Lightningtalks 20211006 Metagov
Speaker 1: Great. Thank you. Can I share my screen somehow? I guess I can. Cool. Alright. This one. So That's fine. This is just a very quick sort of product demo brought to you from the bleeding edge of things that look like Google Docs. So so, I mean, what I focus on is, I guess, primarily, you know, real world organizing, if there's such a thing as not real world, and particularly, I mean,...
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Transcript
Great. Thank you. Can I share my screen somehow? I guess I can. Cool. Alright. This one. So That's fine. This is just a very quick sort of product demo brought to you from the bleeding edge of things that look like Google Docs. So so, I mean, what I focus on is, I guess, primarily, you know, real world organizing, if there's such a thing as not real world, and particularly, I mean, I think a lot of people like to think about governance and, you know, sort of building rules around systems. But what I found tends to be much more or at least, like, very, very significant in a lot of situations is is just how easy things are, basically. I mean, you know, that has a huge impact on how much people engage with things. And so I've been working in London. I run the main Pacific Tech Hub in London, which Josh is dialing in from today, if he's here. I think he's here. He's visiting. You there, Josh? Yeah. He's downstairs right now. There you go. Yeah. And and so so a lot of our emphasis is based on UX. And what I found a lot of what what's keeping back a lot of groups from organizing is somehow the combination of, documentation, with with discussion. So so, you know, there's a lot of very popular discussion spaces online, Discord, Slack is two common examples, and as well in practice, WhatsApp groups in The UK, at least. And none of these particularly have good infrastructure for documentation. And the most popular infrastructure for documentation in the wild that I've encountered is Google Docs. Probably second to that is something like GitHub. But, you know, the vast majority of nontechnical users are completely put off by GitHub and will only really contribute in an editing way to Google Docs, if to anything at all. You know, when you're talking about kind of regular users, you've got WhatsApp, Zoom, Google Docs, and maybe you know, that's about it. Right? Or more or less. So so I'm so I'm I'm working on this tool, this open source tool called Docs Plus, which is looking to work on sort of collaborative editing experiences for you know, with a very low bar to entry in terms of sort of technical ability. And we've really been trying to work around what sort of natural patterns people have when they when they, encounter documents. The other thing we're looking at is is really how sort of communities act around documents. So another way to think of this is sort of maybe a kind of update of the Wiki. So, you know, that was past the kind of best or, I guess, MediaWiki, at least, was the best practice platform for managing sets of documents. And but, you know, now you can't get any nontechnical users to use a Wiki at all. I mean, frankly, no one really likes them very much anymore. So so I've been focusing very much on sort of what people will use. And we've launched some very, very successful large scale wikis on documents. Probably the best example I can bring up quickly is this one, which we ran around the election in The UK in 2013. You can all see this. Right? So we we set up this this Google Doc, where people could come together to share, projects that were doing around the election, and it was used by several thousand people and had an active discussion community alongside it. So so this and and a couple of other experiments we've done now of this kind, what we are, building this work on. Anyway, where is it? Okay. So beyond looking like Google Docs, and, you know, more or less, you can assume it has most of the main, Google Docs features. There's two features I wanted to bring to your attention today. This is still very much a prototype, but, hopefully, I can demo them for one hour. Which is, one thing we've discovered is people will quite happily so I threw this sort of example document together with just some some information from the front page of the website. And things that people will do happily without training is create headings in documents, and these sort of act as, like, metadata. The first thing they tend to they tend to do is want to have or rather the metadata that they create in documents around headings tends to reflect the kind of discussion infrastructure that they want to have. So, for example, we have this, you know, know, this sort of seminar here and oh god. Okay. That's weird. Each of these headings okay. Live demos, guys. Has a sort of Slack like interface built in. So, you know, this is generated live from from the headings in the document. And and and so there's, like, a one to one correspondence. And it sort of preserves the hierarchy as well, so so you can have discussions at different levels of high hierarchy. The second thing I wanted to show is filters. So so with this, when you have community documents and they're successful, they tend to get very, very large very, very quickly. And, also, often, people only care about a certain subset. And this subset is not necessarily reflected in in in the hierarchy, but it tends to be represented in the keywords that are comp that are that are within the headings. So, you know, there will be different sections around budgets or something in for different projects or, you know, here. So, I mean, one natural example came here was we have Nathan Scheider presenting at this seminar, and we also have a section about Nathan who you know, in the sort of people section. And we've created this idea of document filters, which will hopefully work, which uses the metadata in the headings or literally just the text in the headings and the hierarchy to just show you the the sort of relevant parts on a given filter. And then this preserves all the other features, so I can I can sort of edit it live while it's filtered? And, also, I can access all of the discussion infrastructure as well, which is kind of neat. And and we can apply multiple filters as well. So, you know, maybe I only care about you see the URL, and the URLs are all, like, remain legible. So these are things that you can share and link to. Okay. Apparently, that's not working today. But you can maybe sort of imagine what's gonna happen. And we think that this is sort of transcends a lot of the limitations of critical active writing software in terms of a sort of UX perspective and particularly remains understandable when you have a documentary which is used by a large number of people. So it's sort of you're allowed to sort of, like, collapse things in scope around particular