Metagov News #5 (July 2022)

Hi Metagovernors, welcome to the fifth edition of our community newsletter!

Project News

• Govbase. Joshua Tan, Max Langenkamp, Anna Weichselbraun, Ann Brody, and Lucia Korpas, just released The Constitutions of Web3, a study of existing DAO constitutions (built on top of a data set accessible on Govbase) along with a set of practical recommendations for future constitutions. The team is also accepting submissions of DAO and Web3 constitutions. The project was developed in partnership with Verses and supported by the Filecoin Foundation and by MetagovDAO’s rolling fund for qualitative research.

• Telescope. Tara Merk, Ellie Rennie, and Luke Miller have published an introductory essay on the Telescope bot, a Discord bot used for conducting ethical and responsive digital ethnography as detailed in their recent paper of qualitative digital ethnography research on the SourceCred Discord community. The findings of that research are on SSRN “Towards a participatory digital ethnography of blockchain governance”.
• CommunityRule. With the support of the Smart Contract Research Forum (SCRF), a refactor of the CommunityRule codebase is now online. The refactor involved moving the database from HTML to JSON/YAML and moving from vanilla JavaScript to Veu.js. Read more about the update at SCRF, and visit CommunityRule to give it a try.
• Validator Commons. We just helped launch the Validator Commons, a cryptopolitical party of aligned validators and allies who believe that governance matters. The team (Metagov, Stakefish, Figment, Chainflow, Chorus One, and many others) had an in-person gathering at Consensus featuring spirited debate between the leaders and core developers of many validators and several blockchains including Cosmos, Agoric, and Sifchain. Next step: to develop proposals we can agree on, publish them on a proof-of-stake blockchain (likely Juno, to start), and then vote!

Validator Commons in-person gathering at Consensus

• DAO Research Hub. We held the first of our monthly community calls for the DAO Research Hub, a collaborative grant initiative in partnership with DAO Research Collective and the Smart Contract Research Forum to build an industry-university research network for DAOs. Read the details here or watch Josh’s talk at Schelling Point.
• Open Problems in DAO Science. For the survey article, we are organizing a series of researcher-focused workshops to build on our original launch in Amsterdam: first on July 14 at the Web3 Workshop, and then on Sept. 1 at the Stanford Blockchain Research Conference. We will be hosting sessions dedicated to specific chapters of the survey at each of these events. If you are a researcher or academic interested in learning about or contributing to DAO science, come by!
• DAOstar. DAOstar One continues to host a monthly roundtable featuring leaders across the DAO ecosystem. James Brennan and Joshua Tan have written a summary of the conversation from June 3, 2022 featuring leaders from Tally, Snapshot, Abridged, Paladin, Bribe, and Commonwealth. The session was moderated by David Ehrlichmann of Converge and groundw3rk. The DAOstar Voyager Identity working group has also released Attestations for DAOs, an attestation-based architecture and data model for DAO membership, member contributions, and other data. Learn more about DAOstar’s projects and connect by signing up for the community meetings on our beautiful website.
• Cryptopolitics. All of the NFTs from the Cryptopolitics Typology Quiz have been airdropped. If you submitted a survey, check your Polygon wallet to see if you received one, or visit OpenSea.

Cryptopolitics NFTs, illustrated by Joe Hirsch

• Metagovernance Seminar. Our seminar programming has expanded. We are now running three tracks, still on the same day and time. There are the regular seminars that we have been running for over a year now, a return of community lightning presentations/discussions, and a new Practical Governance Concepts Workshops series.
• Regular programming: Our last few seminars have included Eli Pariser introducing New_Public, Emaline Friedman and Michael Hueschen introducing Neighbourhoods: Generic Tools for Specific Cultures, and Aviv Ovadya on Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure.
• Lightning presentations/discussions: Our first session of short talks featured five speakers from Metagov including Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Jacques Courbe, Danilo Vaz, Isaac Mutemi, and Seth Frey. Discussion topics ranged from biogovernance, measures of governance quality in DAOs, political change in developing countries, governance experiment at Keiteki-Ryo, and the use of relational contracts in management practices.
• Our second session featured Josh Tan, Jonathan Kung, and Connor McCormick. Discussion touched on the recent release of The Constitutions of Web3, the design of neutral governance processes, and seasonal governance frameworks and sandboxes in scientific publication.
• Practical Governance Concepts Workshops: Our inaugural workshop in this series was hosted by Metagov member and MetagovDAO funding recipient Alex Rodriguez, and was titled Exquisite Corpse in Common: An Experiment in Sociocratic Surrealism. The session gave participants the opportunity to explore the basic principles of sociocracy through the co-creation of a poem. Read Metagov researcher Val Elefante’s blog post summarizing the experiment.
• 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.

Community News

We have a lot of podcasts and videos from conferences lined up for this newsletter!

