Distroid Issue 14: Diving into the Microwork Rabbithole
Welcome to Distroid, a monthly newsletter on convergence (connection and/or integration) in the decentralized web (i.e., Web3).
Distroid is put together by Charles (Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative).
It includes links to the latest research, useful articles, videos, podcasts, tweets, tools, project updates, events, and more. Expect a new edition at the end of every month and be sure to share and subscribe!
If you want any of these articles summarized, send me a message.
Outline
Profile
Diving into the Microwork Rabbithole
Books
Research
Articles
Courses
Art
Videos/Podcasts
Tools
Games
Project Updates
Events
Jobs
Tweets
Glossary
Questions
1. Profile
Saiph Savage
Background. Saiph is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, where she directs the Civic A.I. Lab. Dr. Savage has experience working at the University of Washington (UW) in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Dr. Savage also currently co-directs the UNAM Civic Innovation Lab, and opened the area of Human Computer Interaction at West Virgina University. Dr. Saiph holds a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), a masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, Saiph was a tech worker at Intel Labs and Microsoft Bing, as well as a crowd research worker at Stanford.
2. Diving into the Microwork Rabbithole
Rabbithole is an Ethereum DApp for making and taking Web3-related tasks (currently just microwork). The majority of the tasks are offered by DeFi providers, such as Compound and Superfluid. The tasks are meant to encourage Web3 users to learn and use DApps (primarily DeFi apps). Users can earn cryptocurrencies and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for completing tasks, and accrue experience points (XP).
An example quest is Intro to Compound. In this quest, users are asked to “[s]upply and borrow tokens on Compound, a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol and liquidity network for digital assets.” A user can earn 0.15 COMP (~ $49.14) and an NFT of the Rabbithole logo as an animation, and 200 XP.
Rabbithole provides a means for an implicit credential of skills and expertise because the user’s tasks are recorded publicly on the Ethereum blockchain. Thus, Rabbithole users can market their skills and expertise to potential Web3 employers through their on-chain resumes.
In AI needs to face up to its invisible-worker problem, Saiph Savage discusses the invisible labor, the “thousands of [crowdworkers]” working on crowdworking platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk who power the development of Big Tech’s machine learning models. These crowdworkers often take on micro-work tasks such as data labeling (e.g., labeling images and websites, or transcribing audio).
Saiph Savage identified the following problems with crowdwork:
Crowdworkers earn low wages, and some earn wages that are even less than the US minimum wage, even though they are working full-time; and
Crowdworkers find it difficult to find future employment opportunities because their skills are not readily recognized, it is hard to find ways to develop their skills, and most employers have not heard of these crowdwork platforms (“We found that a lot of people don’t put their work on these platforms on their résumé”).
Saiph Savage also makes an interesting point about career ladders in the quote below.
That’s a start. But it would be interesting to think about career ladders. For instance, we could guide workers to do a number of different tasks that let them develop their skills. We can also think about providing other opportunities. Companies putting jobs on these platforms could offer online micro-internships for the workers.
And we should support entrepreneurs. I've been developing tools that help people create their own gig marketplaces. Think about these workers: they are very familiar with gig work and they might have new ideas about how to run a platform. The problem is that they don’t have the technical skills to set one up, so I’m building a tool that makes setting up a platform a little like configuring a website template.
I think the success of Rabbithole shows that an alternative model for incentivizing and tracking micro-work is possible. Rabbithole has shown a means for Web3 users to be recognized for their skills and expertise by completing microwork and recording such activities on-chain, thereby resolving the invisibility issues raised in the article.
I think a Rabbithole-like DApp for data labeling may solve the problems mentioned by Saiph Savage in the article for four reasons.
First, crowdworkers could have access to more diversified rewards schemes such as the Intro to Compound quest (and even functional NFTs), and greater means to build their reputations.
Second, crowdworkers would have more transparency on “which tasks are worth their time and which let you develop certain skills” because all the tasks and rewards are on-chain. Additionally, companies would have more transparency on the time and effort it takes for crowdworkers to complete tasks.
Third, crowdworkers could showcase (and explain) their skills and expertise to potential employers because their work is recorded on-chain, thereby resolving the invisibility issue raised in the article.
Fourth, I think such an app would also make it easier for companies to find exceptional crowdworkers and offer them “micro-internships” at their companies. Alternatively, these crowdworkers may think of starting their own companies.
3. Books
Chapter 9: Gigs of their own: reinventing worker cooperativism in the platform economy and its implications for collective action
Platform Economy Puzzles: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Gig Work
2021-08-17
4. Research
Themes, objectives and participants of citizen science activities
Samu Paajanen, Emilia Lampi & Joni Lämsä;Raija Hämäläinen
CS Track
2021-06-24
Big Tech: Four Emerging Forms of Digital Rentiership
Kean Birch & D. T. Cochrane (2021)
Science as Culture
2021-05-26
The problem of innovation in technoscientific capitalism: data rentiership and the policy implications of turning personal digital data into a private asset
Kean Birch, Margaret Chiappetta & Anna Artyushina
2020-03-31
Policy Studies
A spate of recent scandals concerning personal digital data illustrates the extent to which innovation and finance are thoroughly entangled with one another. The innovation-finance nexus is an example of an emerging dynamic in technoscientific capitalism in which innovation is increasingly driven by the pursuit of “economic rents”. Unlike innovation that delivers new products, services, and markets, innovation as rentiership is defined by the extraction and capture of value through different modes of ownership and control over resources and assets. This shift towards rentiership is evident in the transformation of personal digital data into a private asset. In light of this assetization, it is necessary to unpack how innovation itself might be a problem, rather than a solution to a range of global challenges. Our aim in this paper is to conceptualize this relationship between innovation, finance, and data rentiership, and examine the policy implications of this pursuit of economic rents as a deliberate research and innovation strategy in data-driven technology sectors.
Applying intelligence amplification in decision making
2016
This thesis proposes an intelligence amplification (IA) framework to apply IA in decision making. With this IA framework, IA is applied to solve planning problems of synchromodal transport in the simulated environment. Through the case study, the proposed IA framework shows its effectiveness in solving the task assignment to achieve the human-intelligent agent collaboration. Besides, this thesis proves IA's benefits in improving decision and shows that humans' decision making performance is enhanced by IA.
Studying Up Machine Learning Data: Why Talk About Bias When We Mean Power?
