S.1 Ep. 14 Scaling Local: Culture, Decentralization, and the Science of Governance with Seth Frey
In this episode of Governance Futures, hosts Jamilya and Eugene speak with Seth Frey, computational social scientist and researcher of governance, common pool resources, and online communities. Seth brings insights from years of studying how people self-organize — from Minecraft servers to DAOs — and explores what digital communities can learn from Ostrom’s theories of commons management. The conversation covers the roots of governance in human behavior, why DAOs struggle not from a lack of tools but from a lack of community managers, and why decentralization without culture leads to chaos. Seth shares lessons from online systems like Minecraft and Reddit, reflects on the balance between centralization and decentralization, and discusses how “off-chain” culture and human development are the true frontiers of Web3 governance. The episode closes with his one-word vision for governance: Scaling Local.<br> <br>Some of the materials we mention in the episode: Online communities as model systems for commons governance- https://enfascination.com/weblog/post/2907 <br>Timestamps<br>00:00 – Cold start<br>01:00 – Introduction: Hosts reflect on their conversation with Seth<br>04:25 – Overview of Seth’s work on governance and common pool resources<br>05:57 – Parallels between traditional and digital commons<br>08:11 – Applying Ostrom’s framework to digital resources<br>10:11 – The Ostroms’ contribution: self-organization beyond market and state<br>12:34 – Eleanor Ostrom’s legacy and early research journey<br>14:35 – Defining common resources in Web3: attention and computational limits<br>15:42 – Lag, attention, and other finite digital resources<br>18:02 – What Minecraft communities teach us about self-governance<br>20:00 – Bureaucracy and creativity in online worlds<br>22:26 – Rules as history lessons vs. proactive governance<br>24:11 – From informal play to formal systems: emergent order in communities<br>26:20 – How users invented governance in Minecraft<br>28:34 – Human motivation in governance: enthusiasm vs. apathy<br>30:43 – When democracy is appropriate — earning participation<br>33:02 – The problem with solving problems you don’t yet have<br>34:53 – Benevolent dictatorships and transitions to community management<br>37:02 – Why communities resist picking up the ball of participation<br>39:21 – Learning from lived experience, not ideology<br>41:03 – Off-chain culture, vibes, and the role of community managers<br>43:11 – Building strong community culture as a governance project<br>45:12 – The science of vibes and sustaining good culture<br>47:15 – Redefining decentralization and polycentric governance<br>49:36 – Power, purity, and the myth of total decentralization<br>51:30 – Bureaucracy as fairness and human-centered governance<br>53:29 – Training people to govern: developing human capacity<br>55:30 – Technology vs. people — garbage in, garbage out<br>56:20 – Leadership’s paradox: top-down democracy building<br>58:37 – Standardizing culture without killing diversity<br>01:00:48 – Polycentric systems: designing top-down and bottom-up balance<br>01:03:02 – AI in governance: developmental, not managerial<br>01:05:26 – AI as a tool for training future human governors<br>01:07:24 – One-word quiz: Inspiration, Futility, Off-chain, Scaling Local<br>01:14:19 – Closing reflections and outro
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Transcript
Your rules, your governance, it shouldn't be a history lesson. It should solve problems in general. It shouldn't solve problems with kinda one problem at a time. These communities write, like, 20 page policy manuals. It actually makes you appreciate bureaucracy because people are making it. I don't think even most communities even, like, understand fully what they what they exactly mean by decentralization.
Although, most of the communities have centralization in their constitutions.
DAOs aren't failing because they don't have fancy tools. They're failing because they don't have community managers. But if you looked at the manual and you open it up, you'd find underneath the neat little typewritten no pets, there is a giant marker all caps, no miniature police.
I can't help that my mind is fixating on that. No mini pony. A lot of the, academic work on governance feels very academic. Had never even thought of, well, just go to where thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are self organizing and just
And today, we had a pleasure of chatting with Seth Ray. Eugene, what are your impressions right after the chat we had with Seth?
Yeah. I always really appreciate the conversations with Seth. I feel like he has both so much experience and exposure to governance in a lot of different environments. Even as we're recording this, I'm realizing what questions that I wish we had time for, but we didn't. But, nonetheless, yeah, it's always such a pleasure to talk to Seth to get his perspective, and I really appreciate how much he brought up culture, how much he brought up, you know, the the role of or our understanding of the centralization in a lot of these communities and potential misunderstandings that can lead to problems and challenges, and him, you know, generally speaking about governance in a tech last kind of way, which personally really resonates with me. And, you know, governance just feels such a fundamental part of us being human, and it's more trying to understand how to best do it within these bigger and bigger systems. So, yeah, I I thought it was really exciting to get to dive into some of these things with Seth. And, yeah, he's definitely one of the guests that I feel like we could have on multiple times and still leave each conversation being like, I didn't get to ask that thing. But, yeah, what about you, Jamila? How did it go for you?
I really loved it, and, it felt like he really cares. And there's a lot of thoughtfulness, and there's also a lot of reflection. And some of the things, for example, during our conversation he mentioned, your governance shouldn't be a history lesson. I love that. I feel like very often in crypto space, we're living through, like, historic times, and I wish I wish we didn't have to do it that often. And just we would have a peaceful time, we would be able to just build without necessarily running into, some of the situations. And I think he also mentioned this, importance, as you mentioned, the culture, human centered governance, all of that really spoke to to some of the things that I've been thinking recently. Yeah. And I also feel like his replies generally were touching upon so many things, and it was great to hear from him having so much experience researching, not just online community, but also local hyperlocal communities. So, yeah, to me, Seth, when he his research associates with Ostrom's, of course, I think even in his, like, ex account, he has, like, Alfred Ostrom in a very funny, caricature way. So, yeah, if you if you've heard of Ostrom, and even if you haven't, I feel like it's a great conversation, and it's great because because Seb was just so generous providing so many insights into why we shouldn't just think about web three governance as a complete separate isolated thing. It actually has so many connections to common pool resource management, to so many things and problems or coordination problems that have been discussed, like, so long ago. And, we're still trying to find answers for experimentation. And, yeah, if anything, the conversation with him left me very hopeful and inspired.
For sure. Yeah. And I really appreciated also the way that we got towards the end of the conversation with, covering AI a little bit and him mentioning this angle of, you know, the goal of the AI should be to make themselves obsolete because humans are able to kind of master the obsolete because humans are able to kind of master the system so well, which is a perspective that we don't hear that often. So, yeah, if, if folks are excited for this, I hope you get to enjoy the rest of the conversation. As always, feel free to subscribe, like, and share, as you see appropriate.
