Sounds good. Thanks, Nathan. Let me try to click the share button. Does it work? Okay. So yeah. So this is gonna be more okay. Everybody can see it. Right? So this is gonna be more of a fairly casual presentation. We presented GubBase here before almost, like, I think three or four months ago. A lot has changed. But feel free to interrupt me anytime. And hopefully, this would just be a conversation about, you know, what people find interesting, what people find, like, a little bit, you know, suspicious because there's lots of lots of suspicious things in GovBase. And, yeah, I'll tell you a little bit about what we're gonna be trying to do in the next few months with GovBase. So with that, let me click this little present button. Okay. Yeah. GovBase. That's a logo, so that's new. Kind of fun. It's the open database for online governance for those of you who haven't heard about it before. It's to date, as far as we can tell, the most comprehensive database of such things of projects and software in online governance and particularly in online self governance. So I've included some links here. There's a GitHub repo. There's a medium article introducing, GovBase, which includes most of the content that I'll sort of go through, here today. As well as, of course, there's an open air table that you can sort of just click through and sort of see what's going on. All this stuff, if you just Google introducing gov base, you'll be able to find all this material on Google. So you can click through the database at your own time. However, it is a very large database and, you know, it's what we started this project, almost a year ago and even a year ago, it was hard to navigate. As you can imagine, it's grown since then. So, you know, just a just a small warning that it takes a little bit of time to get used to. So I just wanna take a little bit of time just to go through, for those who aren't familiar with database, the main tables. So the first table and the main one is a list of all the kind of software projects and platforms that are available specifically for online communities. We've also included some items that are relevant for offline communities. Partly, that's just to make this sort of this make clear the distinction between projects and tools that are sort of, like, dedicated for things like DAOs, for governing us, for, like, Reddit, and the things that are sort of much more relevant or designed for cities. There's obviously kind of a back and forth spectrum between these tools, but we wanted to sort of make clear the distinction upfront. There's a a column representing implement structure. So if you are trying to implement a DAO, for example, and you type you query gov base for DAO, it will spit back a set of things that can help you build a DAO. So things like Aragon, DAO stack colony. So these are DAO frameworks. There's uses projects. So this is, meant specifically in the sense of, like, sort of things like dependencies, but also it covers covers hard dependencies, soft dependencies, interop. It's kind of like a catch all sort of thing because a lot of the interactions between these projects is a little bit nonspecific, sometimes kind of vague, or at least not sort of obvious from from public documentation. So there's a column that sort of identifies the relationship between projects as well as whether these projects which of them are being used by which organizations. Organizations. So this is not supposed to be a comprehend so projects, first off, is supposed to be a comprehensive list of what exists out there in online governance today. It's still not comprehensive, but it's getting there. Organizations covers a range of different online communities, organizations working in online governance, and just, yeah, a range of it's it's there to provide context for the projects table, which is the really the main focus of GovBase. So includes things like the observed structure, so whether it's a DAO, whether it's a for profit company or an online community, Includes information about whether they own specific projects like, you know, CADCAD owns, the sort of a the CADCAD project or CADCAD Block Science, the organization owns CADCAD, the sort of project. I'd advise information about whether, you know, who's contributing to which projects, like contributing code, contributing time, as well as which organizations, of course, are using projects. And lastly, the structures table, this is more for the political philosophers and social scientists, in this call, as well as I'll talk a little bit about, sort of the interesting sort of experiment we had, with Jonathan, from last week talking about the ECSA grammar. But in essentially, it's a grab bag of all, like, a huge number of different concepts coming from social science, organized by four things, whether they belong to a specific ontology. So for example, like, Larry has this thing, Lawrence Lessig has this thing called the pathetic dot theory, which sort of organizes regulation into law, norms, markets, and architecture. So so that's, for example, an ontology that includes four substructures, these laws, norms, markets, architecture. There's a relationship that basically, it's like parent child relationship whether, like, an instance of a let's say, I mean, civility is also an instance of, like, a state or, for example, DAO is a form of online community, so it would be a subclass relationship. Is component of this model is more like input output and is property of it's like a lot of things that get mentioned social science are ways of, like, measuring things. So this is capturing the fact that this is a metric of some organization or of some structure. So what's new? So there's a bunch of new views that we built. Some of these things may be a little bit familiar to you if you've interacted with the companies in the past couple of months. But for example, we have a list of governance projects by development status in case that's useful for, you know, understanding which ones especially, I find it interesting to look at the things that are currently works in progress to see what's going on. There's the DAOs and the wild view, which is an extension of Brodha's old view in Notion, which has a really, I think, really, really nice sort of, like, overview of all the DAOs and sort of differences in how they're governed. How open is your infrastructure? This is actually kind of originally, how do I say it, suggested by Shauna, another regular in the call, where we wanted to sort of study the specific communities who are developing open source tools. And this is kind of a sort of follow on to that that measures or ranks communities by how many open source tools they use in their governance. So there's funders in online governance, who funds who, pretty obvious, and then I'll talk a little bit later about these building blocks of governance. So this is a sort of subs a view of the structures table that gives you a sense of how people are thinking about governance across different ontologies. We've also managed to do a little bit of data analysis. So this is very preliminary stuff. This is a just a table of the organizations. So these are all DAOs because that's the sort of the the dataset we started with or focused on at first, and these are a set of technologies, projects, and tools that these things for example, they're