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Join us for a relaxed social for folks interested in public AI, civic AI, and paths forward for AI that center public institutions and the collective good. Among other things, we'll discuss:

Full agenda + sign up to give a short talk here

Co-organized by Brandon Jackson (Metagov), Laurie Penny, Alex Krasodomski (Chatham House), and Joshua Tan (Metagov/Oxford). With gratitude to Edward Saperia.

Public & Civic AI Social

Co-organized by Joshua Tan (Metagov/Oxford), Laurie Penny, and Alex Krasodomski (Chatham House). With gratitude to Ed Saperia.

 Case, from DAO DAO, will be taking Nathan Schneider's place for this event. 

Join us for the Metagov House series at ETH Denver. We are hosting four discussions/workshops looking at: 

This workshop will take participants through a discussion and play-based exploration of collective design and governance of games. 

Participants will hear talks from Paul and Nathan on attention surfaces and in-game organization, and break-out into groups to play a modified game of "We-Ness" and think together about questions like these: 

(Google Doc) before registering for this event to see if this is something you would like to participate in. 

Metagov House @ ETH Denver - Collective Game Design and Governance

This event's workshop is focused on attention governance:

In this age of endless information and distractions, rethinking governance and economies also requires rethinking how we govern our attention, at both the individual and community level. For example: How is the attention of members being allocated in a given community? What kinds of interfaces do we need to organize our attention across multiple communities? How do members gain enough knowledge to make informed decisions? How much should communities expect of their members’ attention?

Corporate capitalism dominates our current economy to the extent that most people cannot imagine any alternative to it (if trying to imagine any at all). Similarly, the platform capitalism of social media platforms has locked us into a harmful yet seemingly inevitable attention economy. Platforms enact a “tyranny of convenience” in which it becomes increasingly harder to imagine, let alone implement, viable alternatives to a reality in which our attention is monetized, managed, and mediated by algorithms over which we have little say or control.

In this workshop we wish to explore together regenerative attention economies, which we hope will be more cooperative, decentralized and participatory, as well as more mindful of human abilities and limitations. Participants will come away with some basic frameworks for thinking about attention in governance, and their contributions will help inform a new research project on this topic at the Metagovernance Project.

More practically, some themes and questions we want to discuss in the workshop include:

Metagov House @ ETH Denver - The Noise of Democracy: Attention Economies and Governance Surfaces

If you’re interested in building DAO based communities organized around social relations that decenter profit motives, come join a speculative workshop in which we co-conjure a crypto-economic system based on affinal kinship logics of self-selected mutual obligation.

How can blockchain-based socio-technical forms such as DAOs be mobilized for projects that further social, political, and economic rights?

In an era characterized by mistrust in politics, established institutions, and experts, blockchains have been heralded as a new "trustless" technology poised to enable new social, political, and economic formations that do not rely on corrupt authorities. Blockchain's 

 is thought to derive from the immutability provided by cryptographic security. I don't need to know anything about you in order to transact with you anonymously and reliably on the Internet using a blockchain. Yet, many experimenters in the blockchain space are coming to realize that the social coordination that blockchains enable do rely in some ways on reputation, solidarity, familiarity--in other words, on permutations of what is often called "trust."

Most scholarship presumes trust to be more readily achievable in small-scale, "face to face" societies in which individuals know each other and can swiftly sanction deviant behavior. Trust is thought to become more difficult to scale up in modern societies in which each individual only knows a small subset of the overall group. In such large, complex societies, it is presumed, governing institutions such as the state and its administrative and judicial bodies become essential to maintaining the social fabric. Trust, in this view, is achieved through the reliable supply of rights, services, and mechanisms for repairing violations. Blockchain's innovation —its repair for the crisis of trust in institutions—is "trustlessness." Anonymous participants might coordinate without trusting each other or a middle-man; they could simply "trust" the technology itself.

Against the common wisdom, anthropological research suggests that social coordination in small-scale societies works 

 because all members know each other but because their relations to others in the social group are structured by sets of mutual obligations defined by kinship relations. Indeed, in many indigenous societies, kinship is the basis not just for social but also political and economic organization. 

Can the social coordinative functions of kinship be translated into the virtual world?

Most of the thinking around online self-governance and token economies proceeds from assumptions of autonomous individual actors motivated by economic incentives and operating according to game-theoretical models. I suggest that kinship relationality supporting a demand sharing economy could offer a startlingly different premise for online self-governance, one that is morally aligned with the transformative objectives of social justice by prioritizing the health of the community over the individual accumulation of value.

Within this moment of experimentation with social coordination, I extend Haraway’s injunction to "make kin," by doing so cryptographically. Blockchain technologies could be mobilized as techno-social assemblages to bring together unrelated individuals in non-biological kin relations: making crypto-kinship, as it were, for the purpose of building commons-oriented online communities. 

This workshop seeks to bring together all those interested in co-conjuring an experimental crypto-kinship DAO with the aim of growing healthy communities.

Metagov House @ ETH Denver - Experimental Affinal Kinship-Logics for DAOs

While DAOs started as a decentralized way for individuals to organize loosely around common interests and goals, DAO Constitutions have recently emerged as a core feature for DAOs. By serving as a governing document, they set out the structure, purpose and direction of the organization.

While many authors favor the use of an eternity clause in their DAO Constitution to ensure that the original vision and goals of the DAO are preserved over time, others claim that such clause will prevent the DAO from adapting to changing circumstances.

In this workshop, we will explore the role of DAO constitutions in general and discuss the creation of amendable DAO constitutions. We will examine key considerations to keep in mind when drafting a constitutions, following examples of SAFE, Filecoin, and Q. 

This workshop is intended for individuals who are involved in creating or managing a DAO and have a basic understanding of DAOs and blockchain technology. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a deeper understanding of the importance of an amendable DAO constitution and will have gained practical insights into how to create and implement one.