Hi, everybody. Welcome to another MediGov seminar. Today is 10/11/2023. Today is one of our short talks days. It's a very impromptu short talk session today. Myself and Seth will be presenting on a I'll be presenting on a report that I gave to the board about the community on Monday, and Seth will be giving a short presentation on this collaboration manual experiment that he's running. We have a small group today, so we'll have plenty of time for discussion, and then people who are watching later can catch up asynchronously. So I'll go ahead and go first, and I'm gonna pull up this presentation. So bear with me one moment. Okay. So to give a little bit of context for this presentation, I was invited by the the board of Medigov to give a a short report about the state of the community. And so I prepared this along with a couple of recommendations for some policies that the board could adopt. I think what I'd be most interested in after sharing this is getting some feedback on the recommendations, how the community is represented, if you think there's anything else that should be in here, and that type of thing. So it's about ten minutes ish. I'm gonna try to go through it quickly. But yeah. So this is the report. The it covers the current state of the community, a little bit of a context on the roles that we have, a summary of our current activities and projects, some takeaways from that, a couple of recommendations for the board, and some follow-up. So the current state of the community is that MediGov is a home for those who want to go deep and stop responding governance. The community is anchored in the membership, which, contribute financially and allocate their funds towards cultivating opportunities for the community. And the community also complements the research and operation pillars of Medigas. The three pillars interact with each other in relatively complex ways, but this report mostly focuses on the the community. Just to give a little bit of context for the kind of where the the community fits in with the overall structure of Medigot as an organization, we have two kinds of categories, participants and members. Participants is a broad category for anyone who's involved in Medigot, so this would be inclusive of everyone who joins the Slack, for instance. Members are currently one type. They contribute funds to a collectively governed pool of funds, and we're in the process of potentially restructuring the membership in order to have two types of categories, active and passive. So passive members would only financially support the organization and perhaps receive some benefits, which are still to be determined, but would not participate in the governance of the funds. Active members would also financially support membership, pay a reduced rate for their membership dues, but be required to participate in the governance of the funds. This is also within the context of the organization, which includes the staff, the board, researchers, contributors, guests, partners, and contractors. There's a really nice post by Zargam and hashtag board. If anyone wants to kind of go a little deeper into the kind of taxonomy that is outlined here. So, in addition to being a home for discussion of online governance, the community is also part of a kind of intellectual climate through short talks, go based work in work in progress presentations at go based labs, reading groups, in person gatherings, and our fellowship, we create opportunities for knowledge sharing and development both internally and public facing. The the intellectual climate also contributes to the development of collaborations. Several formal and informal projects have emerged this way. Examples include collaborations between research directors and community participants, some of them based off of in person exchanges, projects that have spun up due to the opportunity to present on a shared interest, and opportunities to co locate through activities such as panel discussions. And also, the community also serves a function of bringing the research that the organization does into the respective communities that the participants exist in. So by involving the community and the ongoing development of standards and software, the organization is increasing the likelihood of its work connecting with other online communities. Here's a brief overview of the programs and activities that are currently running at MediGov. It's not a complete cataloging, but it gives you a sense of the breadth and diversity. And each of these have specific are kind of framed based off of impact outcomes and also future kind of projections for how these programs might evolve. There's a I'm gonna just do, like, a kind of brief overview of some of these and not go into a lot of detail, but there's a document that I'll share at the end of the presentation that basically details all of these slides if you wanna dive in a little further. So, I would say that one of the new developments in the last three or four months that is pretty significant for the community is this monthly community orientation paired with our community navigator program. So each month, we have a new orientation meeting for a new cohort of community member participants that filled out the survey. This this meeting involves presentation of Medigov followed by presentation by the community navigator