topics in a very natural way, you know, which sort of doesn't have, like, invisible magic happening, and also, you know, maintains your sort of, like, discussion infrastructure tightly bound with with the information architecture of the document. And that's about it. This is a work in progress. You know, I've been working on it for, I guess, since last summer in bits and pieces, and I hope it will be stable and ready to use more or less in in the coming months. And and, yeah, it's open source, so so, hopefully, you'll be able to integrate it with any other projects you like. Particularly and so the thing we haven't thought about very much yet is permissions, which I think will obviously be very important. And the thing I'm interested in is is, like, you know, I think token based permission will be very interesting, but particularly, you could give people token based permissions on different views. So so I could say, you know, I I can I can give what people can get in some ways permission to edit, you know, just just in their namespace or namespace tagged in in a certain way? And then and then that can kind of cascade upward or downwards depending on how you want people to be able to to to edit things. And I think that's much more natural. So that's literally sort of by keywords. So I can say, you know, someone can edit just things to do with the seminar, and then that can be reflected naturally in the document just by people labeling things as whatever they are. Okay. That's I think that's all I wanted to present. Are there any questions? Are we doing questions?
I think we can have one question in the
next minute. And there is one in the chat.
Oh, sorry. I'm screen sharing, so I didn't
Totally totally okay. So I can Greg, do you wanna ask your question?
Chat or
yeah. This looks really interesting. I I mean, I facilitated large group deliberation in a Google doc before, and it's you know, we would have long comment threads with really rich discussions and you can, like, link to the comment threads sort of, but only sort of. And it was then very easy to lose that whole discussion thread. So we would, like, not be able to really reference, like, why did we make this decision? And I'm wondering if if the discussion threads in this in this mode are, like, preservable, linkable, etcetera.
Yeah. So, I mean, they're all stored just the way that I mean, I was gonna say by the way that Slack stores them. But but, obviously, Slack doesn't let you see them. But, yeah, you'll be able to link to individual threads. I mean, it's something that we wanna try and force people to do. So our discussion threads don't have threading, you know, sort of multiple threading built in. And what we wanna try and encourage people to do is create headings to represent sub discussions in such which sort of forces people to kind of, like, document their sub discussions in the document, if that makes sense. And, hopefully, that will be because I think that, you know, the the challenge with chats is somehow they they don't, you know, they're hard to summarize in some sense. They're not they're not self documenting except by just literally reading them in a linear way. The other property that, like, a single document have, which it turns out to be very useful, is the fact that it has an order. Like, fundamentally, every single in it is ordered, and there's a beginning, and everything is is is in an order. And you can there are different views which which, you know, don't preserve that order, which may be useful. But somehow for, like, maintenance of long projects over time, we found this idea of, like, a beginning is very useful. Anyway so, yeah, so so, yeah, Coda, Miro. I mean, Miro is nonlinear. Notion, Google Docs, they're all I mean, first of all, obviously, they're all private and designed for enterprise rather than for communities. But also, we find with a lot of them, a common issue is that, you tend to end up in a situation where there's one person who kind of knows what's going on, and then everyone else does what they say. And we're trying to build a product which which maximizes understandability from new users, which I think is a real big problem with with, like, some governance situations in general.
I'm gonna have to cut off our wonderful discussion. Really briefly, I actually should have done this at the beginning. So what we're doing today is lightning talks from folks in our community. We're trying to keep them at around ten minutes each we apply for today. And Shauna and I were thinking about doing this a while ago and and folks kind of agreed that it might be good to hear from, you know, smaller smaller talks from from people inside the community. And we're trying to do it every four to six weeks ish. And so if you're doing this and, you know, come up sparks an idea that you might wanna speak about for five to ten minutes, please let us know and we'll schedule you in for the next one. So just something to keep in mind. So I will now transfer over to myself and Greg for the next one, which is, you know, we, we're part of a group sponsored by the Ostrom workshop and, working with Anouk Ruhaka at Mozilla and a bunch of other wonderful collaborators on translating the eight design principles, Ostrom's eight principles for governing the commons to, data commons. And so I will share my screen briefly and also put a link to this in the chat. And I I think, you know, it's probably not worth in our ten minutes going over really every single principle or anything, but I thought some one thing to focus on might be some of the challenges that we faced in doing this. And I think, you know, at least for me, it was a more difficult translation process than I sort of expected, partly because some of the questions around, for example, clearly defined boundaries and stakeholders can be very difficult in situations where we're talking about collectively owned data, moving across multiple modalities. We had some questions around, how these data commons would intersect with existing kind of rule of law and arbitration organizations, which comes up in the design choices for for regular comments because the legislation is shifting so much and kind of thinking about what the responsibility is for a group that wants to set out and create this data comments in terms of staying abreast of that, making sure they're, compliant with all the privacy regulation that's coming up and transferability and all of those kinds of things. We struggled with some of the collective choice arrangements. So I can go over those a little bit more in in-depth, but I wanted to hand it over to Greg to talk through a little bit of, you know, why we thought about these these design principles as being useful for data commons from the perspective of, the open source work that he's been doing. I can stop sharing if you wanna share your screen.