all using GitHub, of course. Only a couple of them are using Keybase, and this is, of course, is just a restricted segment of the DAOs that we have in GumpBase. We have this is a little bit more informative, like, which ones are sort of mutually used by others. So if I have, like if I'm using BrightID, you know, am I more likely to be using Telegram conviction voting versus things like discourse? Of course, the, the end to these, numbers is pretty low, like, maybe, like, I think, like, 50 to 60. So this is not as informative as it could be. And also, of course, there's, like, sort of problems in the data about, like, how much are we capturing about, like, the usage of these actual tools because, like, little sort of changes can actually make big differences in a diagram like this. But I wanted to give you a sense of the kinds of analytics that are possible built that are already being built on top of GubBase. And this is if you guys remember, we talked a little bit Zargam, in the previous call, mentioned a little bit about hierarchies, and we had we essentially had a big old nerd out about, oh, we could use some pushable complexes to represent collaborations. Anyways, we decided that was a little bit too hard to put together, as a code project, like building out. Also, the data isn't quite thick enough to support images like this, but we've worked with a designer, Nastia, to put together a little nicer picture of the kind of graphic that we would eventually like to produce using the database datasets, which is a representation of the collaborations between different organizations as they're building sort of projects. Right? A lot of this stuff is very very much, like, very fluid, very fast moving, which is part of the reason we wanted to make a base into, it was designed as a crowdsource project. Another new thing, documents. For the lawyers here, there's lots of legal documents for you to analyze. We've started with just a few organizations and projects, and try to capture essentially the legal, or how to say, the written sort of governance documents that people have built. Of course, some of this includes just licenses, but they also include things like, legal bylaws for these organizations if they're actually sort of legally incorporated, as well as sort of just a lot of online organizations don't really have, like, binding things. They have things like codes of conduct or just overviews of governance procedures, and we try to capture some of that in GovBase. Oh, right. So on the social ontologies table that I mentioned before, I wanna give you a little preview of, like, what exactly is going on there. So, of course, this is this is got base here, the Airtable instance. You can click through it at your own leisure. The go to the structures table and give you a sense of, like, a kind of a fun exercise that, Jonathan Billet of the economic, space agency and I, went through recently where we took the essentially, some of the what we might call the building blocks of the ECSA grammar, essentially their way of representing governance, and try to compare it to some of the others, you know, outstanding representations of governance including IAD, mathematical game theory, and various pathetic doc theory and the theory of it's more complicated theory of open games. And just to give you a sense of that, and this is a slightly unwieldy a slightly unwieldy sort of mapping, but this give you a sense of the kind of things that, you know, you can use gov base to do or at least use the structures table to do, which is so over here starting to the left, we have a representation of the building blocks of a constitution. So this is extracted from the constitute project. Over here in red, we have the pathetic dot theory about how different things sort of flow into a governance system or are used as building blocks for a governance system. In green, this is something that's a little bit more empirical that's been derived from the giant structures database. This is kind of by, me doing this by hand trying to analyze and cluster the concepts from this whole morass of different concepts. In orange, we have IAD. So all those sort of, like, inputs that go into an action situation, which is their sort of, like, container for governance systems. Right? So there are things like control, agent actors, actions, and there are not represented here is a whole nest of rules that apply to each one of these little boxes, and this is something that Seth can sort of talk more about when he talks about IAD. In purple is game theory and open games, and then here in light purple or lavender, let's say, is the economic space agency's grammar, which we sort of as we sort of talked about it, it being clear that all these things are being used, sort of things like liquidity, distributed exchange, unit account are being used to sort of describe or components of a protocol, which is then a component we use to sort of define a set of governance structures on an economic space. But that gives you some sort of sort of top level overview of the relationship between these different kinds of grammars for governance, and that's something that sort of got bases built on the front end to support. Okay. Moving back to the, presentation. So, finally, there's, I'm not gonna show this because it's a relatively small thing, but there's, a new table for instances. So this is just basically a way of turning the users project, like, a organization uses a project relationship into a junction table, so that we can refer directly to, like, things like the specific Telegram instance that they're using or the specific Twitter handle or the specific sort of Aragon link for a DAO. So the thing that's really exciting to us, I think, and that we're gonna be focused on in the next couple of months is building what we're calling, for black for a better name, the registry of computational constitutions. So what is that? I'll go over, basically, the idea of it and some of the steps we're taking to build it, including a new policies table, a public string standard for a computational constitutions, and kind of very exciting, actually building a computational constitution for a partner who's kind of cosponsoring the project SiftDao or SIP chain. Okay. So this is kind of the broad level vision, and we've talked about versions of this four, versions of this idea before in this in this community, but I want to start to articulate it sort of precisely here. So a world in which every online community displays a kind of standardized constitution, somewhere on, you know, their website, that articulates the right and and responsibilities of its users as most as constitutions do in a way that's kinda comparable or analogous to the way that open source software communities and projects display a like a creative commons license. So we wanna make sort of the display and sort of representation and design of these constitutions, standardized in a way that, you know, software licenses are in some sense, standardized or at least comparable. Right? Making governance procedures across communities across the Internet, more standard so that they can be more easily compared. So how do we do that? So this is kind of like a table that represents kind of what's going on in GovBase at a sort of a high level view. So what how we represent it kinda sort of