Welcome to Distroid, a monthly newsletter on convergence (connection and integration) in the decentralized web and related fields (Web3, Platform Cooperatives, etc.).
Distroid is put together by Charles Adjovu (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, please send me a message.
Outline
Books
Research
Articles
Courses
Art
Videos & Podcasts
Tools
Games
Project Updates
Events
Jobs
Tweets
Glossary
Questions
1. Books
Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
Daniel C. Dennett
W. W. Norton & Company
2013-05-06
2. Research
The myths and legends of king Satoshi and the knights of blockchain
Journal of Cultural Economy
2021-05-25
In this paper, we present an ethnographic account of the quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies. To do so, we explore the cultural significance of phenomena such as myth, faith, and ritual, without excluding both the realms of technological practices and techno-scientific narrative. Drawing on a comparison with the legend of King Arthur, we analyse how the legendary creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, translates contemporary anxieties resulting from the financial crisis and the centralisation of power. By analysing white papers, we further explore the persuasive narratives which convey how ethics and virtue can be encoded into software, and, finally, we describe the secular rituals that reinforce cohesion among the community – in moments which are often guided by charismatic preachers and specialists. We argue that blockchain technologies have had a symbolic impact in re-invigorating enchantment and material romanticism towards finance and technology, which has had a wider impact on the social perception and acceptance of the transition to a digital society.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization
Internet Policy Review
2021-04-20
A DAO is a blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralised (i.e., independent from central control).
Studying Fake News by Richard Rogers
Richard Rogers
N/A
In this resource, Professor Richard Rogers discusses the research question, to what extend does fake news (or misinformation) resonate in political spaces across social media in the run-up to the presidential election in the US? exploring where the term fake news came from, how researchers can use tools to study which articles are resonating, as well as the terms hyper-partisan sources and misinformation.
ASSEMBLING ACCOUNTABILITY: ALGORITHMIC IMPACT ASSESSMENT FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST
Emanuel Moss et al.
Data & Society
2021-06-29
The Algorithmic Impact Assessment is a new concept for regulating algorithmic systems and protecting the public interest. Assembling Accountability: Algorithmic Impact Assessment for the Public Interest is a report that maps the challenges of constructing algorithmic impact assessments (AIAs) and provides a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of current and proposed AIA regimes. This framework is a practical tool for regulators, advocates, public-interest technologists, technology companies, and critical scholars who are identifying, assessing, and acting upon algorithmic harms.
First, report authors Emanuel Moss, Elizabeth Anne Watkins, Ranjit Singh, Madeleine Clare Elish, and Jacob Metcalf analyze the use of impact assessment in other domains, including finance, the environment, human rights, and privacy. Building on this comparative analysis, they then identify common components of existing impact assessment practices in order to provide a framework for evaluating current and proposed AIA regimes. The authors find that a singular, generalized model for AIAs would not be effective due to the variances of governing bodies, specific systems being evaluated, and the range of impacted communities.
After illustrating the novel decision points required for the development of effective AIAs, the report specifies ten necessary components that constitute robust impact assessment regimes.
Typed Image-based Programming with Structure Editing
Human Aspects of Types and Reasoning Assistants (HATRA'21)
2021-10-18
Many beloved programming systems are image-based: self-contained worlds that persist both code and data in a single file. Examples include Smalltalk, LISP, HyperCard, Flash, and spreadsheets. Image-based programming avoids much of the complexity of modern programming technology stacks and encourages more casual and exploratory programming. However conventional file-based programming has better support for collaboration and deployment. These problems have been blamed for the limited commercial success of Smalltalk. We propose to enable collaboration in image-based programming via types and structure editing.
We focus on the problem of schema change on persistent data. We turn to static types, which paradoxically require more schema change but also provide a mechanism to express and execute those changes. To determine those changes we turn to structure editing, so that we can capture changes in type definitions with sufficient fidelity to automatically adapt the data to suit. We conjecture that typical schema changes can be handled through structure editing of static types.
That positions us to tackle collaboration with what could be called version control for structure editing. We present a theory realizing this idea, which is our main technical contribution. While we focus here on editing types, if we can extend the approach to cover the entire programming experience then it would offer a new way to collaborate in image-based programming.
