Frey Metagov
Speaker 1: Oh, Nathan, do you record the cloud or file? Yes. File.
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Transcript
Oh, Nathan, do you record the cloud or file? Yes. File.
Please do the cloud. Okay. Okay.
With that, gonna transition into today's discussion subject where, I wanted to structure a discussion around the sort of, I was sort of imagining if if MediGov, if this community, if some community building online governance tools kinda went the Adobe route of having, you know, a lot of different icons fulfilling all the different parts of of a of a governance sort of process or protocol. What would that look like? I I I I'm raising it because when we have a lot of our discussions in this community offline, they tend to be about, like, decision decision making, the decision making process. How do we give people options in aggregating the preferences of lots of people in those single collective output? And we really focus my I'll quickly on that almost the to the point of reducing governance to decision making. But there's a lot more decision making. And I'm kind of interested maybe the the maybe just like listing out the different parts is straightforward. I'm sure it's an exercise that's been performed before. Maybe pushing that a little bit further, we could dream into a little bit what parts of that pipeline are actually, like, the worst for an online domain or that are the hardest to do online or or the or the most prohibitive and and maybe get a sense. Are we doing decision making because it's the it's where the light is shining? You know, it's where it's easiest to find your keys in the Chompsky metaphor. Are we doing decision making because it's the easiest to automate, the easiest to make tools for? And if we adopt a broader view of governance, what are things we start considering building that we hadn't really thought through before? It seems at least like Matt's experience on the fundraising side for groups will be beneficial for this conversation. And with that, it seems like Zeke can start us off. Maybe, Zeke, in the process, you'll share a screen with that graphic you posted on the chat.
Answer your question first, which is with my experience, the hardest thing is be, like, creating an informed populace in particular when it's not, you know, everyone having the exact same objectives. So, like, there's a degree to which that you need to be reflexive and better position yourself relative to others and not presuppose, sort of, everyone has exactly the same perspective. So this weird, sort of, problem of having an informed populace slash having that informedness include your sort of reflexivity and positionality exercises, I see this happening, like, zero on the Internet. And so of the things that I think of as part of a healthy governance process, that's what I think is the hardest. But I don't know if anyone else wants to answer your question, and then I'm happy to share that that that image.
Great. So I think of Palace a little bit. Maybe not getting people in on the getting people on the form side, but certainly on the kinda aggregating or figuring out where your population's at. It's a little binary. It's a little dichotomous that if it finds groups, they'll tend to find two groups. But is does that fulfill a little bit of what you're describing, or am I missing it?
I'm I'm describing something a little bit richer, but, actually, it'll come out in if I talk a little bit about that map, I think it'll come out anyway. But I I figured other people might have different parts of the process that they think is hard since I thought it was
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe some maybe some blind spots or or or or challenges in really building a a complete kinda governance pipeline.
Yeah. Just to echo on what Cee said, I think the the hardest part is that that people aspect because when you have a, you know, distributed community that communicates via digital means, the the bandwidth there, the interface between people is very limited. So you're trying to take these high dimensional complex ideas of like preferences and you know people and all that stuff and like fit it into this really narrow digital context, and that creates a lot of opportunity for miscommunication or assumptions. You think other people share certain interests or incentives or beliefs or whatnot, but you're not really sure. It's hard to triangulate that. So a lot of things we're used to in, like, in person groups are much, much more difficult in a digital space, and that creates kind of, like, breakdowns when you have diverse stakeholders who might use different language or see things differently or have different incentives. It's hard to kinda create that those shared norms and shared context.
Yeah. I I imagine especially if you're building an anonymous identity online that precludes things like Zoom. What are some kind of strategies you've done to to to work around that?
Oh, yeah. So so I I was setting stuff up during the intro. I'm Baroda. I've been here before. And yeah, so I don't know if you guys remember that or not. But, anyways, yes, it is much more difficult with the the synonymous thing as well. In fact, much, much, much more difficult. I would say exponentially more difficult. I don't recommend it. But yeah.