tells us, like, how we're representing online governance. And right now, sort of GovBase is really doing this. It's sort of saying, well, if I have a if I have a community, online community, like a DAO or a forum or a Slack channel like Medigos, the way we're gonna sort of define the governance of that is extremely course. We're just gonna sort of look at the which software packages they use. Right? So very coarse representation of what's going on in governance, but, of course, like, it does tell you something, like, whether you choose to use something like Lumio versus you choose to use something like Aragon or something like, you know, just Facebook groups tells you a decent amount about what the structure of that organization is at least at the level of architecture or code. Sitting beneath that are things like documents, which I already mentioned. So these are the written sort of versions, accounts of governance, but they're kinda hard to interpret. And more specifically, there are sort of, like, given that you use a project, there's lots and lots of different ways configuring that platform or project that changes the way that governance actually behaves on that project or or sort of on that platform. So policies is a table that we're hoping to build that kind of represents the different configurations in platform, different configurations that you can sort of have for the specific, either, like, software, libraries, or platforms like, you know, Slack. The so I won't go too far down below here. There's lots of different sort of more sort of fine grained, representations of governance. This is a table that's kind of a placeholder right now in Gumbay called statements that kind of represents the possible, like, an institutional coding from both policies or and documents. And, of course, there's, like, sort of community interviews, ethnographic studies, and just raw data that we we can collect from these communities in order to kind of infer their governance. So the thing we wanna build, a kind of publishing standard for computational constitutions. So we the idea of the policy table is is for start by sort of start by representing the configuration of different governance tools and then use that as a kind of like a platform to start thinking about, like, how do we sort of, map these to a kind of a more readable standard, something that's not just like like, you know, YAML files or JSONs. Right? And the key design question that, you know, is still to be the is how to splice, the policies table, which is, you know, essentially kind of like you can imagine things like JSON files where, yeah, YAML files for converting these platforms or libraries into a kind of like a text rich environment like an actual government constitution. There's different kind of ways I've been thinking about this. Sphinx is a kind of package for essentially making it easy to document code. You can kind of think of this as a kind of if you're modeling, like, sort of design sessions going into source a a product like this, you can imagine this as kind of a Sphinx for online communities. Or ultimately you can think of it as just, like, more like Crunchbase where it's just lifting out very specific sort of, like, metrics from an online community and trying to sort of present that to a wide audience. The project will also entail more ethnographic studies, and this is where I think it's really beneficial that, you know, people like Prima are in the medical community, where we're gonna be analyzing specific subsets of participants in specific DAOs, like synthetics, compounds. And so this is a list of the kind of our existing sort of sense of, like, the different classes of actors. And we're essentially just analyzing, doing some ethnographical work instead to analyze the relationships between these different sort of actor classes as well as we're trying to analyze the different rules that are currently different practices and rules that are currently in place for let's say regulating or structuring the relationship between these different classes of actors. And the sort of the results of that study is to build to identify the best practices among the sort of legion of practices that are currently sort of implemented and then to use that to build a kind of constitution for SIFTDAO. So SIFTDAO is a DAO being developed by SIFT chain. I was kind of agreed to cosponsor this project or cosponsor a research scholar for this. Yeah. With that, I'll just sort of spend a little bit of time just talking about some of the cool stuff that we would like to do, but we don't necessarily have the time to do it, like, in the immediate future. Though if there are sort of other people sort of in this community or, you know, watching this video that are interested in getting involved in somehow, there's lots of things we would love to build that we've already sort of started putting placeholders for. For example, there's the incidence table. This is something actually we started building a year ago, and we were just thinking about, like, all the stuff that happens or, let's say, teachable moments in online community or online governance, things like the DAO hack in the DAO, but also the rape and cyberspace in LambdaMoo. That's a more kind of, like, classic textbook example of online governance and questions in online governance. The statements table, this is for institutional statements related to a talk that we had, heard from a few weeks ago, by Saba and Chris using the institute grammar to code up, different, items in the documents table as well as the people table. This is, a more recent idea. This is something we kind of didn't wanna go into, but it just seemed too obvious not to think about at least or start, which is for representing kind of different people in this space and specifically trying to capture, like, if you're an expert in a specific platform, you know, maybe, we should try to keep track of that somehow or give an opportunity, for people to sort of put themselves in there. Yeah, An actual community website for sort of, like, organizing. If we actually build a people table, it makes sense to have that be an actual sort of online community, and we're looking forward to more kind of partnerships and data integrations with, I I should say, active data integrations with organizations like the constitute project and Participedia. And Daniel recommended this other sort of fabulous resource called Build a Community. A lot of basically, just pointing out this is a lot of parallel effort being sort of used in this space. So it'd be really nice if we could team up with each other and sort of make the entire space better. Oh, yeah. With that, I'll just mention that we are hiring a decentralized governance research scholar to help us with database. So all the activities that I sort of mentioned before. And, yeah, as I mentioned before, just previously, we're looking for more institutional and academic partners in collaborating on this data. So with that, I just wanna say thanks to Jeff Emmett, Nathan, who's, you know, hosting this talk. Thank you. Nastia, who contributed the sort of wonderful graphic, Bharata, which is your books at Sifchain, as well as many people who built, kind of various projects, catalog projects that inspired us as we were building GovBase. With that, thanks, and, open to questions.