and question and answers. All members and participants of the community are welcome to attend each month. It's not just for new community participants. The navigators also detail the journey about how they learn about Medi Gov, what it was like to join, what it was like to, you know, become familiar with the organization, and then eventually what it was like to contribute to the organization. So people can have a kind of model for what it means to be in the community. They also serve as one month mentors for new community participants, offering them a thirty minute meeting during the first month of them being in the community. The outputs of this are currently none, but we do wanna convert some of these presentations that the navigators are giving into a recorded interview format that can give prospective members just a bit of a better feel for the community, put a face to it, get a little bit of a sense for the story. And then in terms of impact, this process helps to increase the legibility of the community. It increases the distributed sense of community leadership through the monthly mentorship opportunity. And it also establishes a bit of a better rhythm and cadence in the org in terms of when we have inflows of community participants, which lowers some of the kind of overhead that can come with a kind of continuous trickle of new members. The short talks and community spotlights are another important part of the community. This is one of them, obviously. Some of the outputs from it include the protocol for hosting one of these activities and the occasional community spotlight, which features speakers from short talks with a little bit of an interview and a photo. It's also led to a lot of informal collaborations. And it also, again, as part of this theme of distributing the agency and leadership in the organization, allows participants to step into a contributor role by hosting sessions. The in person gatherings that we do are also really critical for the organization. Some of them involve DWebcamp twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, ETHDenver, the fellowship program, and casual self organized meetups. Some of the outputs of this have included the ethnography and speculative fiction of a governance like that BluxOne did at dWebCamp, video documentation of that gathering, and the newsletters, both Medigov's newsletters, but also syndicated with organizations like the Internet Archive also really seeing news about our activities. The impact of this is that a lot of formal and informal collaborations have developed, such as the Comtech Standards Department and the Attention Economy and Governance paper. And it's also an effective mechanism for increasing participation and ownership in the community. In the future, I think these types of interactions and gatherings are really powerful and can be paired with more output based activities and could be kind of thought of in a way that is more designed about producing collaborations in addition to just enjoying gathering. There's a new seminar format that we're gonna be exploring in the new year, which is based off of topics that have been surfaced through the community, and it's gonna be more oriented around co working and experimentation. It'll also kind of serve a useful signaling function for prospective community participants, funders, and other organizations to say, we're gonna be focusing on this particular topic for a two month period. If you wanna join, this is a good time to join. And in addition, one of the other longer term aims of the community is to protocolize or standardize to some extent these different types of programs that we have so that other community members could pick them up and run with them both in our organization or possibly in other organizations. I'm gonna skim over this just to say that we have this weekly lab gov based labs calls, and it's, I think it's one of the the best opportunities to really get a sense for where people's thinking is at in terms of current worst research. People share work in progress research and a lot of projects spin up out of this. For instance, there is a project that's being developed at the moment, which is focused on doing digital ethnography at scale with large language models. And it's one of many different projects that have kind of spun up out of this kind of intellectual conversation space. There's the membership program. There's a very a lot that Giri said about this. There's as mentioned earlier in the presentation, there's a restructuring proposal on the table that'll be decided on next Thursday, October 19. And the goal largely with the program is to increase the self sufficiency of the community and also provide a mechanism for the community to actually explore in a a tangible, practical way self governance. There's the groundwork fellowship, which we've had presentations from three fellows so far. And the kind of key here is that it's been a really useful mechanism or program for pairing fellows with research directors and in person gatherings. It's also a really nice way of getting the work of Medigov into a lot of different context than it would originally or typically be found in, and it also increases the diversity and perspective of voices on governance within the organization. We have SETI groups, which I'm not going to go into much detail