Metagov Governance
Speaker 1: So, MediGov is an oligarchy, which is ironic because we have much higher, aspirations and ideals. And interestingly, for people who care about democracy, we've been pretty big defenders of the current structure while also acknowledging, its weaknesses, for at least the first couple years of this thing existing. And and now that it's reaching really more of maturity and and we have...
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Transcript
So, MediGov is an oligarchy, which is ironic because we have much higher, aspirations and ideals. And interestingly, for people who care about democracy, we've been pretty big defenders of the current structure while also acknowledging, its weaknesses, for at least the first couple years of this thing existing. And and now that it's reaching really more of maturity and and we have really negative pressure of of people wanting to take other kinds of roles and step up, we have a a really great opportunity to evolve our structure in more of a participatory direction. And so today, we wanna talk about kind of what we came up with. I'm really organizing this on the fly. I didn't expect to leave, but I did step up. And so maybe a good place to start would be a little report from someone rather than what we're kind of proposing and posting, how things are different today. Is anything different about the the the structure of Rentagov as of, like, today? Or maybe that's yeah.
I'm not
sure if
Go ahead. Go ahead, John.
Sorry. Go ahead, John.
I was just gonna ask. It seems like that's a question for one of the core group members. So maybe we could start by talking about the fact that such a thing as the core group exists, which was a surprise to me when I was invited to join it. So I think probably the biggest change that we're trying to make right now and right away is to be more transparent about the structures that do exist and making it clear what the governance is, how people can get involved. I think so we've been there exists such a thing as the core group. It is a, structurally, it's just a private Slack channel, and it's, like, essentially the oligarchy that, Seth mentioned earlier. Previously, there has not been any sort of structured thinking about how people can join the core group, and people couldn't really ask to join because we didn't know it existed. It was more that someone would sort of, do a bunch of stuff, and then people would be like, maybe this person should get involved in leadership. Let's invite them to the private channel. And, obviously, that's not a great way to have community. So one of the things that we wanna do is make it clear that this group exists, what kind of stuff we do, be as transparent in what we do as possible. So having a lot more of our discussions out in the open where people can give people can participate even if it's not in, like, a formal voting sort of way. So so, yeah, I would say that's the biggest change is the push towards trans transparency and accessibility. One of the things we realized as we were sort of discussing where we wanted to go with the governance was that it's really nice to have, like, lots of ideas about, how to be more democratic, but it's all very hypothetical, and we sort of exist in our current form, and we didn't want to just, like, pick a specific form and, like, impose it as this, like, discontinuous thing. So as part of our conversations, like, one of the things we recognize is we wanted a way to be experimental and to try out new things before sort of formalizing them. Like, figure out, like, what is good for our group before saying this is how our group is gonna be. But the only way that we can do that in, like, a healthy way is to do it, like, really transparently and accessibility accessibly. So the core group is gonna stay around. It's gonna keep for now, it's gonna keep functioning in the way it has been sort of structurally in terms of it's consent based with the same set of people, but we're going to be working in a much more accessible and transparent way so that everyone can be involved in evolving and experimenting and getting us more towards a explicitly democratic, explicitly accountable system. But so that's a huge role for other people to play is to to help us figure out what direction that's that should go in. I'm done. I feel like I rambled for quite a while there.
No. That that that was good, and it touched on a a a couple of these points. I realized I was kinda putting the the end in the beginning, and maybe a better place to start is, you've just covered kinda what structure of MediGov that, you know, we're group people and we've grown, and there are people here who've who've ended up in more leadership positions either through, precedence or kinda through being kinda handpicked with the sorta on some basis, right, on the basis of of what core group people thought was right. Can I get a why for the core group? Like, why it makes sense or why it made sense at the time at least?