Milagros Miceli, Julian Posada, Tianling Yang
2021-09-16
Association for Computing Machinery
Research in machine learning (ML) has primarily argued that models trained on incomplete or biased datasets can lead to discriminatory outputs. In this commentary, we propose moving the research focus beyond bias oriented framings by adopting a power-aware perspective to “study up” ML datasets. This means accounting for historical inequities, labor conditions, and epistemological standpoints inscribed in data. We draw on HCI and CSCW work to support our argument, critically analyze previous research, and point at two co-existing lines of work within our community — one bias-oriented, the other power-aware. This way, we highlight the need for dialogue and cooperation in three areas: data quality, data work, and data documentation. In the first area, we argue that reducing societal problems to “bias” misses the context-based nature of data. In the second one, we highlight the corporate forces and market imperatives involved in the labor of data workers that subsequently shape ML datasets. Finally, we propose expanding current transparency-oriented efforts in dataset documentation to reflect the social contexts of data design and production.
CrowdCO-OP: Sharing Risks and Rewards in Crowdsourcing
Shaoyang Fan, Ujwal Gadiraju, Alessandro Checco, & Gianluca Demartini
2020-10-14
Association for Computing Machinery
Paid micro-task crowdsourcing has gained in popularity partly due to the increasing need for large-scale manually labelled datasets which are often used to train and evaluate Artificial Intelligence systems. Modern paid crowdsourcing platforms use a piecework approach to rewards, meaning that workers are paid for each task they complete, given that their work quality is considered sufficient by the requester or the platform. Such an approach creates risks for workers; their work may be rejected without being rewarded, and they may be working on poorly rewarded tasks, in light of the disproportionate time required to complete them. As a result, recent research has shown that crowd workers may tend to choose specific, simple, and familiar tasks and avoid new requesters to manage these risks. In this paper, we propose a novel crowdsourcing reward mechanism that allows workers to share these risks and achieve a standardized hourly wage equal for all participating workers. Reward-focused workers can thereby take up challenging and complex HITs without bearing the financial risk of not being rewarded for completed work. We experimentally compare different crowd reward schemes and observe their impact on worker performance and satisfaction. Our results show that 1) workers clearly perceive the benefits of the proposed reward scheme, 2) work effectiveness and efficiency are not impacted as compared to those of the piecework scheme, and 3) the presence of slow workers is limited and does not disrupt the proposed cooperation-based approaches
Quantifying the Invisible Labor in CrowdWork
Carlos Toxtl, Siddharth Suri, Saiph Savage
2021-10
Association for Computing Machinery
Crowdsourcing markets provide workers with a centralized place to find paid work. What may not be obvious at first glance is that, in addition to the work they do for pay, crowd workers also have to shoulder a variety of unpaid invisible labor in these markets, which ultimately reduces workers’ hourly wages. Invisible labor includes finding good tasks, messaging requesters, or managing payments. However, we currently know little about how much time crowd workers actually spend on invisible labor or how much it costs them economically. To ensure a fair and equitable future for crowd work, we need to be certain that workers are being paid fairly for all of the work they do. In this paper, we conduct a field study to quantify the invisible labor in crowd work. We build a plugin to record the amount of time that 100 workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk dedicate to invisible labor while completing 40,903 tasks. If we ignore the time workers spent on invisible labor, workers’ median hourly wage was $3.76. But, we estimated that crowd workers in our study spent 33% of their time daily on invisible labor, dropping their median hourly wage to $2.83. We found that the invisible labor differentially impacts workers depending on their skill level and workers’ demographics. The invisible labor category that took the most time and that was also the most common revolved around workers having to manage their payments. The second most time-consuming invisible labor category involved hyper-vigilance, where workers vigilantly watched over requesters’ profiles for newly posted work or vigilantly searched for labor. We hope that through our paper, the invisible labor in crowdsourcing becomes more visible, and our results help to reveal the larger implications of the continuing invisibility of labor in crowdsourcing.
Platformisation in game development
Internet Policy Review
2021-10-21
This article examines how the process of platformisation is manifesting in videogame development. Rather than reinforcing a top-down perspective of platformisation centred on distribution platforms like app stores, we focus on often overlooked game-making tools and the independent, entrepreneurial, and fringe communities that govern and use them. We draw on case studies of Unity and Twine, two such tools that have transformed videogame creation and distribution. By considering how they complicate existing understandings and definitions of both ‘platform’ and ‘platformisation’, we move beyond reductive narratives that frame platformisation as a fixed, hegemonic process. Instead, we reveal a much more ambiguous and complex relationship between game makers and the platforms they use.
Internet and blockchain technologies: authoritarian or democratic?
Andy Yee, Public Policy and Government Relations, Visa, China
Internet Policy Review
2019-05-22
Both the internet and blockchain technologies started out as libertarian aspirations to empower individuals through decentralisation, openness, and freedom. Over time, however, competing visions have emerged. Notably, authoritarian nations like China and Russia have reasserted their internet sovereignty through technologies of censorship and surveillance. In the blockchain world, Facebook and J.P. Morgan are reportedly launching their own centralised cryptocurrencies. What these examples show is that both the internet and blockchain are not monolithic architectures, but rather fluid arrangements subject to evolution and political pressure.
Democratic and collective ownership of public goods and services
Luca Hopman, Satoko Kishimoto, Bertie Russell, Louisa Valentin
The Transnational Institute
2021-08-20
Key findings
A great diversity and number of experiments are found in the energy sector. Some of the main reasons for this are the ongoing and deepening climate crisis and the fact that cities are acting as agents of change. Nearly all cases tackle inequality (energy poverty) as a central challenge in the transition strategy. These experiences have demonstrated public-civic co-ownership of local infrastructure and service provision are possible, and they have pioneered citizen-centred just energy transitions. (stories from Wolfhagen [Germany], Cádiz [Spain], Plymouth [UK])
Public ownership of lands (for agriculture) and utilities (such as water) plays a key positive role. A municipality promotes sustainable agriculture, partnering with farmers, and exercises its public procurement power to purchase local products and services. Multiple public objectives are achieved at once: a healthy environment, good nutrition, sustainable agriculture, local job creation and local economic development. (story from Rennes [France])
Housing in cities is an area engaged in an on-going battle against speculation, gentrification caused by excessive financialisation, and private ownership. Public social housing stocks have been sold for the last decades. Many cities have faced struggles to control excessive rent increase and over- tourism. It is a lesson from many cities to not sell municipal assets (Vienna), and instead establish a public-community collaboration to co-manage assets. (story from the London Borough of Haringey [UK])
Public-community collaborations are not about extra financial burden for local governments, but represent a long-term investment for long-lasting values. Moreover, such partnerships can be self-sustained and self-extended when financing is well designed. Starting with local authorities’ ability to capitalise on financial resources, it is possible to develop locally owned and managed profit-generating infrastructure. These profits are reinvested into projects designed for the benefit of the local communities. (stories from the Lazio region [Italy], the London Borough of Haringey [UK], Burlington, Vermont [USA], Plymouth [UK])
Local authorities have the power to end precarious work and strengthen workers’ rights by creating decent jobs. Terminating a contract with multinationals for municipal services such as care and cleaning can be the first step. Further, local authorities can support the creation of workers’ co-ops and use public procurement power to extend their financial support. Locally organised workers’ co-ops are key players in the advancement of the democratic economy. Empowered workers enjoying their autonomy can deliver essential care services for cities and improve local well-being. (story from Recoleta [Chile])
What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy
Steven Vallas & Juliet B. Schor
Annual Review of Sociology
2020-04-21
The rapid growth of the platform economy has provoked scholarly discussion of its consequences for the nature of work and employment. We identify four major themes in the literature on platform work and the underlying metaphors associated with each. Platforms are seen as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, accelerants of precarity, and chameleons adapting to their environments. Each of these devices has limitations, which leads us to introduce an alternative image of platforms: as permissive potentates that externalize responsibility and control over economic transactions while still exercising concentrated power. As a consequence, platforms represent a distinct type of governance mechanism, different from markets, hierarchies, or networks, and therefore pose a unique set of problems for regulators, workers, and their competitors in the conventional economy. Reflecting the instability of the platform structure, struggles over regulatory regimes are dynamic and difficult to predict, but they are sure to gain in prominence as the platform economy grows.