here, but can talk about more in the discussion. There's a mission and vision workshop that we conducted that I think was really great for the community in the sense that it gave everyone an opportunity to give some voice to how they think about the organization from a high level perspective and has also been a catalyst for doing more community based work such as the conference that Seth is organizing or the panel rather, I should say, for the Ostrom workshop next year in Indiana. The we were doing some practical governance exercises a little while ago. I'd like to get back into the process of doing this, mostly because it had a really nice output model. So there was the presentation, and then one of our researchers, Val Lafonte, would write reviews of the sessions. So we had some difficulties finding people who wanted to do this. So if there's ever interest in picking this back up, I think this would be a really good program to try again. So in terms of, like, future funded community activities, some ideas that we might explore, and I would love to hear what other people think of these or if they have other ideas are leaning into a little bit of the LLM project by, doing some kind of intentional channels where people, specifically feed the model, based on some kind of topic, or doing some RLHF that also feeds into the project. There's also ideas of doing a community run podcast, doing community placement in consultation with other communities both on and offline, putting together a community generated and approved syllabi that brings together research that's happening at MediGov, that other communities could deploy. So, again, that's part of the kind of scaling idea of how we can protocolize some of the work that's happening in Medigap and have other organizations interface with it. And then doing more focused highlights based on some of the kind of projects that Medigap is developing such as collective voice or governance experience, making a zine. There's talks of this proposal to have a circle focused on a zine as part of the membership, and then also involving the community in sourcing and submitting grants. So in terms of takeaways, I think in person gatherings are really effective for generating collaborations and is something that the organization and the community should continue to pursue. The future direction of the community is more cocreative than it currently is. The community so far has been largely autonomous from the research pillar, which is a good thing in some ways, because it provides a little bit of distinction between the two different components, but I think there are ways that we can more tightly and intentionally couple those two things. The the work that goes into doing community building involves a lot of invisible labor and takes a long period of time to be felt. And so I think there are changes that are occurring within the community, but they're happening at a kind of slower pace than, might or normally be associated with other forms of, labor. I would also say that, broadly speaking, the community is developing more operational capacity through volunteering opportunities, such as hosting seminars or short talks, stepping into the community navigator role, activities like this. And I also think that the community activity can also be a catalyst for new research initiatives and collaborations in in a way that keeps the organization and its research sensitive to the shifting interests of the community and online governance in general. So in terms of some some recommendations that I brought to the board, I the the two top ones that came to mind was that more work could be done to integrate community engagement into research projects. So one proposal would be to enact an operational policy stipulating that community management and engagement be baked into MediGo grants. And then I I think more work can also be done to emphasize the value of community through the public signaling of community efforts. So for instance, if at the end of this mission vision workshop process, we have a new mission and a new vision, being able to state clearly that it was coproduced in collaboration with the community, would be really powerful in my opinion. Also, having some information about how funds are managed within the organization. I think demonstrating how the membership, governs the funds could also be, a really useful signal for prospective funders or organizations that are looking at MediGov and wanting to see how an organization that's focused on governance is actually interfacing with that. So another proposal that I made was that the organization will commit to foregrounding the contributions of the community and public facing document documentation where relevant. So yeah. And then I offered the, opportunity for the board to meet again and discuss ways that we can develop these programs and make them sustainable. And there's a link to the Mhmm. Basically, this slide presentation if anyone wants to go deeper. So, I will stop there and then, open it up for a little bit of discussion, maybe, like, seven or ten minutes or so. And then, yeah, I'd love to hear what people think about this report. Like, what's missing, what hasn't been accounted for, what are some other recommendations that we can make to the board, this type of thing. Does anyone have any initial reactions?