No. This is fine. I I mean, I'll share a couple of links in the chat. Personally, I'm not I'm not an academic, and I'm not not not a technologist. And I have observed many disconnects between, like, really rich academic conversations about common pool resource management and digital resource management, and then, like, emerging communities of practice or trying to practice around digital resource, essentially governance. And and it seemed like there was the potential to ideas that are sort of well established, especially in the the world of Ostrom, you know, Ostrom's scholarship and and sort of try to translate them. And and and, you know, I think I I first tried to facilitate a process like this actually in the sustained OSS community of open source software developers who were interested in finding, you know, better ways to manage open source software projects that are more sustainable. And, you know, I think that community initially formed to think about financing and monetization. And then as soon as they started talking, they realized, actually, these these challenges are really of governance. And, I'm sharing in the chat a link to the result of several iterations of conversations about how would we take these very jargony principles that Ostrom lays out in governing the commons that were iterated by Frishman and Madison and Strandberg and governing knowledge commons. These very jargony principles are gonna apply them in in language that would resonate for people who are not academic, but who still really very much understand these dilemmas. So first, just translate the principles and language that would resonate, and then also, we realized what would be useful. Because translating the principles is, like, not not interesting, but it's not necessarily useful. We then tried to figure out how could we help apply these principles, and that took the form of essentially questions. Right? As as a matrix of questions given this kind of this this layer of resource in this project. Right? In this case, open source software or in what Divya is showing, data commons. How would you apply this concept of boundaries, in a practical way? And we took the form of questions that could help think through these dilemmas without expecting them to learn the complexity of resource data management jargon, but still, you know, supporting them in in in sort of a practical approach to applying some of these ideas. This is still very much, you know, first draft. It's been awesome to work with Divya and others who really do study data commons. And I think my question is how we can package this up and complement it in ways that could potentially emerge, you know, to be like a, you know, a a governance toolkit potential with, like, community rule and and some of the other pieces that I've seen emerging from this community. So would would be glad to keep talking.
Yeah. Exactly. And and I think, you know, given our time constraint, this is more of an invitation if you do have the time and interest to, like, look through and provide comments. Because I think as Greg was saying or just send us your thoughts or any communities that you think might benefit from this. We also kind of ended up in a similar place realizing that, you know, one of the great things about having eight design principles is that, you know, it can be enough to wrap your small enough to wrap your head around. And we didn't want to create something so much bigger that it became difficult to use. And so we also ended up, you know, transitioning into trying to translate these again into questions that folks who were trying to build out data comments could, ask to kind of get to these answers without, you know, immediately knowing all of the answers to these questions. And that's on the the second sort of tab in the spreadsheet. And I think our next step will be one, gathering feedback from groups on, you know, whether this resonates, how useful this might be, and then trying to put this into practice in partnership with, existing organizations. And some of the folks in our working group, are already, you know, practitioners in that sense, Greg and and Gary Motts. And so, you know, taking this back to those groups and then figuring out how useful it is. But this is more of an invitation and kind of a a notice about this work because I think as Greg was saying, it sort of fits into a lot of the interest that people in this community have expressed. And while we don't have time to go over every question here, hopefully, you know, if this is relevant, then you'll reach out to us and discuss it. If there's anything in the next two minutes that we should talk about now, that would be great. Otherwise, I'm happy to, have this more via a notice and and give the time that I'm sure someone else will use
back.
To to Shauna's question, I I think that was our first our our first mode of thinking through this was, like, talking to a bunch of people, who have experience trying to manage shared resources and just being like like, are these ideas relevant? And in a lot of cases, we were able to point to some combination of either, like, existing data resources where we could see these ideas in some shape or form, like, in play and or instances of, like, failed or failing data resource sharing systems that lacked these kinds of principles. We definitely had people in the group who were like, my community is struggling. And when we're asking, it's like, well, they don't have clear boundaries around what their purpose is. Right? They don't have, like, clear process about how these decisions are made in this way. So we had some, like, very informal ad hoc validation that some of these contests were relevant. But that's not to say that I think we've got, like, done a thorough job of really testing some of these ideas, testing the translation. It's very much still a starting point.
