Shorttalks Metagov 2023018
Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. Welcome everybody to today's MediGov short talk. Today we're going to have two presentations from participants of the MediGov community. They're going to be discussing either a project, a governance question, and a topic or article. This is the general format for the talks, for the short talks. Presentations will be seven minutes followed by eighteen minutes of...
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Transcript
Okay. Okay. Welcome everybody to today's MediGov short talk. Today we're going to have two presentations from participants of the MediGov community. They're going to be discussing either a project, a governance question, and a topic or article. This is the general format for the talks, for the short talks. Presentations will be seven minutes followed by eighteen minutes of discussion. People are welcome to post comments, or questions to the chat, while people are presenting. And then during the chat, during the discussion, it's okay to raise your hand and or just say I wanna speak, and I'll moderate the the stack. There'll be a sound notification at two minutes, which will sound like this. And then there will be a sound notification at one minute, which will sound like that. You'll get that for both the presentation and the discussion section so that we have a good sense for what we need to wrap up. The recordings are gonna be uploaded and put on the Internet archive with the whole archive of Medigoff seminar talks. And we'll also also kind of remind people that the participation for this is open to anyone who's a participant in the community. It's open sign up. And participants are also welcome to host these sessions, and I'll share some links about all those things in the chat. So for today, we have, two presenters. We have Blaine Hanson, who's gonna be presenting on persistent democracy. Blaine will go first. And then we'll also have Val Alafonte who's a research assistant with Medigov who will be presenting on Restate's Future of Governance Toolkit. I'll go ahead and pass over to Blaine who it appears ah, I just lost you in the video. But okay. I'll pass over to you, and then I'll start the timer. Okay. You're muted.
Thank you. Should I share my screen?
Yeah. Please. K. Alright. I'll wait until you get
K. There we go. Alright, folks.
Well, thank
you for having me. Okay. So, yeah, I'm talking about persistent democracy. And the basic pitch of persistent democracy is that it's a a a system continuous, or it's undergirded by a system of continuous voting that I kinda theorize at this point will be, you know, maximally responsive and flexible, etcetera. So, yeah, I'm just gonna try to cast out threads and see what people are interested in. We'll talk about it more after. And persistentdemocracy.org and then a YouTube video I have called Democracy Doesn't Have to Suck on YouTube has more, and if you're curious. So talking about the mechanics, why I think this would be a good idea, and then the specific projects I'm working on to make it happen. So the core idea is this idea of persistent voting. So if anyone's familiar with quadratic voting right? Quadratic voting is what I'm calling it a resource voting system where you have, you know, credits or or something like that that you spend in elections. Right? So that kind of means that you have to actually choose very carefully what it is you really care about. Persistent voting is the same basic idea, except for instead of it being credits that you spend and that are lost, you have these weights that you can move around that are persistent. Right? You can move around onto different things. You can move them at any time, and candidates can enter and exit elections at any time. So at first, that probably seems like it would just be madness. So the thing is if you have some some particular corrections to make this work, I think it actually works really well. And, specifically, you wanna prevent it from being tiring, unstable, noisy, or impractical. I have these four kinda corrections or things to talk about. The first is, you know, someone might ask, will I have the impulse to vote every five minutes? Right? Is that what it's gonna end up happening? And if you do this naively where people just the second someone changes their votes, they're recalculated and the results of elections change, that probably would happen. There'd be an incentive for everyone to vote as often as possible. But if we instead say there's some sample rate where every Monday at 1AM or somewhat in any arbitrary sample rate, that's when kinda everything is sampled. Right? And that's when all the recalculations happen, then you don't have the incentive to do that. At most, you would you would have the incentive to vote once per time period. The second thing is, are we thinking, oh, well, could the mayor change, you know, once every four you know, or or once every or every week, right, even if you have the the periodic update schedule? And that wouldn't be great. So instead, we can have this idea of stabilization buckets, which is a form of hysteresis. Right? So say you have some particular winner, you know, this orange column, and they're overtaken by some other person. Right? So the the lead the some other person gains the lead. That other person doesn't actually become the winner until they fill up this bucket that I'm talking about, and this bucket fills up according to how large the lead is. Right? So if it's a small lead, it will take a long time for this new winner to become the new winner. If it's a large lead, it will take a shorter time. So this kind of in in in incentivizes, you know, confidence from the electorate. And these buckets get more can get bigger depending on the circumstance of the election. Most most certainly, if it affects more people, but those could have the other things that I haven't worked out. The other is, you know, will people will will bad actors spam the elections with millions of nonsense candidates? And you can use the same basic idea of this nomination bucket concept. You can use buckets again, but for nomination, right, for someone to become a real candidate, they have to build up a nomination bucket. Logistics is probably where some of the trickiest things are. I think for us as experimental people think about experimental governance in online spaces, this matters less. But, you know, here's my stab at how