A Measurable Attention Economics
Michael Toomim
Invisible College
N/A
The internet is like a child—it needs human attention to survive. Websites need humans to visit them. Facebook and Google make money by attracting human attention to ads. The nascent fields of human computation, online games, and crowdsourcing only exist by finding clever ways to motivate humans to attend to tasks, and they succeed proportional to the quantity of attention they recruit. Human attention is the fundamental resource—the fuel—on which websites, and many other human-computer systems run.
Human-computer systems are information processors that consume human attention. They attract it with compelling tasks for achieving valuable goals. Flickr created a compelling way to share photos. This attracted human attention to the task of uploading photos. The more photos Flickr attracted, the more viewers of photos it attracted. The more viewers, the more comments photos received. The more comments received, the more engaged the artists felt, and the more photos they uploaded. This was a virtuous cycle of attention—Flickr used attention to recruit more attention. Attention can serve many other purposes as well. Website owners want more attention, for its many uses.
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Backchannel: A relationship-based digital identity system
Karissa Rae McKelvey et al.
Ink & Switch
2021-09
To identify each other in the analog world, people use rich biological and physical cues such as eye contact, vocal tone, and hand gestures. But to identify another person online, most applications offer us user profiles, which can be limiting both from a collaboration standpoint, and for security reasons. This article introduces Backchannel, an identity system that adheres to design principles leveraging trust in relationships.
In standard user profile design, users are assigned a number in a database and can personalize their public identity. These profiles are usually owned, controlled, and moderated by a single authority. You have used one today: a profile photo and “real name” for yourself, locked with a username, password, email address or phone number. This design is ubiquitous.
However, user profiles present significant challenges when used between small sets of trusted participants. They are vulnerable to social engineering attacks, context collapse, and depend on access to cloud resources through a trusted third-party. In this article, we propose an alternative approach that replaces self-described user profiles with trusted digital relationships.
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Arweave Ecosystem Research Report
OKEx Block Dream Ventures
2021-06-09
Introduction
Arweave (AR), a protocol focusing on decentralized long-term data storage. Since its mainnet launch in June 2018, the number of users and usage has increased exponentially. Recently, AR has gained a lot of flow and exposure through its highly matching features with NFT and correct operation route. The popularity of filecoin (AR is backward compatible with filecoin) and the explosion of storage sector also contribute a lot to the development of AR: take the developer community of AR ecology as an example, its community growth has a significant advantage over Ethereum and Boca, with a growth rate of about 300%.
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Verified, Shared, Modular, and Provenance Based Research Communication with the Dat Protocol
Publications
2019-06-04
A scholarly communication system needs to register, distribute, certify, archive, and incentivize knowledge production. The current article-based system technically fulfills these functions, but suboptimally. I propose a module-based communication infrastructure that attempts to take a wider view of these functions and optimize the fulfillment of the five functions of scholarly communication. Scholarly modules are conceptualized as the constituent parts of a research process as determined by a researcher. These can be text, but also code, data, and any other relevant pieces of information that are produced in the research process. The chronology of these modules is registered by iteratively linking to each other, creating a provenance record of parent and child modules (and a network of modules). These scholarly modules are linked to scholarly profiles, creating a network of profiles, and a network of how profiles relate to their constituent modules. All these scholarly modules would be communicated on the new peer-to-peer Web protocol Dat, which provides a decentralized register that is immutable, facilitates greater content integrity than the current system through verification, and is open-by-design. Open-by-design would also allow diversity in the way content is consumed, discovered, and evaluated to arise. This initial proposal needs to be refined and developed further based on the technical developments of the Dat protocol, its implementations, and discussions within the scholarly community to evaluate the qualities claimed here. Nonetheless, a minimal prototype is available today, and this is technically feasible.
Trustless Two-Way Bridges With Side Chains By Halting
John Adler, Matt, Mikerah & Will Villanueva
Eth Research Forum
2019-07-10
We present a novel methodology for constructing trustless two-way bridges between a main chain and a side chain. By halting the side chain’s progress permanently, we no longer need tight synchrony requirements and long withdrawal delays even in the optimistic case. Instead, withdrawals are only allowed after the side chain has been halted for a long period of time. Once the side chain is halted, atomic swaps can be used to withdraw funds immediately for use, through a liquidity provider network. A new side chain can be launched in tandem to halting the old one to accept and begin processing swapped funds.
