Minimumviable Metagov
Speaker 1: Start recording whenever you're ready, Nathan, or do I have to click on it? Oh, and do you do you have breakout rooms? I figured, rather than talking at some of the most brilliant people I've ever met about what I think, it might be really fun to have everybody sort of go through this process of, like, thinking on your own, getting with one other person, talking through ideas,...
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Transcript
Start recording whenever you're ready, Nathan, or do I have to click on it? Oh, and do you do you have breakout rooms? I figured, rather than talking at some of the most brilliant people I've ever met about what I think, it might be really fun to have everybody sort of go through this process of, like, thinking on your own, getting with one other person, talking through ideas, getting with four people, talking through ideas, and then seeing when we come back together how we synthesize it. It might be really much more fun and engaging and interesting. And, basically, this came out of this, like, what is governance online and how do we how do we create the minimum lightest weight structures that we can and still have it be useful? So Christina is a much more experienced facilitator, so she will be facilitating this process and she will be kind of, like, leading us through this group exercise.
Awesome. So yeah.
Go for it.
I've set up a shared notes doc, with the agenda. We'd like you to take a few minutes, in silence before we do breakouts to write down your thoughts on three questions. And we'll give you two minutes per question, and then we'll split you into pairs just randomly. You have, I think, ten minutes to discuss with a partner and decide what in this insights and questions and synthesis you think together would be worth bringing to a group of four. And then we'll come back, which we actually have perfect four groups right now, and discuss from each of the four groups and synthesize that as a group. In the Google Doc, I have two split out pages. One is just for collaborative notes, whatever you wanna put there. You're not don't have to if you don't want to. And then the second page is for generative questions that maybe are beyond the scope or just come up, whatever. I've been really interested in looking at the ways that questions can help people make sense together, asking the question under the question, figuring out stacks of questions, etcetera. So it would be wonderful to know what questions come up. So the first question that we'd like you to take just two minutes on mute and write down, what you think of are what are the things you've experienced that work really well for lightweight governance? So grounded in your own experience, what works really well for groups? Two minutes starts now.
And and just to kinda get it going, like, one example would be one time I I went to a Sarah Club meeting and they, the beginning of each meeting, they actually read through a list, a short list of rules of conduct. So the rules were like, this is how we talk, this is how we think about topics, this is how we conduct a meeting, and there's like a 10 rules list that they went through at the beginning of every every meeting. Another example would be if you, I went to this other group where they teach leadership and what they do is they teach people on a regular basis to ask for feedback. So they actually taught the students to ask actively what worked well, what didn't work well after a given interaction as like a a ritual. And then another example of like governance that worked well in real life that I've experienced was when creating a team, we talk through how do we make decisions as
a
team and what roles people wanna play. So those types of things oh, go ahead.
We have a a question in the chat. What size group? 10 to 10,000,000? Are we are we talking today about groups within the trust boundary of, like, kind of people groups of people who fairly well know each other closer to the, you know, 10 to a thousand or way up into thousands or millions of people?
I personally wouldn't constrain it. If you've been in a group of a million people and had an experience of governance that worked really well
Please
tell me.
Love to know about that.
So just just make it clear when you're bringing that into your pair or your or groups of four with the scale of the group that you're thinking of is.
Alright. Go.
Second question. Does any is anybody need more time or is this good? And I I'll just drop the link in again. I think Thomas joined right after. Put that in. Welcome. Alright. The second question is if you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change about how groups approach governance? I know that's there's so many things to change. But
Other than human nature, you mean? Just let's just
I mean, I wouldn't put that off the table, but it it you know, the magic wand may be less effective. And then, Philip, you got tagged. You wanna write as we left? Do you wanna try and summarize? Because I love the the summary that you came up with that you said you'd never said before. And then we can just go around and who I don't know if somebody wants to go after Philip, identify yourself now, and then we can do the the other two groups.
Am I aiming
for sixty seconds?
I mean, we're a little I guess running a little late. Yeah. Like, two two minutes one to two minutes.
Oh, we were definitely all about human dignity and putting the human first. The tech should augment the human rather than the human augment the tech. I think everybody would generally nod to that, although often you find out that then you go and do some work and some dev where you actually do it the other way around. We talked about the difference between the human and the tech. The tech's greater automated tasks, and people are better at dealing with exceptions, and exceptions demand conversation. So perhaps if the tech did one thing, well, it would assist civilized discourse, civilized conversation in a way that you didn't necessarily have to be there, but could still get the group intelligence from the conversation after the fact. I found myself saying, although I'm not entirely sure it's right, but I haven't said it before so I'll repeat it now just in case it there's something in it. But if work is conversation and then conversation about conversation is management, then conversation about conversation about conversation is governance. And so we have that Hellenic nesting going on there in a in a beautiful way. But then with sort of connectors going down through those nested holons based around trust, based around friendship, based around affinities, and how that might be recognized and amplified by the digital media that the group in question is using. I think that's roughly where we got to.
Work is conversation. Conversation about can you just do that again?
So, yes, if you're doing work, then you're doing conversation. Because if it doesn't involve conversation, it's being automated. Conversation about conversation is about management, and then conversation about conversation about conversation is about governance. Possibly. I don't know. Haven't given it any real thought.
There's an elegance to it. Okay.
So follow that, somebody.
Step up. Come on. Group two, whoever you wanna be, and name who you're speaking summarizing with.