it work for governments. I think he'd well, anyway, you know what? I actually may have a gloss over this. If you wanna talk to me about this later, I'd be happy to talk about it. For non government things like cooperatives, online spaces, we can just use the Internet, and we can figure out identity c identity privacy stuff. I'm gonna gloss over this. The persistent voting is for decisions that can be made that are kinda fully reversible or at least mostly reversible. Occasionally, we have situations where we need to make a commitment. We're gonna spend money or do something that can't be reversed. And I'm more or less just the idea of conviction voting that someone came up with is perfect, and it can kinda be reworked into this system. We can talk about that if you're if you're interested. The basic reason I think this is a good idea is that it circumvents deadline problems. And deadline problems to me are kind of the thing that produces a lot of the pathologies of strategic voting. So, you know, here are some examples, right, where a lot of elections, we kinda it's it's a false it's a false kind of idea we have when you really stop and think about it, that elections have to be irreversible and everyone has to live with, you know, some particular outcome even if the the margin was really tiny or was really narrow. So these deadline problems, I don't know, they kinda metastasize thoughts of it waste. And the reason I think these deadline problems are avoided is that the election and the polling process, right, the the information discovery process are the same thing. We no longer have to have the horse race kinda guessing what everyone's gonna do before the election. The election itself is the thing that allows everyone to safely and slowly reveal their preferences. And, of course, all of the benefits of a resource voting system in general, you get. You know? Someone choosing to spend or or or allocate a finite number of weights on something means they truly care about that thing to the exclusion of other things. And in practice, that means you have a system where people can delegate. Right? They have delegation by abstention is what I call it. Choosing not to vote in one thing means that you're allowing other people to make the decision there. To me, the really exciting thing I had to hurray, man. Where this gets really exciting is that it seems much more plausible to use persistent voting to elect constitutions, you know, documents, tax codes, etcetera, where you can then have you can have a constitution that is arbitrarily, you know, flexible and that you can have kinda create a tree of subconstitutions or even potentially vote on things like borders. Yeah. Okay. We're we're hurrying. So this is what persistent democracy is.
Yeah.
I'm skipping over this. Dang it. So, specifically, what I've been working on to make this happen is, you know, just software to implement persist democracy and practice. Right? So I think I'm looking at a policy kit plug in. Here's the GitHub repo that, unfortunately, I'm not, you know, as far as I wish I was. I wish I could work on this full time. And then, specifically, the thing I'm most excited to apply this in is a way to basically make cooperatives that govern open source projects, and perhaps using this idea of sponsor where that we can touch on more if people want to, where people, in exchange for financial contributions, they have voting weights in the open source project. And that's it.
Yes. Speaking of, like, the the tyranny of deadlines, having to put a presentation into seven minutes.
Speak of the devil. Yeah. Yes.
Okay. Amazing. And we already have one question coming in from Henrik. Henrik, do you wanna give voice to it, or would you prefer if I read it?
Sure. No. Yeah. It was just I mean, how I I I I actually kinda like the conviction voting where you have this time dimension of actually being able to sort of insist that you are actually confirming and also the quadratic, which makes you sort of think carefully on how you actually deploy your boat.
Mhmm.
So so I've been sort of in that space for a while. So where is this? Is this better for the big big things where where you really have to be more careful, or or how how is it better? I'm struggling.
My thinking my thinking on this is well, this has to do with with the concept of reversal costs. Right? So for example, if we choose to allocate a billion dollars to make a factory, after we've spent half a million dollar or half a billion dollars of it, we've lost a lot of the opportunity to make a different decision. Right? So something like that where we have to kinda make a, well, this is what we're doing. We have to go down this path and commit is probably something where something like conviction voting or my slight twist on it, persistent commitments, would be necessary. But if we re if we're thinking about something like a mayor or even a constitution or, you know, one of these governance, things that we're selecting, as you know, the mayor effectively is just an agent, right, of our kind of governmental cooperative. They're an employee of the public. And we certainly don't think that private companies have to, like, commit to employees in any kind of real way. If we find that a mayor is being corrupt or doing something that everyone is really really hates, then there's no reason why we can't think, well, that's reversible. We should be able to to throw them out. So I don't know. The the the concept of of stabilization buckets helps to not make that pathological. But, you know, it's just the difference between decisions that are quite reversible, maybe not perfectly reversible, but quite reversible, and decisions that aren't, right, where you just use these two different systems. And the benefit of this constitutional I wish I had more time to talk about it. The benefit of doing the idea of, well, we're electing a constitution, which is, you know, some arbitrary governance function, right, where you can kind of divide things up and specify whatever sub rules you want to, is that the the public can kind of flexibly make those decisions of, well, this thing, your budget cycle every month is a persistent commitment. But this particular officer that we we elect to hold you know, to be the mayor or whatever is a persistent election, a normal persistent voting election where it can change it theoretically anytime given stabilization. Yeah.
Okay. Thanks.
No problem.
Seth?