Well yeah. So, yeah, you good did a good job of kinda restating the or stating the motivation for my question. But what are but to push that further, are there some strategies that you kinda settled on for finding who you can trust, finding the values and alignment of the people, and more almost more importantly, communicating, trust and communicating values, to the people, with the very limited kinda bandwidth communication means you're providing them to understand you and get that people side that you talked about.
Yeah. So, I I'm actually not very good at this, so I'm not a good person to ask. But but what we'll say, though, is, like, actions speak louder than words. And so finding people who are doing work that is interesting and that aligns with the goals you have or the goals I have seems like the best signal. Right? So just, yeah, working on stuff that is actually, like, moving in a direction I wanna go. And also to then looking at incentives. Like, what are the incentives for people doing these things as well? Right? So, like, thinking about incentives and focusing on actions over just words is kinda how I'm approaching it. But, again, I'm not very good with this. So I don't really know.
So to put that in context, the map that Seth asked me to present was made by Baratta. So as far as putting, you know, examples of effort forward, I may actually just share it now. We can if you'd like, we can talk about it briefly because it is a literal example of how Baratta does what Baratta just said he does. So this is the screen share of if I can find it. Oh my gosh. I have too many things open. Give me two seconds.
K. While you're while you're doing that, I'll I'll do a little provocative thing to kind of expand how we're thinking. I've been reading a lot about ritual. There's some great evolutionary anthropology on ritual and its importance sort of its universality around, you know, all over the world, people perform rituals, and they have certain things in common. They're often stressful. They often have some aspect of of either what do you call it? Like, emotional activation or straight up negative affect. And they have, like, empirically demonstrable effects on bonding, on bringing people together, on on changing your boundaries of yourself to include people around you. And you see these not just in the religious context, which seems most obvious, but there's there's evidence that fans of sports teams feel a stronger bond and closer affinity to their team the worse the team is. And this, again, like, is an accidental case of negative affect providing that that special ingredient bringing people together. So if group identity and group kind of collective intention and and shared group kind of yeah. Shared group identity and cohesiveness is something we don't want to include in the idea of effective, like, community governance or online community governance, then what would a ritual building tool look like? Or what would it provide, and how would it, you know, facilitate these kinds of activities? That is a lot of information. Z, can you give a or maybe z or b. And why don't you give us a little tour through this? And, Zoom, if you could zoom in a little bit more as much as possible.
I can kind of concede the header, I think,
if
if that works. Is that a little better?
It's a little better. Yeah.
Okay. Let me we'll just start here, and we will navigate as Baratta speaks to it, I guess. Do you want us to answer I mean, I pulled this up. Well, we wanna answer your question before we start.
I'm I that well, I'm calling it a provocative little floaty. Yeah.
Floor is yours, Baratta. I'll navigate if you give instructions.
Sure. Okay. So I guess, yeah, I'll go I'll go through the CAG map. And yeah. And also too, I'm thinking about that idea about, yeah, when you go through difficult things together, it kind of builds bonds. But then there's a wide variety of scenarios in which that is, but it's a very interesting direction to explore. So I'll think more on that. Okay. Right. So so CAG map here, this is a computer aided governance map and process. So it's a map to kind of like show hey here's some things that are generally in the process of computer governance. It's a map. It's not the process itself. Right? So it it aims to provide some intuition to kind of say, hey, here's things to think about. But you know, your experience will vary based on the system you're engaging with, how you engage with it, etcetera. Right? But, generally, the goal here is to provide that shared context we're talking about before. Right? So in a space that has a lot of variability and a lot of diversity, without some shared foundation of knowledge and data to build on, it's just opinions. Right? So you're like, I think we should go this way. I think we should go that way. Okay. Great. We have opinions. Cool. But with some shared foundation of knowledge and data, we we have something to orient around. Right? So the goal here is to apply some sort of data driven, sciency type process of looking at what's going on, asking some questions, coming up with some hypotheses, testing them out in some sort of simulation environment, and then using that to inform decision making. And then after decision making, then actually looking at what happens to then say, okay. Well, we thought this was gonna happen. Here's what actually happened. How is this informed decisions in the future? That's kind of the idea. It's broken up into six or eight sections there, however many sections, whatever. Observe, ask, map, model, present, debate, enact monitor. Right? So the kind of the the buckets that kinda go through that process. And it's specifically oriented in the context of someone providing a proposal in a political process. Right? So it should be noted that there's, like, kind of a difference between thinking through, like, constitutional or system design of defining the parameters of the system, the rules, etcetera, and then being an actor in the system advocating for your interests to to then engage with and shape that system. And so this is more geared towards someone in the system advocating for what they think is important and then presenting that to the group and talking about it and hopefully having some sort of shared foundation of knowledge and data to to then inform those discussions to then make better decisions.