Right. So I'm speaking on behalf of John, Thomas, Lane, Zee, and myself. And we discussed that the answer to question one, which is what worked well, was the need to establish common ground, shared goals, values, objectives. It must be a repeated or repeatable process. There should be some formal process for decisions to be recorded and followed up on. But most critically, I think that the best experience that really worked is your own leading and contributing. If you do that, you would establish your authority, reputation, in the group, in the community in such a way that whatever goals you have will be more easily achieved. So leading by example, would be clearly our answer to question one. On question number two about the magic wand, it just happens so that one of the group members has significant experience looking into this and I, shared the link to a questionnaire that has been worked on for quite some time now, in fact, about a year. And it is based on specific experiences within groups, which I wish people had some prior knowledge about certain issues and have thought about them in advance. And if they already have thought about those and maybe discuss them with various groups, then perhaps the effectiveness or the, you know, purpose of fit would be better and the group will achieve its results more effectively. Separate from that, we also talked about the clear need for volunteer volunteers to participate. So if I could change things, I would certainly add more volunteers willing to contribute their time, their effort, maybe their prior knowledge, their experience, to the process. And it's important, to have a good shared understanding of the group's principles, of the group's goals, values, and also about the scope of governance itself. Again, many of those issues are described in the DIFRAIN paper that I shared with this group. On, question three on the technical side, again, some of us thought that indeed the, technology should first and foremost address, such issues as assisting people to communicate, assisting people to establish their identities, maybe give them the ability to, you know, provide their input in a certain to certain systems in a certain way. But, for larger systems, I believe it becomes more technically better, maybe, definable for the, capability that is required. And those parameters that we should watch for for larger communities, when we approach a million users or more, you should look after a throughput and scalability first and foremost. And as an example of some of the numbers that would be sufficient for a million and even for a billion users, are now available on, this particular network. Is the, lowest cost, 0.2¢ of transaction cost right now, and it's going down with the increase in scope, not up as in Ethereum. We believe we have provided certain minimum technical parameters for a real large scale governance to become possible. That is probably in a nutshell what we discussed. Thank you.
Wonderful.
We didn't get to decide, our our leader, but, I'm happy. Not a leader, representative, and I'm happy to represent if, that's alright. Cool. So just to go through quickly, because I know we're gonna run out of time. Our question number one answers, we had this idea of pre governance, which I think is very similar to what Eugene just said about finding common ground. So, like, how does the group have structure, rules, expectations, but also build trust, get vulnerable, establish social norms, implicitly, noncepholically, emotionally, and having, like, a picnic. What how could you take what you do in a picnic and turn that into a digital space? And then it's best if leadership is inclined to govern by consensus. People have the opportunity to give feedback, and there's a small group size. Small groups are better than larger groups if their organization has resources to do it. Question two. We said we wanna reduce the friction to participate. So if you're in a meeting and you have to raise your hand to vote or to, give feedback or to ask a question, that creates some friction. And sometimes people will say that that friction is too much, too expensive relative to what they're trying to get out of it. And the chair of a meeting or the people facilitating the meeting might might have that same thought. So if we reduce the friction, then more people could participate. Having a specific period focused on deliberation, the specific period focused on governance. So that's clear in people's minds, different modes. And one idea was, what if you could have, direct access to everyone's utility function? Then you wouldn't even need the participation. You could just do calculations on what people want, from you know, mathematically. And then, basically, adding to that from the third question, having something that would prioritize. If everyone could participate with zero friction or if you had the utility functions of everyone, knowing, how how to prioritize the organization's attention such that you're, basically paying attention to the participations that are the the largest, most representative or, most important, most impactful. And then we started to talk about having a MediGo political party. We're establishing norms, sharing preferences as a group. I missed the last part of it. So, Josh, if you wanna add to that, I'd totally welcome that.
Oh, just it's really quickly about how political parties fulfill two functions. One, which is to sort of like validate certain kinds of platforms and validate candidates for those platforms, but also to change it's like a sort of space for deliberation and for space for changing people's preferences. So you shape if you enter into a little party, you know, you often find that your sort of reviews about some of the things start to change as you interact with people within that party. Right?
I I just wanna say I have to jump on the another call, in about three, four minutes.
Yeah. I think we're gonna we're gonna close now. I think it's really fascinating to me because I thought that we were gonna come out with, like, well, like, these, like, really simple practical tools. Like, oh, you know, like, what works really well for governance is a checklist or something. And what's really interesting about this is, like, people are talking about, kind of that, like, what what governance is actually supposed to achieve. Right? So, like, managing of communication, prioritizing attention, establishing culture. So that that's, like, how I would summarize the output so far.
It's a kind of important observation though that, like, if you've participated in governance that went to shit, it was usually because the things we're talking about were missing. So it's almost like the negative of it. Instead of really specific rules about, oh, this works, we just described putting in the things that when they're missing, things go to hell.
I agree with that completely. And, again, a lot of that stuff is reflected in the deframe concept, and that's all practical. So whenever you see a risk if this issue is not decided, that means that we already hit that wall. That means that people already fought. That means that sub govs were essentially stopped, and funds had to be moved back. There's all kinds of trouble. So that's a very practical experience. Thanks, everyone, guys. It's been a great pleasure.
Yeah. And thanks, everybody, for joining us.
Thank you. Bye.
If I put on if is everyone taking off? And now it can. I just was I would add one around and talk to Seth about his little shot there. Great. I really just dropped a bomb last second.