Actually, why don't I I can try to address that. So just to get a little bit of background to what how this Slack channel really got created. It was pretty simple. It was actually just like the original authors of the Montreal politics paper. And we use the channel kind of mostly just to write the paper. And then, of course, Medigov grew out of, in a lot of ways, that paper among other things, but, honestly, mostly that paper in a way. And we just sort of, like, kept using that channel in order to figure out, like, okay. Well, what's the next step? What do we do? How do we develop Benidov? Or how do we actually get to this kind of governance layer that's proposed in the original Montreal politics paper? And well, so that's why I guess exists roughly. And it essentially kind of like just organically took on additional responsibilities. Like, it just happened like, okay. Well, you know, sometimes we need to make decisions about how are we gonna run the seminar in the future. And we just happen to be like, use the core group channel and. Well, part of the reason, at least my, the way I think about this, in terms of, like, how do we make this more transparent and how do we make the core group more accessible is to point out that this idea of, like, creating a governance layer is no longer just kind of an academic research project that, you know, where we're like conceptualizing things. It's really like it needs at this point. It really like in order to succeed, it actually do anything. It needs to become a community effort involving potentially lots of different people, lots of different stakeholders coming from with lots of different experiences and different points of view and kind of different projects that they sort of, like, incorporate or want to bring into this governance layer. And that's why we think it's really I think it's really important that we sort of make that core group more accessible, give a clear sort of a pipeline or sort of mechanism for joining it, or just more generally contributing to this, like, collective project of building this governance layer for the Internet, which is kind of crazy and insanely ambitious in scope. Certainly for a, you know, group of, I don't know, like, eight to 10 academics, but maybe less so if we have 50 sort of seasoned experienced practitioners and researchers, maybe even more possible with a 100 or 200. So, anyways, hopefully, that gives a little bit of more background on the motivation behind the core group.
Great. And I and I've been I think it's a little self congratulatory for a group to, like, devote some time to its own history as if it's so dignified. But it is good to kinda get this background before we get into more substantive questions about our current aspiration and structure of MediGo. And it is worthwhile to devote a session to ourselves in this way because we're about governance. If nothing else, this, you know, change is a key is the kind of key study that is a prompt for a great discussion after we're done kind of talking to the changes. Can I just wanna step up and talk about the current aspiration, like, kind of what the new structure is going to be one day, is going to have been one day, when when all the incremental changes are done? Can we skip to the end?
Well, so that I feel like that's a little bit of a trick question. So as we've been, over the summer, the core group has been meeting and trying to debate what the new, better, more accountable, more democratic governance should be, and we've thrown out a lot of ideas. One was a membership model. One was more focused on working groups. We've had a lot of different ideas, and the sort of problem we kept running into again and again is it felt like when we were defining these things that we were enforcing a structure that didn't necessarily already exist, and it felt, like, very presumptuous to be like, okay. How this works is that there are working groups, and then the working groups elect the core group, or it's like something like that when no working groups currently exist, and it's, like, not how Medigov is currently structured. So it felt like very much like imposing a structure from on high that we didn't know whether or not it would work. So I think the goal over the next months is to experiment with some of those structures, maybe with working groups, maybe folks from the wider community will have other ideas that we like even more. But as we experiment, hopefully, we'll hit on some structures that really work for us as a community. I will say that there are a few core things that we do wanna make sure that we reach in the future, but how we reach them is not quite clear. So, like, we definitely do wanna be more democratic. We wanna have the leadership of the community come from the community as a whole. What it's specifically that looks like, we don't know. We'll find out through experimenting. We want to we have some high level goals for the community. Like, we want the community to continue to be interdisciplinary. We want it to be diverse on a number of accesses. We want it to be have researchers and practitioners and teachers and students and, you know, anyone we want it to be the kind of place that anyone, no matter what their background, if they're interested in governance, especially, like, governance and the Internet of governance and technology, they can find a home here. We want it to be more diverse demographically. We want it to be the kind of place that's very welcoming, so you kind of stumble in, and there is onboarding. There is, like, people welcoming you. Those are, like, high level goals, though, and I think the reason we're choosing this process is because we don't know what the specific structures that are going to achieve that are. That's like a collective project to figure out what the specific structures are. And once we figure it out, then we can put it into our official bylaws. But we didn't wanna put it in the bylaws first because who knows if we would get it right.
And so, yeah, I can echo some some things a lot of our aspirations are things we've heard. One thing we've heard is some people want this to be a literal affiliation they could use. Practitioners wanting to publish an academic venues often feel like second class citizens, And so having an affiliation of a research organization gives legitimate like, literal legitimacy. So that's very practical ask. Another ask we've heard is sort of a path like, a clear path to the right to feel a sense of ownership and some of the and and use some of the prerogative of ownership. What else have we heard? Well, I guess I'm putting those two up mainly to elicit more to say that we really are interested. You know, a lot of the basically, what we're saying today is that we didn't do anything, but we did set goals for where we wanna be, and we intend to get there incrementally through an open process. And so that approach is is the result of of of at least trying to feel like we're listening to some of these, and there's there's room for that. There are constraints on what the final thing is gonna look like. It is an organization incorporated in The US and those have to have boards, and boards have to have three members, and board members can be sued for crimes committed by the organization. So there's gonna be a board. It's gonna have a certain amount of power. We can make it a strong board or a weak board. It can be everybody or a couple people. They can be elected or appointed by elected people or something. So that's a constraint. What other what other constraints on the what the final structure is gonna look like? Maybe some little bounce to to to structure our kind of imaginations for how things kinda might end up.