I would add that, you know, something that's really important about the development of this is it's in the context of what what is effectively digital infrastructure where, you know, even in the example of Medigob, if you if you build out a set of policies and software platforms that collectively implement them, then you are using your your mode of of policy implementation is code and software. It means that you're going to have data. It means you're gonna have some more data driven understanding about how people interact with that, you know, body of tools. And and if we think about this in the context of infrastructure and then the more and I tend to push on this sort of civil engineering, you know, background or, you know, engineering background and civil engineering as the application of engineering to sort of civil infrastructures, then you were asking, like, how do we actually evaluate and make decisions about digital infrastructures where, you know again, I don't wanna, like, over over push on it. But, ultimately, you have to use tools to build a map. Otherwise, it's really hard to tell, you what are you even talking about? It's very easy to talk past each other. There's an absence of obvious shared knowledge. Like, you can't just, like, go out and look at the, I don't know, look at the bridge, so to speak, or, you know, zoom out and you don't have the map, which is the road map to look at to see whether you wanna draw a new road there. That same stuff is happening in cyberspace. We're filling in the geography. We're building stuff. We're giving people new capabilities or looking at how people interact with the capabilities they have. But if we wanted to look at governing digital infrastructure the same way we look at governing physical infrastructure, then, like, at minimum, you have to kinda think through these these concepts. And and, Baratta, I mean, to kinda throw it back at you, one question I I think is super important is how did you decide what the eight things are? Because I think there were a couple iterations where there were different even numbers of of main bullet points before you even got into starting to break them down.
Yeah. So the the bullet points there are pretty much just based on looking at kinda, a, how does block science kind of go about, like, thinking through things a bit, but also to what's my experience been with, you know, communities that actually go through decision making processes and kind of finding something in the middle. Right? So you it's inspired by a science sciency type process, but also it's it's political. Right? So there is debate. There is actions, etcetera. Right? And so trying to find a bridge of something that works to to inform data driven decision making, but also works in political context where people just want what they want, and they think what they think, and they're gonna advocate for their interests. And so yeah. So that seems to provide some tools where you can, you know, not only have have some perspective to inform the proposals you might produce, if you have a specific interest. Right? Understanding different variables of play and and being able to optimize for that will help you. But also if you're analyzing the proposals, then, you know, these different things will help you, actually analyze and say, okay. Well, what are their assumptions? What are they basing this data off of? Do they have a map or a model? How does that relate to me? You know, are we actually checking to to see, like, what the effects of this are, or is this based on effects of prior things? Right? So we can have some context for people to push back on proposals as well in that kind of data driven process. So, yeah, it's kind of a mix of the two. And like I said, it's a map. It's not the territory. Right? So these things seem like they're kind of broadly useful. They might change over time. You might find some are more useful than others. Some might not be useful at all. Yeah. That that's kind of what what inspired it is bridging a political process and a data driven process to create something that might be feasible.
Wonderful. In the interest of continuing to get ideas on the floor and kind of expand our our conception and and and, yeah, expand the range of things we're we're talking about, maybe we could hear from someone we haven't heard from yet. Miriam, I know that you expressed some enthusiasm or at least support on on the subject of this discussion. Do you have any ideas for and especially being deep in a a a fairly general tool. Have you been noodling or do you have on on this subject of kinda where we can push these tools or our toolkits?