Platform cooperativism as an alternative to the platform of work
Rafael Grohmann
Revista Rosa
2021-08-27
In 2016, professor and activist Trebor Scholz, from the New School, coined the term “platform cooperativism” to designate an attempt to confront platform capitalism, which at that time was already discursively masked by expressions such as the sharing economy. This dominant rhetoric captured notions linked to the common good in favor of “sacrificial citizenship”—a term coined by Wendy Brown as one aspect of neoliberal rationality.
This corporate package is joined by the algorithmic management of work, the growing extraction of data as a form of capital, an intensification of surveillance over working people, among other mechanisms for extracting value. This is the dominant scenario of what we call work platform, a growing dependence on digital platforms, with their mechanisms and infrastructure, to be able to carry out work activities.
Because when Scholz defined platform cooperativism, he did so with the intention of building an alternative to all this logic. From 2016 onwards, the need for a movement that fights for democratic governance in the workplace, redistribution of added value and intercooperation (that is, cooperation between cooperatives), re-appropriating digital technologies in favor of a cooperative organization has become even clearer. . What if deliverymen and drivers built their own platforms? Worker strikes for platforms in various parts of the world and low rates of decent work on digital platforms have shown that, in addition to regulation, it is necessary to build alternatives from below.
This does not mean, however, that they will replace, in the medium term, the large work platforms. It's not just about replacing Uber with a cooperative solution. There are difficulties due to the network effect, the strong competitive pressure from large platforms. They are involved in new forms of renting and financialization — as shown by authors such as Jathan Sadowski — which expands their power in favor of an oligopolization of the different platformsized sectors. This allows Big Tech to offer promotions — such as free shipping — ad infinitumto undermine competition. This also involves lobbying and public relations strategies — with great media power — to undermine possible alternatives. In addition, cooperatives run the risk of self-exploitation, something already exposed by the long history of factories recovered by workers. However, these difficulties do not mean, at the outset, to stop believing in a project linked to platform cooperativism. In fact, they can stand as precursors of experiences of confronting the dominant work platform, as prefigurative policies.
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Weaponizing economics: Big Oil, economic consultants, and climate policy delay
Benjamin Franta
Environmental Politics
2021-08-25
The role of particular scientists in opposing policies to slow and halt global warming has been extensively documented. The role of economists, however, has received less attention. Here, I trace the history of an influential group of economic consultants hired by the petroleum industry from the 1990s to the 2010s to estimate the costs of various proposed climate policies. The economists used models that inflated predicted costs while ignoring policy benefits, and their results were often portrayed to the public as independent rather than industry-sponsored. Their work played a key role in undermining numerous major climate policy initiatives in the US over a span of decades, including carbon pricing and participation in international climate agreements. This study illustrates how the fossil fuel industry has funded biased economic analyses to oppose climate policy and highlights the need for greater attention on the role of economists and economic paradigms, doctrines, and models in climate policy delay.
Loops, ladders and links: the recursivity of social and machine learning
Thoery & Society
2020-08-26
Machine learning algorithms reshape how people communicate, exchange, and associate; how institutions sort them and slot them into social positions; and how they experience life, down to the most ordinary and intimate aspects. In this article, we draw on examples from the field of social media to review the commonalities, interactions, and contradictions between the dispositions of people and those of machines as they learn from and make sense of each other.
The Flaws of Policies Requiring Human Oversight of Government Algorithms
Ben Green
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
2021-09-10
Policymakers around the world are increasingly considering how to prevent government uses of algorithms from producing injustices. One mechanism that has become a centerpiece of global efforts to regulate government algorithms is to require human oversight of algorithmic decisions. Despite the widespread turn to human oversight, these policies rest on an uninterrogated assumption: that people are able to oversee algorithmic decision-making. In this article, I survey 40 policies that prescribe human oversight of government algorithms and find that they suffer from two significant flaws. First, evidence suggests that people are unable to perform the desired oversight functions. Second, as a result of the first flaw, human oversight policies legitimize government uses of faulty and controversial algorithms without addressing the fundamental issues with these tools. Thus, rather than protect against the potential harms of algorithmic decision-making in government, human oversight policies provide a false sense of security in adopting algorithms and enable vendors and agencies to shirk accountability for algorithmic harms. In light of these flaws, I propose a more stringent approach for determining whether and how to incorporate algorithms into government decision-making. First, policymakers must critically consider whether it is appropriate to use an algorithm at all in a specific context. Second, before deploying an algorithm alongside human oversight, agencies or vendors must conduct preliminary evaluations of whether people can effectively oversee the algorithm.