Right. So we have a Telegram channel that Doug and I use to sort of, like, answer questions about Gupbase. So that's a really easy way to just pop in and start, you know, asking questions. For contributing, there are many forms, that you can use to sort of just, like, if you just wanna put in a specific, like, your organization or your project, it's very easy to do that. Just go on to the GitHub. There are links to forms where you can just, like, pop it in, and you'll be able to see it immediately in the Airtable. If you wanna be an editor, like, contribute more specifically, I just encourage you to reach out to, either Zargum and I, and we are very happy to sort of, like, bring our onboard and give you, sort of editor access to the Airtable so you can just start playing around with it and doing fun things. And it's, of course, it's Airtable, so you can just all the data is sort of free and open source and out there, so you can very easily fork the Airtable as it currently exists and start playing around with it without asking our permission.

Not sure. I've got a question. Hey Josh, thanks for the awesome presentation. Super exciting to see the amazing progress you guys have made over the past few months on this. I'd be really curious to hear you talk a little bit about what kind of success would look like. Like what are your kind of medium, longer term goals, you you plural for GovBase, and then sort of from there trying to think of how all of us can help or contribute. So I think part of the reason here so I mentioned before this idea of, like, a publishing standard. Right? So kind of a uniform place that people can publish, let's say, their governance of their online community too. That's very related to, I think, the larger question underneath the hood here, underneath, like, the meta governance project, which is sort of, like, how do I represent or how do I sort of, like, build a data model that can support modular forms of governance. Right? Because, essentially, you have, like, software packages, I e modules, that are sort of instrumentalized to sort of produce different kinds of governance. So, like, a reputation management, type of proposal management, different kinds of voting. And the different configurations of these things, like, are obviously a form of governance. Right? They're sort of, like, part of the design choices as I make use to make the different design decisions and structure my governance system. And this sort of goal of the policies table is to sort of like represent that part or sort of like at least in a sort of like, just a more empirical way by studying actual DAOs and sort of like, an actual online communities to sort of, like, start building, like, that data model or getting sort of evidence for, like, this is how the data model should be designed that can cover this vast range of possible sort of, like, you know, governance policies. And then try to relate that to the way that people think about governance today. So it's really about articulating that gap between, like, the way, like, you know, software governance works where I sort of install these packages, run these libraries, and sort of feed in these parameters. And the sort of, like, the off chain governance where and I keep using on chain off chain because, like, we're thinking specifically in the DAO space here. But, like, it is meant to be a broader sort of picture. The off chain governance where everything is written in terms of natural language, where things are supposed in terms of rules and codes of conduct. So trying to sort of, like, bridge this gap, that to me is the sort of the the long term trajectory of this project exploring that.