Yeah. So one thing I was thinking about was it it one thing that isn't really captured in here is, like, the voice of the community or how the the community talks with one another. And it it feels like this report was very kind of, like, output impact oriented. So I'm wondering if people have thoughts on this way of representing the community. And I am really interested to know if, like, these recommendations make sense or if they should be amended in any way that, like, is there something that the board could help us support us with as a community that we could ask them directly that isn't being asked?

Yeah. I think there's something in there that's, like, a little bit of attention to me, you know, just internally with myself that it I mean, I I I I suppose, like, in some ways, like, that mandate to me never felt like to me, like, when I was hired into this role, it felt like the mandate was to support the voice of the community, not necessarily my vision of the community. And so there's often this tension where I'm kind of continuously seeking feedback and input. But a lot of the time, the kind of signal that I'm getting is, no. No. No. Like, it's fine. Please make the decisions.

Yeah. I mean, I I think that, like, you know, a a compromise is is can always be like, well, every three to six months, I I check-in, and then once if I feel like I get a strong endorsement, I just do what I want for three to six months. I check-in again. You know? I remember I remember when I first started doing leadership at the at the coop. You know, initially, I was so cautious because I was just waiting for them to basically tell me that I was doing a bad job. But after a few, you know eventually, they were just like, Daniel, we we we chose you for a reason. You know, we really want you to to to do things and make stuff happen. So it took a long time to to allow myself to feel that. So, yeah, I'm just gonna echo what Seth said. The one thing that I would toss I don't know. That's not the right metaphor. Toss my hat in the ring for would be, in person events, which you mentioned have have been valuable, but, you know, maybe even more proactively organizing. Like, I think there was there were one or two New York meetups that were meant to be, like, day long coworking things. Like, more of those, you know, maybe send a few pizzas over. Like, we pretty high leverage, I I would think. You know, you find someone to host it, get people together, and then maybe even organizing. Like, we just had there was the collective ownership summit yesterday, and I know that we got a a discount as MediGo members, and that was really cool. So things like that, like facilitating discounted tickets, mid person meetups, but probably pretty high leverage in the grand scheme of things.

Yep. That's a great idea. And, also, thank you for the telling your story of of leadership. Yeah. I agree. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. What about the the recommendations to the board? I mean, the like, do those seem like things that people in this call even want, like, to have this kind of representation of community input, like, as part of, like, kind of public facing stuff about the mission and vision or, like, detailing the financial transparency of the membership. Like, are these sensible kind of recommendations, or are there other things that, like, the board could be doing that would help to support the community more directly?

I mean, I know I know that Eugene was working on this a while ago, and I think it kinda got dropped. And and then he did all this research on grants programs, but a internal grants program for Medigo projects, I feel like, would make a lot of sense. You know? I think at this point, the tooling is getting pretty mature. So running an internal round, I think I mean, obviously, I I would want that, but even myself aside, I could imagine that being useful for a lot of people.

Mhmm. Yeah. Cool. You guys are great. That's a great I think I think Eugene is still turning on doing some kind of, like, community based granting workshops. But, yeah, having an internal grants program. We we we tried that with the Medigap DAO, and it was sort of successful. But yeah. Doing grant is really challenging to do it, like, thoughtfully and yeah. Okay. What about the so one thing that I kind of noticed as well when I was doing this was that there's so many activities. Does anyone have the sense that there's too much happening or that it would be useful to kind of consolidate at all?

Yes and no. It's sustainable to the degree that there is is some volunteer support, like, for, like, the navigator program, for instance. But then and and those moments where, like, that role can't be filled, then I become the default person who fills in that role, and that that's the part that's not sustainable.

I mean, that's the idea is that the the membership sort of develops into circles so that people can take on certain responsibilities and, you know, be, like, allocate the funds for that work and that activity how they like. Up to date, it hasn't really been as successful as I'd like it to be in terms of actually getting those working groups, like, spun up and operational. But that's the that's the that's the idea there, is to give people the resources in order to actually meaningfully contribute.

Oh, yeah. Interesting. I had accounted for that. I mean, I was talking to Zargan a little bit about this, and it even, like, the current restructuring basically necessitates a kind of data model implementation in order to be able to accurately track who's active in a circle and who's not in order to move back and forth between active and passive. So there's there's a little bit of, like, a management overhead there that needs to get worked out in the implementation. So I'm already kind of weary of, like, the level of complexity of the the restructure. It would be afraid of making it, like, based on hours of participation. Something like that would be possible. Yeah.

Okay. Great. Well, if there's no more feedback or thoughts, then we will move over to Seth. But, also, feel free to reach out to me if you ever wanna, like, help or do, like, a navigator program or anything like that. So that kind of support is really useful. And, yeah, thanks for listening and responding.

