Shorttalks 20220504 Metagov
Speaker 1: The cloud. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the MediGov, seminar. Today we're doing a short talk series. This is a series that was started, I don't know, I think four or five months ago by Shauna and Divya, and we're picking it back up. So it's an opportunity for people in the Medigap community to give short presentations on articles that they're reading, topics they're thinking about,...
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Transcript
The cloud. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the MediGov, seminar. Today we're doing a short talk series. This is a series that was started, I don't know, I think four or five months ago by Shauna and Divya, and we're picking it back up. So it's an opportunity for people in the Medigap community to give short presentations on articles that they're reading, topics they're thinking about, governance questions they have, and also short presentations on the topics that they're looking at and kind of having a chance to give calls for collaboration. The format will work where presenters have five to six minutes to present. I'll give a brief countdown when we get to two and one minutes, and then we'll have a little bit of discussion. And then, people here are presenting an article which is kind of present maybe an excerpt from it that we can kind of think as a prompt and have a open informal discussion. We have five presenters today. We have Shauna Gordon McKeown, Jack Corbay, Danilo Vaz, Isaac Mutemme, and Seth Fry. And we're gonna start with Shauna who I think can you introduce your topic title? Because I think it changed at the last minute. I think it's management practices, relational contracts, and the decline of General Motors. Is that right? Okay. Super. So I'm gonna pass it off to Shauna, and I'm gonna start my timer now. And then, yeah, I hope everyone has a good time.
So can folks are folks seeing this slide? I did decide to make slides at the last minute. So
Yep. Cool. Visible.
Alright. So as Sent said, I read a paper. I thought it seemed cool. So here is a very brief summary that I have made and then some thoughts about how we can, learn from this paper. So General Motors, the American car company, has had a rough time the last few decades, and it's had a particularly precipitous decline in the nineteen eighties and nineties. And, that's right around the time, when Toyota and other Japanese automakers were taking off. So what were these Japanese automakers do doing, that was, so successful? Why did GM fail to adapt? And what can we learn, from this case study, about what makes organizations flourish? So spoiler alert, TLDR, the basic difference between the two is Toyota's use of relational contracts versus GMs, for lack of a better term. They don't use their own term in the paper, so I'm just calling them regular old contracts. And these relational contracts were, quote, agreements based on subjective measures of performance that could be neither fully specified beforehand or verified after the fact, but were instead sustained by the value of future relationships. Whereas GM approached in place and suppliers is essentially commodities who could be controlled through carefully defined contracts and through market forces. And Toyota's approach allowed it to take advantage of the rich contextual knowledge possessed by workers and suppliers where GM essentially have to discard that knowledge. And so the authors in the paper look at three specific domains where GM and Toyota differed, automotive assembly, supply chain management, and product design and development. So automotive assembly on the assembly lines of these car companies, jobs are narrow tasks were very narrowly defined. But at GM, workers were expected to do those narrow tasks and only those narrow tasks, whereas at Toyota's, workers were trained and expected to take on a variety of tasks, including quality assessment of their own work and problem solving for issues that arose. And Toyota workers were even trusted with the ability to halt production, allowing major problems to be flagged early on. And given the expense of halting production, Toyota was motivated to help workers develop strong mental models of the work that they were doing and to develop good judgment over when intervention was appropriate. General Motors, on the other hand, seemed to believe that workers lacked the capacity to make such judgments, and so they centralized decision making in the hands of supervisors and high level engineers. And the the difference between GM and Toyota can be exemplified by their use of the engine cord, which is a cord that can be pulled by workers to halt production. As mentioned, Toyota invested deeply in workers so that they could use the engine cord appropriately. And as GM struggled and Toyota succeeded, GM started trying to copy what Toyota was doing. And so they copied in some cases, they copied the Ant in court into their factories, but supervisors would yell at workers when they pulled at it. And some plant managers just, like, flat out refused to believe that workers had the judgment or capacity to, correctly notice and fix problems and thought whenever they pulled the cord, that was just them trying to get out of work. Supply chain management was another area where they differed. General Motors offered suppliers short term contracts, and they made their purse purchasing decisions based on price and used spot markets to to derive down prices. And this approach meant that there was very little communication between GM and its suppliers. And because they had little communication or trust, they had to use really precisely specified contracts. And so even necessary design changes were strongly discouraged because they would have to update those contracts, and they would usually have to pay a big fee to the suppliers for for doing the updates. Meanwhile, Toyota developed relational contracts with its suppliers where they would specify a part's exterior dimensions and some key performance characteristics, but let suppliers design the rest of it and figure out how to implement it. And this required a lot of information flow between suppliers and Toyota, which let feedback about the whole process pass through and allowed improvements to grow. And because the contracts weren't precisely specified, it was easier to update designs. And there's a quote and this is about Honda and Ford instead of GM and Toyota, but it gets to the fact that this is, like, a pattern across American and Japanese automakers and not just the two companies in its case studies. So the quote is, Honda cares about making their part fit the car, while Ford cares about making the part fit the blueprint. And just a little note here, just because Toyota trusted its supplier suppliers didn't mean they were, like, lax or soft with them. They pushed the suppliers really hard to avoid any defects, to reduce costs, and they exited relationships where suppliers couldn't keep up. And they actually collected more data on their suppliers that GM did. They just trusted them to do certain things that that GM didn't. And I'm kind of running out of time, so I'm gonna skip this one because it's the least interesting of the three, but this pattern repeats itself for product design. So just a a couple questions that this raised for me. One is around so I do a lot of work with designing digital governance system. And when you're writing code, you often have to be pretty precise in how you specify something, and it's hard to create a sort of relationship focused, approach, but this paper suggests that being too specific can be really counterproductive. So is there a approach to governance in digital spaces that really embraces this relational contract model.