send I'll let

you know later.

Yes. So there's there's many relations. So let me actually just list these off for you because it's gonna be easier if I just, like, look at the so if you go to the, like, the organization's table and you sort of click around, you'll see that, you know, there's columns. They're kinda, like, nicely grouped together in the main view that sort of talk about, like, how organizations relate to different projects. So there's Owens projects. So, like, you have legal ownership over the repository. Right? It's not necessarily, like, you have ownership. You have administrative control over the repository. It doesn't necessarily mean you, like, own it, own it. You know, it's kinda hard to say say that with, like, things like open source. But that's kinda like you have administrative control over the project, you contribute to the project, you fund the project through direct monetary contributions, and you use the project. This is how currently gut based models relationship, like, four ways in which projects are related organizations. And that graphic, where we're talking about collaborations is really focused on owns, contributes, and funds. Right? We've talked about using doing uses because it's actually a richer like, it's a much richer, like, dataset in a way. But we kinda wanna we wanna get like, give the sense of, like, there are many people contributing building these projects together. So it's really coming out of the contributes sort of column. So that dataset is coming out of that specific column in GovBase. The issue is that yeah. There's just, like, just for the one that's most filled out, just, like, if you look at the constitute project, for example, there's, like, 15 different contributors to one of these things. So you, like there's actually, like, if it was actually if they just said it was actually completely filled in, it would be like really, really rich data source with a lot of structure. But right now, the problem with, like, these contributors things is, like, they're kinda hard to access. They're, like, not always obvious, like, who's for Yeah. Time and code into certain projects. So this is something that we would really need, like, some basically, GovBase needs to pick up steam, which is part of the reason we wanna build this registry computational constitutions, which is more sort of user facing, community facing. And once it it picked up a little bit more steam, we're hoping that different projects will actually put in the information of, you know, who exactly was contributing to my project. But, I mean, this is also something that we're gonna put the, the research scholar on.