Yeah. Exactly. And I think we're hoping by publicizing this work, we will get, you know, those, that feedback and also criticism where we've gone wrong and, you know, understanding how this can be made helpful practically. Our initial working group was bigger and had more practitioners that kind of validated, as Greg was saying, moving in this direction. But now we wanna extend it back out again. Alright. Wonderful. Well, reach out to us if you have thoughts, and I will hand it over to Ofer.
Thank you.
May I share a screen? So I just wanted to have a very preliminary discussion about some thoughts that I have about the role that MetaGo may have with starting some evidence based recommendation system for governance tools. And the talk that we heard right now is somewhat relevant to that, except that, of course, recommendation system is not done by the developers. But I just wanted to mention an important issue about the history of developing tool, and I wanted to take an example from medicine, which I know something about. And you can think about governance tool as some kind of social medicines of drugs that we use, and maybe they're good and maybe they're not so good. And if you look at the history of medicine, you know, up to the twentieth century, we have a lot of medicines used and most of them are other use useless or or very harmful, like arsenic and stuff like that. And the first revolution happened in the early twentieth century where we developed methods to design amazing drugs like antibiotics that saved millions of life, anesthetics that allow us to do surgeries and anti inflammatory drugs that change almost everything about pain. And but there was a second revolution that fewer people know about which happened in 1962, really by the FDA mostly. And that was not developing new stuff. It was really filtering. It was improving how we test new drugs and approve them. And that was not less important than the first one because there was so much junk stuff in the market. And they have the they imposed those requirement for demonstrating efficacy and safety that really changed everything. And the question one question that I was thinking about is where are we in governance tool in this historic framework? To what level you think about it as a generic thing? And the second thing is just what would be the challenge of developing a recommendation system that is robust for for evaluating governance tools. And, of course, we have to take into account that any tool that is made available, it has outcomes that unfold over multiple time scales. And and if you want to have a guidance system, then what should be based on? And and one thing that MetaGOV already is doing is the GOV base, which really shows you who uses the tool. For developer, of course, if everyone use my tool, then it's a big success. But that's many times a bad way of thinking about it as the only thing because if many people do something, it doesn't mean that it's useful at all, and the history of medicine showed that. So so the other issues, of course, evidence for safety, evidence for efficacy, getting some unbiased rating system, figuring out what case studies could help doing control experiments, and also having academic guidance from people that are experts in the field. And so I was wondering and and I really want to stop here and and hear from other people what they think about should got MetaGo have anything to do with trying to develop, you know, at least guidelines to to recommendation system that is evidence based. And how should we go ahead with that? Should we set a committee for that? Should we discuss it? You know? That that's that's the kind of thing that I wanted to ask. So I'll I'll I'll stop stop the sharing. Yeah. So we can just open discussion on this.
So one thought I have is around like, so much of the governance work that I've been participating in feels just like a little bit like, you know, reaching around in the dark as opposed to other research work I've done when I was in neuroscience, which, while still incredibly confusing and uncertain, I felt like I had a firmer grasp of basic principles. So I'm just kind of curious. Like, I think despite the fact that governance is one of the oldest activities that humans have ever done, it's thinking about it in an evidence based way as some somewhat novel, And I am curious about how sort of similar fields or, like, what other fields do, like, sort of early on when it feels like, yeah, maybe we have intuitions about what could be good, but we are not even sure, like, how to measure, like, what are the endpoints that we're looking for, etcetera. I mean, my my perception of governance as being sort of in, like, such a uncertain stage might be other people might have a stronger sense of where we are as a community. But in any case, I guess what I'm wondering is, are there similar fields we can compare to? And, like, how did they go about figuring out how to be more evidence based in the face of so much uncertainty?
Yeah. That that that's why I kind of suggested the medicine, of course, but you're talking more about fields that are not scientific by design.
Yeah. I mean, I think that I mean, there's a whole suite of fields that are so basically, governance is a social science. And a lot of social sciences really struggle to formulate principles in the way that things like some medicines, physics, like chemistry, etcetera, can articulate principles and, like, make strong predictions that, like, are solved a 100% of the time. So I'd see governance as a bit more like sociology or, I don't know, like, economics, but economics does a better job, in my opinion, of pretending to have strong principles that it can prove. But maybe I'm just too cynical about economics. I don't know. Yeah. I guess, like, what like, not to overstate the certainty and the knowledge that is exists in fields like medicine, but, like, I don't know. I I tend to think that there is a qualitative difference in terms of how how we can how we can know what we know in the social sciences and correspondingly, the way we would approach trying to be more evidence based and to build up a a set of of ideas and principles that we are confident in.
So other people Josh had something to say.