And without further ado, here's the conversation with Seth. Hi, Seth. Thank you so much for coming to our podcast. You are a computational social scientist who studies common pool resources, governance institutions. Your work is very much rooted in data, online community sports, games. Your research personally to me always associates with Austrians work, Austrians workshop, everything that relates to self governance, online communities, cooperatives. And my first question actually relates to the talk you gave a year ago at Stanford and you said that groups who start online communities must overcome the challenges of recruiting finite resources around difficult common goals. So could you please tell us what parallels do you see between traditional common governance and digital community governance?
For me, they're very much the same. So, you know, online communities for me are a model system of common pool resource systems generally. Any any anywhere you have a group of people trying to do something together, you're gonna have something that's finite, some valuable resource that there's not enough of to go around. And it can be physical like water or trees or it can be virtual time and attention or, CPU or RAM. And where there are finite resources and lots of people and inability to privately own those resources, they're fundamentally shared, then people have to share, and you'll get governance and theories about, governance, self governance, resource management generally, common pool resources, and public goods, theories like that will become relevant no matter where you are. So online communities, I I think of them as a toy model, a simplified toy model of the same fundamental, processes that that, drive the tragedy of the commons, and other social dilemmas in the real world just like, we use the fruit fly, and the mouse, as models of people, their model systems, their model organisms, and we can learn so much about humans from those things even though they don't look like very good models. Online communities, have, exactly the same properties, that, and have exactly the same power, to give us really deep insights into, real world, social systems.
Thank you so much. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into common pool resources, and most of our listeners will be familiar with Ostrom's framework, but someone who might be listening to us might think, well, common pool resources, we usually think about, I don't know, something that is physical or something like fisheries or some other resources that may not necessarily overlap with what we're seeing in digital space. So how would you say the relevance and research of common pool resources, the Ostrom's framework is applicable to, for example, blockchain based common pool resources? And also, here's the second question from me is, from what I know, there's no unique one, like, definition of common pool resources, especially digital common pool resources. So maybe you could, like, just dissect it a little bit to us us how this framework's applicable to the common folder source we see in digital space and in web for space, and what is that definition that you are using in your work, for example.
Great. Great. Yeah. It's almost a nice comfortable step back. Maybe, maybe we shouldn't assume folks know who the, the are. So let's see. We have this idea of, common pool resources going back to the twentieth century, and they're resources that are finite and nonexcludable. You can't keep other people from accessing them. And they're inherently vulnerable to, over extraction, and that's a social dilemma. As a social dilemma, we can map on to every major world, world problem, deforestation, carbon emissions, overfishing, superbugs, antibiotic resistance. These are all examples of a thing that's valuables, but a thing that no one can keep anyone else from accessing, causing a problem in which the quality of that thing degrades for everybody. And it became a model system for, governance, the the kind of one of the simplest expressions of the type of problem that demands governance. The first picture of the tragedy of the commons, was very binary. You can either suffer from it with no governance. You can solve it with the state telling everybody what to do, or you can solve it with the market. Divide the commons up into privately owned little bits, and then use that to distribute. That was aligned very much with the whole twentieth century narrative, about the state, and freedom, and so it fit very nicely. So this woman, Eleanor Ostrom, and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, more of a constitutional scholar, they they came in and and spent decades breaking that dichotomy and showing there's a very rich middle, of solutions to this type of problem that communities can self organize, can take advantage of of local ecological structure, can can use their, local or indigenous knowledge about the resource, its context, and the cultural conditions of extraction to come up with very creative, and, very long term sustainable solutions to, the dilemma that, you know, was treated, in earlier times is only solvable through the market or the state. So that's a major contribution from the Ostroms. Now in the process of showing that and convincing economists who are especially skeptical audience, they had to develop a whole way of doing research that, integrated insights from everywhere from anthropology to mathematics, the integrated, methods all the way from, pencil paper proofs to laboratory experiments and and, ethnography. And that toolkit ends up being useful anytime you wanna study a social a real world social dilemma, with lots of moving parts that and anytime you wanna do that in a way that respects the kind of richness that context brings. So, as much as anything, as much as I'm using the theory from that community, the it's really the methods and the frameworks that, are useful for porting over to DAO world, to online community world, because, they have this superpower of being able to take context into account, to adapt, and so
on. Thank you so much. And I love that you gave an intro to Eleanor and Vincent Osterholm. To me, she is definitely a hero because, she was starting her academic path, during sixties, if I'm not mistaken. She was doing her PhD, and that was quite a hard time for a woman trying to actually convince the university that her research was worth time and effort. And then, I've heard from just so many challenges that she had to go especially in the earlier stages of her career. But what is I was fascinated about is that during Austrian workshop last year, I saw that, like a little book that, Eleanor Osterholm was, like, drawing, like some drawings when she was seven year old or something. And she was already drawing some water canal systems and it's just incredible actually how she carried it through her whole life. I wanted to just like one quick question to follow-up on the common pool resources. So it's very now I think clear when we talk about deforestation or you know this free rider program, But when we apply that to a free space, those rivalrous, subtractable goods what do we mean by that? Is it attention? Is it, perhaps, I don't know, time, treasury funds? What would be something that you would disqualify, within, like, the DAO or, like, just web three community that are like those are common pool resources, guys. You you should be aware that those are that. It's tough because,
yeah, some of the context around workshop, I'd, I love to elaborate on. Yeah. I mean, it's it's, like, it's remarkable, for example, that Ostrom was a spousal hire. She was hired as a condition of the hiring of her husband. He was sort of the, like, the the original hire, And she was given just administrative duties for about a decade, and teaching duties before she really started to get recognized and get her own resources. And a lot of that comes from the fact that because they didn't have kids, they funded their their institute out of salary. Out of pocket, they funded a research institute and a research program. So they really made it happen, and I'm really, really pleased that you remember that exhibit. I was I was behind that. That was my, legwork to go into the archives, and and dig up those resources. It was such a treasure to find that book report by her as a kid. I couldn't believe I could actually touch it. I was like, oh my god. This feels illegal. We should not be able to come close to it. Yeah. We we definitely share this attitude. She's a she's a science hero for me up there with, Donna Meadows and and Herbert Simon are I'd say my three big ones. Endow space, to identify the, common resources, you, yeah, you just have for me, that's the definition. There's just the two bits, subtractable or rivalrous, as you're saying, and, excludable or nonexcludable. So, and so you just have this handy checklist. You look at everything that's finite, and if in addition of it being finite, no one can keep anyone else from accessing it, then it's a common pool resource. When most applications of the idea of common pool resource to online communities, kinda capture more abstract things like, yeah, time, attention, vibes, and so on, which has its place. I like to go a little more concrete when I can, but it's true that a lot of my work, for, you know, online community governance, when I'm looking at the resources with those characteristics that communities are managing actively, it tends to be attention, basically. Any rule you see about proper formatting of titles and headers, proper use of tags in Reddit, those are, those are managing the finite resource of attention. Mostly, when I'm looking at online community governance of a common resource, it's usually attention that's being managed, attention being the finite nonexcludable thing, the thing that I can take from you, without you having that much necessarily that much control over it. And so any rules that a community has around keeping it short or proper formatting of headers or titles, proper use of tags, which channel to use. These are all examples of managing the the the finite nonexcludable common pool resource of attention. More concrete examples. My favorite concrete examples all come out of Minecraft. In physical resources, lag is a beautiful example of a common resource. You grow too many mobs, too many sheep, you set too many fires or make too many explosions, and this will impose a CPU load on the server that introduces lag for everybody. And so rules about the the use or growth or cultivation of those resources made by kids, or other players of Minecraft are are common pool resource management institutions. A really nice example then of a virtual resource and and just a great example of how technology doesn't just isn't just there to solve resource problems, technology can cause resource problems, is the emergence of new kinds of common pool resources in a special kind of online community context. I think of creeper creators. I knew a community of, Swiss kids. The the kid I had hired to, reverse engineer the the Minecraft network protocol had been, obviously, a long time player himself, and he was in a community that had chosen not to turn off craters created by explosions. And so between, like, the wilds of their resources and their thriving little village was a sort of no man's land, this moonscape of creeper craters. And so his community created a norm that if you are the one who set off a creeper, it's your responsibility to fill in the crater. And again, it's a it's a, it's a negative resource in this case, that affects everybody, and that nobody can keep anybody else from, you know, giving them. And so it's another example of the kind of richness you get, from a technologically defined, environment that creates new more need for governance, not less.