Sure. Yeah. We're at time. I wonder if maybe we could just kind of approach that that one question
with the remaining questions. We don't have enough time to really approach three questions. Alright. Sounds good. I will leave this up, though, I guess, or maybe I'll
That would be great. Yeah. Okay. So I wanna open the floor to anyone in the audience. I think Josh here has said super interesting question. Wonder if maybe you'd like to respond to that.
Well, I definitely don't have a solution or an answer to it. But, yeah, like, I do feel, like, oftentimes, we're you know, there's a there's a tendency in the space to over specify the solution, right, or to focus on solutions that are like, that can be specified without thinking through, like, is this the solution to the actual problem that people are facing? In terms of, like, whether there's an approach that approaches those relational contract, like, generally speaking, I would sort of, like, think interoperability. You specify the interfaces, and that's, like, a way in which, like, technical objects can relate to each other. Of course, like, Sean knows this very well. The question is, I think there are, like I I guess I'm not quite sure how to extend the analogy from the Toyota GM example to how we think about, like, this, like, kinda interoperable approach. It's kind of like Citadel Bazaar kind of thing, but not quite because those are sort of, like, mechanisms for producing products that doesn't I mean, it is actually is a little bit similar to Citadel Bazaar kind of, like, ways of understanding open source development. And I wonder if, like, that's something that you thought about, Shauna.
Yeah. I mean, I don't I don't particularly have strong feelings about the citadel bazaar metaphor. Like, there are a lot of metaphors, and I don't, like, I don't have strong feelings about that particular one. I think I think, you know, there's a metaphor here with interfaces where you can say, like, the interface that Toyota had with its suppliers versus the interface where GM had with its suppliers where GM had, like, a very precisely supply precise interface whereas Toyota had a sort of looser one. So Toyota was like, here are our high level goals. Here are the, like, the the external dimensions because this has to fit into the car in a certain way. But even there, like, there was a back and forth where if a supplier said, you know, there's a problem. We need to change the dimensions. Can you change the dimensions of your car? That wasn't completely off the table because they were flexible in their designs. And, like, one of the problems with designing interfaces in digital spaces is that you really want them to be stable. Like, when you create an API, you want it to be stable so that when people depend on it, like, you don't cause breakages, and, like, the whole point of an API is to be reliable. So is there a way that you can build flexibility and change into an API while maintaining those core characteristics, stability, and reliability? Yeah. I don't know. But it's also possible that, like, the API is not the right level to think about this abstraction. But who knows? Like, there probably isn't one right level to think about to think about.
There is a kind of, like, a this is something that, like, I studied such work on, like, a while back when we were doing, like, more, like, database modeling. Because, like, databases change all the time as well. Right? I mean, it I mean, an API model is, like, very similar to, like, a data model for a database. Right? I mean okay. Not super similar, but, like, they're they're trying to do similar things. And this sort of issue here was that, like, the database models would, like, change quite often. And this is, like, profoundly, like, expensive and painful for giant companies that, like, operate, like, hundreds of these kinds of databases. Right? So there's a solution called, like, categorical databases, which was originally actually mostly a mathematical research project that got spun out into, like, a small company. Let me find it. Categoricaldata.net.
I think there were I think there were about
ad hoc I'll just I'll just put
that into the chat. Yeah.
Yeah. So we're coming up on thirty seconds, and this is really nice. There's a nice little bit of conversation happening in the chat. Feel free to just carry it on asynchronously.
Chatting in the chat.
Be like a real multitasking kind of moment for us all. Okay. Wonderful. So thanks so much, Shauna, and also Josh, for your, presentation and your contributions to the conversation. We're gonna pass over to Jack Corbat at the moment or sorry, now, whose title for their presentation is institutions, deliberative quality, and decision outcomes, an empirical framework for assessing governance quality in DAOs. And I'll also share the article that that spurred this.