Yeah. So I guess
my like,
it's the way I think about, like, medical studies is that, essentially, it's just medical validation is just, in the abstract, it's just causal fury. Right? And most, you know, drug trials have a literal causal sort of diagram that one uses to articulate. This is, like, actually why this thing is valid in some sense. Right? Or when when you run, like
Oh, no. That that's not how it works. I mean, no. No. I don't think so. But we could discuss it later, but but I don't think that's how it works. I think evidence base is a very broad field. It's not only in medicine.
It's
it has to do with with many issues that that has to do with accurate things, like when you talk about flight technologies, and we've seen a lot about that. But in social sciences I mean, through the social sciences, it's mostly crap, but we want to change that. Right? So
So I guess, like
okay.
So maybe let me put it another way. My experience with medical sort of validation studies, in particular grants for this thing, have involved a kind of like explicit causal component, where I'm trying to sort of like model sort of the causal efficacy of something. And I'm in order to do that, I sort of, you know, construct this model, causal apparatus. And I just find that quite hard to do in these, you know, generic, social science cases just because, like, the there's too many causal influences. The I'll say that from a more practical perspective, I do really like this idea of building some sort of recommendation system or facilitating recommendations. And that can that doesn't have to be done necessarily done or validated scientifically. Sometimes, that can just be done through these, like, ethnographic case studies that we already have some of in, you know, gov base, sesh, meta gov. And it's just a matter of exposing those in a way that is consumable by, let's say, a wider audience. And right now, like, a base is definitely not set up to do that. It's really set up to be consumed by relatively, you know, how do I say it? Relatively technical and, you know, expert researchers, essentially. That's, like, who it's being consumed by. And if it could be sort of retooled to make it more accessible, I think that would be amazing.
Yeah. Marcus, you had a question before also. Somebody else?
I did, though. I wanna check with Divya. Have we run out of time, or can I ask another question?
I think we can do one other question. We have five minutes of buffer, so I'm gonna send.
Well, thanks for the framework, initiation and presentation there, Ofer. I'm I'm curious if you are sensitive to the possibility that's that some people would find, certain definitions of evidence based controversial such that positing an authority in charge of deeming something sufficiently evidence based is actually usurping a governmental like like like asserting a governmental control that hasn't been consented to by the by the government body.
Yeah. Absolutely. That's a very important point. That's why I I suggested the several approaches. So the scientific is only one point. There are the issues of case studies. There's an issue of safety measures and and we're doing some of those things, but in a very haphazard way. It's not that we are not doing it. The all the conversation about Facebook has to do with that. So but but there are different aspects of that, including, you know, how much we get academic experts involved and so forth and case studies. And I think that we are not dealing with it systematically. I think that if we had a broader approach and say, okay. These are the different thing that we can look at. And if we have a recommendation system, this is where we have data and this is where we don't. To meet would be useful. Otherwise, we are just, you know, playing the same game that people played in nineteenth century medicine. And most of it, you know, we won't be able. The the tools the number of tools will grow up quickly, and they already are. And we don't want to have any ways of deciding in a reasonable way how to make progress. That that's my entire point that that we need to think about it, and we need a committee to to actually discuss all those issues. The the the I think we should stop here. Yeah.
Okay. Now I think we will have to move on, unfortunately. But if we do have time at the end, maybe we can come back to outstanding questions. I think next, we have Nathan.
Okay. I'll be quick. Thank you. This has been awesome. Thanks to Sean and Divya for organizing. I just wanna retreat.
Share
a We just thought maybe we can put questions in the chat and keep the conversation there while we do the next presentation. Just a thought. Sorry.
Go ahead.