And I remember when I first heard about some of the research that you had done on these kind of Minecraft networks. I found it fascinating because it a lot of the time, it seems, you know, not to sound silly, but a lot of the, academic work on governance feels very academic in studying hyper formalized environments and, you know, things where there's a literal constitution businesses and corporate charters and things along those lines. And, you know, in my own kind of learning journey, I had never even thought of, well, just go to where thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are self organizing and just study that, and you learn so much. And so I guess as a quick kind of question on that side, you know, when it comes to some of the work that you've done either on Minecraft servers or any other kind of getting to observe, digital communities as they are kind of instances, What are some of the the major kind of surprises there when it comes to thinking about, you know, these shared resources and some of these other fundamental things that these groups end up governing even if they don't think of it as a governance exercise?
For For me, I think there's two big surprises. One is how good people are at it, and and one is how bad people are. I was still I was getting my head around that. On the good side, they showed tremendous creativity, and astuteness, often a surprising amount of vigor. There's a wonderful ecosystem of pirate World of Warcraft servers. So these are people who took who liked the old World of Warcraft and didn't like that it was always changing, so they reverse engineered all assets and all kind of server mechanisms and just rewrote their own version of the server. If you look around, you'll find, maybe 50 to a 100 major, so private, Wow servers, in the world, and each one has to kinda be Blizzard. Each one has to become the central administrator because that's how the the game is written. So you'll find, these communities, right, like, 20 page policy manuals, not just processes for becoming an administrator, but processes for appealing if you get rejected in your application as an administrator. So just bureaucracy, like, huge amounts of bureaucracy, and you can't complain about it. It actually makes you appreciate bureaucracy because people are making it. You know? People have chosen to have it. They're they're brought from the outside. Online communities, in some ways, have increased my respect, for bureaucracy, which is to say for processes that solve problems in systematic ways, whether or not they have a human in the loop. As for bad, I see a lot of it on Reddit. Just some very reactive rules. It's not unique to online communities. I lived in a, a small country town with a small country library, and that library had, a manual with lots of typed out rules, and one of them was was no no pets. But if you looked at the manual and you, and you open it up, you'd find underneath the neat little typewritten no pets, there is a giant marker, all caps, no miniature ponies. And so what you get from that is people can be very you know, your your rules, your governance, it shouldn't be a history lesson. It should solve problems in general. It shouldn't solve problems with kinda one problem at a time. And so if you're just writing rules reactively, which you see all the time in sort of the subreddit side bar when you're listing out rules, you're not thinking ahead. You're not really thinking in a general way. You're more just, like, trying to get on top of the complexity constantly coming at you. You haven't yet gotten your your head around it. You have to when you're coming up with new rules, you have to think of what future problem am I solving, not just what path the past problem's already solved, you know, because time ended it. So thinking kind of generally, and maybe that's some of the value that this kind of theory can bring is with the definition of of what resources require extra attention and management, we can go straight ahead to putting our attention and our care and our our thankless, management effort, into the problems that actually need, long term sustainable attention and solutions.
Yeah. And I I I can't help that my mind is fixating on that no mini pony. And what exactly happened in that community where either someone just trying to argue that a mini pony is not a pet or that they had a special bond that superseded petness or something, but I I I kinda would love to be a fly on the wall of that interaction.
I I actually I I have a rule collection just just because of the really wonderful questions that come up when you see a rural like that. A recent one I stumbled on in my collection, I have it. Maybe I can share it if you guys, publish things. It's, no theology books on the patio. I think it was due to recent events. Due to recent events
Meaning, yeah, that's I feel like that's that could be its own whole hour we do of just these absurd rules that are instituted somewhere. And I actually feel like that's both fun for governance nerds, and I imagine for improv nerds would appreciate the reenacting the situation of where that rule came from. But I did wanna bring back to I mean, a number of what you're alluding to here with, some of the elements of these, you know, Wow servers or Minecraft servers, I imagine in most, if not all of these instances, it didn't come because somewhere there were these formalized rules written out and all these, you know, constitutionalized concepts. It was more kind of emergent. And, well, a, I guess, let me know if that feels like an incorrect, characterization. But, you know, the question that I wanna get us to is kind of what happens when communities go from, hey. We're just a bunch of people hanging out. We don't need written rules to actually shifting towards, you know, there's the board with the the guidelines, and there are the things that we need to do. And, yeah, kind of what what is that experience of transitioning from informal to formal like from your perspective?