Awesome. I'm just gonna get started sharing my screen. So, I streamlined the title a little bit. So, basically, my presentation is a little bit of a combination between a article presentation and also a project presentation. And I'm a PhD student in political science, and I'm interested in deliberative democratic theory, and especially new measures of deliberative quality that are being developed that are more automated than kind of the status quo. And I think that kind of the online governance space might provide, you know, interesting data, basically, and interesting new governance structures for the study of political science. So kind of motivating why deliberative democratic theory would be interesting for the study of online governance. And, you know, these these are all quotes from the article. And after this, it's kind of moving more into my ideas for what a, a project could look like in this, a research project. But some observations from the from the article. Pure procedural voting is often insufficient to achieve collective decisions that best reflect the fundamental interest interest of participants. I think that this might be to for some DAOs kind of an assumption that underlies the voting process or, you know, kind of the the ethos of a DAO is that if we allow people the ability to vote, decisions will be better. But I think that we have plenty of, examples from classic political institutions that show this isn't always the case. A recent topical example would have been prop 22, which basically, you know, allowed Uber and other, gig economy companies to pull a fast one over the public by offering lesser benefits to, I think, pass, you know, a referendum that otherwise probably wouldn't have passed. Also, another observation from article has become essential to discover when, where, and how online conversations might lead to better decisions, more informed participants and increased mutual understanding. You know, I think a lot of times when I talk to people about online governance, they're the first place that they go is Trump on Twitter or, you know, flame wars that they've seen on different social media platforms. So how to, kind of increase the quality of online discussions, I think, is an important question. And then finally, this is kind of a final quote that kind of, for me, hearken back to a presentation by the Yacht Collective, I think, a couple weeks back, that basically, oftentimes, so, you know, sociopathic members might gain undue influence in decentralized political organizations. And ideally, good deliberation would help the, you know, the arguments that gain credence, you know, be higher quality arguments rather than based off of the the speaker. So, for kind of a a maybe, analytical framework for thinking about this, we can look at maybe a a three step process, the input. So for me, I'm thinking about institutional inputs, DAOs that use Aragon vote versus DAOs that use holographic consensus versus DAOs that use sortition might create different incentives for individuals to communicate one in with one another to influence their opinions on votes being taken. From there that and and that brings us into the deliberative process, the action of participants in their the contents of their communication. To it seems to me, from what I can see, that a lot of this is kind of disorganized or maybe lacks to some degree of some structure. But we can have, you know, interesting measures of deliberation on these platforms, equality participation, agenda setting power, and arguments of equality. And many of these measures are actually quite high quality and have demonstrated validity. And then finally, we can look at output, opinion changes, decisions, and votes, but, ultimately, I think more important outputs like, DAO survival and and token price. So kind of looking quickly at what an empirical approach might look like, and I'm kind of looking for close analogs to something like this, which might kind of make for a convincing causal inference paper on the role of, you know, kind of governance institutions and how they affect deliberative quality of finally outcomes.
Just to let you know,
we're at
a couple of minutes. So Cool. If you can wrap, please.
Yeah. I'll I'll wrap up. So, yeah, basically, we'd wanna see a DAO service provider releasing a new governance module. A lot of DAOs taking votes, creating an opportunity for regression discontinuity, then measuring differences in deliberative quality, and then finally, you know, do are we also seeing that changes in institutions allow DAOs to survive for longer or higher token prices? So, yeah, that's that's kind of, you know, where where my head's at in terms of, of potential empirical projects, and, I'll open it up for for to the to the group.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Chuck. I mean, I mean, I also see here that you're interested in seeking collaborators. I'm curious if you wanna get give a prompt or if anyone has any questions or both about, like, the presentation or how to kind of get involved as a collaborator with this.
Yeah. I mean, I think that what I'm kind of looking for at this stage is, examples of, like, effective DAOs that have, you know, good what what seems to be functional governing systems and, like, really high quality so that I can I can take a look at kind of what it seems like they're doing right and also just understand the space better at this point?
Great. Anyone from the floor have any thoughts, comments, questions?
Maybe I'll just briefly sort of chip in that. I was recently just having a conversation with What's going on? Justine, who's head of strategy at Rabbit Hole, which does a lot of, like, onboarding into DAOs and web three. One of the things that any actually working DAOs I mean, there are lots of actual working DAOs. But the one thing that I thought was kind of interesting there is just, you releasing a new governance module. This is, like, people building DAOs or people, like, building in these ecosystems actually really want to know what they should be building. And they don't like, many of them don't have necessarily, like, a good pipeline or suggestions of, like, this is what I should be building next. Like, this voting thing or this other thing or this, like, subgroup thing. You know, where should I be focusing my attention or my engineering resources on, like, building stuff? So, you know, if there are, like if you have an interesting enough proposal, you can literally just post it, and, you know, you might see it just like, hey. Like, we'll build this.