Oh, yes. Actually, that's

Yeah. That's 100% what's in the if not the next phase, at least the next next phase of the project because Zargam has actually been Zargam is kind of this amazing creature who has access to every single dataset in the DAO universe somehow because they're all given all all their data. So, yeah, we're hoping to use some of that data about, like, co ownership to analyze overlaps between DAOs, which often sort of, like, feeds into collaborations between DAOs. I

planned. So okay. It is, I suppose, in a way both rigorous and casual because the part of nice thing about the database and the terrible thing about the bay database is if you wanna represent something in it, you're gonna have to, like, define what it is very precisely. And we will have a structured representation of, like, what we mean by practice. Probably following certain guidelines in the institutional grammar that was presented a couple weeks ago by Saba and Chris. At least that's something I would like to explore. The best idea of best practices, that's much looser, and that's gonna be, I think, a merge over a set of conversations where we work with our kind of institutional partner, Siftchain, and try to find, like, the kind of practices that are most relevant to them and then kind of, like, sort of, like, go back and forth on what qualifies as the best practice. Really, like, the best practice, like, qualifying something as best is not gonna be part of Govchain. Sorry. Not gonna be part of GovBase. It's really this, like, hidden this hidden variable that we're gonna go to and try to define in order to sort of define a computational constitution that will then get represented in Govbase, if that makes any sense.

Agreed. And and just just to reiterate, we're not we're not gonna be able to represent things like the fact that a practice is a best practice. We're not claiming to do that in GovBase. It's just trying to represent practices at all. That's that's really the goal, to find a a good representation of practices and try to build an example dataset that's where it says these are some practices that are going on in Daoz.

Thanks for that interesting question, Thomas. And it really is a good point whether the best practices or adequate practices, emerging practice, how stationary is the frontier of governance. And my question was a little related. Basically, I was wondering whether this project or the digital constitution idea would apply to these novel online type communities and groups or to what extent it has backwards compatibility, maybe we could say, to describe static or offline communities as well.

I think that's where it's it's helpful to think about, like, what is the relationship between let's say oh, you're not seeing my screen. Okay. Between the sort of online sort of the projects that are built for online communities and the projects that are built for offline communities. Because if you could imagine, like, a municipality like, you know, Barcelona or Basel or Madrid is using something like Desidine or console. That is obviously, it's a technical tool that is structuring a lot a bunch of different relationships and the way that those, you know, offline communities communicate to the government. Right? It's mediated through this technical tool and, of course, so the technical is essentially part of the government. Or to be more precise, it's like, I think a lawyer once said this is, like, something closer to, like, this idea of, like, procedural norms in law. So these are sort of, like, not specified at the level of law, but they're sort of, like, things part of the practice of how government works. And in principle, they should be relatively, like, you know, if you design a representation of sort of packages for online communities and governance in online communities that sort of hangs on the fact that these communities use these software packages, that should be relatively exportable to packages that are used by offline communities because it's just software at the end. Right? In practice, I think a lot more is visible in an online community, and certain things are simpler at least. So it's probably just in practice empirically much easier to represent, like, have a satisfactory representation of the governance of an online community than it is to get a satisfactory representation of, like, a like a giant like a city, which is, like, has tons more people usually and is some orders of magnitude more complicated.

It's basically if it says it is. If it says this is the bylaws of a legally incorporated entity, like a foundation in the Cayman Islands or something, that's why it classifies legally binding.