Great. Not at all. Yeah. Absolutely. I just wanna share a a product that a group of us are involved in, and I'll introduce this by you know, it goes back to me for till, like, 2016, this blog post I had about pools. Basically, an idea of how to create you know, I was I was involved in supporting cooperative development and the online economy of that and thinking about how can we make it, like, super easy for people to create, you know, little democratic economic worlds? How can we enable meetup groups, other kinds of easy online spaces to become, more like you know, to become more co op like in their structure and design, and to practice democracy kind of without even thinking about it? So I, you know, articulated this in different ways over the years. This was a paper I did trying to encourage the National Co op Business Association to get involved in, like, doing fiscal sponsorship for this kind of approach where people wouldn't have to legally incorporate, but could just build co ops, you know, with a click. And then and and and a key piece of this is this, this platform open collective that a number of us are are friends with and and a a kind of Patreon for open source projects that also offers fiscal sponsorship, a legal structure that you can work in. And so my first experiment in actually implementing this idea is social coop, which is a a a Mastodon instance, a social network, on an open source federated system, that is cooperatively run. It's not incorporated legally itself, but it's it's hosted by now a a a UK based coop, and it's part of my daily social media world now. And, you know, here's what it looks like. And, you know, it is kind of my entry point to the to the Fediverse along with a few 100 other people. And it sort of works. We self govern on Loomio, and we manage our funds on Open Collective, But it's still a little hard to replicate. We have, you know, bylaws, things like that. More recently, I've been working on this this kind of propaganda effort called Exit to Community, trying to encourage companies, startups, so forth to become community owned. And there's a group of people who are interested in advance in that. So we've been starting to develop what we're calling the ETC Collective, at least for now, a kind of mini worker coop, focused on just paying people to to advance the exit to community, vision. So whereas social dot coop was a is a consumer coop more, it's the people using it that are paying for it. This is more worker coop. People are getting paid by it, and they're the members of it. And so we've been developing a kind of a kind of governance process. We've set up a an open collective. And and really based on some of the flows that I'm seeing in the DAO world, we're looking to create, you know, what could be called, like, a fiat DAO, you know, a DAO, that has a lot of the processes of collective governance online first, processes, but, but without need for cryptocurrency. In this case, cryptocurrency is not really what this stuff is rolling on. You know, we've got dollars coming in to pay for this stuff. And so we're trying to see, can we implement some of the practices and logs that we're seeing in DAOs and crypto just with with old fashioned money and with trusted centralized tools? And the key to this is actually this Medigap gateway prototype that a group of us here have been building, which enables, for instance, us to make decisions in a Slack or a discourse and have them automatically implement in in open collective releasing funds. So we're just about to start deploying this experiment. We're just about to fund it with the help of the Smart Contract Research Forum, who's represented here, I believe, Jean. And, and and and the hope is, to build something like what our friend in, in OneHive have been working on building as well, which is a kind of easy to deploy kind of framework to enable people to form these kinds of communities, get their projects up and running relatively quickly. We're kind of trying to do the the the the hard live work so that other people can can do this stuff more easily so that democratic decision making becomes one step closer to a kind of default norm for how online communities might operate. That's where we are right now. Thanks.
I mean, this is super exciting work. I'm waiting to see if there's any specific questions that we should go over or thoughts that folks might have. Oh, that is Keith's question.
Christina just unmuted, I saw, first.
Oh, great.
I just had a quick question of, what's been your biggest challenge as you propagandize getting out of this, like, co ops aren't really for me and bringing them more into the public mind, I guess. I I would love to hear anything that you have on in terms of insight on that.
Well, I think sometimes the the whole language of co ops can be kind of like, you know, it's it's an ideology. It's a, you know, it's a it's a movement, and some people may not identify with it. It's one reason why I've explored other languages for it, like that idea of pools or, or exit to community. You know, through exit to community, we've got a lot of people interested in shared ownership who didn't necessarily identify with the cooperative movement. Right? And I think that's exciting. And then they get introduced to it, and then they learn about it. And and that's kind of how I think of the pedagogy of this project is is rather than, like, the more traditional form of cooperative development, which is, like, form a study group for a year with your friends and devise everything, plan everything ahead. Instead, let's just create experiences where people, you know, experience a coop's hand and then realize what it is and realize that they actually, you know, know how to do it and like it.
That's how
I got into this movement, you know, like, living in a coop, you know, when I was a teenager. Right? And then and suddenly realizing, hey. That was a really nice, you know, tie. That was a really nice arrangement. You know, this is cool stuff.
Accidental cooperativism. I love it.
I I said John too.
John, I think you're muted.
John, you you remuted yourself.
So sorry. I commend you for taking the crypto out of DAO. I'm wondering if you missed crypto at all or whether you've just demonstrated that a great deal of the the charm and the lure of DAOs has really nothing to do with the technology that the geeks are all fascinated with.
Well, yeah, thanks for that. I I don't think we've come far enough to know, you know, how how the dynamics work, but I suspect a lot of the the things that are cool about DAOs can be replicated without DAO ness. But I do I would actually wanna give the technology a little more credit. You know, the reason why we have these kind of DAO like processes and flows is precisely because that technology is decentralized and couldn't rely on centralized control as the foundational basis of it. And so they had to figure out bottom up decision making structures. So so I think, actually, the crypto part of DAOs has has has nudged forward the need for online self governance and the development of some of some best practices that were not happening in in web two. But I now that we're seeing them happen in web three spaces, we can bring some of that stuff back to, you know, healthy web two spaces and recognize, hey. Actually, there's there's a lot we can learn from this. And then in terms of Seth's question about hardest, easiest step to implement, I we're not there yet. I'll I'll I'll report back. We make a little progress on, you know, actually getting this going. But one thing that was surprising to me was, you know, sharing some of, you know, the work when our team showed, you know, what the prototype looks like, what the Medigap prototype looks like to to one of the, you know, cofounders of this, effort. He was really excited, and he's you know, there was a skeptic you know, he's not the person I was expecting to be excited about this tool. And so I I I'm really, you know, optimistic it's gonna open some doors.