Yeah. That would that would be fantastic. I think I do have have some ideas, and it would be interesting to be able to kind of, yeah, create the the institutional variation that that might be the most interesting for me. So thanks for that suggestion.
Any other thoughts? Maybe, kind of reflections on experiences, in DAOs that might relate to this? I see that we have this this comment here by Nathan, the the zillion ETH question. Are any DAOs actually working that I could study?
Alright. No nobody's winning in the Zillennese today, I guess.
Do you have anything to maybe leave us with, Jack? We have another two minutes. Maybe any anywhere people can find you on the Slack, or just anything else you might wanna add?
Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, maybe, I'm I'm thinking of a recent Andy Hall paper that I'll that I'll write, that I'll that I'll post into the chat. But I think that probably part of the reason why there seems to be a few examples of working DAO is that that DAO is that there's overreliance on decentralized governance, and there's maybe a need to kind of move towards more simplified decision making procedures and also just thinking about how do we kind of manage the basic you know, requiring everybody to vote on every single initiative is too much, and we need to simplify that process. And so for me, like, a committee system would be a great way of thinking about kind of making a step in that direction. But I wonder if it's because it's, like, basically, the decentralized, DAOs are are are just too decentralized to actually be be functional, especially when there isn't, like, social cohesion that might come from, you know, in person, interaction.
Yeah. That's great. And I think there's also a little bit to respond here in the chat. We have Thomas Cock who's just talked about how in, like, their experience, not many DAOs or, like, founders of DAOs are, like, really interested in discussing governance design. So there's a question for Josh, but this may It might just be me. Maybe you just don't wanna talk to me about it. I mean, that's certainly
possible. Right?
That is possible. I do I do need to move on to the next person, but let's please carry that conversation in the the chat async. Okay. So next up is Danilo Vaz, who is gonna be presenting on bio governance and asking the question, how can human technology, both modern and ancient, provide interfaces for governance interactions between humans and more of the human worlds? So go ahead and take it away, Danilo.
Thanks, Sant. Let me share my screen. Mhmm. Alright. So hello, everyone. Yeah. I'm Danilo, and I'll go straight to the point due to time. And and here, what what what I'm trying to present is is a personal inquiry that is now taking larger contours around, yeah, possible ways through which web three technologies can enhance our abilities to make decisions and considering other living beings inputs, especially in decisions that have a lot to do with shared spaces or territories in general. So that's how Biogov came to being. And here we have a couple of guiding questions, which, shows the direction of where we're trying to go. And the most important one, is the first one, which is how can we consciously develop symbiotic interfaces with the modern human, beings and, sent a prompt? How can our technology provide translational interfaces for interspecific interactions and deliberations as well in in this case. And this is a document I can share where with myself and some other folks who are also working on this, We have been putting some ideas in order to contextualize this endeavor. But what I want to show here is something that actually emerged in a previous session with sent himself where we sort of thought of a possible structure for how how to go about this in terms of a research inquiry, and more specifically, a qualitative research inquiry. And, of course, when I talk about this, it sounds fantastic and perhaps delusional. But the fact is that what I'm trying to propose here is just the beginning or a reference point to something that I can't describe what it could be yet. But the the seed is for decision or or, yep, governance protocols that incorporate everyone, all of those who would be impacted by any of those decisions taken by that protocol. And when we consider that are being associated with specific areas and territories, then that becomes quite relevant. So how to go about this in terms of steps? And and and now I'm I'm talking about the sort of, like, project structure for this inquiry. So we understood that a great way to approach this would be through the, thanks, would be through the development of a story that would narrate steps towards a future in which what I'm describing would be happening. And in fact, that story has already, begun to be written by myself. But then we we thought that a continuation to that story would be a a great approach. And in sequence to that, the development of a game, which would invite people to have those kinds of deliberative experiences with nonhumans and then feed that back into the very gate to the same game slash story. And our hope with that, these two structures, story slash game, would provide enough feedback or enough insight for our for us to speculate about a a a possible DAO dynamic slash protocol that would breach the the the experiences of the of the players into a into a, yeah, decision making dynamic or mechanism. So that's where we got when we spoke a couple of weeks ago. And where we are right now is that we have these ideas. They need to be polished towards more refined research questions that could then be investigated ideally by folks from Atagov. Another important aspect of this is that this entire inquiry has already been subscribed not subscribed. We we have applied with it to an art residency taking happening here in Brazil where I am based. And chances are that we will be going there and then working on this a bit more early in July. So next time I present this or we talk about this, this will definitely be at a better shape. But as of now, I just want to say it out loud to see who finds this interesting enough, in order to come and chat because, yes, we're really seeking for collaborators.