It's absolutely accurate to say that these are emergent, you know, systems. Minecraft is just the most inspiring example. So and you kinda have this ratchet effect. You start off with a beta or an alpha an alpha of Minecraft, you know, k, by one person who also releases the server. So you have people kinda running a closed source server and playing this game, but then they decide they wanna modify it. So the community reverse engineer, decompiles, the server, to get the source and then starts writing up, a system of, hooks, software hooks for it. Hooks are a, design principle, design pattern for, module systems. And so now people start writing little modules, little, you know, now you can wear hats, now you can, have more more skins or more behaviors. But people also start writing, plugins for governance, for creating, the idea of teams, the idea of social hierarchy, the idea of cleaning up vandalism or preventing vandalism and so on. So the Minecraft community, they create a bunch of plugins that enhance the game experience that makes the game more popular, more users, more outside people, that motivates more changes. Basically, with every technology you introduce, you create the new problems that you then have to govern. And so eventually, the Minecraft moves into writing, modules for governance, better ways of preventing vandalism or out or, or delegating vandalism prevention or management, delegating, the the process of flagging users for banning, creating the idea of social roles, creating the idea of private property and private property rights. These are not built into the game. These are ideas created by the user community in the form of plug ins that they create. Eventually, they create an entire the fan base. This has nothing to do with the lead, the developer. They create a, like, a a market for plug ins. One place you go to download plug ins to have your style of governance. They create lists, server lists that, show what servers in the world you can join. Those lists are dynamic, so they create an API that every server list can talk to every server to know how many people are on it at that moment, what the lag is at that moment. So they create this whole monitoring ecosystem. The fans did this. They created a lot all their they created all the problems, they had to govern and all the solutions to govern them, and you get this ratchet effect of of institutional complexity that ends up being a wonderful counterpoint to concerns that, bureaucracy and and, like, off chain governance thickness is a problem to solve. If it's adaptive, if it's coming out over time as a solution to problems that emerge by the people who are in, you know, spending tremendous amounts of their lives in these systems, then you can't really resent it. You have to admire it, and you have to start to wonder maybe it's there for a reason. Classic Gordian knot. You come out as an outsider, you know, and you wanna slice the knot. You come to it from an inside or you built that knot and you built it for a reason.
Yeah. And it's so interesting to think about, you know, especially if someone listening to this was never interested in video games or that entire world and kind of being a bit dismissive of these kind of communities and spaces. I know I personally was when I was first learning around the research because I I didn't frame it that way, and I was very much miscategorizing and misunderstanding the fascinating things that we could learn about, you know, humanity and people's desire to just jump in and be self organizing in these ways. At the same time, though, it doesn't feel like that individual level enthusiasm towards self organizing and self governance is as emergent in all other spaces. You know, it's great to see in video game environments, but say, you know, in your local PTA or, you know, something going on, a parent teacher association or in just some kind of community or even local government environment, there isn't always that enthusiasm. And I I don't know if you would feel comfortable kind of commenting or, at least reflecting on, you know, what are the kind of environments where you have seen that passion burn most bright, where people are just super excited about it. And for those of us who end up working in spaces where maybe there isn't as much of that intrinsic motivation, whether in politics or whatever other domain, but, yeah, are there any elements of that brightness that can be, you know, used to illuminate governance spaces that might feel a little darker to keep that analogy going from the enthusiasm perspective?
That's a great question. You know, it's funny. You're we're kind of approaching for me, you're approaching the question punch line first. So there's just a general question of, you know, when is some kind of, like, democracy or some participatory, kind of governance appropriate. And, in my opinion, the inappropriate application of, like, like, democracy, voting, participation, meetings, inclusion is one of the biggest causes of a lot of tech skepticism about, inclusion democracy. I think there's a place for, leadership, for one person to say, I'm just gonna decide this for now. And and it's that it's usually you really see it in open source. You have one person coming in and saying this thing should exist, and so they start building it. And they make decisions about how it should be built. And maybe people start to join them, but they still have authority, and they still are the decider. Now if they're successful, if they do a good job, they get to create the new problem of including others, the good problem. But it's a lot of work before they created something that anyone wants to help them govern. And essentially, they haven't earned, democracy or participation because for democracy or participation to make sense for those governance mechan we should not introduce them for their own sake. For those mechanisms to make sense, they have to be solving a problem that lots of people want different things, and, really capital w wants. They deeply desire. They have a stake. They're invested. Until you have a large group of people deeply invested in a thing, participation is just overkill. It's just a lot of, it's just so much bureaucracy, and you're gonna have a problem of low participation if you front loaded mechanisms for supporting participation without creating a need for it by creating something that usually the people's lives depend on. So you know don't vote on your team's color of shirt but do vote on things that affect your livelihood, whether that's, you know, how your country runs, but in a more mundane way, how your city runs or how your grocery coop runs. It's possible to get passionate about those. It's not I think it's less common. So, like, you you give example of PTA as, like, a drab dry thing. But when it's your kid, there are people who get actually super invested in, like, wait. I can control how this thing runs. I'm gonna take advantage of that by getting involved in how this thing runs. And then this is where games come in because games are, I'll just go ahead and say, frivolous. That they're create. You're you're simulating life challenges, and you're becoming a person who's experienced at, like, solving simulated life challenges and and creating simulated life achievements that may or may not, and I'm I'm very skeptical, transfer to what it takes to make real world life achievements. Sorry. There's a little bit of a screed. The point being, it's not actually where you would expect to tap into that passion, that want, those deep needs that motivate, like like, self governance. But you're absolutely right. The vibrancy is evidence, that that people wants to be involved. I and they're a good example of creating the wants before creating the support and not ahead of it, which I think is a great example of a problem Daz make. They solve a problem they don't have yet. They solve the good problem before they have it when they're still stuck with the bad problem of no one being really all that involved. I really like that you mentioned
that democratic processes, democratic decision making shouldn't be the end goal, rather a tool. And I feel like it very much aligns with some of the conversations we've had with our previous guests, related to decentralization and more specific, DAO governance, web free community governance. And I feel like most of our conversations fall within somewhere like centralization as a spectrum, but also decentralization should be an end goal. So do you have any insights from studying community, online communities, digital communities, even like hyperlocal that would maybe shed some light on what we're doing right or wrong? Or maybe there's certain things that we still, as you said, just doing for the sake of it or running into the same problems. And you as a person with so much background in just analyzing so many different communities, you're like, guys, you're just doing it so wrong. Why are we keep doing the same mistakes? Do you have any of those,
big observations and insight that you would like to share with us? Gladly. Yeah. So, I mean, a really clear one, and you see it in Reddit. You see it in Minecraft. You see it, up and down is, you know, people again, they don't always want participation. And even their favorite Minecraft server, maybe they don't wanna run it. Maybe they're happy to play it and delegate. So, you see a lot of people opting into centralized, governance. I think that's a that's a it's a pragmatic choice, and I'd love to there's actually very little democracy in online communities. I end up being a scholar of benevolent dictatorship and markets for dictators, situations where your job is to choose between different leaders, whether that's different subreddits or different servers or different discords or or whatever. So I think one surprise for me is that there's so much support for that. Another surprise for me, is how hard it is to get out of that. A grant that we, got from National Science Foundation focused on transitions from benevolent dictatorship to community management in open source. It happens all the time. Communities that have succeeded at creating something that's, not just a value to lots of people, but of so much value to lots of people that they wanna be involved in how it runs. And so we have a corpus of, 700, communities that use one standard, the governance dot MD file, which sits in in version control next to your readme dot MD file on on in Git, in GitHub, and we looked at the evolution of those documents, which amounts to, documentation of the transition from a zero byte governance MD file, which is your benevolent dictatorship. All rights and responsibilities are on one person and built into the software, and you don't have to write that. Two, a document that as it grows creates the idea of new roles, creates the idea, defines what the resort what resources are at stake and what actions can be legislated and builds the mappings between resources and roles via actions that you know constitutes a multi stakeholder governance institution. And so watching those transitions at play, it it becomes really clear that, often the big obstacle to bringing participation in democracy in is not this, you know, this leader who won't, like, go with a ball or right? It's the it's a community that doesn't wanna pick the ball up. Are you saddened