Thanks so much, Blaine. So, yeah, I found that kinda what democracy needs depends a lot on what's wrong with it, and and and a lot of diversity in the solutions depend on people's diversity in the answers. So I'd be curious just like a big picture. In in your opinion, what's the big reason that, you know, democracy is broken today?
That's a great question. I mean, I guess there's kinda several things. Right? I mean, in my talk that I talked that I referenced on YouTube that is too long, but I kind of go through what I think over a bunch of them. I mean, one of them is just that we have these unsound and inexpensive voting methods. Right? I don't know, man. I'm having a hard time answering your question because I don't know. With our current democracy, what's not wrong with it? You know, at least we're talking about governmentally. Right? So the fact that people can't express their true preferences, right, that there's we use first pass to post voting where, you know, everyone's incentive is to be highly strategic. The the meta problem, I guess, I had all in my slides this meta problem, right, of it's when people have an election, it's very unlikely they even had any choice in what the the the options are in that election. Right? There's I mean, for example, I I live in Salt Lake City. And recently, there was this proposal from the planning commission, I think the transportation planning commission, where they're gonna build a gondola in in one of our canyons, right, going up to one of the ski resorts. And the thing is, it's it's very unclear. They had other options that would probably do less environmental damage or that would solve the problem more robustly, but I don't know. No. No. Those weren't even on the table when they had a voting session. Right? They said gondola or bad option or bad option. So I don't know. I guess that's people people's lack of expressive express expressivity in voting systems. They can't say what they really mean. They don't have enough control. I do think that is a thing in general that our voting systems disempower us. Right? As in we, the collective, are not the actual owners of of this system that we are underneath. And what's the what's the kind of other thing I was trying to say here? We're not the owners, but at the same time, we can all spam each other. I guess that's another one of the core problems is the way our voting systems work is that it's very easy to give inform it's very easy to put information into the system that I'm not don't not don't actually think that much or I'm not actually that convinced of, right, kind of because it's slightly strategic for me to vote. I mean, straight straight party ticket voting or straight ticket party voting is probably an example of this, right, where someone can go into an election and say, well, I'm a Republican. I'm a Democrat. I'm just gonna vote for those people even though I have I don't care at all who the county treasurer is, right, or the county, the auditor or whatever. And that just produces this noise, right, this this these scam boats that just gunk up the system and create these weird pathologies.
I'll I'll put I'll put an answer there. While you answer, Val, my second brief question that we can answer passively is could you put the slides for that hierarchy of constitutions up again? You didn't get to go very deep, and I just want a better look.
I didn't. While
alright. Great.
Let me go to that. Let's see. Yeah. So the basic idea here was I mean, think about
No. No. I'll I'll just I'll just curve on it.
I don't wanna take up too much time. I'd love to move on to now. Thanks, sir.
Well, my question is kind of on the constitution train, which is just that if you could speak a bit more to the kind of features of constitutions that you think make it really conducive to persistent voting. Like, is it the rules of a constitution? Is it kind of the structure of an organization or the roles or, you know, that and more? What yeah. Just to kinda speak a little more on that.
Yeah. Why does a tree, fit this problem? Is that kinda your question?
Yeah. Well, I guess tree and also just like
Who's this voting?
Yeah. Okay.
Well, let me think. So I guess part of it is that part of it is that designing a constitution is hard. Right? It's kind of an inherently iterative problem where the document itself kind of has to you know, it has to kinda think of everything. When you're electing a person, you can kind of just trust in that person's moral character or whatever. Right? But when you're making rules, it is important that the system itself can evolve, hopefully, evolve quickly, but evolve correctly towards something that works for everyone. Right? So especially given the fact that the world changes, people you know, societies change, the idea the hope here is that you've designed a system that can change whenever it needs to, but through systems like stabilization and resource voting, etcetera, only changes when people are actually convinced it should change. Right? So, I guess that's that's why I would say precision voting is is a fit in my in my estimation. And I don't know. Right? All of this is theoretical still for me. That's part of the reason why I'm trying to implement tools to help, you know, people experiment with it in real life so we can find out if I'm crazy. Right? This might this might be awful. I have no idea yet. But my theory is that, yeah, it's just enabling the kind of appropriately sped up evolution based on, you know, things changing over time. And then the tree nature of it. Right? I guess with this, we were kind of going at the first layer where you say, I I let's say, you know, I propose a constitution as one of the candidates in this election that's going on. And part of my constitution does is it says, you know, beneath this constitution, I'm defining these subelections. Right? There's an election for a mayor, election for this, but I also have a subelection for, you know, the the kind of different distinct parts of governance. Right? I think probably most people would agree there's probably at least some difference between, you know, our kind of our our legal codes as in our definition of rights, you know, what kind of crimes are crimes versus our zoning laws. Right? There's some difference and or maybe maybe not. My people might split that up differently. So the point is that people who really care about our definition of justice might not care very much about our definition of zoning or taxes or whatever. So it allows it allows us to arbitrarily split things up so that people can have the precise voice they want to have on the things they precisely care about. And then the tree is about well, you know, if you can if you can split things the constitution itself up into pieces, you can also say, well, underneath this, we have kind of administrative districts. So we have these subareas of of responsibility. And this is basically just trying to implement subsidiary. Right? Trying to say, well, we're gonna push some of these decisions down, right, to people who are actually directly affected by them. So you can imagine, for example, if you had, I mean, the The United States. Imagine in a in a in a hundred years or something, this is being used to govern a place like The United States. You know, a a two hundred years ago, when a lot of the state borders were drawn, they were drawn kind of ad hoc or in weird political gripes. And instead, what if there was a constitution that defined all of those administrative borders and we could over time evolve them where, you know, maybe maybe in one era, it would be, well, all the watersheds. Right? All the watersheds, all these people ought to be working together because they share a watershed. And that's the thing that kind of most binds them together in having to cooperate with each other. But then a hundred years later, it's, oh, well, the Internet networks we've laid down. Right? You know, whatever it is. Right? Where the the the boundaries and the the roles and the the the delegation can shift around as society changes and as the world changes. Does that does that is that a good answer to your question? Val? Sorry.