Well, the main thing is that, yeah, is there needs to be a legal board of directors that need to be finite, like, in a sense of, like, small because you also have to pay insurance nonprofit, directors insurance for them. That is essentially it. Anything Excuse me.
And that is because you're becoming a five zero one c three corporation. Yes?
Yes. Well, certainly because of that. Also just because, otherwise, you would just need to get like, we would all need to get fiscally sponsored by another sort of nonprofit organization in order to even hold a bank account. Like, you need that legal status to hold a bank account unless we're operating and tiling crypto, and that has its own legal kind of issues. So it's just it's just
yeah. I do wanna point out that so I you know, enable my organization, we pride ourselves on calling ourselves a non organization. There is a nonprofit, which has this cofounder I actually am the president of, but it has the smallest possible role, which is to handle the funds. The dispensation of the funds of which are determined by the community using a voluntary voting process under Lumio. I'm not gonna go on for a long time, but I wanna just question your model, give you an opportunity to consider your model. If I had it to do it all over again, that's not true. At the time, that was the only obvious way to do it, to have sort of a decentralized communitarian organization, but still be able to accept donations and have a etcetera. But, you know, now Open Collective is sort of offering a fiscal sponsor service in a box, which actually means that there's no actual requirement to become a five zero one c three or to have those formal relationships. So I just wanna make sure you're aware of that set of options.
Yes. So actually
So, yeah, John, I mean, you're great. This is a great illustration of the value of opening up before making any decisions that I think it's I think it is fair to say that our imagination of possible future structures was limited by the people in the room. And so from from Daniel's input on the in the chat and from from your suggestion, we're already getting a sense of how much bigger we can think down the line. Josh?
Yeah. I think I'll just reference what's already kind of, like, being discussed in the chat. The people are talking about grants, and that's another big reason, actually. It's the biggest reason that we, spend all that time to get even the c three status is because in order to get certain grants like, literally, we received the grant, and we haven't been able to get it into our bank accounts because we don't yet have c three status. So having c three status and thus, like, having that entity set up in that way makes it possible to for us to have and to receive these kinds of grants and to apply for them. And, also, just to be clear, like, almost, like, 99% of Medigub's, like, budget is pre budgeted through these grant applications. So that just, like, speaks to how the organization currently has run, I. E. Not through donations to support generic activities.
Yeah. I thank you very much, John, and to Daniel in the chat for talking about some of the alternative structures. Something that I did early on in the summer was to take three case studies and sort of write them up for the group's consideration. And I can link I wrote that up as well. I can link it in the chat. But, obviously, three structures plus, you know, whatever we're bringing individually in terms of our own past experience doesn't cover the full scale of, options out there. So one thing that I think would be really interesting and fun to do would be to continue expanding that set of case studies to include your organization, John, other organizations that people have worked with. Because I think these case studies can be I'm not necessarily aware of any similar resource out there, and I think they can serve a really helpful purpose, even if, you know, we don't necessarily go and adopt the exact same structure as any one of the organizations, being able to see how different communities have tried to address these problems and all the different potential options out there, is, really potentially, quite helpful. So if folks have an organization that they think would make for a good case study, let me know, and we can chat about how to, add case studies and how to make that more available for people.
So we are Shauna, you threw a a month which made me realize we were not super clear intent. Do we have an aspiration for, like, when our first concrete step in the direction the vision is gonna be and when our last concrete step in the direction of vision is gonna be?