by this? I just feel like there's, a bit of yeah. Feeling like you are sad about this, that you're observing it, you're accepting it as a fact, but maybe you wish it wasn't this way or maybe you like, the first reason that comes to my mind, I'm thinking there's attention scarcity city and it requires time. And very often if there's no incentives, like, we see it from, like, just delegates and DAO governance. It's very hard to actually, you know, get that consistency and attention and time and understandably so we'll have lives and so so many different commitments. But I'm just curious from your side, do you is this something that you still feel like, oh, I wish it was a bit different? Or maybe there's a problems where you see, like, well, obviously, it's gonna be like that because of those things that are happening and it's just so hard to change them.
The only thing that's disappointing is that we're also surprised by it. I think so much design, and so much governance effort is driven by our ideas of how we think things work and our ideas of how things should be and our ideas of what people want, and they're not nearly enough driven by our actual experiences. We've experienced, you know, the tension of top down and distributed power and and the the beautiful balance that you can get when you're hitting it just right through growing up in, like, families, you know, and being in classes, where a teacher cares about what students think and being in student groups where everyone's a volunteer and you can't use coercion, to artificially implement alignment and being in in having jobs where you can use wages to artificially, induce alignment. But, you then lean, on authority, and hierarchy for getting things done rather than tapping intentions and desires. So we've already experienced institutional diversity. We all know the up and downsize of every different form of governance, and there and there is no perfect one. Right? And yet so much of our design is informed by, I'd say, pretty, at this point, vapid ideas. Like, yes, there's something you said for vision, but you gotta read more books to have a novel vision, to have a vision that doesn't just rehash all the old conversations that we've already been having for millennia.
And I guess following up on that, what role do you see culture playing whether in these transitions specifically or even zooming out to, you know, what role does culture play in governance systems more broadly?
So I'm really excited about culture. I've, I've dreamed about starting, an a null coin called off dot chain. Just to really emphasize that all the the big, wild, sexy, exciting frontier in governance for me, is off chain. You know? Is going deeper in the off chain, not going further away from it because that's the the hard problem. I I feel like so much of our effort goes into taking the the things that are easy and making them easier, which is to say taking structures, formal processes, and making them more formalizable, when that's very often not what we need. You know? DAOs aren't failing because they don't have fancy tools. They're failing because they don't have community managers, create and, investing in community, creating a thing that everybody feels like they need to be involved in. Need, you know, capital n. So that's for me where culture comes in. It's a very goopy word, and so there's a question. Is this can it be defined? Is there such a thing as a systematic approach to measuring it, to implementing it? And so a good amount of my work has gone into this, and yeah. Yeah. I think there is. I mean, I'm a social scientist, you know, so so put a big asterisk on the answer. Social science is not a very good science, and it's not to follow social scientists. It's the fault of, social systems. You can do science well on things you can control. I have something called the blender test. If you can put it in a blender, if you can destroy it, you can do good science on it. And so we have a great science in mouse brains and atoms and rocks and plants and trees. We don't have very good science of people or social systems because, there's ethical limits on how good the limits to how good science can be are ethical. So that means that a science or culture is gonna itself, have to do a lot of work, to build systematic generalizable insights, but actually a lot of it's there. And we're it's already quite clear, from the work I've done that the ability to be a great community manager and to create value out of nothing that makes people keep coming back and wanting to contribute. That's not a skill set that you have to be born with. They're pretty clear procedures you can follow if you put the time in to, creating a strong culture, creating a thing that people want to be a part of, that out of all the things they could be doing, they wanna be a part of this thing, engaging with it and stressing out about it and having fun with it. That, for me, is the the thing we need technologies for supporting. Right? And that's a very web two answer, and so, is often not sexy. But I think it's if it's about making people, like, excited about something, what's sexier than that? And so when we're thinking of this intersection
of governance and culture, what is the area at that intersection that you want to either personally or you wanna see other people exploring more? Is it kind of mapping what does culture mean in its various facets? Is it about understanding how to what are the cultural processes and procedures to in get more participation or activity? Kind of how do you look at that intersection and from the perspective, especially looking forward of what you hope people were to look into or learn more about? Is there something specific on your mind there? I I think I'm motivated by the same kinda,
more or less the same utopian vision as a lot of people. What if we had a system where people are just excellent to each other, and we don't need a bunch of rules and people just know the right way to be, to maximize everybody's, else's dignity and potential, and to get a lot more done together than we could, get done alone and to have a lot of, fun or value doing it. So there's a lot of misconceptions, I think, about how to get there, because we've all had experiences of of a of a group just clicking. And so that kinda operates so you get this model that, like, oh, if I just pick the right people, we'll just click, and then we don't have to do any work, and it'll be great. But it turns out that, clicking I don't know. It's not really I think it's a giant die roll even if you love every single individual there. And, and it it it's it's not it doesn't sustain. It takes work to sustain. You you even if you even if you're lucky and you get it for free, you don't keep it for free. And so community vibes can decline, because you're not investing in them. So it turns out there's work. There's work you can do to make vibes, to make them good, and to keep them good. But you have to treat that like one of the projects your community is managing. That's what a community manager is a project project manager or a product manager whose product, you know, is is the vibes. And if you do the work, you can maintain that great experience, which reduces the the the need for bureaucracy and for process and for rules and, and reduces just how onerous governance is for everybody involved, you know, particularly leaders who get who do some very thankless work. Yeah. I think it's fair to say a science of vibes, is, is absolutely a big exciting frontier for me and something I'd I'd love to see master. The big misconception to get over, right, is that you get it for free. There are clear steps you can do, but you gotta do them, and they take a lot of work. But I think we can get there. And if we succeed at that, then we've, made everybody a community manager. We've given everybody the experience of building a strong culture. And, just like literature requires, you know, is a couple people who can write really well, but it it doesn't come into existence without, a lot of people who can kinda write kinda well. And so in the same way, only by giving everybody, enough experience in governance and self governance and vibes, right, and and process and meetings can we create the conditions necessary for a couple people who really like that stuff to do a fantastic job of of it. Talking about misconceptions,
I wanted to ask you bringing back to decentralization question. So from what I understand, decentralization doesn't necessarily mean lack of centers. It just means that there's no one single center. And post interest is a subtype of decentralization, and it refers to, you know, having multiple centers that often compete with each other, overlap. And my question to you, how do you define decentralization and governance, first of all? And second of all, what do you think its role in web free governance? Because it feels like it's definitely one of those buzzwords, definitely something that we just, like, keep on hearing and just using. And if we just take a step back, I don't think even most communities even, like, understand fully what they do with the exactly mean by decentralization. Although, most of the communities have centralization in their constitutions.