Yes. Thank you so much, Danilo. And I'll just also direct people that there's a a really nice long thread discussing this proposal in the starter project channel and the slack. So I encourage you to go and also visit that and kind of get up to speed on all the references that have been shared around this. I guess, I'll open it up to the floor and see if there's anyone who has any kind of insight or interest in or feedback on, this project that Danilo has, shared. And they also just recently put a they just put a link to the the the outline of their project in the chat as well.
No, Joshua.
Do you wanna give us a quick DSI, Josh?
Sure. Let me so Dizzy stands for Diverse Intelligence of Summer Institute. It's a collection of academics, but also artists and storytellers who come together to over kind of every summer to explore what I would think of as, like, a combination of artificial, bio kind of biological intelligence. So, like, animals and insects, as well as human intelligence or even collective intelligence. Right? There are it's actually based in UCLA. So I think Jacques Hume Jacques might know one of the the person who kinda runs it, guy named Jacob Foster.
Yeah. I'm familiar with him.
Yeah. Yeah. So but I I pointed this out because, especially, like, they they there's a they have, like, a fellowship program for artists, as well, and it's, like, quite appropriate for, I think, the subject of this proposal.
Absolutely. Yeah. And that reminds me of what sent shared last time we spoke, which is a working group on indigenous people's AI code, so how to bridge these two universes, so indigenous people's knowledge and and artificial intelligence. And and that's definitely sort of the intersection that that that we are aiming towards. So so thanks. We'll look at it.
We have about ten minutes. Please. I I was gonna say, Danilo, I'm not yeah. I'm I'm in the d size space as well. So, yeah, maybe we can find some other time to talk about about these overlapping interests. It's pretty much it.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I'll I'll find you on the on the Slack.
In response to the sort of post for the Maker research, there's also some practical work being done by members of the Maker team to do move towards a sort of decentralized science approach to analyzing some of the parameters in Maker. So I'm just gonna drop a link here. One of the Maker team members has I think that's the second or third post in a series about some of the the modeling that they're doing and how it can, inform the, governance decisions in that ecosystem.
Thanks, man.
We have another minute. Does anyone else have any other comments, thoughts? Great. Well, then we'll oh, b has lots of thoughts. Well, b, if you post your your computer thoughts either here in Zoom or on Slack, and, tag Danilo. It'd be really great to share that conversation on either here or in the in the community chat.
And Thanks, everyone.
Yeah. And everyone, feel free to message Danilo or ping him in the start a project channel. It'd be really nice to see some more collaboration around this idea. Okay. So we get to save about twenty seconds and we get to move on to our next presenter which is Isaac Mutami, who's gonna be presenting on the title modeling political change in developing countries. Go ahead and take it away, Isaac.
Hi. Am I able to share my screen?
Yes. You should be. But let me know if you have any problems.
Let me see that.
It's coming. Yes. I can see that.
Alright. So, hi, everyone. My name is Isaac. I'm joining you from Kenya. A little bit of introduction. I noticed that probably 90 or 99% of the members in this group and the larger group are I think I'll I'll classify them as academicians interested in applications. Right? I am a practitioner interested in the academy, so I'm coming from the other way around. So I'm seeing problems on the ground, and I need solutions for this and trying to figure out where do you go from here. So one second. This thing is hovering on my screen, so I can good. Right. So I think so this is the title. Question is, how do you harness technology to better capture the political discussions that happen, within a very vibrant political ecosystem like Kenya? Now there are three problems. So one, the first one is so complex and so common that we have an a name for it in our own language in Kisahili, which is different, which basically means that things on the ground are different. I'll explain what that means. Then two is we're we're caught in between and beyond. We're caught between, and we need to go beyond both legacy and social media. I'll explain that. And then the third one is the need to overcome the organizing inertia in politics. So why are things on the ground different? And there are two meanings to things on the ground being different. The first meaning is that, in order for you to really understand what's happening, on the ground, you need to have the lived experience. And then second one is that the tools that we currently have available to us to capture these discussions for discourse for online discourse do not capture and report the reality on our ground. So and why do you need to have so so why is it necessary for you to have lived experience for you to understand why what we discuss online and in the in the legacy media is different from what actually happens in the ground? So all these are related issues. You I'm I'm sure you're aware of developing countries' history with colonialism and then intersecting with democracy. So the consequences of that is there's a lot of history that is unexplained or inexplicable right now. So and the consequence of that is that there's a lot people act out when they cannot explain what's happening and the and the and the conflicts that happen, for example, between different ethnic groups that are poorly recorded history. So then you end up having a lot of, ethnic conflicts in politics, which I also characterize as interrupted complexity because, there