No. I mean, certainly not on the last. Like, I think we've got, like, a vague sense that we'd like to start experimenting pretty immediately, like, giving a little bit of time for the community to start giving ideas and feedback so it's not, like, barreling ahead before anyone has any chance to even think about it. But I think we wanna begin the process of experimentation, you know, going forward, and hopefully, we'll have things I I personally would love to see us having a more concrete sense of, what system we want and, like, building that sort of accountability into the bylaws or whatever, like, formal legal structure we have, whether it's a nonprofit board or sorry, nonprofit bylaws or something else. I would love to see that in, like, a year ish. But, like, that's just me saying what I would like to see. That's not, like, the consensus of the community because I can't speak for the community, and, also, it's because it's experimental, it's kind of hard to say how long it's gonna take.
Great. And that that's kind of, like, the range of questions, except Josh, maybe so we did write sort of the public facing document or expression of the vision, and I can share a screen on that if Josh would be willing to share the post or someone would post post the link. In the meantime oh, we got a ton of links right there. It's separate from, like, just putting that that kind of tech stuff as an overall description of where we wanna end up. I think we're now probably unless I'm missing something, anyone can chime up who's in the discussion. But I think we're ready to kinda open up for discussion. Discussion can go in a couple directions. It could be talking about the sort of value side of the endpoint, particularly if there's any kind of delta between how things are and how, like, any of us who are excited about this organization want it to be. We can talk about the kinda legal structural, like, look of the endpoint as John and Daniel have already kinda started to explore. We can also talk about the process of getting from here to there a little bit more in line maybe fleshing out some of Shauna's timeline. Like, what happens over a year? What happens in a month that we're that we're starting in direction of fulfilling these visions these, you know, a far out vision through this far through, you know, through this far out structure? Okay. Let's see. Let me share screen on this doc, and then what's Medigov? Where's Medigov? Do we have a a little vision blurb? I thought we had something like that. John Josh? Maybe we don't oh, governance at the bottom?
I think that should be posted in there, but if not.
Yeah. Just post the link when you can. I'll share screen. In the meantime, I'm actually a little bit at a lot, so maybe that was a good time. We can either, like, questions kinda drive the direction or but I'm gonna give a last chance to folks who have been involved in these discussions to chime in with anything missing or with the direction they'd like to maybe a prompt to guide the discussion.
This is not a prompt or anything. I just wanted to shout out a document that I linked in the chat that Divya and I worked on. Divya really took the lead on it, which was amazing. And it's meant to be it's pinned it's part of the pinned post to the top of the general channel, and it's basically just, like, our first stab at an onboarding guide. It contains a bunch of links, shouts out, like community projects as well as meta gov core projects that links to the stuff that we've shared here, the governance documents. And I wanted to invite everyone to, you know, suggest things to add to it. You know, if wording is confusing, suggest changing wording, etcetera. But this is really meant to be, like, a community document, so it's and the first of many iterations of that. So, you know, take a take your read through. You might be surprised, to find stuff on there, that you didn't realize was happening. And, again, if you wanna add things, just reach out to me or Divya, and we can we can get it added. I actually don't know what the settings are. You might be able to just comment directly. But in any case, that document exists.
One prompt that I might raise is is the question of how would you want to be able to get involved more? You know, to me, one of the main goals is to create pathways for people to get involved and to involvement both in doing work and in, you know, gaining kind of power and accountability in the in the in the in the community. What what would you like to be able to do in MediGov? What does that pathway feel like for
you? Any other prompts from folks?