Yeah. I don't have any, I guess, like, well formed thoughts about this yet. I think I need to spend some more time with this diagram. I think I resonate with your comment exactly, like, the boundaries of what is governance and what isn't is really not clear. And I think we, I mean, we've talked about this before, but as I'm developing, I have this concept of an asynchronous governance process, which is something that takes some asynchronous amount of time from seconds to months and some decision or some outcome is reached at the end of it. And that's, like, attempted to be some really generic thing, but the only implementation or, like, use case we ever come up with is, like, a vote. So I this this, I think, discussion would be helpful in, like, trying to push that model, I guess, and see, like, what else what what doesn't fit in there and what else does fit in there, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. Josh, I saw your hand up.
I guess something about I was thinking of contra making one comment, but I don't know if it's too specific now. I guess, like, a so in constructing GUB Base, there are, like, you know, lots of projects, and there's not really a distinction GUB Base for, like, what counts and what doesn't count as a governance tool. It's kinda just like well, not one that's like explicitly advertised and sort of enforced. It's just from, like, based on our guesstimates, you know, this, like, this falls kind of like under governance. So the range of what goes in there currently is fairly wide. But
and
I'm not sure if there's, like, sharp boundaries on any of them, right, or on any classification. The only the only use for a boundary we enforce is between, like, whether this is explicitly intended for online communities or whether it's, kind of like for something more like offline communities. One thought is that, you know, maybe the sort of like the examples we can sort of could be expanded to sort of cover not just like advertise software projects, but, like, more behind the scenes, like, policies, if those things could be properly aggregated. And that way, we could build a better dataset of, like, what I think it was, you know, brought it, talks about the map versus the territory. And I suppose, like, we're trying to build a more still not the territory exactly, but kind of, like, more more of a full list of all the things that are going on rather than the kind of the labels that we had attached to them. I'll just briefly mention that like one idea that I don't know if it's like super relevant to this question, but, I was just speaking to someone at an organization or project called the Society Library, and what they're trying to build is a a data set of essentially like, you know, for a given debate, let's say like climate change, right? They're building a data set of all the possible positions involved or all the possible positions and arguments involved in that, in that, in that debate or in that topic, as long as well as sort of like structured into kind of a logical format, so you can sort of make remove deductions, make articulations about, like, how this position is, like, some, you know, further correlating of this one, which is quite cool. And we were just talking about maybe there's a way of using that as comes for a benchmark for simulating with different governance processes. So like, if I specify a governance process in the abstract, or let's say like a a, you know, deliberation space. Right? We can sort of imagine how, let's say, a climate change discussion might happen within that, within that space, which might give a more solid, or concrete, perspective on what counts as governance and what doesn't within these spaces. That's one sort of
You know, I I like that a lot, Josh, because I think a lot of our focus has been mapping kinda online governance tools to the offline space. So, of course, we have all our decision making tools. Jenny's country Jenny's, digital juries, is in a wonderful project, that really expresses this. What's something really useful we have in everyday life that we can map online? I actually I think Nathan's committee rule kind of fits under that as well. But you're sort of raising the opportunity. What are the how can we what are what would what are what are tools we can add to the toolkit that weren't imagined that because they're just not practical or feasible in the offline realm. And I think their simulation tool, like a policy simulation tool, really kinda fits that. It I I it's not super concrete or feasible at the moment, but if it's a thing that can be done, it seems like it would be able to be done in the online space. I almost wanna compliment that with what are with this sort of a converse or inverse. I'm not sure which. What are things that we don't consider as governance tools in the offline space that must become governance tools in the online space because, for example, it's so hard to build a people connection. So suddenly that gets included in the vocabulary because you sort of almost have to do more work to to meet the basic requirements of a governance system. And so I've been sort of new noodling dreaming about the idea of a culture building tool. Like, it it would it would incorporate best practices for how people internalize values of a community, how they get how to onboard people, how to control the rate that people come in in a way that allows you to sort of not get overwhelmed by by by people who don't hold the values of your community. And maybe it would have a ritual mechanisms. Maybe it would encourage you to just post something in line with the community's values or redirect or something. You know, I don't I don't know. I've been looking at the closest I've gotten to understanding the science of culture building and the science of building reliable cultures is in the business school literature. Because you have a lot of people in the consulting space who talk about organizational culture and sell to companies ways to build a good culture. And that seems to be the least bad sort of set of set of theories or perspectives that that I can find for for how we could go systematically, intentionally, you know, with software support in the direction of of make of that people side of making people feel together and making people and and helping people hold the values that that makes the that that kind of community special. I see your hand, Josh, but I do want to, if possible. Jenny, could you could you share that in in words, in voice?