is no way to fully expound and explain on the difficult conversations and and and and construct between communities. The third one is very interesting. I call this we quote between the excellence of empire and the limitations of democracy. And I'll start with a quote. So this is from I couldn't put her name here too late, but this is a a quote from the book, political tribes by professor, of law at Yale, Amy Chuar. So this is a very, very succinct quote I've got in in the book. So I'll just read it out in full, and then, hopefully, the minute comes out very quickly. So Great Britain's acute group consciousness during its imperial heyday contrast jarringly with America's group blindness today. The British were minutely knowledgeable about, almost obsessed with the ethnic, religious, tribal, and caste differences among the subject populations. They studied and cataloged, harnessed, and manipulated, often deliberately pitting groups against each other. They also left behind time bonds that are still exploding today. Underline the last part. Final part part of the quote, from a cold blooded strategic point of view, Britain's divide and rule policies were astonishingly successful. In India, some 40,000 British officers and soldiers governed approximately 200,000,000 Indians for nearly two hundred years. By contrast, America couldn't hold Vietnam for ten years, couldn't stabilize Afghanistan for five, and couldn't unify Iraq for even one. And all that the import of all that is to say that, as one of the many developing countries, we are caught between our institutions are British, but our aspirations are American, which means that the institutions we have, you know, still deeply, deeply based on, you know, colonial extraction, but we aspire to be a democracy. So then, you end up having all these complex realities that are very difficult to capture unless you live with us.
Yeah. This is great, Isaac. We're at time. I wonder if you might wanna, like, open the discussion with the kind of I think you had mentioned that you're seeking collaborators. If if there's, like, a kind of prompt that you would like to kind of open up for discussion, that'd be really nice.
Yes. So at this point, I think you can open it up. How do I exit the screen? So my my interest in this is as as as that said, I'm a a practitioner who's interested in academia. I'm very interested in the possibilities that computational tools have. I'm particularly interested in MetaGov's stated interest in computational possibilities for governance. I'm very interested in exploring and and finding more people who are exploring these issues, figuring out how do we use computational tools to address and capture these complexities that are very poorly captured by existing technologies and which translates then to very hedged discourse. So yeah. So open it up.
I would say that it's extremely difficult to create collaborative environments for such complex concepts. I've been working for a while on trying to make the sort of domain of modeling something that can be approached with, open source way of thinking and tools like software. But, yeah, I just if you wanna reach out to me, you're you're welcome to. I've got a bunch of projects with a bunch of people. But my my first point is I don't know that I have an immediate solution for you because the very essence of taking something like modeling complex phenomena and inviting it into an open source workflow is extremely is extremely challenging because you need some degree of standardization in the in the workflows in order to open it up to more people to work together, especially if they have differing opinions, actually.
Awesome. Thank you.
Josh, can I give you the floor?
Just, like, one quick thing that I think it's quite interesting is that, you know, generally, we think of, like, these computational groups as, you know, like, voluntarily assembled. Right? Like, people kind of, like, go in. Like, you click a button and you join the Facebook group. You click a button, you join the DAO. Or you pay money, you join the DAO. Whereas, you know, in a lot of these cases, when we go into, like, you know, in the subject of colonial history, like, these groups are preassembled. Right? They reflect realities on the ground, you know, ethic attachments, cultural kind of questions. And we don't usually think of it it it's clear there's a kind of, like, a something's off when we think about, like, how we are at least how my intuition intuitions work for online groups versus how these kinds of, like, you know, social, ethnic groups, are formed and how they sort of, like, appear to people. It would be interesting to have to some sense, like, try to understand the differences between, like, these, you know, groups by affiliation versus groups which are defined by some property, which is not, you know, voluntary, and these groups which are much more voluntary. And I would point out, like, one way maybe, like, sort of studying this is to just just point out that there are groups online that also are defined by specific kinds of properties that are not assembled through voluntary processes who do not obviously have, like, yeah, subpopulations, essentially. And it'd be interesting to, you know, try to understand, like, in a way that I I I haven't really explored this or thought about this much, but, like, how these different subpopulations, if you gave them sort of, like, governance kinds of rights, because you you could do that. Right? You know, especially if these properties with these subpopulations are defined by computable properties, whether there's a way of, like, organizing that, through some sort of experimentation. I would just say most of the experiments are definitely on more of the voluntary ones, at least the ones that we talked about in MediGo
today. Awesome. I I don't
know if you wanna respond to that, Isaac, or I there's also a comment here from Bee if you'd like me to read that out.
Yeah. Go fast or do go fast.