I I think it might be helpful to think about whether while there clearly will be grants and paid people doing various tasks under those grants, you should recognize that that implies one form of accountability and command and control. When you're taking someone's money to do something, suddenly, there's a level of responsibility. On the other hand, for the larger group, it I'm I'm I'm gonna be less abstract. In our group, however, outside of that, we are a duocracy. If people have an idea for something, they are encouraged to take the lead and do it, and it either succeeds or fails, and it gets assimilated or not. But the point is, we've tried to structure an entirely volunteer ecosystem, a a mostly volunteer
ecosystem,
around around that principle and have increasingly come to see the role of the leadership group, which is self appointed and anyone can self appoint, as facilitating those making it easy, creating those pathways for people to do the kinds of things they think they wanna do. So I there there are two points I was trying to get at. One is there's command and control, and there's sort of a more let's say fair duocracy, duocracy, and they're not incompatible with each other, although they do need to be partitioned in some way. And secondly, if you have a duocracy or you just want lots of casual people coming and going, which I think is gonna be inevitable if you succeed, you want to think about, less about rules and more about pathways that will make it easy for people to do what you collectively be believe is the right thing, than for them to blow up the boat, if you will.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, John. I think, yeah, you're definitely opening minds. Actually, one question kind of hidden under your question. Does Medigov have an obligation to have an experimental kind of avant garde or radical governance structure? Is it a disappointment if Medigob has, like, a fairly familiar if we use, like, sort of existing familiar models for, like, participatory governance, established, you know, drawing on inspiration from co ops and using, like, a corporate structure and having a board and using and and hiring an executive director or some kind of staff to fulfill administrative duties. Like, is that a downer? Is that a big disappointment or or a or a failure of our duty to innovate in the government state? Or is it a reflection of the internalization of lessons learned? Like, I yeah. You can go either way, but it'd be fun to hear folks' opinions on that. What else do we have? I'm seeing lots of questions in the chat. So anyone can type up on anything going on in the chat or any other prompt thrown out. The most valuable thing at this point, I think, would be to have a range of voice to to to see things a little bit on Nathan's prompt, the things you can get from Medigap. I can just give examples. You can get money from Medigap. You can apply for grants under the umbrella if you wanna collaborate with people, if you want some kinda institutional legitimacy for grant writing, for paper writing, for collaborating, for recruiting speakers who you admire, who you don't think you have the heft to get on your own. Maybe we're accumulating enough of a track record to be able to and and, of course, we have a social network that we can pull speakers and people you wanna hear from and have conversations with. This is just like a small sample of the things you can ask for. So think about what your own goals are and what you need as a person, and there's you know? And and it's too too totally on the table that we can provide that if it's in the area of a governance layer for the Internet.
I mean, I just feel like, honestly, like, one of the major things is that if somebody's in the Medigap Slack, they are much more likely to respond to you than if you just cold email them.
I don't
know how that's worked for other people. That's, like, my impression of one of the most exciting things about having a community like this.
Yeah. I'll just quickly jump into the
so Yeah. Please. Go for it. You do
No. I was just gonna say just specifically to the earlier question, and I've been in travel, so my apologies if this is already clearly stated, and I should just go back to rewatch the portion that I missed. But to the specific question of, how exciting would it be? Or I don't know if to go the other way. Like, is it disappointing if MetaDev is using traditional governance structures, you know, quote, unquote. But it would be really exciting if there are pockets within what meta gov is trying to do where there is room for experimentation. I realize as I'm saying this, I don't know what this means structurally or organizationally. And I I do like, I have really loved being part of this community over the last six, nine ish months. Right? I don't even remember exactly where I joined, but just hopping in now and getting to meet folks and sort of the intellectual curiosity and knowledge here is really amazing. And as the, I guess, as the organization grows, it's gonna be interesting to see just what are the different activity types because I get sort of the different tools that are being built. I get the fact that there's the weekly seminars and that there's a community forming in some way. But is there an explicit desire for this to be, like, a launchpad of experimentation of little governance things, even if it's as informal as, like, hey. I wanna do a little book clubby thing. Like, let's figure out a wonky governance structure to experiment. Like, is that how deep we want this to be? I don't wanna say, like, a proper consultancy, but more of, like, hey. If you wanna experiment actively with a really small hands on governance structure, MetaGov could be a good launch board for that. And I don't know how in line or off base that is with kind of what the current core team is thinking of in the long term. But, yeah, I think there's a lot of ideas and different forms of governance, and especially as someone who's not safe from a co op background or from some places where they might be more prevalent, it can feel a little unapproachable to be like, well, how do I actually become part of one of these? And granted the crypto space is a little different and wonky in a different direction. But, yeah, it it would be interesting to to just hear from some of the core team members about, like, what what are some of the other sort of activity
important question. So one approach that we've been that that has really been central for us is really to organize around working groups. And, you know, one of the challenges we've had is, like, the question of how much to kind of decentralize that. But the idea with the working groups is that they would really self determine how they govern themselves. Right? And so, for instance, you could have a working group that's, you know, a a dictatorship or a partnership, like, you know, for instance, you know, the game mod project I'm doing with Luke. You know, we don't have any fancy governance. It's a couple of people working on something. And in contrast, you know, another project might be much more kind of open and dynamic. Another one might be much more hierarchical. The idea would be that that we could enable different kinds of governance to happen that are appropriate within the working groups. And most of the activity would really be in the working groups in this model. And the role of the core group would essentially be coordination among working groups. So for instance, right now, in some respects, like, the Mediga prototype has been happening kind of under the umbrella of, like, the core group, but increasingly, it's become really group. I stopped you know, I don't go to the to the prototype meetings anymore. The people who are working on the prototype are going to the prototype meetings. And so and and they're organizing themselves in a way that's different from how, you know, the seminar is being organized or how the the, you know, the the game mod project is being organized. And so I think I think in that way, if we really center working groups as, like, the primary means in which most of the work is getting done and those working groups, you know, the the the logic that we had too there would be that working groups in getting approved by the kind of central body, whatever the, you know, the core group maybe, would also have to document how you make decisions. Right? So so we know who's accountable for the activities of that working group. And so there's some line of accountability. And so when you submit, you know, your proposal to be a, you know, in a recognized working group, you're also submitting, okay, here's how governance basically works in our in our working group. And, you know and and and that would allow for both some clarity, some mutual learning about how others are organizing, and some some transparency about, you know, about about if you wanna get involved, here's how here's how this work group operates.