Yeah. Fantastic. It's certainly a word full of misconceptions, and it's a good example of us using our ideas of how we think we want things to be to to drive design rather than using our experiences. Because as soon as you tap a little bit into your own experiences, your own actual experiences of decentralized system, you see that, you know, decentralization is most effective and most reliably, delightful with a little bit of centralization, and vice versa. Right? Centralization's, empowering and exciting and and wonderful with a little bit of decentralization. You almost, you know, it's almost this homeopathic thing, right, that you have to pollute, your ideology with the opposite in order to get the right mix, that, you have to be just off the boundaries of your extremes at least, in order to have the best. Another misconception for me of, decentralization, people are really they're really concerned about power. The we don't want decentralization for its own sake, for the same thing we shouldn't want democracy for its own sake. Right? We want it because it solves a problem. I think there's a concern about power. The problem for me is that power and centralization, they're pretty orthogonal, and you see it in how, you know, decentralization decentralized systems are not coopitation proof. Powerful entities that were powerful before can become more powerful with decentralized technologies. So when you're developing new technology, you can ask, will this make it possible to have communities that solve the problem of power? The question they ask becomes, will this create such communities faster than it entrenches the the pow this the power systems we already have? And the thing about, Web three being so legible, to market systems and market systems being the basis of, extreme power inequalities in our world is that they've they're that much easier to co opt, and they and even if they solve a lot of the problem of power, they, make it worse faster. So what's the implication of all these misconceptions, for about decentralization for DAO space? For me, I respect the non purists, and I respect the app estates. I respect the people who, you know, maybe it happened easily, right, that their, that that their ideology encountered reality, and they accepted it. Or maybe maybe they really had to suffer. Right? Maybe they just hammered and hammered and hammered trying to make reality accommodate their preconceptions and just got destroyed and overwhelmed by reality's complexity before finally admitting, that, decentralization isn't all that or decentralization, we can respect and admire requires power and authority and trust and, like, off chain stuff and traditional stuff. And it it can take that much banging your head against the wall, before you finally start to accept that. I guess I'm not the first person to, like, encounter these problems. I maybe I'm not the first person to have these great ideas. Maybe this all has been done before. Maybe I should read a book.
And so on that note, you know, I'd be interested to hear what other insights from the research that you've done in governance in various domains that, you know, really do feel most urgent for, those in web three, those specifically working on DAOs today?
I'm becoming technology last person. I'm becoming a all governance as onboarding person. Like, it kinda doesn't matter what governance system we create. When everybody, internalizes it and recognizes the legitimacy of it and is invested in it, it can be really good. And this is why we have really empowering benevolent dictatorships and really empowering bureaucracies. That's the thing. Like, bureaucracy can be a beautiful thing. It's a fantastic fairness mechanism. It's a fantastic approach to fairness. And it's a beautiful illustration that we can't be out of our systems, that we have to be a part of our systems. Remember, because bureaucrats are citizens too. Right? The people who operate and maintain the processes for getting things done in our community are members in that community. And if it was everybody, there's an argument for that being better if everybody had the skills and the training. And so this is really the vital part for me is, you know, kinda remember the human, and build for the human. And wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Do your best. Do your best. Do your best with, with, whiteboard, you know, and markers and Post it notes until, and develop your people to be really good at really good at solving problems and talking to each other and maintaining, cultivating, and sustaining what, made your community great. Do all that with as little technology as possible until they're clamoring, for something. And probably what they're gonna clamor for is gonna be boring. It's gonna be a spreadsheet. Right? Like, a simple web one, web two app. It's it's all you have to be very far along before people are asking for the things that are exciting to build. And so there's a little bit of growing up that has to be done among technologists. Yeah. It's really cool building cool stuff, and if nobody needs it, you can't make them. And so ask what's your goal? Is your goal actually to make things better, or is it to build cool stuff?
So to double click on that, you know, how important do you think it is, you know, you said, to to develop folks or, to help them, I imagine both onboard into the system, but also to potentially, you know, develop the capacity to operate in the system better or to, you know, be, if you wanna frame that as just be better at humaning or be better at governing or, you know, there there's different ways of kind of looking at that. But do you see the actual education and development part just something that is missing from a lot of governance environments? Because it is
yeah. And do you mind commenting on kinda what you would wanna see more of there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm working on it, which is just kinda copy paste curricula that make it really easy to give people the right skills. So we've generalized that to the commons thinking that common stewardship is the umbrella that you can fit, you know, all community governance, that you can fit all workplace stuff and home life stuff and PTAs and garden clubs and so on, and or, you know, and on the street organizing. So everything fits under that umbrella. And so if we can kinda define the the most minimal values you have to hold, skills you have to have, and and knowledge you have to internalize, for responsible, sustainable, collective, common stewardship, then we can systemize systematize that and build general curricula and release those. It's still in every community to keep that up and to put the work into distributing that. But here's the payoff. You build a great commute a great technology, and you put crap people in it, then it's garbage in, garbage out. Every technology you build, no matter the no matter the amazing thing it gets out of a a it makes a collective capable of. It'll make that collective capable of more if you put highly trained people into it. And, this isn't like a technology versus people thing, you know, and and it's not a new insight. We already know Linux is built for, people with a very high skill set. It's an operating system for very high but for people with very high skill set. Whereas, to single it out, Windows, is an operating system made for people who don't have a very high skill set. So if you start your technology ideation, for people who are already highly trained, you start building sufficiently powerful tools for them to do astonishing things. And so, so, we don't develop people instead of developing technologies. We develop people so that we can develop the most fascinating, exciting technologies because they're making the most of what people know and what are already capable of without it. And do you see that kind of education
as being truly generalizable that there is some platonic ideal of governance education that's out there somewhere waiting for us to discover it versus even with the best general curriculum, you're gonna need a high degree of customization for your community, your specific values, the the ends that you are working towards. And, yeah, just how I guess, given some of the other governance failures that you've seen, will the deployment the development and deployment of such curricula fall back to some of these same problems, and kind of be reliant on that, you know, the the BDFL, the benevolent dictator for life to run that education program before getting a program in place? Or, yeah. Do you have a kind of other hopes, to look towards there?