I'm nodding. Yes.
Okay. Okay. Sorry. I couldn't see you. Let me stop sharing. K. Cool. Anyone else?
Seth has a follow-up. I don't know if that's more just kind of rhetorical comment or if you wanna kinda speak to that.
I guess it's just a minor question. I'd really love to to move the floor to someone else. But absent that, you you kinda related the hierarchy of constitutions as, as a as something that the continuous voting makes possible. But, are is it just a different is it just a different idea that you're making them compatible, or is there something kind of fundamental about continuous voting that you can't do hierarchies without it?
You know, I think okay. Probably the reason the reason I think that is because of this reversibility. I guess it feels more dangerous, right, to make more serious, more impactful decisions in a manner that people just have to live with for longer periods of time. Right? So if we said, well, we're gonna elect a constitution, and we have to live with it for the next four years. Right? Then then all of the kind of games, I guess, I I didn't get into this much, but the games the strategic games people can play in the window of the election, right, the kind of narrow time band where the decision is being made, makes it easier for people to kinda game the system. Right? So for example, it's really easy for someone in the two weeks of an election to spam the if they have lots of money and they kind of have a particular gotcha thing they can spam out into the electorate, they can maybe swing a an election and have everyone regret the results in three months. Right? Whereas if the election is continuous, if it's ongoing at all times, the cost of doing that becomes, well, you have to spam people forever, which isn't impossible. Right? It's not like that is not something someone could theoretically do, but it at least raises the cost substantially. So the system, because it is continuous, it feels to me I mean, that's not my theory. I actually have some rough theory that I could go into if if people are interested. The theory is that the the system will kind of converge towards people's true preferences much more reliably rather than kind of having these strategic fluctuations in this critical window. That's my theory. But, again, you know, that might be wrong. Well, we have to find out.
Thank you.
Yeah. Great. Thank you. We have another question. Sorry if I mispronounced this name. Gia Jia. Would you like to speak it or do you want me to read it for you? Okay. I'll go ahead and voice it. So we have this question. First of all, thank you for sharing. But also one question is curious whether stabilization buckets have similar traditional legal practices in reality.
Oh, interesting. I don't know. I mean, maybe. I haven't encountered anything necessarily like that. Honestly, the the system that I think was in my head I'm I'm a software and computer engineer. The system that was in my head when I was thinking about this is is debouncing circuits, right, where you have a switch. And if you hit the switch, it might be possible for you to have bounce it and hit the signal multiple times. And so there can be systems to, you know, debounce it, right, to kinda stabilize to one signal. That's what I had in my head when I came up with that idea. And I think also you know what? I went to Radical Exchanges Unconference in 2021, I believe, at the one in Denver. And there were some gentlemen at, I think it was Polygon, who they were doing something similar. I can't remember exactly what they were doing. So I think there's there's probably some there's some there's definitely people playing around with ideas like that. Even conviction voting itself, right, is a form of that. So, you know, it's I think it's the same broad idea of hysteresis trying to stabilize, you know, not go too quickly, but apply it in this particular application, right, this particular situation.
Right. And, Chance, I I saw I saw that, you have possibly a second question as well, so feel free to, add that to the chat at some point. In lieu of that and kind of recognizing that we're coming up on two minutes here, One thing I'm curious about, you know, you talk about, you didn't get to it in this presentation, but in the video that I shared where you go into more detail about persistent democracy, you talk about this idea of persistent documents. I think that connects up with this constitutional thing that you're talking about, about pushing down like the kind of decision making and the constitutional definition to the subsidiarity level. I'm curious like sort of with that in mind and with this kind of idea of experimentation in an online context where we already recognize that there are some kind of limitations to the kind of verifiability or validity of voting, and we can take a little more experimentation and some kind of lower stakes environments. Like, what have you imagined could be a kind of possible, like, test case or test, like, scenario to apply some of these, principles of persistent democracy that you think are tractable, and actionable?