May I add something? I think that one issue that if I understood probably the question the question of experimenting is still to me a very weak link. I mean, I'm an experimentalist. So to me, experimenting means that you're doing things in a controlled manner, and you figure out a way of doing it in a replicable and publishable way. And and here I'm not quite sure if anything that I see in the list is falling into what I would call serious experiments yet. And and then I wrote a little paper also about it that Nate Nathan edited. But I wonder to what level, you know, academic experimentation par excellence should be part of what this group is doing.
Yeah. I'd like to jump in real quick. So what Nathan's talking about with these different working groups, that is actually happening in a few different circumstances. So I'm I'm Elizabeth Barnes. I work for Figment, which is a staking as a service company, and I I kind of had a lot of our governance operations there. So we're involved in, like, 40 different networks, and so we got a a wide span of of governance from from all of those both on chain and off chain. So but what you're talking about with these different working groups is happening on a few different of those networks. So there is, like, there is some sort of precedence for this. It's not an exact one for one match, but it's very similar. So NEAR has they have, like, a DAO of DAOs. So they have a the overall off chain governance oversees all these sorts of DAOs that all are are allowed to organize within themselves, and each of them have their own structure and own own people who are able to create their own governance systems as a as they see fit. There's there's a bunch of other examples like this too. Celo just created something as well that has an overarching treasuries and multisig. And then underneath that is going to help, how governance, individual regional specific governance organizations who can help modular their own governance specifically for their own products. So I think that's a really good idea because in in particular, people should be allowed to create software and produce governance in their own way, whatever they need for their own community. So there's a precedent that'd be really cool, and and I'd love to, like, be a part of that. I'm on Salo's committee to establish those, so I'm happy to chat more about it.
Thank Elizabeth. Would you also post some links to some of those examples in the network and that network? Thanks so much.
I I have a kind of a question or a comment generally that was, prom prompted by Elizabeth's input. My name is is Max Nijenkamp, by the way. I'm a graduate, researcher at MIT. And, I mean, my name's still my summer camp name. So I'll change that at some point. But the question that I have is that it is about MediGov interfacing with external organizations. Like right now, it seems like a lot of, people from different organizations come in and give talks and then they like feedback and they'll follow-up with, people individually from Medi Gov. And, you know, one function for Medigov could be something like, I mean, some type of, like, advising. I don't know how concretely that would be, but something like giving feedback on a governance structure or helping run, a governance experiment within an organization. And that's just that's kind of one area that I would be curious about. Specifically, I guess, what would be different what could be different in the future is that there's more maybe, like, a coherent, like, MediGov stance or maybe that doesn't make sense and it just still ends up being individual people in MediGov giving their feedback for that. But I just I think that, like, how Medigob interfaces with other organizations is is something that I I'm curious about.
Maybe maybe it's best for Josh to speak to that. Actually, Josh, you put the beginning of this group at the module of politics paper, but I put it at, like, the seed project, which really is, like, something sorta and and so that that's almost an example of what Max is having. Could you speak to that? And, also, I think at some point, we talked about almost like a consortium model where our membership is other organizations rather than people. Can you speak to kind of these possibilities?
