Metagov News #4 (Apr. 2022)

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

Community Update

• We have a new community website where members of the public can learn how to join the Metagov community, get involved and contribute to the collective, review currently open projects, browse a community directory of members, view work from the community that we are peer reviewing, and read and comment on the collective’s governance proposals
• Visit now and fill out our new onboarding survey to be added to the Metagov Slack and have the opportunity to have your information added to the public directory of community members.

Metagov Public Charity Status

• Metagov has finally received our 501c3 classification! We are now officially a public charity in the US.
• This means: if you are taxed in the US, you can now officially deduct all your donations to Metagov 😉 and if you already donated, all your donations are retroactively also deductible. We take donations through Open Collective .
• Perhaps more importantly, this means we have finally upgraded (for free) to the Pro version of Slack, meaning all sorts of goodies like Slack groups & bridges via Slack Connect & better APIs.
• We can finally receive some of the grant funding that has been pending our 501c3 classification. 🎉

Project News

• DAO Research Hub. We are partnering with DAO Research Collective and the Smart Contract Research Forum to launch the DAO Research Hub, a major grant initiative to build an industry-university research network for DAOs. It will fund an in-person fellowship cohort for both academics and contributors from participating DAOs, organize conferences and workshops, and fund million-dollar grants to build the future of DAOs and DAO science. Read the details here or watch Josh’s talk at Schelling Point .
• Open Problems in DAO Science . As part of the DAO Research Hub launch, we organized a workshop at the DAOist in Amsterdam to build a set of open problems in DAO science, with the aim of putting together a large survey paper. From that workshop, we put together about 60 open problems that we are looking to refine and organize.

• Metagov Gateway. We are continuing to develop our partnerships with beta testers Social.coop, and Youth Power Coalition . If you are interested in learning more or integrating Metagov Gateway into your community or software tool, fill out our short expression of interest form and schedule a meeting with us.
• Metaeth. Metaeth, short for Metaethnography, is a research project and working group focused on conducting ethical and responsive digital ethnography. The group has developed a Discord bot for facilitating this type of ethnography, called Telescope. The bot has been used to conduct qualitative digital ethnography research on the SourceCred Discord community. The findings of this research can now be viewed on SSRN. Read “ Towards a participatory digital ethnography of blockchain governance ”.
• Govbase. Govbase now has a new website with an overview of the data collected as part of the project and more information on how to get involved. Visit the website and go to the Getting Involved section to learn how to submit a new project, organization, or governance document.
• DAOstar One. DAOstar One’s Voyager Identity working group just released a new working paper, “ Membership via Attestations ”, that extends the EIP-4824 data model to new use-cases involving web3 profiles and CVs. We continue to host community calls open to the public. Learn more and sign up for the community meetings on our beautiful website.
• Metagovernance Seminar . Our last few seminars have been by members of the Yak Collective who spoke about their recently published Online Governance Primer , Bryan Wilson who gave a presentation titled “Reimagining Rent: From Analog to Computational Tokenization of Community Equity Interests”, and Metagov researcher Lucia Korpas giving an introduction to the DAOchem data set.
• As always, a full archive of our seminars can be found on archive.org. Visit our Research Seminars page for the full schedule past and present. We hope to see you at the next session on May 4th which sees the return of our Short Talk series where members of the community will give five ten-minute presentations on aspects of metagovernance that they are researching at the moment.

Community News

• “Permissionless” article added to Internet Policy Review . Kelsie Nabben and Michael Zargham have had their paper on, and definition of, the word “permissionless” added to the Internet Policy Review:
• Abstract: “Permissionlessness” is a term often used in association with public blockchains. In this glossary entry, we explore the origins, evolution, and coexisting uses and meanings of the term “permissionless” to contextualise it. We argue that a technosocial system is deemed permissionless if it is possible to participate in the use, development, and governance of that system or infrastructure without requiring permission from an authority, by adhering to publicly stated procedures. This term is much more broadly applicable then just blockchain systems although it is relevant to decentralized systems. It can be conceptualised as a technical attribute, an ideology, and a cultural value, and links to the access, control, governance, entry and exit of an open information system.
• Sunlight, a fictional short story on governing businesses . Shauna Gordon-McKeon has published a fictional short story on governing businesses in the After The Storm series. The story traces a journey of a local cafe transitioning into community governance.
• Ann Brody presents Introducing Metagovernance Project at ETH Portland . Ann gives an overview of the Metagovernance Project and an autoethnographic account of her time working as a research assistant with Metagov as part of the Govbase working group. In particular, she highlights some of the findings around the Cryptopolitics Typology Quiz and the Constitutions of Web3 research projects.

• Aligning the concept of ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’ to Precedents in Cybernetics . Kelsie Nabben and Michael Zargham have released a new paper that draws on Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model to bridge DAOs and the field of cybernetics “via two main principles of organization: viability and purpose”. You can also read an introduction to the paper that Kelsie wrote on the Block Science Medium page.
• We need to talk about the social graph . Philip Sheldrake from ASHAKA has written a blog post exploring the concept of “the social graph”, which traces the history of the concept, and the history’s implication on, and intersection with, decentralization and identity.
• DAOlitical Parties and DAOliticians: A Future in the Metagovernance World . Oxkydo has written an article looking at the topic of metagovernance in the context of the protocol governance landscape, and the potential for political-party-like DAOs.
• Amy Zhang presents “The Perceived Legitimacy of Content Moderation” at AKASHA Conversations #4 . We mentioned Amy’s paper Comparing the Perceived Legitimacy of Content Moderation Processes: Contractors, Algorithms, Expert Panels, and Digital Juries in last month’s newsletter. Since then, Amy has given a presentation on the research findings from that paper at AKASHA’s fourth event in their Conversations series. A summary and video of the talk is on the AKASHA website.

On our Radar

• This video release by Public Trust featuring Andreas Nitsche presenting on Liquid Feedback.
• In a timely connection with Kelsie Nabben and Michael Zargham’s paper “Aligning the concept of ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’ to Precedents in Cybernetics”, we have taken notice of this Real Life article by Kevin Munger, Tipping the Scale, on Stafford Beer and the balance between large-scale systems and individual autonomy.
• A Cold Takes article by Less Wrong’s Holden Karnofsky exploring the space of ideal governance structures for companies, nonprofits, informal associations, or countries. There is a lively discussion happening in the comments based on the request for relevant literature.
• A series of multi-media artifacts from Constant’s working session Bureaucracksy , about the governance of techno-social systems through the prism of bureaucracksy. The series is being published on 21-day cycles and available via email or podcast feed until June 2022.
• How Do FOSS Communities Decide to Accept Pull Requests? A study on three types of Pull Request (PR) governance styles: protective, equitable, and lenient.
• A long-form article from 2019 titled Spadework, looking at the journey and practical process of politically organizing, written by Alyssa Battistoni for n+1.

Community Tips

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

• PostDoctoral Scholar — Community Organizing and Social Computing . Roderic Crooks at UC Irvine is looking for a postdoc to work on an NSF-funded position that will study how professional community organizers use data to pursue grassroots-led projects and influence data-intensive technologies.
• Application Deadline: May 11th
• Lead the Research Pod at Protein Community . Protein (aka PRTN) is looking for a lead for their Research Pod. The first collaborative research initiative will be researching web3 compensation.
• No Listed Application Deadline
• Product Manager at Wikimedia Foundation . The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Product Manager to “help build features that enable our communities to achieve our Vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”
• No Listed Application Deadline
• 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

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And that’s it for this edition of Metagov News. As always, if you’re not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up below.

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Cent