Yeah. Well, I guess I I, you know, hinted broadly at one at the end. Right? Open source open source software projects is one that I understand, and that's something I'm working towards. But I don't know. I mean, Reddit, Reddit boards, normal cooperatives. Certainly, I think I I have to admit I'm a bit of a Web three skeptic in a lot of particular ways, but I think some of this could absolutely apply very well to blockchain communities and DAOs. Right? I don't know. I guess that's the thing. It's just any any any place where people have to make decisions, where there's moderation going on. I don't know. There was a gentleman who was working on I can't remember what it was called. He was working on a cool kind of Reddit alternative where there was a two d plane, and people put things on this two d plane and had to kind of mock him or bid for their spot on it. And Mhmm. He then recently talked, and he was kind of wondering how he could maybe use ideas like this. And I told him, well, I'm I'm getting put. Maybe once the software is done, we could talk. Yeah. Yeah. But
Great. Yeah. Super interesting. There's a there's another platform. I can't remember the name where they kind of do, like, a two d map of the channel Oh. The server architecture. It looks like to find a link to that and share it. But we're we're at time. Maybe if if you if there's any way that we can get in touch with you and kind of connect with this work, leave a comment in the chat. And people feel free to message Blaine on the Slack and connect with him about the work that he's doing. Thank you, Blaine. And we'll go ahead and go over to Val now. I'll start the timer when you're set up.
Awesome. Gonna share my screen. Can you all see that?
Yes.
Cool. So hi, everyone. My name is Val. Ascent mentioned, I'm a research assistant with MediGov and also a research assistant or researcher with the ReSTAVE Foundation working on this future of governance toolkit, which is a living library of participatory governance use cases from all around the world. There we go. So what is Restate briefly? Restate is a Swiss based nonprofit foundation reimagining the future of governance and global collaboration. And the purpose of this project, the toolkit, is to cocreate a living library for communities of all sizes to to learn about participatory governance practices from each other, starting with governments, private cities, and online communities. So we're striving to make this toolkit useful for both practitioners as well as academic researchers, and I know this community has a good mix of both. So excited for your thoughts on this project. We know that there are other databases out there like the one we're trying to create, and so we wanna, you know, be really clear about what we kind of felt was lacking of what's out there and and where we kind of see ours fitting in. And so if you ever heard of participedia, we really like the kind of detail orientedness of it and that it's, you know, community built. We we want a clearer taxonomy and more complete entries. From Medagov's gogov base, it's really strong, good for quality quantitative research, less so for qualitative, but really strong on taxonomy and inclusive of a lot of web three and emerging tech examples. NBCG has a center for public impact. They have, you know, very story like articles, basically, and we want better searchability and clearer taxonomy. So kind of taking from what's out there. I'll ask a couple of quick asks and are included in this presentation along the way. So as I'm going, you'll see them. So feel free if you like a database out there, whether it's governance related or not. We're looking for inspiring, other, like, sites that are inspiring, so please type them in the chat along the way if anything's coming to mind for you now. So a brief overview of the structure and taxonomy. We have basically four units of the toolkit. One unit is processes. They are participatory governance processes. They are actions that community uses to govern itself broadly. Then we have communities. Communities are the groups of stakeholders participating in the governance process, But a community for us is, you know, not just like California's redistricting committee committee, but that being sort of representative of the state of California. So it's kind of the the larger group, when there is that kind of represent representative participation. Tools are tools that are established and replicable frameworks, resources, or digital platforms to enable a community to do a a process. And finally, a use case. To us, the definition of a use case is a participatory governance process done by a community using a tool. And we'll go into, more. This is basically the discussion we'll have in the end of this presentation. I wanna dive a little bit deep into processes to give y'all an idea of, where our thinking has landed here, although it's not finalized at all. Basically, participatory governance processes are actions that communities use to govern themselves. But for us, there we're we acknowledge that this is a pretty we have a pretty broad definition of governance. We're interested in use cases where we see communities doing things to shift power. So that kind of is closely aligned with our definition of governance. And so, for example, like in a use case about a tool like Mapio, you know, participatory mapping might not necessarily on its own be considered governance in a traditional sense, but to us, you know, mapping is used directly to basically allow these indigenous communities to retain legal protections over their land. So we wanna account for examples like that. So processes are sort of these mid level actions. They are floating somewhere between some of these, like, the highlighted categories of types of processes, but something a little bit