Yeah. There's a lot on a plate. It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. The core group, I would I would set that starting around the, the Montreal politics paper, but, like, the organization itself, yeah, definitely began kind of earlier. The how do I say it? So I feel like okay. There's a couple of things here. One about maybe can MediGov advise or come up with a you said a stance on how to advise external organizations on governance as just more generally, like, what is the strategy for partnering with other organizations? Speaking of the first thing, that's honestly like, that's actually something I'm very much focused on right now. Because, like, Medigob itself, Medigob prototype is really a kind of a generic piece of infrastructure that connects lots of different, like, technical affordances and services together. But, this is like you know, it's hard to find, like, a precise value proposition for something like that generic that's meant to be consumed by such a wide set of stakeholders. So as part of kind of, like, you know, the the activities of the Medica prototype working group, what I've been ex what we've been exploring is precisely developing kind of more of a stance. Another way of saying that is, like, a more focused, you know, value proposition around a specific product and a specific set of, like, governance problems experienced by a specific set of people. So that's something, like, a little bit more, like, you know, focus that currently interested in developing and possibly, like, developing kind of advice for and or products for. More generically, like, the relationships we're trying to sort of foster with external organizations, these like, you know, we would done things like actually, like, we've advised NEAR on, like, governance experimentation, worked with a couple of projects, working with this artist community that's doing NFTs. So but this is, like, often in the form of, like, we're trying to collaborate with these organizations as part of exploring or dog footing or building use cases for Medigap, the Medigap, the prototype, the technology. Separately, I think there's longer term relationships. So we're really, really interested in building. That's kind of like what originated some of these discussions around, like changing the governance of Medica itself to organizations like, basically developer communities, like the ones building source code or the developers of Loomio or, Open Collective. We're actually working with both source code and Open Collective, those teams. And, hopefully, what we're you know, one thing that might rise out, this is more of a consortium style or at least just like, some sort of network of all these different organizations working on different governance products, teaming up to build, you know, or store to constitute this kind of governance layer. So that is not something that we have recently discussed in the context of working groups just because we think working groups are really intended to become, like, a pipeline for the, like, community here, like the what I think is, like, the internal community. Whereas, like, this these external projects are already, you know, exist in their own ways and have their own fully extent either funding or governance for volunteer structures. There's probably a different pipeline we need to do sort of foster collaborations between what we're doing here in this community and what those folks are doing. I don't know if I covered everything that was on the table, but, yeah, hopefully, that helps.
John, you're gonna have to unmute. We've got go ahead.
I'm sorry. Other people should jump in.
Thank you. Well, I think there's at least a couple people around in the community who are curious about, like, what's the first change to core group kind of. And I'm I'm certainly kinda kinda asking that question. If we're hoping to to be are we gonna design the perfect thing and then all of a sudden, once it's designed, do you send a core group, or does core group incrementally kinda do center itself? And so I'd love to hear people's ideas, both everyone's ideas for kind of what what the first step looks like. We're we haven't thought of that. I don't think we've planned or thought about it at all.
Can I broaden that prompt to the group at least a little bit just to say that whether or not it's focused on decentering the core group or not, like, what things would you like to see, like, big or small, like, that would enable you to participate or observe or otherwise know about governance as part of this community?
I can speak briefly. I feel like I learned about MediGov structure as I was writing the info document with Shauna. I mean, most of what I put in there, I didn't know before writing it. And so to me, that was, like, the only way to figure out what was going on despite sort of having been in and around and a part of pieces of the community at least for some time. And I think it's great that we are moving towards more transparency, hopefully, a little bit with that document and with these meetings and things like that. To me, it seems like I've spoken to a lot of folks, and I feel this way where there's, like, an excitement about a lot of the work that's happening, but confusion as to how to participate, not just in the kind of governance of MediGov, but in the projects and the research collaborations and things like that. I know we put in a list of projects that folks have been asking for collaborators for, but I've definitely noticed an interest in kind of getting more things out and and a desire to have those be under the MediGov umbrella because it's growing and it's an exciting space. And so to me, one part of this conversation is the governance of how decisions get made, but another is, you know, how can people plug into that? What is and isn't under the medical umbrella? What does it mean for projects to be medical? We had a difficult time, for example, in writing that document, separating, like, internal projects that cover some of the stuff that Josh has been talking about, like, MediGov and Policycade and all of this. And, like, in network, I don't know what the name I ended up with is. That was, like, folks in MediGov that were working on things that wanted collaborators. Maybe they were all in MediGov, but it wasn't really a MediGov project still. And so I think those are things that I would at least like to know more about. Shauna mentioned she and I and and Bea and some other folks are interested in. Like, oh, is there a policy angle here? Can we move towards a Medigov point of view or a set of things that we do in tech policy? Like, what what would make that under Medigov where we would talk about it as a Medigov project versus not? Like, those kinds of questions at least are things that I have, and and I think maybe beyond me that I'd be interested in getting a better sense of.