Yeah. I'm set.

a little bigger stuff. I don't think.

template

I mean, I think my an initial thought that that I would have would be that the the security model is maybe just too brittle. You know, there's this it it relies on a lot of, like, sort of good faith assumptions. And I think, you know, I think there'd always be a concern that, a, the the person who owns your doc, you know, for whatever reason, they might become a bad actor, that relationship could break down. You know, there's really no guarantee that you won't be shared the document at any given time. And so someone who contributes might worry that there could be retaliation if you eventually I think, ultimately, anyone who would wanna use this would probably assume that at any point, it could become public, and the the promises of that not happening are pretty brittle, and that might be that might be a deterrent. It could be that if you had a platform that was more credibly anonymous or secure, people would be more comfortable. That'd be my first thought or my first my first critique.

I I guess my other question would be then why not just say this is a a public document that I own for myself. Anyone can contribute to it. And that I think that that reduces the maybe the honesty you'll get, but it would maybe avoid some of these concerns about retaliation or inadvertent exposure or privacy or whatever.

I guess I I would I would push you further and say, why not just make it a make it a a public document that I own? And I accept that people might be less candid, but maybe they'll engage with it more often.

maybe that that would be totally useless.

it's useful.

Yeah. I mean, maybe it's the last

last thing I'll last thing I'll say because I don't wanna dominate. Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately, it would just change the nature of the feedback you would get, but maybe that's something you have to accept. Like, it becomes more of like it becomes almost like more like a roast, which is which roasts are public. You roast the person, so you can think of it more as a roast, like a productive roast.

the feedback given, I think, to put it Yeah. Yeah. More accurately.

What do you

Yeah. I picked I picked

I think not like, for instance, even this template is is nice. But, like, it would be interesting to see even if it was, like, a fictionalized person, what kind of thing I would be getting from the manual? Like like like, what about someone else would I be learning that I wouldn't be able to learn otherwise through the kind of, like, secrecy element. Like, to be able to, like, actually get a sense for, like, what it means to interface with this, I think, would be really useful. I think that's one thing. The other thing is, I mean, it it's I mean, I remember I remember when you first posted about this in the Slack, and I was like, this is really complicated. Complicated. Like, I don't know how to get started. Like, I don't know who to reach out to. Like, I I just also have no way for me to remember who owns something. So, like, the discoverability mechanism is is really hard to work out. So there's no clear linkage of, like, who has ownership over these documents. And so if it was to scale, it would become difficult for like, it would be difficult to know who to get in touch if I wanted to, like, actually learn something about somebody.

Complicated because of the permission stuff.

But also yeah. I mean, I think it's hard to avoid the kind of stuff that Daniel's talking about. Like, there's a lot of, like, like, is the thing that I type going to use against me? Or will it be misunderstood? So I think there's also that level of, like, like, self censorship that's involved. It's a benefit for sure, but then it's, like, actually useful for the other people who are reading the document.

I mean, I think it would be interesting if it if we if you check that. I think it but I think it'll be very different. I mean, I guess one thing I mean, you said that you've been doing this with other people as well outside of Medico. Is that right?

Yeah. But I guess well, the thing I'd be curious is, like like, have you noticed anything change about I guess it's, like, two questions. Like, the goal for people to be able to collaborate with each other more efficiently or more smoothly because they have this information, or is there another goal? And if that is the goal, like like, do you have any kind of, like, experience to suggest that that this achieves that goal? Or does it produce all sorts of just other externalities such as anxiousness because of the kind of security model?

Yeah. Just my my one thought was maybe there needs to be a certain density of collaborators to to get this to get traction. And that Medigob, it's just too diffuse and the interactions are too intermittent. But when you have a bunch of students working closely, then you have a critical mass.

No. No. No. I mean, I think that's a good question, though. And I think, I mean, I think if you were to sort of say, like, you know, 10 or 15 people have, like, decided to do this, like, do you also wanna participate? Like, and then here's, like, the really easy process to do it, then that that could be a way of getting some more traction.

Okay. Well, thank you, Seth. Thank you everyone for coming. Yeah.