Podcasts/Audio

• SCRF Interviews, DAOstar One (Part 1 / Part 2). SCRF’s Head of Operations, Eugene Leventhal (also an active member of Metagov) moderates two discussions with members of DAOstar One on DAO standards and DAO tooling. Featuring Joshua Tan, Isaac Patka, Kei Kreutler, and Michael Zargham.
• The Ownership Economy, Modeling Digital Community Governance. Josh Tan joins Martin Smith and Jahed Momand for a wide-ranging discussion on the ownership economy, modular versus composable governance, exit to community, and the tools that Metagov builds for self-governing online communities.
• Research Hole, Governance in History. Shauna Gordon-McKeon talks about how The Dawn of Everything and Legal Systems Very Different from Ours inspires her to think differently about progress and the possibilities of governance.
• #Web3Thursdays: Effective Self-Governance. Metagov community member, and lead of contributor experience at Clarity, Caryn Tan joins Ted Rau from Sociocracy for All and Sean McCaffery from jokedao to discuss effective self-governance as part of Susie Kavanaugh’s series of #Web3Thursdays Twitter Spaces.

Videos

• Tools for Governance on Online Social Platforms. Amy Zhang presents “Tools for Governance on Online Social Platforms” at the DIMACS Workshop on Computer Science and Law: Content Moderation held May 11–12, 2022.

• Measurement Systems and Contributor Rewards. This is one of two Metagov appearances at Funding the Commons. In this panel discussion, hosted by Michael Zargham, panelists Aaron Soskin from Govrn, Jeff Emmett from Common Stack, and Metagov collaborator Ellie Rennie discuss qualitative digital ethnographic and quantitative research and approaches to understanding and measuring contributions in DAOs.

• Funding Positive-Sum Goods. In our second appearance at Funding the Commons, Divya Siddarth invites us into her process of thinking about what constitutes public goods and how by expanding our model beyond a public and private framework we can find ways to better align individual incentives with public goods.

• From Users to (Sense)Makers: Stigmergic social Annotation & The Quest for Collective Sensemaking. Metagov community member, Ronen Tamari, has shared a video presentation of a paper on the Blue Sky ideas track of the 33rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. The paper is co-authored with another Metagov community member, Daniel Friedman, as well as William Fischer, Lauren Herbert, and Dafna Shahaf. Ronen has also prepared a Twitter thread going over the research.

Writing

• How We Can Encode Human Rights in The Blockchain. Nathan Schneider makes the case for blockchains as a technological stratum for enforcing rights that do not rely on the assent of military-backed nation-states; a layer of global social contracts where human peers are the protagonists.
• Measuring Decentralization in DAOs: Lessons from nation-states. Metagov research assistant Lucia Korpas looks at eleven established indicators of nation-state governance to study and measure the decentralization of power and governance in DAOs.
• Trust me, I’m a smart contract & Is pseudonymity the answer?. Two new installments in Charley Johnson’s newsletter on technology. This time Charley is looking at trustless systems and the place of pseudonymity in blockchain projects. Charley also sat down with Katie Notopoulos from BuzzFeed News to discuss the revelation of the names of the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club.
• A long bet for DAOs. Joshua Tan places his long bet on the future of DAOs in 2023. Here’s the bet. Check out the article to read his rational.

By 2032, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and other digitally-constituted organizations will organize more assets and production than traditional, legally-constituted corporations in the United States.

On Our Radar

• People Powered, Platform Ratings. A collection of matrices comparing digital participation platforms across metrics of cost, capacity requirements, features, accessibility, ethics & transparency, and track record & reliability.
• Reinventing W3C Governance. Robin Berjon writes about governance for the internet, the membership model of W3C, the historical governance models of W3C and how they might be reformed.
• BigBang. Software for scientific analysis of open source and internet governance communities through mailing lists.
• Reclaiming Democracy: The Deliberative Wave. A look at the history of democracy, its entangled connections with voting, and the trend towards more sortition and citizens’ assemblies. Metagovernor Aviv Ovadya also gets a shoutout for his paper “Towards Platform democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure”.
• The Community Power Compass. The Community Power Compass is a tool for thinking about the place of controls and freedoms when considering power dynamics in communities.

Opportunities

Metagovernors 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.

• Newspeak House Residency. Newspeak House is a hub for communities working to change society with technology, spanning all kinds of civic institutions, from government, politics, activism, charities, journalism, think tanks, NGOs, philanthropy, to academia. The hub is seeking applications from prospective residents for their 2022 cohort.
• Application Deadline: Rolling until filled
• 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
• Metagov Open Positions. Metagov has open positions for research engineers, community research fellows, and an intern.
• Application Deadline: Rolling until filled
• Redwood Parliament at DWeb Camp. Metagov is partnering with the Internet Archive, RadicalXChange, and the Unfinished Network to organize a four day program of governance workshops, happenings, and discussions on the topic of a governance layer for the internet. August 24–28.

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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.

If you’d like to join the group of metagovernors discussing these topics, you can visit our community website and complete our survey.

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