Metagov News #2 (Feb. 2022)

Hi Metagovernors, among other news, we’re delighted to welcome our new community manager, Cent! We also just posted a new call for research proposals to our community. Spread the word.

🌱,

Josh & Cent

Project News

• Metagov Gateway. Lots to report. Shauna recently wrote a post describing some of our use-cases with Open Collective , so you can get a better sense of how folks are currently using Metagov. In the meantime, we’re running a beta test with Social.coop and looking to onboard additional beta testers, especially developers. Next month, we’ll be posting a new sandbox server for gateway.metagov.org so that you can start exploring PolicyKit + Gateway in less than 10 seconds, and working with Open Collective on a tighter integration.
• After an amazing year, Miriam is leaving the team. 😢 It’s been so wonderful working with you to turn Metagov from a dream into a reality. Good luck in your future adventures, Miriam!
• Farhaan Patel is joining the team as our new research engineer. He’s worked as a backend engineer at Roku, Informatica, and several startups. Welcome to Metagov, Farhaan!
• As mentioned above, Cent Hosten will be joining as our new community manager. He has a background in operations and community, as well as a PhD in music composition. Welcome, Cent!
• DAOstar One. We just released a public draft at daostar.one. Coming up next month: sample implementations with Moloch, Compound, DAOstack, Aragon, and others.
• Cryptopolitics. Last time we wrote, we had just launched the Cryptopolitical Typology Quiz at Liscon. Since then, Josh, Lucia Korpas, and Ann Brody have crunched the data and published a report on CoinDesk! You can see a longer version (with less ads) on Medium. Here’s Vitalik tweeting about it ;)
• Agreement Engine. Luke Miller and Josh just released a first draft of their paper, “Building web-native agreement systems ”! Comments appreciated. 🙏
• Govbase. Ann, Lucia, and Josh have been working with DeepDAO to refine our entity-decision model , which examines the network of entities involved in a typical decentralized organization. As part of our work on “governance surfaces”, Lucia and Mehdi Salehi have also been parsing and compiling data on the smart contract code of major DAO frameworks such as Compound, Gnosis, Aragon, and Tribute; you can see some of those tables now in the Govbase Airtable.
• Mike Price is joining the team as Decentralized Governance Research Scholar, sponsored by Sifchain. Mike is a social anthropologist at the Santa Fe Institute with a background in anthropology, aerospace engineering, and physics (Metagov just got a bit more interdisciplinary 😆 ). Mike will be working with Metagov community members Nick Naraghi and Marcus Philipps on a study of SifDAO. Welcome Mike!
• DAO Constitutions. Josh, Max Langenkamp, Anna Weichselbraun, and Ann are working on a short blog post exploring the DAO constitutions data set we are building in Govbase. We’re planning to work with Verses.xyz on a website to house and display these constitutions.
• MetagovDAO. Things have a tendency to move with lightning speed in Metagov. Case in point: we now have a DAO, which just issued an open call for proposals for DAO and governance-related research in partnership with Gitcoin. We just recently awarded our first round of grants, including work on DAO resilience, platform cooperatives, and constitutions in Web3. See more in #metagovdao.
• Modpol. Nathan Schneider and Luke Miller published a Hackernoon article on Modpol, a software tool that adds governance features to the community-developed Minetest, an open-source version of Minecraft. Nathan and Luke have also put together a guide to using ModPol ; you can see a recording of their recent seminar presentation / playtest here.
• Metagovernance Seminar . In our last seminar meeting before the holidays overtook us, we discussed Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything. Next up: Prof. Eric Alston of CU Boulder will be speaking about “Why Private Firms Aren’t Democratic”.

From Metagov’s “Dawn of Everything” book club. Thanks to Brian Keegan for leading.

• See more projects and updates in our community doc!

Community News

• Moving Castles: First Primitives and Lore . Our friends at Trust have published a major update on their Moving Castles project, which they describe as “hybrid social spaces built using game engines, decentralized web3 tools and synchronous chat apps.” The project had its first stream last week, with future streams scheduled throughout this month where they will “develop a novel set of real-time rendered formats for the facilitation of community activities, the creation of community-governed media, and cross-community interactions.” We’ll be keenly watching these developments in community-governed media.
• SourceCred hosted a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion with Metagov’s Ellie Rennie, and her collaborator Tyson Yunkaporta, on the topic of Governance and Indigenous Modes of Thinking. The duo can also be heard in discussion in their podcast Disconnect. SourceCred is also continuing to collaborate with Ellie on Metagov’s Metaeth project, a Discord bot that manages the ethical consent process and allows Discord communities to communicate with a researcher Discord.
• What’s the Deal with DAOs? Metagov community member Charley Johnson published the fourth installment in their monthly series, Untangled, this time doing a sociological deep-dive on DAOs. Untangled is also a podcast hosted by Charley and recently featured Nathan Schneider in a discussion on co-ops and crypto .
• Towards a Digital Pluriverse . A digital artifact, seeded by stewards of Verses (Spencer Chang, Alejandro García Salas , Divya Siddarth, Jasmine Wang, Jacky Zhao) and developed in collaboration with Metagov community members Josh, Nathan, and Max Langenkamp. This artifact builds on and extends A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace , and is created “with the hope that collaborative dialogue and action centered on pluriversality can offer an alternative to the digital monocultures of the present, and help catalyze an ecosystem strategy towards meaningful digital interdependence.”

What We’ve Been Reading

• Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism . We’re regularly tracking the critical conversations happening around blockchain technology and how they intersect with society. This article by Varoufakis sparked a conversation about the conditions for social liberation, legislative capture, dual-power strategies, and internationalist infrastructure.
• The Yak Online Governance Primer . A compass of online governance based on a year-long survey into online governance conducted by the Yak Collective, an online space for collaborative tinkering towards life in a post-Weirding world. The primer presents four governance regimes — Citadel, Gaia, Muddler, and Hobbesian — accompanied by a lexicon describing how the collective talks about online governance and an extensive annotated bibliography.

ETH Denver

If you plan on being at ETH Denver or Schelling Point next week, join our #ethdenver channel!

Other Tidbits

Ever been curious about all the software tools that Metagov itself uses? As a design exercise, we mocked up the following widget.

A version of this widget will go on metagov.org, and will eventually be made available through the Metagov Gateway. You can see the data behind this widget on this Airtable.

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