Metagov News #3 (Mar. 2022)

Hi Metagovernors, welcome to the third edition of our monthly newsletter!

Project News

• Metagov Gateway. We are getting closer to releasing a new sandbox server where you can start exploring PolicyKit + Gateway in less than 10 seconds. In the meantime, we’re currently running beta tests with Social.coop, the Youth Power Coalition , and are looking to onboard additional beta testers , especially developers.
• We’re also exploring applications of the Gateway to collective knowledge management. If you’re part of a knowledge-focused community that might be interested in trying out a prototype, please reach out! Our initial focus is on communities using Github but we’re interested in hearing from and working with folks using a variety of tools and platforms.
• DAOstar One. We launched the DAOstar One project last month at ETHDenver, and made an open call to the public to attend bi-weekly meetings and give feedback on how the standard is developing. Coming up next month: sample implementations with Moloch, Compound, DAOstack, Aragon, and others. We also had our first Voyager Identity meeting last week, where we began to explore the question of identity systems within DAOs. Learn more and sign up for the community meetings on our beautiful new site.

Launch of DAOstar One at ETHDenver

• DAO Constitutions. A funding proposal for DAO Constitutions has been granted by Filecoin! Our funding will support the data analysis already conducted, an analysis of a Filecoin contract using our analytical governance lens, a blog post that will be published in April, the creation of constitution templates, a Jupyter notebook to host visualizations of governance documents, and the creation of web crawlers and parsers to create an index of various governance documents on Web3.
• CommunityRule. Work is being done to re-implement CommunityRule in Blockly, an open-source library for block-based visual code editing. This re-implementation gets CommunityRule one step closer to converting the governance structures described by someone’s community into code that can be implemented by software like PolicyKit or smart contracts. Read about the news here and leave feedback on Smart Contract Research Forum’s Discourse.
• Metagovernance Seminar . Our last two seminars have been by Prof. Eric Alston of CU Boulder who spoke about “Why Private Firms Aren’t Democratic”; and Antoine Vergne, co-director of Missions Publiques, who spoke about deliberative governance in crypto.
• As always, a full archive of our seminars can be found on archive.org. Visit our Research Seminars page for the full schedule and a link to the archive. We hope to see you at the next session with Eli Pariser who will be introducing New_Public.

Community News

• Comparing the Perceived Legitimacy of Content Moderation Processes: Contractors, Algorithms, Expert Panels, and Digital Juries . Amy Zhang has shared their latest co-authored paper on platform governance and content moderation. This paper compares “the perceived institutional legitimacy of four popular content moderation processes” by “conduct[ing] a within-subjects experiment in which we showed US Facebook users moderation decisions and randomized the description of whether those decisions were made by paid contractors, algorithms, expert panels, or juries of users.”
• An Active Inference Ontology for Decentralized Science: from Situated Sensemaking to the Epistemic Commons . Daniel Ari Friedman has shared their co-authored paper on decentralized science. In the paper “we consider science as a collective process using Active Inference, an integrative framework that models the cognitive processes of perception, planning, and action selection in terms of Bayesian probabilities and updating.” The paper also makes reference to several Metagov works.
• Creators: Tokenize Thyself! Charley Johnson published the fifth installment in their monthly series, Untangled, this time writing about social tokens and the transformation of personhood into equity.
• This Is Digital Politics . Released by NERV, this article covers the digitization of politics, the increase in online voting, the frequency of participation in democratic decision making, and new online tools for digital governance in an international context.

What We’ve Been Discussing

• Spurred by the release of Pluriverse last month, we’ve been having a discussion around the topic of pluralism and what its relationship is to metagovernance. One of the key questions to arise has been “does pluralism include differences of perspective around ‘who can/should engage’?” Along these lines, we’ve been discussing this proposal by community member Aviv Ovadya on the case for algorithmic feeds , what a community governed algorithm might look like, and what impact these lines of thought could have on pluralism.

Excerpt from Towards a Digital Pluriverse

• We are currently engaged in a discussion around the topic of personal/group identity play in online communities. The discussion is touching on several topics and events including advertising companies using facial recognition technology, differences between identity and individuality in the context of governance technologies, Nordic LARPs, headphone verbatim theater, the place of pseudonymous actors in an organization’s governance, and a surreal case study of people changing their legal names to take advantage of a promotion for free sushi — all while considering the implications of these examples in the context of online governance. Very much an extension of the pluriverse discussion highlighted above.

Community Tips

Metagovenors will occasionally share research and networking opportunities for people and communities interested in exploring matters of governance. Here are some of the opportunities on our radar this month.

• Open Call: Bring Decentralized Tools to Your Community . Sacred Stacks has an open call for communities wanting to explore decentralized tools. “We are looking to partner with vital communities — communities centered around deep commitments like spiritual experimentation, collective study, and social transformation. Together, we will explore how decentralized tools and self-governance practices can make these communities even stronger.”
• Application Deadline: March 11
• Data Leadership Cohort — Call for Participation . “Aspiration, Digital Public, and Fenris are excited to announce the Data Leadership Cohort (DLC). […] The first-ever Data Leadership Cohort will provide an opportunity for emerging data leaders to meet, learn, and build connections with each other as they work through challenges and opportunities in governing data resources, designing data-intensive platforms, and procuring data systems.”
• Application Deadline: March 11
• Polis Meetup — London . Short talks followed by dinner & networking. Meet other researchers, practitioners and technologists working on and with digital tools for public participation. Speakers include: ​Colin Megill (cofounder of Polis and member of the Metagov Slack), ​Sarah Castell (CEO of Involve), ​Oli Whittington (democratic innovation in the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta), and ​Simon Parker (Director of Transformation and Policy Capability at the Department for Education )
• Meetup Date: March 30
• MetagovDAO Research + Community . MetagovDAO’s call for proposals for qualitative DAO research is still open! We are looking to fund qualitative research related to DAOs and/or community events for the Metagov community.
• Application Deadline: Rolling

ETH Denver Highlights

Many Metagovenors were in attendance at ETHDenver last month. Here are some highlight videos and a photo from the event.

• DAOstar One Launch Roundtable (featuring Kei Kreutler, Ivan Fartunov, Isaac, Joshua Tan, Michael Zargham):

• Policy Proposals for Non Dystopian Crypto Protocols (presented by Nathan Schneider):

Folks from Metagov gather for brunch at ETHDenver

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And that’s it for this edition of Metagov News. In our next newsletter we will be announcing the rollout of a new community onboarding flow that is in active development within the community, and other community development related news. In the meantime, you can continue to track our projects and updates in our community doc!

🌱
Josh & Cent

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