Did you wanna respond to that question or that comment?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's very fascinating. Doing the difference between online communities and, you know, do I say real life real life communities? Like, what good phrase do you I mean, online is still real life. So yeah, but that that difference between the, you know, the presence of choice is a very important one, very significant one. Adults be very, very interested in what's exploring that in in that direction. But, yeah, I I think the the there's definitely a lot of room to explore that because especially in the developed country context, there is very little exploration that is done. There's a lot of assumption that the complexities we observe are not malleable, that they are fixed rather than thinking, hey. What can we actually do with what we have? So thanks.
Yeah. There's also a comment in the chat here from Bee. I don't have the time to read it up, but I encourage you to follow-up in in the chat with Bee, around around these discussions. And there's also, a question here from Shauna. We're gonna move on to our final. Thank you, Isaac. And we're gonna follow on to our next presenter, Seth Frey, who is gonna be presenting a topic called Kakiti Rao, the world's greatest laboratory for governance experimentation.
Hey, everybody. This change of pace. This is just like a kind of a wild idea, get us, like, thinking big sort of presentation that I like to give because I was trying to think what would it take me to quit, this amazing job of academia and be in the world, and this is what I came up with. So let's just skip to the end. What would it take to evolve a utopian government system? Kinda custom, like, for a specific need. They're a perfect world. I think you'd need maybe, like, a couple 100 people and dozens of small groups. You'd need pretty medium stakes, so it should really be in person, probably not online. You'd really wanna iterate quickly and in parallel. All these groups are experimenting at the same time and constantly feeding back. You need to really have an intention that everybody's in on on being a elaborate in their own self run experiment. You need a lot of independent experiments that are still circling back, and you need cheap mistakes, people building solutions for themselves. Now does that exist? Actually, that kind of exists. It's called it's like Rio and it's the world's greatest laboratory for governance experimentation. We're looking at Northern Japan, the islands of Hokkaido, you zoom into support, you zoom into Hokkaido university. We find that it's sort of a dormitory. It's a 430 person student cooperative at Hokkaido University. It's one of the largest and one of the last, Jushiryo, which is an autonomous self governing dormitory, traditional student housing. The hub of protests and radicalism, they're kind of endangered. They've actually never heard of co ops. They've heard of each other. So we can start with the architecture of the building. It's got these sort of six lobes. I can kind of skip to, their, their, their, their, they have letters. It's Roman. Five stories. The, the they're separated by gender, but the whole building is co ed. There's two blocks per floor inside the outside. There's sort of an airlock connecting each state atrium. So it has the structure and every single one of those has like kitchens and bathrooms. So they're really kind of self contained in a way. Nevertheless people, you know, share, there's about 40 of these units, six to 15 residents per block. Everyone has a theme, but they all manage their own food, chores and finances. Here's what it looks like whenever it meets an atrium about once a week for once a month for a meeting or a meal. But most life happens, you know, in your own kind of block. This is the entrance, there's a lot of bikes. This is where you put your shoes because that's in the culture, you take your shoes off before going outside, you walk by the office. And so this is where rent gets paid, snacks get bought. People watch sports together. But this is like the where the leadership hangs out. It's all filthy. This is that atrium you saw when it's empty. It has a big there's one block whose theme is to write poetry. And so they write a poem that like rallies everybody. There's graffiti everywhere. There's a mini convenience.
You can see
Cheerleader, you dress like a bum, from the country, who's really psyched to go to a game and and that's, they're called Owen Dunn. So there's there's sort of the thieves are everything from, like, traditional stuff to to video games. My the people who took me in, I lived there for two months over two summers. They were the video game floor. You can see we've got, advertisements of floors, advertising to each other. They sell meals, in order to raise money. So they have an internal kind of mark emergent market economy. You can see the meticulously maintaining seven types of trash while also like having a huge filthiness. This is an actual chore wheel. For a shared group shower, that, that all floors in one wing kind of rotate through on their cleaning. This is meeting minutes. Here is rent paid or food contributed to. This is the upcoming meal for the floor. This is, like, the main living room for mine. You can see they knocked out a wall with a hammer. So the and then there's wires hanging everywhere. So it's kind of, like, informally reconfigurable. People building ownership of their unit and making it how they need it to run. A clean kitchen, filthy kitchen, clean room, filthy room, and this is a very interesting public good provided by the community. What you see here is a recliner TV, a wall pornography roll of toilet paper is called the masturbation room. It was provided by my unit as a public service to everybody. When you arrive if the door is closed, This is the only room that had a door on my unit. They had to take in all the doors off of all rooms and all bathroom stalls except this one room. If the door is closed when you arrive, you waited in line. So there would often be a line outside of my room of people waiting to use the masturbation room. And this, of course, is maintaining the public good. That is a trash bag full of, used tissue. Interaction. So every six months, oh, your menus, this is, the, these are advertisements for meals sold by floors, to advertise their meals as there is money. But what's really interesting is every six months, the 50 or 40 most senior members name a theme and then all 430 people reassembled self sort into 30 new themes all the time. So it's really, like, staying dynamic and reconfiguring constantly. So now just imagine if they were doing it, not, you know, for for governance instead of, like, themes. Let's see. What if they were configuring that by hobby, but by governance? That would you'd need a place big enough to have, like, unit dozens of units. You'd need a place with lots of kitchens. You need people who wanna be, lab rats. You'd need all of these things, and because Katechie has them, it is, the world's greatest laboratory for governance experimentation.