That's perfect, Divya. Thank you. I think you captured a couple call from the community that we are listening to that I forgot to list off great like, the greater transparency absolutely and a clear path to involvement.
Just as our time starts to come to an end, I wonder if
Josh could talk
a little bit about, like, the, you know, the process of starting to release the documentation, start to create you know, we're we're really trying to get this moving, like, from the bottom up a little bit, you know, delay a little bit of the questions about the the board, but to start working on enabling working groups to form and start publishing, making the website more focused on working groups rather than a kind of unitary organization. Josh, do you wanna say a bit about what we're kind of ready to deploy and and and where we can you know, how we can start moving on on testing out some of these new approaches.
So there's gonna be a redesign of the website coming up soon, which we're gonna try to give more space to more community activities and also open up a way in which you can kind of mechanisms by which you can affiliate directly to MediGov and perhaps, like, use that affiliation to either apply for grants or just receive, like, funding directly from MediGov. There'll be, like I'm gonna try to sort of set up, like, like, essentially mini grants or we can call them bounties around, like, specific projects that people are interested in, just to sort of, like, give that little bit of support. And sometimes the moral support is even more valuable than the than the economic. The those are the main things, I think. Speaking with respect to the core group, we've bandied about a few things, and I think it'd be how do I say it? One is just to, you know, expand the membership of the core group and just keep doing that. And eventually, we'll hopefully hit a critical point where when it becomes feel more like a membership rather than less like a oligarchy. And second is just, like, as part of fostering that, and I kinda, like, realized this is something that Medigap needs anyways. We've talked about but haven't, like, yet concluded this discussion, so I don't wanna make sort of promises on behalf like the other core group members. But making that core group meeting spot, which literally happens right after this this seminar into just open to everyone. And then it'll just turn into kind of like a lab meeting for all the different projects in MediGov. That'll help with just, like, keeping everybody updated on what's going on, while at the same time, if there are sort of discussions, making that a little bit more transparent and giving people an idea of what's currently going on inside the core group. So those are some of the upcoming sort of things we're kind of fielding.
Sorry. I think that there was there's also a poll do are we also playing some kind of policy, like, proposal system or that's on the line?
I honestly would just say, like, the there's a public Google Doc folder, which I believe is both pinned to the Slack hashtag general Slack channel as well I linked here a couple times that has, like, all the policy documents and the governance documents. If there's a policy that you would like to see happen in MedGov, literally just create it in that folder and just, like, ping it to Slack, and we will essentially discuss it. So it's a relatively informal proposal system at the moment.
Yeah. And feel free because it's so informal, if there's a way that you want to do it, please feel free to say, like, hey. I would like to have an explicit discussion about this on a Zoom call versus, hey. I would like to have a discussion about this in Slack. Like, it is a okay to suggest what seems good to you because we don't really have a system, and something that seems good to you might be, like, the best way to to just do it. So please feel free to put your desires and ideas out there on both the policy level and, like, the meta process level.
So with that, we are about at time. I I like to give people a couple minutes before the end of the hour to transition out. The the chat's really valuable. It has a lot of questions that need answering. I could see down the line possibly a survey or something or something or something just to get, like, a more a really representative's stance of of the variety. So maybe, Nathan, could you be sure to would you be on the post to chat on the Slack when we get to that? And with that, thanks everyone for and bearing on this on this pretty inward looking conversation. We try to spare people these types of things, so, hopefully, it's fun and engaging and pointing to the possibility. There's lots of really big questions. We don't know the answers. We love knowing what other people want because that gives us the basis for choosing from the infinite possibilities. So thanks so much for your forbearance and eagerness, and and I'm really grateful to be part of this community for for I've never been a part of such a vibrant group of people and with such a shared common vision that I feel is really important. Boom. Boom. Boom. That's a really big thing. And so this has been really big for me, and I'm looking forward to to growing it with all of you. Thanks, everybody. Oh, I guess we can give ourselves a hand. Yeah. I'll count to three, and then we'll unmute. Yeah. One, two, three. Okay. Thank you,
Seth, for moderating.