more broad than a citizen's assembly. So something like establishing a decision making body. Yeah. I'm running out of time, so I'll keep going. So for just in terms of search, you know, this is kind of I threw this together, but you can see how a bunch of use cases look, and you're able to kind of search by process, by tool, or by community. You know, again, quick ask if one of these categories kind of sticks out to you. If you're like, oh, I would be so interested to search this database by process, Type that in the chat, send it in, but also we can dive in more during the discussion. Other search filters. We noticed that there's a lot of search filters around, like, details about a community. So, like, what's the size of the community? Where does the community convene? What kind of governance domain is this in? These are some other search filters that we're thinking about. You know, want your feedback on. Tell me if you like. Tell me if you don't. And finally, so the main kind of question I have for discussion today is the just kinda how this how this is hitting you all. Particularly, the use case title formula is something that we are really excited about. We think it brings together taxonomy. It's clear perhaps in some ways, but, you know, definitely want feedback on this idea. Basically, use case title formula being that participatory governance process done by a community using a tool. These are the guiding questions. You can see a glimpse into what a use case entry in this toolkit will look like on just kind of a skeletal level over here. Yeah. I'll give you all a second. I'm almost done, but I do have one more slide I wanna get to. But, again, we can come back to this during the discussion. Yeah. So more questions that I'm curious about if you don't have a million already are, you know, why might you use this toolkit or why not? What catches your eye about it? What are you most interested in learning about? Are you more interested in the results and outcomes? The how of how communities design, you know, their kind of processes and governance experiments, insights from researchers, insights from communities, which one is more interesting to you. Yeah. And, you know, we'll be interested in doing more one on one interviews with people. So if you are excited about this project like we are, please send us your email, and we can reach out about that. And if you have any use cases, y'all are probably working on lots of cool stuff in this realm. So if you have use cases that you think we should know about, please let me know. You can message me on Slack. My name is Val Elefante or email me. And, yeah, thank you for this time. My fellow collaborators are actually on this call as well, so excited for the discussion.
Great. Thank you so much, Val. We'll
go ahead and move into the discussion. There are no questions so far in
the chat. So, if anyone wants to, speak, feel free to raise their hand or post something in the chat. One of the things that Val's kind of framed is, like, thought about this use case title formula, participatory governance process done by a community using a tool to address a problem. I have some questions, but I see that Henrik has already raised his hand. So we'll go with Henrik and then Josh, and then, feel free to keep raising your hand, keep asking questions. Looking forward to the discussion.
Yeah. So can I mean, does your project also look at how to address behavior in processes like in DAOs or communities in general or only the sort of voting aspect? Just thinking about the project I mentioned in the beginning, where if I have a 100,000 people and I wanna make sure that I actually preserve culture as this grows from zero to big. So I'm doing some ethnographic analysis to figure out, okay, what is actually the cultural drivers and then hoping to create a data model for that, then I say, okay. How do I then make sure that we the community preserves the culture that they want to preserve? Is this part of the scope here, or is it something completely different?
Yeah. Great question. I I would definitely say that community norms, kind of those, like, unspoken things are what we're trying to bring to light in this project to include in our analysis of governance of a community, so definitely part of the scope. That's something that I'm personally also really interested in. And, you know, in within this process kind of wheel, I think there are, you know, multiple buckets where something like that could fit. I think something else I I think about when I when you were talking was just about use cases that have, like, you know, experiments and results. So we would look for less so, like, emerging projects and more so, like, we wanna we wanna bring to light kind of how it's going, like, how it's going so far, what are kind of some of the, results or outcomes. So you would yeah. I could see, you know, you using this this toolkit perhaps to find a similar use case to your own and then be able to, like, model a process or, you know, use a tool that a community like yours has used for something like that for that. Yeah. Like, participatory honestly, it sounds like the it almost sounds like our Wikipedia case something about participatory, deliberation on community norms, which is done by Wikipedia when it, used model cards. So yeah. Okay. Thanks for that question.
Thank you.
Hey. Thank you, Henry. Josh?
Hey. Love the presentation. The kinda a lot of questions for comments. The one thing is, you know, okay. So you have a taxonomy slash ontology. And of course, like, anytime you want to build data, you have to. Right? You know, it's just like part of what it means to have a schema. A schema is literally ontology. Right? The but, you know, an issue is that the fact that, you know, there's, like, so many different choices you can make.