Wow. Incredible presentation. That's great. Let's open it up for discussion. There's a couple of seemingly facetious questions in the chat. I don't know if anyone wants to pick up on that. Val or Lucia, do you wanna contribute?
Sure. My question was in there. Can women go in the masturbation room?
My floor this was a very important question. I happened to be in Japan with other people who lived in cooperatives in The States who were women who had the same question. They infiltrated a one of the women's floors. And very, like, rudely and bossly ly by the standards of the culture, very, like, inquisitively and curiously and with a lot of passion, asked their, tour guide of the room for every single room, what's in that room? What's in that room? What's in that room? What's in that room? Until I finally got to one room that, their tour guide was very, like, avoidant about, and they super rudely, kept sort of asking until they got a sense that it contains a bed, and some other, like, stuff, but no one lives in it. But peep but everyone in the floor uses it. That's as far as they got. So we think, yes, the the women, on the women's floor has probably maintained their own masturbations. Great question.
This seems to be a similar kind of line of question from Lucia. I don't know if you wanna speak to that. And I'm curious also maybe hear Seth kind of elaborate on, like, the governance dimensions of the kind of coed quality of this this layout.
Right. Right. Right. There is a lot of, like it's almost taboo to, like, publicly be in a relationship. Like, in that culture, I don't totally understand it. But, basically, when I asked, like, how much interaction and what kind of interactions are there between the sexes, like, it was very, like, people are very muted. Like, hey. We're all friends. But every single time I got someone one on one, they said, oh, yeah. I'm secretly And all of our interactions together are at like, pay by the hour, low hotels. So like, there's like a kind of underground, a sexual economy. That's pretty quiet and that's certainly not actively governed. They're kind of more emergent. Did I answer the question?
I
mean, it gives us a sense of the vibe at least.
Yeah. I mean, it kind of,
I
don't know. It kinda makes you wonder, like it's it's just interesting that there's, like, this kind of, like there are these implied elements that, like, are kind of subterranean to the kind of dynamic qualities. I wonder if there's, like, a correlation there or if it's just kind of like a cultural byproduct. Like, is it partly possible to have, like, a kind of governance laboratory in part because of, like, the way that the culture kind of, like, segments these aspects of their life?
Yeah. I I think not right. I mean, I like, if I just had the building, you know, in in a different country, you know, something would happen. People would, like, at least the qualities of of being open to experimenting and and that kind of dynamism, but in every other way from a totally different culture with their own needs, their own livelihoods. I like to think. I certainly hope. I sit in and out, and I obviously have not planned any of this, that you would still get, like, great local utopias, great local active experimentation towards a society that works for everybody, that everybody can maintain.
Yeah. Great. We have another I know we're slightly over, but there's another minute allocated for Seth if anyone has any closing comments or reflections.
Thanks, all.
I I have something on my mind. I I wonder based on your experience, would you say that something like that what what do you what do you just said? It was kinda, like, works for everybody. Could something like that be built that is more aesthetically appealing or or or cleaner.
Certainly. Remember. Yeah. Yeah. These are students who have never lived on their own, who've had, like, all their needs met for their whole lives. Right? So you get an older group, and then you get a different dynamic, different set. And, again, I showed you the filthy because those are the bits that are public, and those are the people most likely to take me in. But there's also, like, very tidy floors and and their units that were themed around, like, you know, respect. Yeah. Alright. Thanks, everybody.
That's great. Yeah. Thank you, Seth. Thank you, Danilo. Thank you, Shauna. Thank you, Jack, and thank you, Isaac. A lot of really rich presentations. We could have gone on much longer talking. And I have a sheet in the chat. If anyone who is here, who's part of Medigov wants to do something like this in the future, you can sign up. The next session is gonna be July 6. And we might tweak it to maybe have four people so we have a little more time for presentation. And then I can stay on for another three minutes if anyone wants, like, has any feedback on how the session went. But before we do that, before I stop recording, let's go ahead and, unmute and, give a round of applause to all of our presenters today.
And dissent.
Yes. So I'm gonna stop recording.