Unions: Scale and Trust
Nick Houde & Arthur Röing Baer
Trust.support
2020-01-12
Currently, union membership is declining all across the OECD and in most other regions in the world while anti-union sentiment and legislation have become commonplace giving workers few, if any, means to collectively bargain with increasingly large and diffuse firms. At the same time, zero hour contract models and the platformization of labor have fragmented and deconstructed many of the labor protections that unions have made possible which has, in turn, destabilized the conditions for social solidarity that once made collective bargaining effective. All of these conditions add up to some severe questions that unions must face regarding their efficacy and survival in a 21st century global economy that is structurally stacked against their current ability to leverage power.
Outside Looking In: Approaches to Content Moderation in End-to-End Encrypted Systems
Dhanaraj Thakur, Guest Post, Mallory Knodel, Emma Llansó, Greg Nojeim & Caitlin Vogus
Center for Democracy & Technology
2021-08-12
A new front has opened up in the Crypto Wars: content moderation. During the 1990’s, policy debates in the U.S. and Europe about encryption focused on the benefits and risks of public and foreign access to encryption. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world pushed for restrictions on the development and export of encryption technologies, arguing that greater public access would limit their ability to monitor communications to fight crime and protect the public. In the end, the U.S. government decided against such restrictions with a shift in policy in 1999 (Swire & Ahmad, 2011), and other governments followed suit.
As billions of people around the world began to use encrypted services to protect their privacy and data when communicating with others, the concerns of law enforcement agencies regained prominence in the last decade. In 2014, the then-Director of the FBI argued that encrypted communications were an impediment to law enforcement (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2014). A 2020 statement by the governments of the U.S., UK, Canada, India, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand expressed similar concerns, calling for greater access by law enforcement to encrypted communications (U.S. Department of Justice, 2020).
Statements such as these tend to focus encryption policy on law enforcement and intelligence agencies’ claims that they need to be able to access encrypted communications (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). But encryption is not just a law enforcement issue. The availability of secure encrypted communication services is central to privacy, free expression, and the security of today’s online commerce (Thompson & Park, 2020).
Perhaps recognizing the uphill battle they face to undermine such a crucial part of our online infrastructure, some law enforcement officials have begun to link the threat of unconstrained illegal content online to concerns about large social media platforms’ content moderation practices. In the U.S., for example, the proposed EARN IT Act was framed as a bill that would establish best practices in content moderation for fighting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but the debate quickly came to focus on the implications of the bill for end-to-end encryption (E2EE), with many commentators expressing concern that the bill’s approach was designed to discourage providers from offering E2EE services or create strong incentives to build in a special access mechanism for law enforcement (Murdock, 2020; Newman, 2020; Ruane, 2020).
But what is the actual effect of encryption on content moderation?
In this paper, we assess existing technical proposals for content moderation in E2EE services. First, we explain the various tools in the content moderation toolbox, how they are used, and the different phases of the moderation cycle, including detection of unwanted content. We then lay out a definition of encryption and E2EE, which includes privacy and security guarantees for end-users, before assessing current technical proposals for the detection of unwanted content in E2EE services against those guarantees.
We find that technical approaches for user-reporting and meta-data analysis are the most likely to preserve privacy and security guarantees for end-users. Both provide effective tools that can detect significant amounts of different types of problematic content on E2EE services, including abusive and harassing messages, spam, mis- and disinformation, and CSAM, although more research is required to improve these tools and better measure their effectiveness. Conversely, we find that other techniques that purport to facilitate content detection in E2EE systems have the effect of undermining key security guarantees of E2EE systems.
The current technical proposals that we reviewed all focus on content detection, which is only one part of the content moderation process. Thus, there may be other useful and effective approaches to moderation for countering abuse in E2EE systems, including user education about applicable policies, improved design to encourage user reports, and consistency of enforcement decisions. These approaches may offer important potential avenues for researchers to build on our analysis.
Cryptoeconomics as a Limitation on Governance
Nathan Schneider
OSF
2021-10-18
Governance practices in distributed-ledger systems have grown increasingly diverse and diffuse, while retaining a commitment to cryptoeconomics—the use of economic incentives to guide user behavior, in tandem with cryptographic technology. In the space of a few years, cryptoeconomics has introduced advances in techniques for self-governance. But reliance on cryptoeconomics also introduces limitations on governance possibilities. Drawing on earlier critiques of how economic logics can erode democracy, this paper identifies specific limitations that cryptoeconomic governance faces. It contends that, to overcome these limitations, designers should envelop cryptoeconomics within a logic of politics capable of seeing beyond economic metrics for human flourishing and the common good.
Meanings of Tools, Support, and Uses for Creative Design Processes
Kumiyo Nakakoji
Proceedings of International Design Research Symposium’06, CREDITS Research Center
2006
When evaluating application systems for designers, the roles and effects of the systems must be taken into account. Existing research on design support tools often seems to pay little attention to such evaluation variations, however. This paper uses three physical tools, dumbbells, running shoes, and skis, as analogies to explore different types of computational tools for design processes; dumbbells help people to develop muscles, running shoes allow people to run faster, and skis enable people to ski. We describe what different schemes would be appropriate and inappropriate in evaluating each type of design support tool. Some existing research tools for design are presented as illustrations of each type of physical tool analogy.