And
one of the ways that gov basics kind of tackles this is we literally have a table on social ontologies. Right? That allows us kind of map. Like, this is participatory as sort of a model. This is how some other sort of organization has a model. So, like, one question to ask is, like, what is the kind of social theory underlying, you know, your taxonomy? What's motivating that? The second thing is, like, you know, like, what is and this kinda relates, like, what what is really the use case for for this kind of database? And this is something that, for example, Zargav and I talked about, like, for, like, ad infinitum for months. Because thinking about, like, oh, you know, like because, like, Uplaz really started as this project to,
you know,
just to understand, like, essentially, a sense making in this space. Right? I was computer scientist. I've done a lot of database kind of research. I just started building this thing because it kinda made sense, and it kinda glommed into, like, a bunch of different sort of, like, datasets that just, like, kinda pushed together because it kinda made sense or it's just how it happened. And then we spent a lot of time thinking, like, what is this database for? You know, like, clearly, it's just, like, some set of datasets that you can sort of, like, do data analysis on. And we love it when people do use it, like master students, etcetera. But for it to really be kind of, like, in use by practitioners, it's just like it's that's really hard. Right? They're not gonna go digging around in Airtable. They're not even really gonna go dig around, like, participant in some sense. That's my sense. How can we take this information, package it up in a way that is, like, directly consumable? Like, I'm thinking, literally, at the level, like, can we make it show up in Google search somehow? That would be amazing. Can we make it, like, you know, in their in their, like, you know because Google search essentially uses a knowledge graph, right, to populate certain, like, rich results. Or are there ways we could, like, link this directly into, like, some other sort of, like, more consumer facing platform that, you know, puts it like a like a like a practitioner might actually be used on a regular basis. It was these are just some questions I wanted to post because I think they're really important in thinking about the long term sustainability of these kinds of projects.
Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Josh. And as I messaged you, like and as you know, you know, working on this project, like, I have had many conversations with you also about, like, GovBase and some of the limitations and some of its strengths and just kind of, like, yeah, making databases useful to practitioners and researchers. So, yeah, a lot of, like, credits and kudos to you and folks at Medigov who've been working on GovBase because it is, like, one of the most projects that we draw from most on in this project, as well as, like, even community rule. It just on your first question of kind of social theory underlying taxonomy, you know, we I think and Sent and I have had a conversation about this. Like, there aren't some like, there isn't a taxonomy out there that is, like, kind of the go to. So it's, like, all of us that are working on these projects and similar ones are are sort of all taking our best stab at it using what we have and are, you know, relying on each other and and the, you know, citations of, people who have tried to do this from Jessup to Larry Lessig to, you know, Nathan to just a bunch of people. So, yes, please throw, you know, any other resources you think that would be helpful for us into the chat. But, yeah, I think, you know, to some extent, like, what we asked Nathan, oh, where did your, you know, process structure, decision, like, where did that come from? And he's kind of like, we kind of threw it together. It's pretty, you know, arbitrary, but designed by us. And so we're kind of, you know, taking our stab at this. And but, you know, I I think I I totally agree with you. And, yeah, just kind of some of your your thoughts on making it really, clear and useful. And I think there's a real need to find, like, it is just if participipedia, I imagine this database being something like if participatpedia and govbase had a baby, and also thinking about ways to, like, plug in to those other databases directly, I think is something that we're definitely interested in down the line as we as we build this out. But, yeah, it's all an experiment.
Yeah. Can I just add one small thing? Because I'm I'm working with Val as well on the restate team. And oh, my camera's not on. Sorry y'all. So one thing about why folks might not use their in database now is because it's a little it's just hard to navigate. And so as Val was saying, we're trying to build on top of what already exists in terms of the content. And so can we make it a little bit more like what Val mentioned with the BCG Center for Public Impact? Like, their case study library is something that might be more familiar for different practitioners. And so we're trying
to see, like
I like that Val had the the baby with participedia and GovBase and then probably with the BCG and CPI as well.
Yeah. And I'll throw in also if anyone doesn't know about the solutions journalism network, they have a database called, the solution story tracker that is journalism articles that cover it's journalists covering solutions to social problems with a a framework that's very similar to the one that's on the screen now of, like, what was the challenge? What was the choice action? What were the outcomes? It really focuses on, like, how did this community solve this problem? And I recommend you you know check that out that's been one of our inspirations as well. It's kind of like taking what we like and you know yeah putting it all together.
Nice. Alright. Up next is Blaine.
Oh, you're muted, Blaine.
I'm bad at this. Yeah. I have my screens, and I'm getting going to yours. Well, I guess my question that I asked was just it seems like this is a descriptive project. Right? Or at least my understanding of it is that you're looking at all these things out in the world and saying, what do they do? Have you experimented at all with or have you thought about experimenting with using this kind of, formula or this this framing as a way to kind of interview or to help people figure out what their what governance problems they have or how to find solutions. Right? Like, could we flip it in the other direction? Does that make sense?
Yeah. And no. I haven't I honestly haven't thought about that at all, but will now. Yeah. It's a really interesting way of using, yeah, some of the tools that we're developing just by building out this use case. So I would be really curious to hear, you know, what your kind where your mind goes when you think about that and who, you know, you might who you think might find an exercise like that useful.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. And that's interesting. I guess what we were talking about earlier of well, sometimes you have a community that has to make decisions, but maybe they're unclear about, well, what work is there even to be done? Right? Or there there's a design problem in front of them. Okay. Well, we have to and, you know, I I guess, Sent has been going through this figuring out what what is the process for, our membership program in Medigov look like. Right? How does that work? What what what is there in front of us to be done? I don't know. I mean, maybe that could be a place we could play around with it. I don't know. Yeah.