Yes. Sure. I think it's an interesting question. I was kind of noodling over it, what you're saying, things that are not really thought of as governance but become more governance oriented online. And I think a lot of architecture kind of scratches this or, like, starts to address this perspective, especially because I went to a a grad school with all these architects, and it's really interesting to hear about how academic architects describe their practice. And, like, the thinking about how to direct flow through buildings, for example, are all decisions that are kind of made, and it reflects in the discipline as well. Spatial architects are a lot more paternalistic in how they think about it. There's a, like, a lot of all their reading and philosophy is, like, thinking around, like, we make these decisions for people. Whereas, web design and UX UX design is very, like has become very human centered. Maybe, you know, for a lot of good, but it kind of devolves into, like, we'll test it and figure it out. We're just gonna have to pull people. So even though they're two design disciplines, they're still they come from very different pulls. And I think is it Cast Sensing that started writing about choice architecture recently? It makes me wonder if there's, like, cultural architecture that can be built because somebody has to walk through the building first. Right? You you can't just kind of expect people to there's there has to be some sort of direction to start out with. So it's it's something I'm just sort of thinking about.
Josh?
I just wanna say, first off, that's a really beautiful analogy or observation between the differences between these different kinds of architectures. Between open space architecture where physical architects and I guess UX designers. That's so interesting actually. I wonder if that could be like or maybe it's just a clarification. Is that like is that sort of observation of that differences? The difference between these like specific approaches? Is that like like a well established sort of like connection or is that something you're just kind of observing from your own experiences?
I would be really interested if other people have commented on it because there's not that many people that work between those two spaces. It does make me wonder about, like, VR design and AR design. Like, maybe Snapchat people are kind of in that mix of, digital spaces, but it's there there's something kind of, like, infinite I think there's a feeling of, like, infinitely indivisible virtual stuff that's a lot of web apps are still going for. But once you start layering in the spatial element, it starts to be, like, quite limited. You have to decide, divide. There are clear boundaries. A lot of our, like, commons oriented metaphors start to apply more when you think about space, and I think the web the digital space is starting to realize that there are spatial boundaries.
So the organization of, like, how spatial architects work is really limited by or it's it's a function of their limitations in terms of, like, once I involve space considerations, I can't just, like, create the space and iterate. So but I I guess also it's like maybe there's, like you could make the argument that, like, like, UX researchers are just, like, you know, they're finding some local optimum because it's cheaper and easier to do user testing. Maybe the physical architects, because they were forced to go this way or have to develop better tools or better systems for rigorously built. I don't know. I'm just, like, making up something, but that's that's super interesting sort of connection.
I wanna chime in on this topic. I mean, I'm a big fan of this analogy. I've used it actually a couple times, but I think they're or several times. They're more similar than even you might realize because when you start thinking about what what the equivalent of spatial restrictions are in digital spaces or, like, you know, cyberspace, so to speak, you quickly realize that, like, colocation looks a lot like your attention is located in the same place, and that moving through a space can be mapped to the concepts of friction that appear in UX. So you actually really do need to funnel people into spaces together to get them to do things together. You need to do a lot of things that actually start to look a lot like what you might reason about in physical space. You can't just grow unbounded because if you have too much space, people spread out and don't accumulate together and don't do things together. So, like, although maybe it's not a limitation from a material physical limitation sense, some of the limitations actually still make sense. And so, like, if we reason about this and start to, like, draw parallels, I think you'll find, at least in my experience, the the the analogies are are actually pretty consistent, well founded, and maybe not perfect in every aspect. It it really just begs the question about what the middle ground is because a super top down paternalistic approach is not particularly productive, but a totally raw bottom up approach is also, you know, it turns into a random walk. And so you end up needing to find the right way to ask, like, what things do you need to be imposed structurally, you know, and what things need to be discovered iteratively. And, anyway so that that's sort of my take on it. And I I I just say it from the perspective that it was really cool to hear somebody making that link because I feel like I'm often trying to make that case and people are kinda like, maybe. But, you know, it's different. And I'm like, it it doesn't feel different. Anyway so awesome thing. I appreciate that comment.