I'll check to ask my question just another way.
We're actually out of
are we out of time, Divya?
I was gonna jump to Zargan, actually. Okay. Question.
Seth, let's let's talk offline offline.
Yeah. So I just wanted to tag on about the the the stuff the question specifically about the crypto versus DAO. And while the terminology or the semantics is a bit of a sticking point amongst the crypto people, they tend to restrict the term DAO to, like, highly technically decentralized things with a lot of automation built into the policy making. First and foremost, there's a ton of overlap with the research in Medigov around, like, policy kit and other tools and the prototype because what you're actually doing is building up some of the the automation infrastructure, which makes it easier to build and sort of decide on shared policy within a relatively decentralized group. So I kind of I'm building on Nathan's comment that and in a way, there's some enabling properties coming from crypto and even some sort of necessities coming because of it. But I I actually agree very strongly that most of the organizational dynamics are not new. They're just coming to a head and that we're getting some of the novelty in the automation dimension, which doesn't depend on web three. It's just sort of kinda got there first in in web three because of the necessity of high automation in a smart contract paradigm. But we keep building tools that do similar policy automations in Web two, then there there's a strict necessity for any crypto infrastructure.
Awesome. Yes.
Alright. I think we're right on time for our last talk from Josh, so I'm gonna hand it over to
Thanks, all.
Josh, are you muted?
Is this it? Okay. So I'll present two things really quickly. One's just a project I kind of referenced, like, last week in the updates, but this will actually be released soon. And I want to share a little bit of, like, you know, what's going on. So this is the crypto political typology quiz. You can see it online at I'll just post it into the chat. But it's a small, fun, little side project that I put together in about a week based on the Pew political typology quiz and trying to, you know, capture empirically what is the political sentiments in the crypto community nowadays. It's a little bit more memeified. So there's eight predefined factions and four class governance classes, how you would approach it. Plus, I we've commissioned a artist to put together a set of limited stock NFTs. So there will be, like, stickers and all sorts of funds for things attached to it. But behind the scenes, there's actually data that we're hoping to collect. I will putting I just wanna share, like, sort of preliminary, like, what this data could potentially look like. Right now, this is just a very small kind of completely nonrepresentative dataset of folks I've sent this to just to get some feedback on what the the data kinda looks like. But it kinda gives you a sense of, like, oh, okay. You know, how many people are really interested in are for Maximus for one blockchain or another? I found this kind of interesting because I usually think of, like, most people in crypto think that it's an economic technology, but clearly, at least in our little kind of, in group, crypto half of them think of crypto as an economic technology, half of them really think of it more along the lines of politics. I'm really curious eventually how crypto for people in the kind of, like, let's say, mainstream crypto community, you know, at a typical Ethereum conference might actually think about, you know, whether they think of crypto. They're motivated to participate mainly because of political consequences. Goal is to create social change. Anyways, I'll share the sort of link at the end so you can kinda get a quick sense of the questions. And I would love to get some feedback on well, you can kinda take it and sort of get a sense for yourself of how the survey can be improved and what kind of additional data, we can hope hoping to capture because we're trying to put some effort into making this more sort of fun and get sort of make it a little bit more viral. So hopefully, we'll get actually a reasonable number of takers, in which case we can actually start doing some fun empirical work just capturing political sentiments and distribution of political sentiments and affiliations within the crypto space. The I'll pause it there. I'll share a different screen because I'm the thing I actually wanted to present a little bit more on was a project that actually got started before MetaGU didn't existed. But it's something I've been kind of kicking back in the back of my head, and I've started to rework on. I would love to sort of this is very much like speculation. So this is more to the invitation to get some feedbacks. If there are folks kind of interested in this work, just reach out. But, basically, it's a it's kind of a project that normally called data is world. And the intuition here is a little bit more theoretical slash conceptual. It's asking, you know, if I have certain kinds of data, you know, that are generated by process, you know, like, not contracts, let's say. And the contracts live on top of certain kind of shared data or data where they kind of interact on the same pieces of data, then, you know, that forms a kind of persistent relationship between those processes or, let's say, in the blockchain context, those contracts. And I can think about forking of those contracts. We're forking of those platform services as kinda operation that a lens to which I can study these kinds of persistent relationships. Long story short, I'm gonna skip lots of, you know, ideas and sort of things here to just jump into the meat of this or the upshot, I suppose. Or other ways, looking at the proof I would like to prove or the theorem I would like to prove is really a kind of question around, like, okay. If I have, like, tokens, and this is, like, a very common pattern in the blockchain space that we see today. If I have a a token associated with some sort of service or platform, how does the existence of that token interact with and incentivize the quality of the platform service that's not only supposed to support? Right? Normally speaking, we typically expect tokens to, you know, improve platform quality or service quality