Market-Protocol Fit
Laura Lotti, Sam Hart & Toby Shorin
Otherinternet
2020-04-17
In the realm of open source permissionless innovation, the traditional product development cycle shows its limitations, because cryptonetworks are not companies. While startups with focused teams can iterate toward product-market fit, decentralized protocols must rely on headless branding and cooperative incentive structures to evolve. We call this market-protocol fit and describe the phases of this challenging process. While product-market fit is concerned with building an agile team to find and fill market demand, market-protocol fit begins with a broad distribution of tokens, followed by permissionless narrative formation and product innovation which activates them in useful ways. We conclude by outlining strategies that projects are using to advance the expansion of their decentralized ecosystems.
The platform belongs to those who work on it! Co-designing worker-centric task distribution models
David Rozas, Jorge Saldivar & Eve Zelickson
OpenSym
2021
Today, digital platforms are increasingly mediating our day-to-day work and crowdsourced forms of labour are progressively gaining importance (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk, Universal Human Relevance System, TaskRabbit). In many popular cases of crowdsourcing, a volatile, diverse, and globally distributed crowd of workers compete among themselves to find their next paid task. The logic behind the allocation of these tasks typically operates on a "First-Come, First-Served" basis. This logic generates a competitive dynamic in which workers are constantly forced to check for new tasks. This article draws on findings from ongoing collaborative research in which we co-design, with crowdsourcing workers, three alternative models of task allocation beyond "First-Come, First-Served", namely (1) round-robin, (2) reputation-based, and (3) content-based. We argue that these models could create fairer and more collaborative forms of crowd labour. We draw on Amara On Demand, a remuneration-based crowdsourcing platform for video subtitling and translation, as the case study for this research. Using a multi-modal qualitative approach that combines data from 10 months of participant observation, 25 semi-structured interviews, two focus groups, and documentary analysis, we observed and co-designed alternative forms of task allocation in Amara on Demand. The identified models help envision alternatives towards more worker-centric crowdsourcing platforms, understanding that platforms depend on their workers, and thus ultimately they should hold power within them.
ALGORITHMS AT WORK: THE NEW CONTESTED TERRAIN OF CONTROL
Katherine C. Kellogg, Melissa A. Valentine, & Angèle Christin
Academy of Management Annals
2020-01-15
The widespread implementation of algorithmic technologies in organizations prompts questions about how algorithms may reshape organizational control. We use Edwards’ (1979) perspective of “contested terrain,” wherein managers implement production technologies to maximize the value of labor and workers resist, to synthesize the interdisciplinary research on algorithms at work. We find that algorithmic control in the workplace operates through six main mechanisms, which we call the “6 Rs”—employers can use algorithms to direct workers by restricting and recommending, evaluate workers by recording and rating, and discipline workers by replacing and rewarding. We also discuss several key insights regarding algorithmic control. First, labor process theory helps to highlight potential problems with the largely positive view of algorithms at work. Second, the technical capabilities of algorithmic systems facilitate a form of rational control that is distinct from the technical and bureaucratic control used by employers for the past century. Third, employers’ use of algorithms is sparking the development of new algorithmic occupations. Finally, workers are individually and collectively resisting algorithmic control through a set of emerging tactics we call algoactivism. These insights sketch the contested terrain of algorithmic control and map critical areas for future research.
A Peer-To-Peer Publication Model on Blockchain
Frontiers in Blockchain
2021-02-02
In the past few decades, there has been a sharp rise of research irreproducibility and retraction, to a point that now is deemed as a crisis. Addressing this crisis, we present a peer-to-peer (P2P) publication model that utilizes blockchain and smart contract technologies. Focusing primarily on researchers and reviewers, the conceptual P2P publication model addresses the sociocultural and incentivization aspects of the irreproducibility crisis. In the P2P publication model, instead of a complete publication, a preapproved experimental design will be published on an incremental basis (unit-by-unit) and authorship will be shared with reviewers. The concept of the P2P publication model was inspired by the transformational journey the music publishing industry has undertaken as it traverses through vinyl age (complete albums) to the Spotify age (single-by-single), where there is a growing inclination among artists toward building an incremental album, taking account of feedback from fans and utilizing automated revenue collection and sharing systems. The ability to publish incrementally through the P2P publication model will relieve researchers from the burden of publishing complete and “good results” while simultaneously incentivizing reviewers to undertake rigorous review work to gain authorship credit in the research. The proposed P2P publication model aims to transform the century-old publication model and incentivization structure in alignment with open access publication ethos of the 21st century.
Unchaining Collective Intelligence for Science, Research, and Technology Development by Blockchain-Boosted Community Participation
Jens Ducrée, Martin Etzrodt, Sönke Bartling, Ray Walshe, Tomás Harrington, Neslihan Wittek, Sebastian Posth, Kevin Wittek, Andrei Ionita, Wolfgang Prinz, Dimitrios Kogias, Tiago Paixão, Iosif Peterfi, and James Lawton
Frontiers in Blockchain
2021-05-07
Since its launch just over a decade ago by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) blockchain has followed a breathtaking trajectory into manifold application spaces. This study aper analyses how key factors underpinning the success of this ground-breaking “Internet of value” technology, such as staking of collateral (“skin in the game”), competitive crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and prediction markets, can be applied to substantially innovate the legacy organization of science, research, and technology development (RTD). Here, we elaborate a highly integrative, community-based strategy where a token-based crypto-economy supports finding best possible consensus, trust, and truth by adding unconventional elements known from reputation systems, betting, secondary markets, and social networking. These tokens support the holder’s formalized reputation and are used in liquid-democracy style governance and arbitration within projects or community-driven initiatives. This participatory research model serves as a solid basis for comprehensively leveraging collective intelligence by effectively incentivizing contributions from the crowd, such as intellectual property work, validation, assessment, infrastructure, education, assessment, governance, publication, and promotion of projects. On the analogy of its current blockbusters like peer-to-peer structured decentralized finance (“DeFi”), blockchain technology can seminally enhance the efficiency of science and RTD initiatives, even permitting to fully stage operations as a chiefless decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs).
⭐Is a DAO a Panopticon? Algorithmic governance as creating and mitigating vulnerabilities in "Decentralised Autonomous Organisations"⭐
Kelsie Nabben
SSRN
2021-08-18
The Cypherpunks were terrified of surveillance. They envisaged the combination of cryptography and computer technology fundamentally altering the nature of trust and reputation. Now, not just on chain transactions but every move of participants in blockchain communities is being tracked. Reputation in blockchain systems could become the new algorithmic authoritarianism. Are ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation’s the next social credit panopticon of algorithmic governance or a different panacea, and what does this mean for human autonomy in “autonomous” systems?
TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods
Stephanie Lin, Jacob Hilton & Owain Evans
2021-09-16
We propose a benchmark to measure whether a language model is truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. We crafted questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models must avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts. We tested GPT-3, GPT-Neo/J, GPT-2 and a T5-based model. The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. Models generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans. The largest models were generally the least truthful. For example, the 6B-parameter GPT-J model was 17% less truthful than its 125M-parameter counterpart. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. However, this result is expected if false answers are learned from the training distribution. We suggest that scaling up models alone is less promising for improving truthfulness than fine-tuning using training objectives other than imitation of text from the web.
5. Articles
What does DAO look like in the eyes of more than 400 practitioners?
2021-09-13
Gitcoin DAO and Bankless DAO released a joint survey report on DAO, which refined the opinions of more than 400 DAO members on DAO and made this report into an NFT.
Redecentralize Digest — August 2021
Gerben
Redecentralize
2021-08
In this issue:
Appeals to prevent the next Google in the EU, and create “full stack” public media in the US
Apple’s controversial step towards making iPhones police their owners
Other tips & updates and events coming up
⭐Market Map of the Metaverse⭐
Jon Radoff
Building The Metaverse
2021-04-13
In my article on the value-chain of the metaverse, I described the seven layers of the ecosystem. In this article I’m going to focus-in on three of the most important metaverse companies — Unity, Epic Games and Roblox — and describe the commonalities and differences.
…
‘We’re all fighting the giant’: Gig workers around the world are finally organizing
PETER GUEST
2021-09-21
Rest of World
This past July, Singh was on a midnight run, biking a chocolate mousse cake 7 kilometers across Mumbai, when he was rammed by a drunk driver on a scooter from behind. He got off with a few scratches and sprains, but his bike was badly smashed up. The cost of fixing it — 14,000 rupees ($189) — is about what he takes home in a month working for Zomato, the Indian food and grocery delivery app. So for the last month, he’s been fixing it up a bit at a time whenever he can get the money together.
…
Biometric-based Marketplaces
Humanode Blog
2021-08-25
With user accounts tied to the crypto-biometrics based identification, businesses will be able to provide sybil defenses, only allowing “proven human beings” from providing reviews, being able to build (or utilize) credit scores for customers and merchants alike, and be able to prevent a wide variety of frauds (or at least be able to hold people accountable, in the form of blacklisting the ID, preventing them from doing more harm).
…
Crypto-Biometrics Helps Create Decentralized Pseudonymous Identities
Humanode
Hackernoon
2021-08-06
Why is it that the cryptocurrencies that were supposed to launch a new age of decentralized finance, are more centralized than even the Federal Reserve System in the U.S.?” was one of the main questions that shot through Dato Kavazi’s head back in 2017. As one of the co-founders of Paradigm, a crypto fund and research institute known for their thorough analytics, he was one of the many who were hopeful about the possibilities that decentralized finance could bring to the global economy, but at the same time was stumped by the fact that mining cartels and validator oligopolies seemed to dominate the market.
…
DAOs: MolochDAO discusses v2 upgrade, Uniswap resolves governance upgrade bug, Aave cross-chain governance, Curve gauge voting app, Polychain chimes in on Compound governance, Gitcoin + Bankless DAO worker survey, and more!
Paradigm
Medium
Sept 4, 2021 (2021-09-04)
TL;DR
MolochDAO is rising amongst the shadows and discussing a v2 upgrade
Uniswap resolves governance upgrade bug. While Uniswap’s community enabled analytics vote. At the same time, Uniswap Labs faces SEC investigation. Uniswap’s proposal to support stable UNI is live for voting
Andre Cronje releases trustless Curve voting bribery mechanism. Curve’s brand new gauge voting app allows checking bribes, biggest movers, new votes, etc
Cross-chain governance and open-sourcing the Aave UI. Aave adopts broader liquidity incentive scheme
Index Coop votes on a framework for submitting proposals in underlying governance systems
Polychain shares perspective on improving Compound governance through more focus and organization. While Compound’s proposal 057 passes
Decentralization at Balancer Labs. Community considering sourcecred program activation and staking of BPT for economic and governance benefits
Gitcoin and Bankless released DAO worker survey to better understand contributor experience. Gitcoin Grants Round 11 begins Sept 8th with the biggest matching pool yet
Idle DAO’s IIP-12 proposal lands in the forum. New members’ elections successfully passed
Synthetix V2x revisited. SCCP-137: reduce L2 target c-ratio to 750% is live for voting
‘A DAO defined: The Big Picture’ by Aragon. Check out the Aragon August project updates and the second ‘How to…’ series
PoolTogether proposal #21 passes. PoolTogether on Celo
Commons Stack & ixo foundation partner up to build the Internet of impact
Following approval of KIP-12, Kyber DMM and Rainmaker liquidity mining is now launched on Binance Chain. Moreover, KIP-13 passed
API3 announced the partnership with EQ8 network
PieDAO organizational roadmap Q3/Q4 2021
Controversy over Etherium gas limit token voting mechanism
Polygon’s DAO announcement
a16z delegate disclosure
Active proposals: Aave, Balancer, GitcoinDAO, Index Coop, Synthetix, PieDAO, Uniswap
New & ongoing discussions: Compound, mStable, MakerDAO, Yam Finance, Curve, Yearn Finance, Nexus Mutual, LidoDAO, BancorDAO, Akropolis, GnosisDAO, PoolTogether, API3, Idle, KyberDAO, Kleros
The importance of DAO tooling for social cohesion
Podcasts on DAOs
And more!
Make a personal changelog
Brian Lovin
2021-04-29
Over the years I’ve made dozens of websites, started and ended a handful of side businesses, hosted industry events, interviewed hundreds of people, written blog posts, reviewed apps, and generally used design and code to chip away at problems that I find interesting.
Despite all this, the world still expects my intersection of skills and experiences to fit neatly into a single title. For me, it’s product designer.
What a reduction!
…
UNLOCKING THE COMMONS
Nieman Lab
2019-01
The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free.
Collectivizing Finance
David Phelps & Annika Lewis
Three Quarks
2021-08-10
In other words, tokenization enables collectivization. It enables community. If you assume Web3 is the future, then you have to assume that Web3 is the future of investing. And in Web3, multiplayer investing is the default.
⭐A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy⭐
Harvard Business Review
2021-09-24
Platforms are fundamentally changing the contract between workers and companies — and the workers and creatives that create value for platform companies, and rely on platforms for their livelihoods, often have little power when it comes to getting the concerns addressed. In the face of this, a new form of collective labor activism tailored to the gig and creator economies is emerging: decentralized collective action (DCA). Mixing methods of traditional organizing with new approaches — from manipulating algorithms to deploying blockchain powered decentralized solutions — workers are using DCA to try to rewrite the rules of platform work.