Is this knocking more loose for you, Jenny?
Oh, yeah. I just posted a link about this too, but I think a lot of people that look into, like, psy ops and information warfare kinda think about this just like I I really like the connection of attention as territory. I think that kind of helps link more things to me. And maybe that's kind of, like, why intuitively, higher fidelity media like video chat just feels more local because you must draw more attention and there's, like, grades of it, like, video cam on. I it's hard for me to multitask right now while I'm, like, literally talking on video camera. But, yeah, maybe that's where the metaphor ends. Like, I don't know how you can be in two rooms at once
physically.
I it's worth pointing here with all the interest and attention that the very first applications of, like, kind of resource management, self governance frameworks, to online spaces that I'm aware of is Peter Kolick's work from the nineties. This he's he was a socio quantitative sociologist on Usenet applying the Ostrom design principles to how discussions are managed online. And he identified the resource being managed by most rules that existed on the early Usenet discussion platform were about managing attention. So the introduction of the idea of proceeding your subject line square brackets was, you know, a a rule that popped up in communities that clearly helps people decide what to pay attention to, what to skip, rules about using all caps. All of these sort of fit into that realm of actively managing attention as the the resource of interest in online spaces. So we have basically, we can say it may be one of the first online goods that was that did receive a merit governance effort.
To kind of bring it to governance, again, for attention, is there, like, an equivalent of, like I I think, like, an offline context, apathy around governance is kind of an issue, like, political apathy. You can have a lot of great governance tools, but a lot of people, like, are like, people that don't vote or just kind of float along. They're almost like equivalent of lurkers. Is there some sort of, like, engagement to be measured here? Or, like, I I think I think that's a quite common problem with online tools where you can set all these rules and standards, but if there's not enough buy in, it's just kind of bureaucracy or cruft without usage?
Yeah. Yeah. Well so can I can I try to get you to answer your question? If we were managing a tool that for engagement in Krishna, that's the worst word. If there if we're imagining a tool for for, I guess, meriting new rules, waiting until that they're needed, what do you what what what would you build? This is a problem you've decided to devote your next five years to. Is is there a way you'd tackle it?
Like, I think wonder if there's, like, a minimum liable governance type of thing, but that kind of suggests that you have to break a rule before you suggest governance to fix it. Mhmm. But I I think I often see this with, like, the project management space where you start a project and a lot of people are quite keen to, like, set up, like, here's our base camp, here's our Asana, here's our, like, our toolkit when the project doesn't quite need it. And then Yeah. You end up with more tool tooling than you need at the time, so being able to match that better.
I actually love that a lot. I've been really engaging with that and seeing a lot of that. That actually seems like a great example of something that's kind of more keenly needed online than offline is rather than a governance system, a sort of a theory for the stages of governance systems and that allow you precisely to start with minimal and kind of maybe have flags or or some indication. Congrats. You have now reached the point that you should probably have written rules. Congrats. You have now reached the point that you can now transition out of your kind of implicit benevolent dictatorship model into something more community run. Congratulations. You've now reached this milestone that you should probably have not just rule enforcement, but appeal processes for rule enforcement, which you do see in especially large communities.
I can make an observation, maybe see what people think, but it sounds like we're still very focused on creating structures, deploying the rules, deploying the tools to, like the thing that drives me nuts is that people seem to disappear the second you go to the maintenance, the stewardship, the the ongoing boring bit that's the actual living thing. And so, like, if everyone's so focused on deploy the new thing or change the thing and never just do the thing, like, you don't have these living things that persist and provide, you know, support or whatever. And I don't really even here where I feel like we're better about it, we still lean in the direction of the new tool, the new rule, the deploy the new thing. And I'm wondering what people's thoughts are about how to maybe, like, rebalance that.
