The toolkit strives to be useful for both practitioners as well as academic researchers.

MG: What was one piece of feedback from the Short Talks discussion that you’re still thinking about?

VE: The interest expressed in seeing use cases of “failure” in participatory governance experiments was very exciting, as well as the idea of using our taxonomy to formulate an exercise that communities can do to learn about themselves and their governance was also not something our team had thought about before but are interested in implementing down the line!

MG: What attracted you to Metagov and what is one thing you enjoy about being part of the community?

VE: Metagov is a diverse community of researchers and practitioners from around the world interested in exploring and experimenting with new ideas and projects in governance. I love learning about all the different projects that folks are working on, and I love that governance is the uniting factor for everyone because anyone working on anything can relate! In fact, I believe the governance level of an organization or project can often tell you a lot about what the larger impact or outcomes will be. It sometimes feels like fortune-telling :)

MG: How can others who are interested in this work connect with you to collaborate/contribute?

VE: Email me at val@metagov.org.

Blaine Hansen

Presentation: “Persistent Democracy: A maximally responsive, flexible, and ethical foundation for democratic society.”

Metagov Community Profile
Presentation Deck
Project Link

MG: Tell us a little about yourself and what you presented during your Short Talks.

BH: I’m a staff software engineer at a growing startup, and use my spare time as an independent researcher to do my small part to unbreak our world. My most concrete projects are Persistent Democracy, a framework for democratic organization that aims to be complete and maximally expressive, and the Magmide proof language. I’m generally interested in logically validated democratic governance mechanisms, welfare and justice focused ethics, cooperatives, and software formal methods.

During my presentation, I covered the basic concepts and mechanics of Persistent Democracy, why it might be beneficial, and current concrete efforts to make it a reality.

MG: What was one piece of feedback from the Short Talks discussion that you’re still thinking about?

BH: Persistent Democracy is a large departure from how democracy is practiced today, especially given its highly continuous nature. Val Elefante and Seth Frey asked very good questions about why exactly continuity is helpful or transformative. In particular, the core question “would the degree of continuity being proposed be transformatively positive or merely exhausting and chaotic?” is the one I find to be most important to consider, and can only be answered with real world experimentation.

MG: What attracted you to Metagov and what is one thing you enjoy about being part of the community?

BH: I struggled for a long time to find people actively engaged with the hard questions of how to improve governance, and drove a lot of my friends crazy talking about all my ideas! It’s so refreshing to encounter people who are so knowledgeable and concerned, and to not only share my ideas with them but learn about topics I never even considered myself.

MG: How can others who are interested in this work connect with you to collaborate/contribute?

BH: I’m (eventually) responsive on the Metagov Slack, and can be contacted by email at faichenshing@gmail.com.

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And that’s it for this edition of Metagov News. If you’d like to join the group of metagovernors discussing these topics, you can visit our community website and complete our survey.

🌱

Cent

Meta Governance

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Cent
The Metagovernance Project

Written by Cent

2 Followers
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