It sounds like a contradiction. Right? That wait. You can you can't force and design and engineer bottom up vibes. Right? You you can't, like, I'm gonna shove democracy down your throat. You know? Like like but, actually, not a joke. That's how it happens. Overwhelmingly, when communities when when, like, companies, for example, transition from, like, a CEO model to, to community management and, and self self management. They do it because there was a strong CEO who wanted to perform that transition and forced everybody to develop the skills and competencies to run the organization together. So there is actually a place for leadership making democracy effective. This is what I mean by the most effective decentralization has a bit of of centralization. The most effective democracy has a little bit of authoritarianism, in there. This idea of a leader coming in and telling everybody to be flat, not Noximon. As for the Platonica deal, like, yeah. Context matters and blah blah blah blah blah. Don't have to tell me. However, you know, I'm the guy studying, like, a theory that was developed for, you know, rivers, and forests and fisheries and applying it to online communities. So what justifies that is that the underlying intellectual architecture is the same. There are resources. They are finite, and, they are nonexcludable. If those fundamental things are in place, then the theory will map to your domain. And so, because we're developing this for common stewardship, these principles will apply, in the management of commons wherever they may be. Now that's a little bit of a faith claim. Right? But it's also an empirical question I can validate. I can develop a one size fits all thing and watch it not fit. At some point, what's the difference between imposing an artificial platonic ideal on everybody and defining a standard. Right? There's an advantage. I think it's a big failure. One way we limit our potential by treating cultures, this magic baby thing that comes out of nowhere with no control, is that, you know, if you've seen 20 great cultures, you've seen 20 great cultures. And and that's not a good thing because it it impedes the scalability. It reduces designability. So I want, scalability and designability of cultures. And that in a sense means, defining a standard, Not imposing a standard, right, but making it so easy to adopt that you do end up getting interoperability between the cultures of different communities because they use the same framework to train everybody up. And that can only be a good thing, in, in in part because it supports polycentricity with, what Jamilia, raised, which is one of our models of, decentralization. So, actually, you know, this is this is interesting, Jamila. You, you kinda started off with common pool common pool resources saying, oh, everyone defines it differently. For me, it's actually pretty clean and clear cleanly and clearly defined. The the word that gets thrown around like crazy with that with different meaning by everybody is polycentricity. And in my circle, a lot of people who throw polycentricity around use it, in contrast to decentralization as a kind of system that artfully mixes top down and bottom up, by creating lots of top down systems that have to compete and that are nested under other authorities so that in the sense they're they're a bunch of decentralized bodies, and a bunch of centralized bodies at the same time. And so, by creating a language that makes it possible for communities to talk to each other, by highlighting literacies that make resource stewardship, and resource limits connect across communities, connect communities to each other, we create, I think, the basis for a lot of that messy richness in a designed, and systematic way. And I'm really excited about that.
And, yeah, I feel like there's so many other, fascinating angles that we can get into. But in the interest of time, I did wanna touch on one more, topic before passing it off to Jamila for the quiz section, and that's kind of looking at the role of AI. And not just because it's 2025 and AI is all the rage these days, but also because, you know, we're talking about a number of elements which aren't inherently scalable or at least we haven't found a way to scale culture, scale certain elements of community. And, you know, there is potential from the positive side of, a lot of benefits or some benefits at least from the use of AI and governance, While at the same time, I can see a lot of potential fears for, you know, I'd especially in crypto Twitter circles. Right? At least once a day, you'll see someone arguing about how, oh, I can't wait for AI to take all, overall of governance. That's gonna be a better world. And I I personally don't believe in that vision. But, yeah, I would be interested in kind of your perspective on where you personally hope to see AI being used for governance and maybe even bringing it down to the point of concrete experiments you would wanna see run-in the coming future. I I prefer to be the Luddite,
Nokia owner, but, I do get pulled in, especially something so important, especially with so many stupid conversations happening. I get really annoyed at this idea that, you know, we can use technology to, like, make the problem go away without understanding it. So and this is all making me an advocate for a developmental AI where the role of AI, at least, in a certain type of work, is not to make human, obviously. It's to make itself obsolete by developing humans. So there's work that we only do for the output, like the the notes from a Zoom call. Right? I'm glad we have some notes. I'm glad I didn't have to take them. But there's also, a work we do and notes we take for the process. Right? Brainstorming with others, and, when I'm in a debate, you know, taking flow notes, right, to formulate my argument and to do that you know, there's some writing that is the thinking. It's, and that's work that you don't wanna job out. So that's work that's for the process. What's the role of AI in that work, in work that's, more formative than summative? The role of AI there, is to, make itself obsolete. You know? The role of a teacher in a grade school classroom, is not to maximize grades and attendance. If it were, we should replace every grade school student with an LLM. Schools will get more funding, and outcomes will be better. Grade school you know, school scores will go higher on average, and, it'll be cheaper. You wouldn't need classrooms. You wouldn't need bus systems. Kids could stay at home, and play games, and schools would be doing great because, there's only LLMs in every chair. No one's proposing that. Right? Because that's not the point. Like, the point of an education system is the process of learning. And so, the role of, AI then is to, cultivate people, who don't, need a crutch. At some point, the kids grow up, they don't need their teacher anymore. There are individually there are, you know, independent agents out in the world, who can read and write because they learn the skills themselves. A developmental approach to governance well, first, you have to ask how much of the work of governance is the process of doing it and not the outcome. Is the point of governance just the decisions that come out, or is there a daily practice? You know, just like you have to practice the languages you've learned regularly to not forget them. Do we just have to do we have to practice governance? Do we need facilitators? Do we have to facilitate our own meetings in order to just stay literate and and keep up our literacies of how to do it well and how to maintain keep those vibes up? I think the answer is yes. And if that's true, then the role of AI is not to, make us obsolete. It's to make itself obsolete. Now what does that look like? Something I'm really excited about, I think we make better decisions in an org when we've worn every hat in an org. That's pretty doable in a smaller org, and it's pretty doable when you have when everyone, like, in in, the meta governance project, MediGov, that I'm, in with, that I interact with both of you through. That was started by people who have already started and failed a bunch of orgs, and so our democracy was great because it was run by a bunch of people with dictator experience, who with involuntary dictator experience. We'd all started orgs that we didn't want to be the person running it. We'd all wanted it to be flat, and that that, but we'd all failed one way or another to create something valuable enough, for people to get engaged in. So having all gone through that experience, we'd all worn the that hat. We're able to be participants in a new kind of org and build it because we had the sensitivities subreddit, let's say, you have to have successfully run and built, an LLM subreddit, you know, a population of thousands of of agents, and you are their community management. And when normal in the real world takes a couple years, you kinda went through the simulation in a week successfully managing all the tensions and getting things to a certain point. Having done that, we've now cultivated you and build you up into a person who can contribute meaningfully to a community with no technology support. And it'll be a vibrant, healthy community. And it's a little bit of a vision, but, yeah, we have, lab experiments, currently in design to test that thesis. Right? That, we can get further, by putting LLMs under people and giving everybody management leadership and governance experience then we can by putting, AI above people in a management role that's properly structuring their incentives to make the right choice until the, until the system goes down. That's a little bit my my vision for AI, this developmental perspective, that at least for the work that's about the process of doing it and not for the outcome, the proper role of AI is to, put itself out of a job.