Do you mean online? Or I I sorry. This is kind of my first time or at least first time in a while. So the the implicit question is that we're always talking about online?
I think it's fine for it to be at least a comparative analysis. I'd say the focus is online, but I I don't see them as being a lot of times, at least, the discussions come to comparisons since there's probably a longer history of offline.
Well, I would just say,
you know, in the field of civic engagement, we encounter this, you know, apathy is encountered obviously in lack of participation, which gets called apathy, but I don't know if that's the actual case. But it's overcome with, like, civic bonds and people enjoying being with each other and, like, Coke and pizza and things like that. You know? And, obviously, that's not a terrific silver bullet, but as far as, like, the arduous part of enforcement that, you know, I think that can be enough just to, like, lean on community bonds. That that does get you through a lot.
I was on the board of a nonprofit that threw parties adjacent to big governance decisions in order to sort of get people into a room talking and getting the the, like, the points out there that would lead to a theoretically a more informed and more engaged membership. So totally with you on that.
Exactly. And it might seem kind of, like, feeble or really simplistic, but at the same time, like, it's just a it's it's a rule of thumb. It works if done right. And so yeah. The online, how do you do it? Yeah. That's a good question. Like, it has a lot to do with the way that you the bonds that you form. I I can't help but think that, like, gamification in ways of just sort of, like, incentivizing getting through a process which has a beginning and an end. And the beginning is fun and the end is satisfying, but then it kind of might be boring for a while, you know, and sort of finding a way to to get people to do that through through probably a mix of, like, bonds and and co like a sense of responsibility among the group and and maybe gamification.
Nathan?
Yeah. I I apologize for anybody that who's been subjected to this distinction because I've been think kind of pondering it for for a while, and I think if you if you have been in spaces on this, but I've been, like, thinking a lot about the the relation the kind of a distinction between kind of governance or sorry. Decision first governance and action first governance. So systems that are biased toward, like, governance as decision making as opposed to systems that also have decision making but really folded in the background, and the main purpose is to do things. And and so, for instance, like, in in kind of blockchain governance, the you know, you might consider, like, the difference between Aragon, which is focused on, like, voting and decisions versus Colony, which is focused on reputation and actions and, like, enabling actions based on a person's reputation. And and it seems like the latter, the the kind of action bias is, you know, something that that could you know, where this question of, like, maintenance and the doing is just is totally central, whereas the the decision bias might produce might be more likely to produce things like like Yeah. Zargan raised where people, you know, pitch in for the big decision, but don't really follow through on it and don't engage in maintenance and stuff like that. And and, you know, this this distinction really surfaced for me for the first time, not in the digital context, but really through, like, vicious arguments with a a mentor of mine who who in activist context, you know, who was a long standing activist going back to the nineteen fifties and civil rights and and, you know, got you know, keeps getting really angry at at people like me who was raised by middle class bureaucrats who prioritize and and focus on the decision and logic rather than, you know, what he understands is his bias from a working class perspective toward action. And so he really saw this as a class bias, which, you know, which I think is an interesting, dimension to the question as well. When we are designing governance structures, is there a kind of class, logic that we're that we're importing into into into these that will, you know, also affect who feels, most at home in the kind of structure that we're creating. Are we enabling people to do things, above all? Are we are are we designing structures that are biased from the perspective of, you know, what the bureaucrats need or what the the, you know, the owning glass needs or, so forth. So the so these kinds of biases can have, you know, important consequences. And and I think too, like, for instance, in designing community rule, I think there is a strong, like, structural, like, top down bias in it. It's it's about creating a structure, not about what you can and can't do. And so how we visualize our our, you know, governance designs, I think, also have has consequences for who feels welcome and imagining them and participating in them.
Thank you, Nathan. Jenny?
