Metagov News #1 (Oct. 2021)

Hi Metagovernors, Josh here. People have been telling me for a while that they wish they knew what was going on across Metagov’s various working groups. Lately, even I have had a hard time keeping track of everything going on across our community. So I hope this newsletter helps!

Since this is the first iteration of the Metagov newsletter, I’ll just briefly describe the active projects in Metagov and where they currently stand. Future newsletters may feature more updates from community projects, member highlights, thoughts on where Metagov is going, and interesting discussions from the seminar.

Project news

• Metagov Gateway. This is Metagov’s flagship project. Recently renamed from “Metagov Prototype”, the core Gateway team (Miriam, Shauna, Amy, Josh) collaborates heavily with PolicyKit, a governance “driver” being developed by Amy Zhang’s group (Ricky, Felicia, Amy) at UWash. We are currently in Phase 2 of the project plan, meaning that we have an alpha up and are working closely with partners, especially several collectives hosted on Open Collective, to test the gateway and various governance policies that use it. Most recently, Miriam and Shauna have been talking about re-factoring the architecture of the Gateway, while Miriam has worked on upgrading our Discord integrator so that we can start working with DADA.art’s Discord instances. More broadly, the team is working towards a November soft launch of the gateway, with help from designer Jenny Fan. For more info, join #metagov-gateway in the Metagov Slack and ask a question! For those of you who are not in the Metagov Slack: contact me if you would like to join. The Slack is open to everyone, but we don’t post the invite link publicly.
• Govbase. The Govbase team (Ann, Zargham, Campbell, Ellie, Kelsie, Josh) has been working on Metaeth (see below) and a new entity-decision model that bootstraps the initial model that Josh and Gina Pieters designed for Wharton’s Cryptogov survey. You can see some of this in the Govbase Airtable (click to the tab named “Entity-Decision Model”). Ann is also helping organize an anthropology paper on digital governance systems as infrastructure. We also recently dusted off a few of the blockchain constitutions we commissioned and looking to add more into a new data set on GitHub. We also recently received a $5,000 micro-grant from SCRF! The Govbase team hangs out in #govbase and on our regular calls. Sadly, Campbell will be leaving the team this week in order to accept an awesome new position. Congrats Campbell, and good luck in your future adventures!
• Metagovernance Seminar. In our most recent seminar, James Hazard (Common Accord) and Megan Ma (Stanford CodeX) presented on prose objects in computational law. See the recording here.
• Metaeth. The Metaethnography team (Luke, Jon, Zargham, Campbell, Josh, and Ellie) is doing some absolutely amazing work with the SourceCred Discord community. In short: Luke and Jon have built a Discord bot that manages the ethical consent process and allows Discord communities to communicate with a researcher Discord. In the meantime, Ellie, Zargham, and Campbell have been piloting the bot with the SourceCred community, where it’s become a hit. Ellie has produced a great workshop paper explaining it all (to be released soon). Metaeth currently works out of the #govbase channel and on the Govbase calls.
• Agreement Engine. The Agreement Engine team (Luke, Nathan, Larry, Josh) are building a tool for building contract systems. Luke and Josh recently completed a couple of additional experiments with Agreement Engine (Twitter Social Capital, Ghost Knowledge) and are busy upgrading the recent Agreement Engine blog post into a journal article. We hang out in #agreement-engine on the Slack.
• DAOstar One. We’ve brought together every single major DAO framework (Gnosis, Aragon, Compound, Moloch, Colony, DAOstack) as well as several DAO tooling developers and researchers to work on a new ERC standard for DAOs. The first meeting of the roundtable is this Friday.
• Cryptopolitics. I just launched the Cryptopolitical Typology Quiz at Liscon, along with an NFT collection to incentivize survey-takers. Lots of juicy data already flowing in!
• Consulting Network. Not yet released. Some of the academics in Metagov sometimes get requests for consulting that they don’t have time for. So we’ve recently started building relationships with a few industry consulting/research groups (Nick + Marcus at EvenGov, Jad + Scott at HBS) to which we can funnel some of these consulting requests. Let us know if you would like to be involved.
• Metametagovernance. Slow evolution in #core-group (now publicly-joinable and more transparent) as we set down a more explicit internal governance process so that we can process some disagreement between members.
• See more projects and updates in our community doc!

Other updates

• We raised ~$49,000 USD from the most recent Gitcoin grant round (~$16k in direct contributions, ~$33k in matching funds). Ellie, Josh, Zargham, Nathan, and Kelsie have started a Gnosis Safe multisig to handle and govern the money.
• Our very own Nathan Schneider recently published a commentary on the limitations of cryptogovernance. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, posted a reply.
• I’m presenting modular politics today (Oct. 25) at the CSCW conference. Video will be available later.
• Over the course of August/September, we wrote and sent out 4 grant applications. While I wouldn’t call it “progress”, writing grant applications definitely takes work!
• I’m piloting a shared Google calendar with all of Metagov’s regular meetings and sessions. Subscribe!

Fun stuff

• There’s talk brewing of a Govfest workshop or meeting of some sort for Metagov, possibly to be co-located with groups such as Cryptogov, Governauts, TEC, SCRF, and others. Interested? Contact Josh & Jiajia on the Slack.

From our earlier workshop in June. From left to right: Josh, Divya, Shauna, Luke, Miriam, and Amy.

• Potential book club for Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything? Follow the thread in Slack.
• Join #dao-dystopia, where we are working to bring about the downfall of civilization with DAOs, blockchains, and DeFi.
• Speaking of book clubs, this thread on governance speculative fiction has been dormant for a while, but we should really pick this back up!

❤,
Josh