Crowd Guilds: Worker-led Reputation and Feedback on Crowdsourcing Platforms
Mark E. Whiting et al.
ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
2016-11
Crowd workers are distributed and decentralized. While decentralization is designed to utilize independent judgment to promote high-quality results, it paradoxically undercuts behaviors and institutions that are critical to high-quality work. Reputation is one central example: crowdsourcing systems depend on reputation scores from decentralized workers and requesters, but these scores are notoriously inflated and uninformative. In this paper, we draw inspiration from historical worker guilds (e.g., in the silk trade) to design and implement crowd guilds: centralized groups of crowd workers who collectively certify each other’s quality through double-blind peer assessment. A two-week field experiment compared crowd guilds to a traditional decentralized crowd work model. Crowd guilds produced reputation signals more strongly correlated with ground-truth worker quality than signals available on current crowd working platforms, and more accurate than in the traditional model.
Emerging models of data governance in the age of datafication
Marina Micheli et al.
Big Data & Society
2020-09-01
The article examines four models of data governance emerging in the current platform society. While major attention is currently given to the dominant model of corporate platforms collecting and economically exploiting massive amounts of personal data, other actors, such as small businesses, public bodies and civic society, take also part in data governance. The article sheds light on four models emerging from the practices of these actors: data sharing pools, data cooperatives, public data trusts and personal data sovereignty. We propose a social science-informed conceptualisation of data governance. Drawing from the notion of data infrastructure we identify the models as a function of the stakeholders’ roles, their interrelationships, articulations of value, and governance principles. Addressing the politics of data, we considered the actors’ competitive struggles for governing data. This conceptualisation brings to the forefront the power relations and multifaceted economic and social interactions within data governance models emerging in an environment mainly dominated by corporate actors. These models highlight that civic society and public bodies are key actors for democratising data governance and redistributing value produced through data. Through the discussion of the models, their underpinning principles and limitations, the article wishes to inform future investigations of socio-technical imaginaries for the governance of data, particularly now that the policy debate around data governance is very active in Europe.
Data Co-Operatives through Data Sovereignty
Igor Calzada
Smart Cities
2021-09-05
Against the widespread assumption that data are the oil of the 21st century, this article offers an alternative conceptual framework, interpretation, and pathway around data and smart city nexus to subvert surveillance capitalism in light of emerging and further promising practical cases. This article illustrates an open debate in data governance and the data justice field related to current trends and challenges in smart cities, resulting in a new approach advocated for and recently coined by the UN-Habitat programme ‘People-Centred Smart Cities’. Particularly, this feature article sheds light on two intertwined notions that articulate the technopolitical dimension of the ‘People-Centred Smart Cities’ approach: data co-operatives and data sovereignty. Data co-operatives are emerging as a way to share and own data through peer-to-peer (p2p) repositories and data sovereignty is being claimed as a digital right for communities/citizens. Consequently, this feature article aims to open up new research avenues around ‘People-Centred Smart Cities’ approach: First, it elucidates how data co-operatives through data sovereignty could be articulated as long as co-developed with communities connected to the long history and analysis of the various forms of co-operatives (technopolitical dimension). Second, it prospectively anticipates the city–regional dimension encompassing data colonialism and data devolution.
Data as asset? The measurement, governance, and valuation of digital personal data by Big Tech
Big Data & Society
2021-05-16
Digital personal data is increasingly framed as the basis of contemporary economies, representing an important new asset class. Control over these data assets seems to explain the emergence and dominance of so-called “Big Tech” firms, consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook. These US-based firms are some of the largest in the world by market capitalization, a position that they retain despite growing policy and public condemnation—or “techlash”—of their market power based on their monopolistic control of personal data. We analyse the transformation of personal data into an asset in order to explore how personal data is accounted for, governed, and valued by Big Tech firms and other political-economic actors (e.g., investors). However, our findings show that Big Tech firms turn “users” and “user engagement” into assets through the performative measurement, governance, and valuation of user metrics (e.g., user numbers, user engagement), rather than extending ownership and control rights over personal data per se. We conceptualize this strategy as a form of “techcraft” to center attention on the means and mechanisms that Big Tech firms deploy to make users and user data measurable and legible as future revenue streams.