So for yeah. This is actually kind of interesting. So for, like, for a lot of these, like like some of the DAOs at least that have, like, more fully featured, like, governance systems, the legally binding stuff is not usually that relevant. There are some relevant stuff like qualified code deferrals that say, here, go to the code. Right? So that's obviously kind of like, how do I say it? It's like active. That's an active part of those bylaws.

A lot of the a lot of the

other stuff is just more like, I mean, what to me looks like legalese, just like covering a whole bunch of sort of like other clauses, things, that basically just like our man I think of as like stuff that manages the interaction between whatever is online and whatever is offline. And I suspect that probably those things are to some degree active in a way. I just and don't have the interpretive faculties or expertise to sort of see in what ways those aspects are active in the governance of the organization. Yeah. I don't know if that answers your question. But

Ofer? So my question is simple, and I think I asked it before a little bit. Like, how do you capture the evolution of governance over time? How do you intend to do that?

Yeah. Yes. So I think the issue here so like like governance over time would be like I typically think like a numeric measure like, you know, like size of the community. Right?

No. No. Not only that. Like, even the the the constitution itself or the bylaw, the tools used. I mean, there's huge dynamics happening Yes. That people look at. I mean, how is it captured? I mean, what happened when things change? I mean, how are they how is it captured? What mechanism are you thinking about?

So the way, for example, the constitute project does this is they just, like if you have a constitution, right, like a like the constitution of Albania in 1983, and then there's an amendment or something happens and there's a constitution of 1987, it would just represent these completely separately as, like, separate documents. Right? And it will be kind of up to, partly because, like, these kinds of governance systems don't really change that quickly. If, like, if I can imagine, like, cases where, like, the parameters of different software packages are changing constantly as people, like, iterate. Right? Especially, like, in, you know, the early stages of an organization. And, honestly, that's a really good question. It's not something I've really found a way to sort of represent in GovBase. Like but partly, I mean, probably that's because it's something that's I've so far been abstracting to this like, to the design of a policies table. So I think you're right actually. Like, in a policy table, it would behoove us to have a representation of, like, evolution over time as these parameters change. I think the issue there is that also, like, that requires I I kind of imagine, like, if you really wanted to, like, to have that, you would need, like, some sort of active connection to, like, a GitHub repo that is reading, like, like, you know, there's a CronJob task that happens, like, every week or so or every day or so or something that captures, like, how often these parameters are actually being modified. That would be the best use case I can imagine for for, like, a time based analysis of the policies of, like, software's policies.

think it's for the good reason.

I think that over time, it will become important, like, if you look at it, like, five years from now or something.

Yeah. Exactly. How that how those things could change or, like, just the different packages that people install or the like, as those packages upgrade, you know, you kinda wanna keep track of that as well. It's important data point.

if yeah. If if the, versioning were captured, like, a time series of different versions of the computational constitution, then you could do, like, a phylogenetic type analysis or a stratigraphic going back in time. And then you can externally see what a company or what a group is putting out. But then if you had access to internal metrics, like your chat logs or something, you could have a more nuanced understanding about, like, the development and evolution of forms.

Yes. So I think that's like, you know, if you remember the representations graphic, there was, like, you know, data sitting at the bottom. But things like activating that kind of, like, resource, even if suppose you had it. Right? So you need access to those those kinds of internal metrics. Plugging them into a definition of governance, what I I I think of is like the sort of the mediating thing would be like an something like an institutional statement, like a formal grammar that represents that we sort of, like, use to define, like, governance rules. Mapping that kind of data into producing institutional statements seems to me like an unsolved problem, though maybe Seth knows more about this. The more generally, I think this idea of, like, sort of, like, get versioning and sort of, like, building phylogenetic trees or I really love this word, phylogenetic. Is that an actual word?

It's an actual word. Phylo plus stratigraphic analysis.

