Metagov News #6

Hello metagovernors!

Welcome to the sixth edition of our monthly newsletter.

This month we are highlighting three of our upcoming IRL presences at DWeb Camp, August 24–28, the Stanford DAO Workshop, September 1, and Unfinished Live, September 21–24.

Redwood Parliament at DWeb Camp 2022, Aug 24–28

Metagov is partnering with the Internet Archive and RadicalxChange to curate a broad collection of governance-based events at DWeb Camp around the topic of building a governance layer for the internet. Our track at camp is called Redwood Parliament. You can read a sketch of what we have planned in this excellent article that Mai Ishikawa Sutton wrote giving an overview of the whole camp.

DWeb Camp is a five-day retreat where diverse builders and dreamers gather in nature to connect, learn, share, and have fun, while working to build a better web. A web that is more open, private, and secure. A web with many winners. A decentralized web.

If you are planning to attend DWeb this year, get in touch with us. We’d love to connect with other folks working on digital governance.

Stanford DAO Workshop, Sep 1

Part of the Science of Blockchain Conference 2022, the Stanford DAO Workshop aims to accelerate DAO functionality by facilitating collaboration between academic and industry leaders. Join us for a day of intimate curated workshops focused on resolving some of the most critical issues for DAOs.

Unfinished Live, September 21–24

Metagov has recently joined the Unfinished Network and will be present at Unfinished Live this September in NYC. Unfinished Live is an immersive event exploring the collision of technology, art, ideas, and impact. Unfinished works to strengthen our civic life in the digital age. With a network of partners in technology, academia, social impact and the arts, Unfinished is imagining the future of technology, culture, and governance to create a thriving multiracial democracy and just economy.

As part of Unfinished Live, Joshua Tan will be speaking on a panel titled “Are DAOs the Future of Collaboration?” and Nathan Schneider will be speaking on a panel titled “Social Good and the Decentralized Web: Power, Equity & Rights”.

Readers of Metagov’s newsletters are able to attend and hear Josh and Nathan speak by registering using this 50% discount.

Metagovernance Seminar

• Governance Workshops
• We conducted a beta test of Niccolo Pescetelli’s audio and text-based collective intelligence decision making application, PSi.
• Regular Programming
• We had Jessy Kate Schingler present her work on extitutional theory. Read an introduction here: An Introduction to Extitutional Theory. Following Jessy we had Issac Patka presenting his framework for DAO security analysis titled DAO Roast.
• Short Talks
• We had two community members present at our last Short Talk: Ananth Natarajan on “Decentralized Governance of Capital Project Metaorganizations” and Tucker McLachlan on “Crowdwrite, a tool for large-scale participatory writing that brings governance options into the editing process.”
• Upcoming Book Club
• We’re also looking forward to a book club on Lorraine Daston’s new book Rules, led by Metagov community member Anna Weichselbraun. Visit the seminar page at Metagov for more information.

Network Publications and Media

• To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up. Divya Siddath has written an article on the virtues of collective intelligence and what lessons we can learn from CI to improve our democratic structures and governance processes.
• Building Human Values into Recommender Systems: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis. A recent publication by Amy Zhang and co-authors brings together several disciplines to form a shared language, articulate current design approaches, and identify open problems in the effort to ensure recommender systems enact the values of the individuals and societies that they serve.
• How to Think About Voting Systems: Toby Weed writes about comparative analysis of voting systems, how to think about them, and goes into detail about some of them, including: network visualization, clustering analysis, and power indexing.
• In pursuit of DAO answers, how does Metagovernance create standards and infrastructure for online governance? curiousjoe has written an overview of Metagov, our research projects, and what lessons people working on DAOs can draw from the research. The article was also a Mirror Spotlight series winner for the week of August 4th.
• STOP! Throwing Money At Each Other. Another publication by Network emergency Response Volunteers (@nerv). This one on Web3, governance and DAOs.
• Presentation and discussion around the paper “From Users to (Sense)Makers: On the Pivotal Role of Stigmergic Social Annotation in the Quest for Collective Sensemaking”. Daniel Friedman and Ronen Tamari lead a discussion around the topic of their paper on stigmergy and attentional governance.
• Bonus:
• Since our last newsletter, we put together some resources in Zotero and Research Rabbit for folks who’d like to easily cite Metagov’s research and discover similar researchers working in the field of digital governance.

On our Radar

• Soulbinding Like a State. On the relationship between soulbound tokens and James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. We had a lengthy discussion around this one, and Jacky Zhao wrote a response here, titled “On Digital Identity” that also draws from The Web of Trust’s “Five Mental Models of Identity”.
• Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave. A dataset of deliberative institutions and processes.
• A presentation by Case from DAO DAO at ToorCamp on a tabletop DAO Game. We’ll be playing DAO Game at DWeb camp this year.
• Humans Need to Create Interspecies Money to Save the Planet.
• Design choices: Mechanism design and platform capitalism.

And that’s it for this edition of Metagov News.

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

Cent & Val Elefante