⭐The dream of interoperability⭐
Joey DeBruin
Forefront
2021-08-16
The key point to take away from this is that owning the content is not important to Mirror’s strategic moat. What differentiates Mirror and makes it a sticky product for creators is that it offers a number of ways to build a business that you can’t get anywhere else. Mirror dramatically lowers the coordination cost of creating a complex online business as a writer - hidden behind what looks like a content platform is actually a crowdfunding, e-commerce, and media platform all rolled up into powerful cryptographically backed tools. It’s Kickstarter, Patreon, and Substack all in one.
Artist ownership is the way to fix Spotify’s broken streaming model (guest column)
Austin Robey
Musically
2020-09-01
If artists can collectively own platforms like Spotify, we can address the underlying problem that drives their incentives and decision making. As a for-profit, publicly traded corporation, Spotify has no responsibility to artists. Its only binding fiduciary responsibility is to seek profit and to increase shareholder value.
This dynamic inherently misaligns shareholder interests with artist interests. It’s why Spotify internally refers to payouts to artists as “content costs” or “costs of revenue.”
Court rules Apple must change its App Store policies
Andrew Paul
Input
2021-09-10
A LONG TIME COMING — Despite internal knowledge that the App Store’s business model was untenable in the long run, Apple has fought back tooth-and-nail against changing policies regarding its 30 percent cut of third-party developer profits, as well as allowing outside payment alternatives for apps. Perhaps sensing the coming shift, Tim Cook and company finally agreed to a version of that latter change a couple weeks’ back, although the ruling in its battle with Epic necessitates far more from Apple.
Check your Pulse #62
Check your Pulse
2021-07-16
On tokenized advertising. Here’s another idea some friends and I have been toying with (👀maybe drop 002?) — what if you could own a small piece of the digital real estate in promising sites/startups you believe in? In the physical real estate business, it is well known that value is driven primarily by one thing: location, location, location! The same logic applies to digital spaces, but thus far there have been few ways to monetize valuable digital real estate (domain squatting?). Owning shares of a startup has proven to be a huge source of wealth creation - but most people can’t invest in startups, either due to lack of access or not being accredited investors. And most startups thus far have had to trade money for freedom, defaulting to raising venture funding even though the tool of venture capital is appropriate for a tiny, tiny fraction of companies. I think there’s an opportunity for tokenized advertising to allow people to bet early on promising sites, while opening up a new revenue stream for startups to raise funding from their community. The lines between patronage, investing, and advertising are blurring. Ad products typically only work once you have millions of eyeballs. But tokenization introduces a new dynamic. By combining the benefits of an ad with the appreciation potential of an NFT, your community has a unique way to align themselves with your mission, promote their projects, and retain significant upside potential, making it possible to bet early on promising sites. I feel way out of my league here and I’m sure I’m missing something. If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.
Community DAOs
Patrick Rivera
Crypto x Creator Economy
2021-09-02
Unlike traditional startups, the initial purpose of most Community DAOs isn’t to maximize shareholder value. It’s about the vibes. People want to be surrounded by like minded individuals, make collective decisions, and move the community’s purpose forward.
⭐The Double Edge Sword of Exclusivity⭐
Mason Nystrom
Messari
2021-09-02
Financially-derived exclusivity or membership is a double edge sword – it will succumb to the social token paradox. It naturally limits the size and potential growth of a community.
Exclusivity as a value proposition will always exist but it doesn’t have to be wholly financially dependent.
Social Token Paradox
Gabby Goldberg
Golden Hour
2021-09-30
The problem here — in what I call the Social Token Paradox — is that with this mental model, tokenized communities are incentivized to uphold exclusivity. Let’s work backwards: if you want your community to be valuable, you need your community’s token to go up in price. This makes sense, sure. But to make the token go up in price, you have two choices: you can either increase the price of the token, or you can decrease the number of tokens available to prospective members. Either way, this restricts access to the community and promotes exclusivity, codifying and enforcing a level of scarcity that feels almost at odds with web3’s vision of a truly open Internet.
Take Back The Future! The progressive case for techno-optimism
Jasmine Sun
Reboot
2021-09-28
Systemic problems require systemic solutions. We can recognize that technology is critical to our future without replicating the narrow techno-utopianism of the past. From the beginning, a new left techno-optimism must be willing to engage with social justice, politics, and history in a way that past techno-utopians have not.
⭐Novel user interface ideas are public goods⭐
Andy Matuschak
Andy’s working notes
A novel interface idea is roughly a Public good: they’re non-excludable (Excludability), modulo the relatively smaller costs for a competitor to duplicate the idea. Happily (for society), such ideas are non-rivalrous (Rivalry) or even anti-rivalrous.
⭐On Nathan Schneider on the limits of cryptoeconomics⭐
Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin's website
2021-09-26
Nathan Schneider has recently released an article describing his perspectives on cryptoeconomics, and particularly on the limits of cryptoeconomic approaches to governance and what cryptoeconomics could be augmented with to improve its usefulness. This is, of course, a topic that is dear to me ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), so it is heartening to see someone else take the blockchain space seriously as an intellectual tradition and engage with the issues from a different and unique perspective.
The main question that Nathan's piece is trying to explore is simple. There is a large body of intellectual work that criticizes a bubble of concepts that they refer to as "economization", "neoliberalism" and similar terms, arguing that they corrode democratic political values and leave many people's needs unmet as a result. The world of cryptocurrency is very economic (lots of tokens flying around everywhere, with lots of functions being assigned to those tokens), very neo (the space is 12 years old!) and very liberal (freedom and voluntary participation are core to the whole thing). Do these critiques also apply to blockchain systems? If so, what conclusions should we draw, and how could blockchain systems be designed to account for these critiques? Nathan's answer: more hybrid approaches combining ideas from both economics and politics. But what will it actually take to achieve that, and will it give the results that we want? My answer: yes, but there's a lot of subtleties involved.
⭐Blockchain Bridges: Building Networks of Cryptonetworks⭐
Dmitriy Berenzon
1kx network
2021-09-08
At an abstract level, one could define a bridge as a system that transfers information between two or more blockchains. In this context, “information” could refer to assets, contract calls, proofs, or state.
Aura & Transvestment
Aura & Transvestment is a transmedia project consisting of a series of generative images, an experimental form of crypto-media, this website and a video essay. By describing its own powers and contradictions, the work explores notions of value, ownership, authenticity, artificial scarcity and abundance in the digital realm. The project is a critical analysis of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) used as proof of ownership for digital art, taking Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura as a starting point. It argues that, for tokenized art, cryptography serves as an artificial source of auratic power that reverts the political potential of reproducibility falling back to a magical and ritual notion of aura. This time around the ritual performed is that of property, authenticity, ownership, markets and commodification. Finally, the essay outlines alternative uses of cryptography and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) to support artistic labor and proposes transvestment as a temporary counter-action for the reallocation of value from capitalist forms of production and into commons-based models of social coordination.