That's pretty awesome. Okay. I hope to use it in some future presentation that I will give. But I was thinking more I think the original sort of, like, sort of, like, kinda tree based diagrams we were envisioning that Zarka and I was really tossing around were were ones where so, yeah, there would be, like, some sort of forking. That is a kind of, like, Git, like, versioning system where I publish a constitution, some other organization kinda basically forks it and uses it, modifies it a bit, and that's, like, a new version. And then you can sort of trace the evolution of these things as they sort of get forked and change, evolve over time. So, yeah, this is absolutely something we would love to do.

Yeah. My question is similar about change, but just, sort of casually across the whole database over time, have you done an analysis of trends that, you've seen within the whole dataset?

So this is not something we've done yet, but so, actually, like, I can't remember, which diagram or which sort of article this came from, but it actually it is kind of interesting to look at. If you just go to, like, projects and classify organize things by year founded or, you know, by development stage was kind of a proxy for that. It is kind of interesting just for us to see the rise and fall of different projects in this space. Right? So that's like a that's a kind of analysis that's been done for, like, let's say, civic tech, which broadly speaking is I think of as, like, sort of tech projects software geared toward off like communities, like, sort of like national politics. And it's interesting to see that there's, like, a large number of sort of projects that have been developed just in the past, like, sort of, like, five to ten years, in this space. At least that we've seen on GitHub. And, the year founded is really just looking at their GitHub repo and sort of looking at the date of the first commit. That's where a lot of this data is coming from. So, yeah, it's, I I think it's, like, that's the kind of, like, overtime analysis we would be performing once we have a little bit more time to put into actually filling in that column of data. Currently, it's like some of these things are not obvious, like, when they were founded, so it takes a lot more digging. And as you can see, there's, like, over, like, I think almost 300 sort of entries over 300 entries in database right now. So digging doing all that digging will take quite a bit of time.

Yes. So so there's, like, two things that are kinda happening simultaneously. Like, on a sort of, like, publications publishing stand for constitutions. I suspect we'll we're gonna basically splice two ontologies, like, a combination of the constitute projects ontology and the IID ontology. So constitute is an ontology that's used to already sort of classify national constitutions. So there'll be essentially a dumbed down version of that to sort of, like, capture well, I wouldn't say dumbed down, but, like, a modified version of that to capture the kind of constitutions and governance documents that are typical in online communities. And then basically splicing that with elements from the IAD on the ontology to how do I say it? Which sort of like is a more I think I think what is a slightly more low level, more precise accounting of different sort of rules and policies that one can sort of enact. And the idea would be to map software configurations into that ontology and then that ontology into the constitute ontology or constitute plus plus, something like that. That's that's like this is all a little bit more speculative. Like, Yeah. This is like a plan that will almost certainly, like, sort of go up in flames once we actually start coding these things. But that's currently the sort of idea and sort of the the work we put in.

what do you mean data ontologies? Like the

Oh, oh, oh, like a data dictionary.

Yeah. Yeah. That is not something I thought about in terms of producing data dictionary. Okay. The

mean, it's all just different forms of metadata. Why do I do anyways, I I

Yeah. For sharing this.

Right. So, like, the constitute ontology is written in so it's an RDF file. So it's some sort of, like it's a it's a formal web ontology, and we could output export to some version of that. This is not I mean, so I I think it's a it's an important question to ask, but it's not something I've thought about so far, like, which specific ontology format file format I plan to export to. The I will just say that the kind of the idea of the structures table at least. So, yeah, so one part work here is, like, to produce, like, a workable publishing standard, like a product essentially that people can use. Sort of in parallel, there's a more kind of research oriented exploration. So, like, the goal of the structures table is not really to provide a complete, It's not to say, like, one social ontology is the best, but really to provide kind of, like, a, like, a concise and easy to sort of access view through which we can start, like, relating different ontologies, which is precisely the sort of goal of that big graphic that I sort of took us through, where, you know, had, like, formal game theory on the other one side constitute constitutions on the other, and somewhere in between, there's things like, you know, IAD, and and different kind of governance ontologies. So hope that helps.

Alright. Awesome. Thank you.