because the token, you know, is supposed to foster contributions to the platform or to provide funding to produce things related to that platform. But what if there are secondary effects, like, you know, economic strategies? Clearly, people create tokens for all sorts of different reasons besides just, you know, in a base way trying to improve the quality of the platform. So this is kind of asking from an economic perspective, you know, what are these different strategies and to what degree do they support, you know, what how how do in what ways do they not support actually increases in platform quality? So I kinda restructured this, this line of reasoning to a few lemmas. The main thing I would like to prove or examine or possibly disprove is that whether or not there exists an equilibrium strategy in which one fork, of a given, like, service, I think, like, compound or Uniswap or something like that, achieves the optimal benefits, in which one fork kinda wins in terms of market share irrespective of whether it achieves the optimal benefit based on it's, like, some sort of assumed platform quality. And the idea is that if that is true, then we can kind of try to sort of articulate or translate that as saying that any kind of tradable token that you kind of associate to a given project, even in a kind of maximally permissionless ecosystem like Blockchain is designed to be, actually amounts to a kind of a very strong barrier to entry, which is saying that this, like, normally fair system that we all want is maybe not as fair as we kind of imagine it to be or it can be gained in certain ways. And I'm not gonna go through the proof sketch right now since we're definitely running out of time. But this is kind of more of more economic y thing I'm interested in just exploring. And, yeah, just maybe the base thing is trying to understand how tokens work and how they actually interact with this idea of platform quality from a kind of competition perspective between different projects. Okay. That may have been too much in a very short amount of time, but we
Oh,
it's wonderful. There's a bunch in the chat, so I'll sort of leave it to you, Josh, to kind of referee that because I'm not sure which would be best for you to go over.
Yeah. Seth, you wanna hop in? I'm just reading the questions now.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Are you still adding questions?
Yes. I am still interested in adding questions.
Great. Actually, I wasn't gonna be surprised if a lot of people, they have ideas for questions we'd love to get answers to from this kind of survey. Maybe we can open it up on the hashtag seminar on the slide. People can suggest things.
That'd be amazing.
Do we have any more clarity about the dimensions? I know when we did the test, some of us took the survey very early on, and they didn't feel particularly representative of the, the, I would say, the the groups because I think most people in web three spaces tend to be off the the or at least feel off the standard spectrums. Like, you get weirder mixes of or less common mixes of libertarianism and leftistness, for example. Like, I know a lot of people who are weirdly in the they're not particularly anarcho capitalist, but they're pretty much anti, anything authoritarian and that feel central planning y. But then there's a lot of space in the sort of leftist anarchist realm, and there's a lot of there's just a lot of weird, like, areas that I think if we find out which dimensions people are you know, we need to expose the questions should be used to kinda tease out the dimensions where the the clusters are. And I I think there's a lot of work that could go to, sort of parameterizing the space that we're sampling, and then the questions could be, organized to better tease out where people fall in that space. And I think there's a lot of expertise around that could help, improve this quality of the survey and the quality of the space we're trying to populate using the survey.
I would, short answer to that. Two questions, to Seth. Yes. Hopefully, there will be a general call out of this at some point. And second off, the possibly not based on this particular iteration of the survey, which is not controlled in any way. The and to the sussing out the sort of, like, the clusters in crypto because it's kinda very specialized. In some sense, that's what, like, that all the governance questions kinda relate to. Like, where this thing distinguish between whether you're Sabian, Danfries, Gavinist, or Walken. Those mean, like you know, the Walkens are, like, the true, like, governance support governance regulation. Everybody else is just, like, different variations of some kind of libertarian.
I I I think the point I'm making, though, is that I didn't feel like those axes actually were the a particularly good coordinate system. It may be that they're the best we can get, but we kinda pulled them out of a hat based on sort of just some observations. And I think there's room to refine the space that we're populating, as part of determining the questions. That there's, like, a back and forth between, is this actually leading to results where people feel like their beliefs have been captured or not? Because the first round of validation, most of the people that I know who took a test felt a little like they hadn't had their position represented. And so if that's the case, then we need to look not just at the questions, but also the dimensions the questions are parameterizing.
Yeah. It makes me think I should just have a question at the very, very end that asks them, do you think this is an accurate fit to your political typology?
Okay. I know we're at time, and I'm happy to have the discussion continue. Just wanted to thank everyone for participating in lightning talks. I made a super quick spreadsheet. If you wanna sign up for the next set of lightning talks, we'll figure out a way to put that in the Slack so that, you know, it would be easier to sign up. And, yeah, huge thanks to everyone who presented, who engaged. I love hearing more about what's going on in our community. I hope everyone else does too, and I'll step out so that we can keep the discussion going with folks on this data.
Yeah. Now let's let's keep let's see Patrick in the phone.
Alright. +1
23. Unmute.
Alright. Thanks, everyone.