6. Courses
⭐What is Platform Cooperatives⭐
Travis Higgins
Coonecta
The model of platforms such as Uber, Airbnb and Rappi has been appropriated and reinvented by the cooperative logic, giving rise to platform cooperativism: a model that makes platforms fairer and more sustainable for everyone involved.
There are already more than 450 initiatives around the world, mapped by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, proving that in addition to being a movement in response to the precariousness of digital work, platform cooperativism is good business.
7. Art
Me + You
Suchi Reddy
An interactive AI/ML artwork by Suchi Reddy
8. Videos/Podcasts
'The Automatic University' – the new normal for higher education?
University and College Union
YouTube
2020-09-07
In 2019 UCU Scotland commissioned work to review and understand the expansion of data systems and automation in higher education. We wanted to be able to pre-empt and respond to the challenges that artificial intelligence and automation bring to our sector. A year on and Covid-19 has made these challenges all too real for staff and students in education.
This UCU webinar will hear from the report’s author, Dr Ben Williamson, an academic from the University of Edinburgh; from Ann Gow, UCU Scotland immediate past-president, who was involved in the working group for the report; and from Jenny Lennox of the union’s Bargaining and Negotiations team. UCU’s Scotland official, Mary Senior will chair the session.
The report, and its recommendations for the union are available on the UCU website: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/10826/...
An Introduction to Platform Cooperativism by Professor Trebor Scholz (PCC at The New School in NYC)
Trebor Scholz
Loom
2021-08-26
Packy McCormick on Web3 (how he got sucked in)
Li Jin
Means of Creation
2021-09-28
Packy McCormick, author of Not Boring, one of the most widely-read analysts in tech. His newsletter now has more than 75k subscribers and he's raised a fund to back startups he finds interesting.
In this conversation, we focus on how Packy went from crypto-skeptic to writing a post almost every week about crypto. We also talk about where power will accrue in the web3 value chain, the tribal nature of many crypto projects, and the possible deep connections between the idea of a 3d "metaverse" and blockchains.
Visual programming with Maggie Appleton
Metamuse
Metamuse
Aug 19, 2021 (2021-08-19)
Creating software is typically done in text-based environments—but would programming be more accessible with graphical programming tools? Maggie joins Mark and Adam to talk about the relative success of Scratch, Shortcuts, and Zapier; how to make the abstract visible; embodied metaphors; and the false duality of artistic versus logical thinkers. Plus: how to make blinking lights for your Burning Man art installation.
The platform belongs to those who work on it! Co-designing worker-centric task distribution models
David Rozas
P2P Models
2021-09-09
Teaser for the presentation of the article "The platform belongs to those who work on it! Co-designing worker-centric task distribution models" during the 17th International Symposium on Open Collaboration: OpenSym 2021 (Madrid, 15/09/2021). Slides and full paper (preprint) available at https://bit.ly/3hh8fGq
9. Tools
Inspo
Meet Inspo, your search engine for inspiration. Whether it’s forcontent, campaigns, brainstorms or moment marketing, Inspois here to enrich creative thinking on any topic!
Digital garden Jekyll template
Maxime Vaillancourt
Create a digital garden with Jekyll.
⭐eLabFTW⭐
Deltablot
A free and open source electronic lab notebook
Livebook
Livebook is a web application for writing interactive and collaborative code notebooks for Elixir, built with Phoenix LiveView.
⭐Starboard⭐
Starboard brings cell-by-cell notebooks to the browser, no code is running on the backend here! It's probably the quickest way to visualize some data with interactivity, do some prototyping, or build a rudimentary dashboard.
⭐Distributed Press⭐
Hypha Cooperative
Distributed Press is an open source publishing tool for the World Wide Web and DWeb. It automates publishing and hosting content to the WWW that it seeds to Hypercore and IPFS. We are currently adding new features to deliver verifiable content to decentralized social networks like Aether and Scuttlebutt.
In addition to seeding content, the Distributed Press API also seeds other project data over DWeb protocols. For example, the current Monetization API integrates with Ethereum and Open Collective to provide real-time project funding information. In the future, these APIs will support content verification and social messaging across DWeb ecosystems.
Startup-Investor Matching Tool
The Startup-Investor Matching Tool is a tool that introduces underestimated founders to investors globally. We're enabling access to investors and capital, since May 2020.
Comradery
Comradery is a customizable platform that’s built from the ground up to help you and your community thrive. Focus on building your community, not the software behind it.
BumpTop - A Multi Touch 3D Physics Desktop
BumpTop is a 3D desktop user interface inspired by real desks using physics, multi-touch gestures to drive towards a more expressive, human vision for computing. You can download it for Mac and Windows or build on top of the source code. Learn more by watching the TED talk.
⭐Screenotate⭐
Screenotate is an app for macOS and Windows that might help you with your screenshots. Every time you take a screenshot, Screenotate steps in to recognize and save the text inside (using Optical Character Recognition), along with the URL and the title of the place where you took the screenshot (where possible).
VizierDB
Mike Brachmann et al.
Vizier is a notebook that puts your data front-and-center.
NeuraCache
Long-Term Memory Assistant in your pocket
immers-client
Client library to connect with Immers servers and Immers Space accounts from the Immersive Web. Using the Immers Client, you can enhance your site with social features and let your users share your site with their friends. Immers Space is a decentralized and federated social network, so you're not casting in with any one company or community; you're enabling users from any number of communities to bring their accounts, identities, and friends with them to your Immersive Web experience. Check out our FAQ for Immersive Web content creators.
View the full API documentation at https://immers-space.github.io/immers-client
Git Notebook
Git Notebook is a document management tool based on Git, which programmers use for code management. You can manage documents in the same way that programmers manage code.
⭐Stencila⭐
A platform for authoring, collaborating on, and publishing executable documents.
Crossnote
Crossnote is probably the world's first markdown notes reader & editor Progressive Web Application that works offline and supports syncing with arbitrary git repository right inside your browser.
Polywrap
d0rg
Polywrap is a development platform that enables easy integration of Web3 protocols into any application. It makes it possible for software on any device, written in any language, to read and write data to Web3 protocols.
Listed
Listed is a free blogging platform that allows you to create a public journal published directly from your notes. This unique approach to keeping a public blog on the internet using just a notes app yields two surprising effects.
Relanote
A note-taking tool to help you connect the dots.
Wiki or classical hierarchy, Relanote adapts to your thinking process
⭐Gener8⭐
Control and be rewarded from your own data
⭐UBDI⭐
Talk, Learn, Earn. Anonymously, with your data.
Deepnote
a new kind of data science notebook. Jupyter-compatible with real-time collaboration and running in the cloud.
10. Games
Across The Multiverse
An in-browser, freely explorable, 3D game across infinite universes procedurally generated.