Thank you so much. I wish we could continue our chat, but unfortunately, we have limited time. So I suggest we move to the quiz part. Basically, we'll ask you questions, and we ask you to give us just one word as an answer. And, yeah, let me start with the tricky question. I have two books, Ostrom's, obviously, learning the concept, comments and false interest in local, public economies edited by Michael McGinnis, which but, yeah. I think anyways, this is just a shameless plug, and I That that love to just show off with some of the books that I have. I treasure them greatly. So, excuse, a a minute of me just appreciating my books, but really my question is, give us a one reason why everybody should read, Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons at least once.
It's because it's so inspiring, because it shows you community governance, what's in all, and you see so much creativity when people need a problem to be solved, and they need each other to solve it, and they all have a deep understanding of, of that resource and the tensions behind it and its ecology and biology and politics. They develop incredibly creative, and inspiring mechanisms for managing it together. And it's just, the best to humans at work. Yeah. Perfect. We'll take I I appreciate it but that one word would be inspiring. One word, oh, man.
No. We love it. We love it when you provide more context. But just that one word is
inspiring. Well, to to wider reading. Yeah. Yeah. Inspiration.
Inspiration. Perfect. Eugene, did you go to pick up your, Ellen Nordstrom book?
Oh, I can I I I can pick something up? This is a good one, actually. Joe us. Joe us. Yeah. My books are still disorganized, so I don't I don't actually know where it is. So, I'm not gonna waste the time looking for it at the moment. Well, let's do it because I have a feeling he knows exactly where his is. So,
behind every book, by Lynn, there's a lot of method. And so what I've got here, this is, the oh, oh, field manual. Blur. Yeah. Field manual. This is this is the research manual for, a project. I'll take a picture of something. This is a a field manual for a project, that, 80 institutions from around the world, every, three years for the last forty years have gone out and done tree measurements. They've hugged the trees, breast height, tree diameter. They've hugged the trees, and they've measured their institutions. They've taken social variables, biological variables, psychological variables, political variables, longitudinally in every part of the world to build the dataset that makes it possible for us to make general claims about, long term sustainable, you know, a common core resource management, in this case, forest community forest management. And, yeah, I I hold this, dearly because that's the that's the work of coming to these conclusions, and I love that work.
Nice. I mean, I I I bet you both have so many unique books. I'm always, you know, when I see Jean's collection of books, and I just hope that one day I'll have as big of library as his. But for now, I'm happy with what I have. Great. So my second question is, what's one thing that perhaps inspires you to carry on with what you do in your research, in your work? What is that one thing that gives you that inspiration? And you can't say Eleanor Osterholm's work. Right? Because that
I don't know. No. No. Because that's and that's two words. Futility, actually. I, am very lucky to be, motivated by the futility of trying to know anything at all. I, think science is just a microcosm of, the pointlessness of trying to do anything in the world, and I love this idea that, you know, if you bang your head against the wall long enough, it'll become a door. And so I really love the the practice of science, and especially science on something that's so hard to do science on humans, is really, I I get destroyed by reality every day, and it's, really humbling and wonderful.
Great. I don't have so many, but what is that one thing that you think governance architects in Web three are getting wrong about governance?
Oh, we I guess we talked about it. Decentralization or culture. Decentralization, like, so much that they can't get it that that, they're losing it, and, culture not not enough. Off chain. Yeah. I guess they yeah. There it is. Off chain. Maybe the answer. There was three different answers. Sorry. I couldn't help it. What would be that one word?
Off chain governance? We can hyphenate it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Or okay. So the most proactive single word would be, what are what are blockchain developers getting wrong? On chain.
Okay. Great. And if you had to pick one leading principle or ideology to build the community, what would it be?
Scaling local. Staying local. Mhmm. It's a little bit of a tagline. It's just this idea that, the government system would be excellent to each other, can actually work with a small enough group of people, and the the governance philosophy of develop and sustain good vibes, can really work with a small enough group of people. And so the question is, how do we get these really magical small scale mechanisms to scale? What can what do we build, to get that same beauty and power, in a way that doesn't degrade once you add too many people? I love that.
And last but not least, what is the future of governance in one word?
A positive future of governance is Just a few it it doesn't have to be positive. But what is the future of governance in one word? No. No. I'm gonna go positive. I wouldn't give the same answer as last time. Scaling local, which is two words, but, it was two words for two questions. So my average is still one. Yeah. Nice. We love that.
Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you for coming to our little podcast, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Thanks for tuning in. The Governance Futures podcast is sponsored by the Scroll Foundation and produced by the governance team at the foundation, Jamila Kamalova and Eugene Leventhal. Any music and photos are attested in the episode description. Feel free to subscribe, leave a review, or share with a friend. Until next time.