Okay. So I don't see any other questions in the chat. There are some sort of, you know, comments on previous comments, from Seth. But if other people have questions, feel free to raise your hands. One one thing I, was curious to know about was, the I guess this has a little bit to do with the kind of question that Josh is doing. Like, how do people use this? And so maybe I won't ask that, but I guess another thing I was curious about in this famous Streak Devlin's point about the kind of knowing the direction that you want to move. So there's this this comment that you've made about moving in some kind of direction or shifting, making some kind of change. And I wonder I wonder, I guess, two things. One, like, is the assumption that, like, that shift or governance transition is always in a positive or productive direction. And, like, are there kind of mechanisms for steering or guiding people towards certain types of directions. I guess, like, to some question, the question is like, is there a bias or kind of opinionated element to this project? And how like, what about, like, organizations that, like, want to basically, like, stay operationally the same, but they're not happy with, I suppose, some kind of, like, way that decisions are made. I don't know. I think the first question is more relevant. The second question is a little less baked.
Yeah. No. It's a great question. And I think the bias is just kind of almost like really clear just being participatory is sort of the bias in in just the sense that like we are interested in only highlighting, participatory processes. So, but I think within that umbrella, it's a matter of like finding a fit of, you know, you like a community that did some that is, it doesn't necessarily even have to be one similar to your own like that's something that our team is talking about a lot too is, like, is it a design choice that we make to limit how you can search this database? Like, maybe you can't search by, you know, like, legal structure where you can't search by non like, only nonprofits, and you you can't search by only DAOs, or you can't search by only governments like because we want you to, you know, be able to to see more on a process level what these communities have done and and you know, how that went for them, basically. And so it's like, oh, you know, we can't do something like that because, you know, we're not a nonprofit. So that is perhaps where, like, our biases come in a little bit just in the sense of, like, wanting to, yeah, like, show show that that sometimes those things might not matter as much as you think that they do. There are, yeah, plenty of examples of participatory governance processes across, you know, sectors and and types of and domains and and ways that you might be able to learn from those experiments and insights. So but, yeah, it's I am thinking about because I'm as a medical as you know, as a medical research assistant working on, like, transitions, like, exit to community and kind of, like, progressively decentralizing organizations. And I think this is, like, similar in a sense, but different. I think there's, like, participatory models that aren't necessarily yeah. I I I I want I'd I'd have to think more about it, but I think, you know, it's not that, like, gradual decentralization. It's not as much of a funnel into that as much as it is, like, different types of participatory processes that might work for your community.
But Yeah. If I can just pick up on that very briefly. I think the you know, one thing that's also coming to mind there is the, like, the the question of, like, failure states. And, you know, this came up a little bit in the discussion that Seth was having about, like, what's the problem? What's broken about democracy? And in some sense, democracy is a process of just, like, continuous failure or persistent failure possibly. And so I wonder, like, it seems as though, like, in this case, like, I wonder how a community might kind of know how to adopt a participatory model for making decisions or doing governance processes? If like, would, like, a kind of list of failure cases also be useful as a demonstration for things that don't work rather than things that just do work? Wondering if that's something that's kind of accounted for in this in this toolkit.
That's a great question, and, I think it is something that we early days thought about as, like, really important and and haven't looped back to since we've done all this other taxonomy work. So I'm really glad you brought it up because it is a really I think you're right. It's a really important addition to consider is, like, some of the, like, yeah, failure cases or just, like because they could be really innovative, and I think that's a really important theme for this. It's a future of governance toolkit. It's something we talk about a lot with this project is, like, you know, in making sure that there are these yeah. I guess, like, it's more gov based than it is BCG. BCG's database hasn't updated since 2018 or something like that. I feel like so staying very, like, innovative on top of, like, emerging tech and just, like, emerging experiments. But at the same time like I think it is, yeah, it is important to also include like the limitations of certain designs and ways that things might have not gone according to plan. So yeah, thanks for bringing that up because I really think that that's you're right. A crucial piece of this.
Yeah. And it's also, like, a really key kind of, like, grounding to, like, the work that Jessup does, like, ten ten tons of his studies about, like, failures. And in fact, like, his notion of governance comes out of the the failure of government as a as a model. Okay. We're at time. Just a quick kind of closing thing. First, thanks everyone for attending. Thanks to our presenters, Blaine and Val and for everyone in the chat for, the really engaging discussion. We have a tradition of unmuting and applauding. I think this started before Zoom like attenuated everyone's audio, but if you but just for the the tradition, feel free to unmute and we'll applaud our speakers. Great. Thank you again. The next short talk is going to be on February 8. And the next seminar next week is going to be from Lucia Corpus who has been doing some research on governance surfaces. Of course, as always, there are some links to the Slack and the survey and all that kind of stuff. So feel free to join us on the Slack and carry on the conversation and hashtag seminar discussions. And really looking forward to the next short talk and next week's seminar and thanks everyone for coming.
Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you guys.
Bye.