Go from universe to universe and discover the origin of everything.
A four chapter story with an epic revelation at the end
11. Project Updates
PrimeDAO secures $2M from top DAO contributors
PrimeDAO
PrimeDAO
2021-09-15
A big milestone for DAO to DAO innovation — PrimeDAO is thrilled to close a seed round in which it raised $2 million from top DAO backers, including LD Capital, Stratos, TokenInsight, Signum capital, Stacker ventures, Senary Ventures, Atka Capital, ID Theory, SMAPE Capital, XeO4, Meld ventures, Faculty Group.
⭐Wicked Co-op, LCA Awarded $1,000,000 from the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Program⭐
Socialroots
Socialroots
2021-09-03
Socialroots is thrilled to announce that we have funding from "America’s Seed Fund" powered by the NSF. We are the first cooperative to gain funding through this program.
12. Events/Hackathons
Sociocracy & Better Decision Making
Outlandish
Stir 2 Action
2021-10-13 & 2022-04-13
Despite some organisations or collectives having the best intentions to spread power and decision making among workers, we know that in reality it is incredibly complex to foster autonomy and get things done. The good news is that Sociocracy is a practical way to move quickly where it’s safe and understand when it isn’t. It’s made a difference to ‘nice’ organisations all over the world, and it’s worth a couple hours of your time if you’re interested in workers having more input on decisions. After all, they know best.
Introducing the Capital for Cooperatives Act
Media Enterprise Design Lab
2021-09-20
Speakers:
Sandra Baca (Assistant Director, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union Cooperative Development Center) (or director Dan Hobbs
John Conrad (Special Assistant to Sen. John Hickenlooper)
Yessica Holguin (Executive Director, Center for Community Wealth Building)
Doug O'Brien (CEO, NCBA-CLUSA)
Linda Phillips (Senior of Counsel, jason wiener|p.c.)
Responsible Tech Summit
All Tech is Human
Hopin
2021-09-15
Are you focused on reducing the harms of technology, diversifying the tech pipeline, and ensuring that technology is aligned with the public interest? If so, please join us for the Responsible Tech Summit! This all-day gathering brings together a diverse range of participants that are committed to building a better tech future.
The Responsible Tech Summit is being put on by the non-profit All Tech Is Human. All Tech Is Human is a Manhattan-based organization with a global audience filled with students, academics, startups, industry, policymakers, attorneys, sociologists, designers, artists, advocates, psychologists, and more! Our flagship resource is the Responsible Tech Guide, which is aimed at providing information and pathways for new voices to enter the ecosystem. The Responsible Tech Guide, released last September, has surpassed 30k reads and become the go-to resources for new individuals looking to gain insight into the Responsible Tech field.
Our organization acts as a meta-connector for the people, organizations, and ideas of the Responsible Tech movement. We have a popular Slack (over 1700, join here), newsletter, a Responsible Tech Mentorship program of over 200 mentees, and recently launch a Responsible Tech University Ambassadors program for students looking to assist other students at their university. We also have a Responsible Tech Job board, which is a curated space for roles focused on reducing the harms of technology, diversifying the tech pipeline, and ensuring that technology is aligned with the public interest. If this mission is aligned with your work, please considering supporting our non-profit here.
All Tech Is Human was founded in 2018 and has brought together thousands of individuals across a broad range of backgrounds to help co-create our tech future. We have done this through previous summits (NYC, SF, Seattle), livestreams, and regular online gatherings designed to expand the community and promote a culture of knowledge-sharing & collaboration. Recently collaborative projects included our reports on Improving Social Media: The People, Organizations and Ideas for a Better Tech Future and The Business Case for AI Ethics: Moving From Theory to Action. Both of these projects diverse working groups of 100 individuals and interviewed dozens of leaders from a variety of backgrounds. You can see a list of the over 250 individuals we have interviewed here. Stay in touch through our LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
Our community partner for the Responsible Tech pipeline is TheBridge, which is breaking down silos & building community across tech, policy and politics. Our underwriter for the Responsible Tech Summit is Avanade.
OpenSym 2021
15 – 17 September 2021
Online
The 17th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2021) is the premier conference on open collaboration research and practice, including open source, open data, open science, open education, wikis and related social media, Wikipedia, and IT-driven open innovation research.
13. Jobs, Grants & More
Early Career Research Fellow in Ethics in AI @ Institute for Ethics in AI, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford
⭐Article Summarizer @ Smart Contract Research Forum⭐
⭐Quests @ Rabbithole⭐
Call for Proposals (CfP) @ Grant for the Web
14. Tweets
15. Glossary
Social Token Paradox
A problem that arises within social tokens communities based on exclusivity. The challenge is that social tokens need to appreciate by including new members and yet these membership gated communities must keep their groups exclusive otherwise the social and utility value will decrease. Thus, the social token paradox is born.
By Mason Nystrom in The Double Edge Sword of Exclusivity, citing Gaby Goldberg in Social Token Paradox.
Veblen Good
“[A] good for which demand increases as the price increases, because of its exclusive nature and appeal as a status symbol. A Veblen good has an upward-sloping demand curve, which runs counter to the typical downward-sloping curve. However, a Veblen good is generally a high-quality, coveted product, in contrast to a Giffen good, which is an inferior product that does not have easily available substitutes.”
“The term is named after the American economist Thorstein Veblen, who is best known for introducing the term ‘conspicuous consumption.’”
By JAMES CHEN in Veblen Good
Union Cooperative
“[A] worker cooperative whose workers are covered by a labor union collective bargaining agreement, and whose workers believe everyone has a right to own the full fruits of their labor.”
By John Clay and Arbeitskammer in Will German Workers Declare Independence?
Play-to-Earn (P2E)
Economic model lets the players create new digital assets and trade them via the game’s infrastructure. More, in the games using the play-to-earn model players can earn virtual in-game currency which is liquid, and can be pretty easily sold for other cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies.
By Sergey Baloyan in Play 2 Earn: A New Trend on the Crypto Market
16. 🤔Questions
Some questions on my noggin:
What would a cooperative alternative to Peloton and Hackster.io look like?
How to apply the Play-to-Earn (P2E) business model in research and education contexts (or just the knowledge lifecycle in general)?
How to tokenize Open Knowledge Maps?
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You can find me on Twitter and Medium, and my thoughts in my digital garden.
Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative (LDCRC) is a 501(c)(3), member-led, independent co-operative for the study of the decentralized web and human-computer interaction, seeking to move society towards a global technological commonwealth.
Our organization acts as a meta-connector for people, organizations, and ideas working on open, accountable technologies and fairer working models.
If this mission is aligned with your work, please considering supporting our non-profit.
Links
Find us online via the links below.