I wish this connected a little bit better to Nathan's topic, but I was thinking more about Zargim's question around why don't we focus on the maintenance part. And it's something I've been noticing a lot in just, like, digital product
development as as well. If you if you look at, like,
the way that Google does a as well. If you if you look at, like, the way that Google does a product, it's they much rather prefer to kill, a old product and replace it with a new one that has redundant the overlapping features. And it it kinda makes me think of from a more, like, cybernetics perspective. Maintenance is kind of trying to push towards an equilibrium. And, like, while I definitely see the value of that, especially in thinking of, like, large infrastructure that has, like, higher costs. I kind of wonder if this, like, cyclical nature of, like, new replacing the old is maybe just more natural. And even if you think about offline governance and, like, in terms of, like, revolutions, the the time scale is longer. But, yeah, I wonder if there's, like, governance tools that can retire a little bit more gracefully or if that's just part of the expectation of it. And, like, trying to strive for maintenance is like, I guess, like, knowing when to die might be something to think about.
That's great. I think someone shared, tools for, like, a website around how to kill your organization, how to, like, mourn or grieve or or shut down and say goodbye to a project, how to end the project. Maybe if that rings a bell, someone can share that link. And then it might have been superior. I want I was I pinged Miriam if you're if you're if you're comfortable unpacking your reflection on the.
Yeah. I just wanted to, like, get get that out while I was thinking it's pretty specific to the policy kit and Medigub tools that we're building. But I think, like, this discussion about at this discussion in the chart about, like, decision making only being a small part of governance. And when we talk about, like, MediGov and PolicyKit as governance tools, then they need to encompass more than just the decision making process, which is not revelatory. We've talked about this. But, as I was thinking about this, like, architecture and culture thing, the way that I see that digitally usually is, like, through community bots that are, like, welcoming people or, like, trying to, like, nudge people and gamifying things into in an attempt to, like, build a certain kind of culture. So thinking of, basically what Nathan said, like a tool that kind of just does stuff. So which PolicyKit is. And in that way, the tool itself that basically is like a community controlled bot where obviously, it requires, like, some amount of engaged people to be maintaining and iterating on that bot as the community needs changes and as they, see how the culture is, like, responding to it. But, that that was my thought.
Great. So I yeah. Yeah. If I if I'm hearing right, you've been thinking how far should we extend PolicyKit? Should we extend it to include the whole pipeline? And this discussion is helping you say, we should extend it a little bit and not further. We beyond a certain point of, let's say, culture, we should start writing other tools. And, hopefully, that's a fair restatement of what you said. It's just me trying to reflect what you said. But it does help me appreciate in in my own interest in culture building tools. I should probably start articulating them myself. Is is is what Slack already provides not enough? What am I what do I feel like it's missing, and and how would I wanna see it push? So that's valuable. In our last minute, I wanna reflect that I'm quite happy how much engagement we got. Matt, I really appreciate the practitioner kinda on the ground perspective. Everybody offered something. Maybe a closing word from one of our pure lurkers. Thomas, with your offline comments, Mark or or or Shu. Having just watched and observed, any closing thought as we end it in the last minute?
I I I'm not a specialist on on, let's say, digital
Even better.
Digital communities. But, anyway, I think it's the analogy you made about architecture is is interesting. It reminds me when you do research in in in fields. And on the one hand, you have, let's say, the modernist that try to impose a structure on the reality and ignore, usually, people that are living there. And the discussion about the flow of people showed this very, very well. If you see a city like Brasilia, the Capella of Brazil, it's with the modernist model, and it it didn't think very much about the people living there. No? And and the communities out there organized. So they they they have a center, and they have satellites. And in the nineteen seventies, they show it like a a model city. Now it's not anymore the model city. And I think what you have, it's an an opposition of a logic that's related to the Cartesian conception of of the human being and its interaction. And so I think Well,
I so I I don't wanna keep folks too much longer, but I I I I really do like your little caution for all of us. The perils of thinking that and the perils and hubris of even thinking we can design social systems and have them come out any way like what we imagine they would. With that, thank you, everybody. Let's maybe we can unmute and give everybody a hand for our great, wrap participation. One, two, and three. Actual clapping. Alright. Thanks, folks. See you next week. Later.