The linked legal data landscape: linking legal data across different countries
Erwin Filtz, Sabrina Kirrane & Axel Polleres
Artificial Intelligence and Law
2021-02-25
The European Union is working towards harmonizing legislation across Europe, in order to improve cross-border interchange of legal information. This goal is supported for instance via standards such as the European Law Identifier (ELI) and the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI), which provide technical specifications for Web identifiers and suggestions for vocabularies to be used to describe metadata pertaining to legal documents in a machine readable format. Notably, these ECLI and ELI metadata standards adhere to the RDF data format which forms the basis of Linked Data, and therefore have the potential to form a basis for a pan-European legal Knowledge Graph. Unfortunately, to date said specifications have only been partially adopted by EU member states. In this paper we describe a methodology to transform the existing legal information system used in Austria to such a legal knowledge graph covering different steps from modeling national specific aspects, to population, and finally the integration of legal data from other countries through linked data. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by exemplifying practical use cases from legal information search, which are not possible in an automated fashion so far.
Using Sapelli in the Field: Methods and Data for an Inclusive Citizen Science
Fabien Moustard et al.
frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
2021-07-01
The Sapelli smartphone application aims to support any community to engage in citizen science activities to address local concerns and needs. However, Sapelli was designed and developed not as a piece of technology without a context, but as the technical part of a socio-technical approach to establish a participatory science process. This paper provides the methodological framework for implementing and using Sapelli in the field. Specifically, we present the role of Sapelli within the framework of an “Extreme Citizen Science” (ECS) methodology that is based on participatory design. This approach enables Sapelli’s users to decide, with the help of professional scientists, which challenges they wish to address, what data to collect, how best to collect and analyse it, and how to use it to address the problems identified. The process depends on the consent of participants and that the project is shaped by their decisions. We argue that leaving ample space for co-design, local leadership and keeping Sapelli deployment open-ended is crucial to give all people, and in particular non-literate people who we have found are often the most ecologically literate, access to the power of the scientific process to document and represent their concerns to outsiders in a way that all can understand, and to develop advocacy strategies that address the problems they identify.
Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
Luke Stark & Jevan Hutson
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
2021-09-20
The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. This Article, which contributes to critical data studies, consumer protection law, biometric privacy law, and anti-discrimination law, endeavors to conceptualize and problematize physiognomic artificial intelligence (AI) and offer policy recommendations for state and federal lawmakers to forestall its proliferation.
Physiognomic AI, we contend, is the practice of using computer software and related systems to infer or create hierarchies of an individual’s body composition, protected class status, perceived character, capabilities, and future social outcomes based on their physical or behavioral characteristics. Physiognomic and phrenological logics are intrinsic to the technical mechanism of computer vision applied to humans. In this Article, we observe how computer vision is a central vector for physiognomic AI technologies, unpacking how computer vision reanimates physiognomy in conception, form, and practice and the dangers this trend presents for civil liberties.
This Article thus argues for legislative action to forestall and roll back the proliferation of physiognomic AI. To that end, we consider a potential menu of safeguards and limitations to significantly limit the deployment of physiognomic AI systems, which we hope can be used to strengthen local, state, and federal legislation. We foreground our policy discussion by proposing the abolition of physiognomic AI. From there, we posit regimes of U.S. consumer protection law, biometric privacy law, and civil rights law as vehicles for rejecting physiognomy’s digital renaissance in artificial intelligence. Specifically, we argue that physiognomic AI should be categorically rejected as oppressive and unjust. Second, we argue that lawmakers should declare physiognomic AI to be unfair and deceptive per se. Third, we argue that lawmakers should enact or expand biometric privacy laws to prohibit physiognomic AI. Fourth, we argue that lawmakers should prohibit physiognomic AI in places of public accommodation. We also observe the paucity of procedural and managerial regimes of fairness, accountability, and transparency in addressing physiognomic AI and attend to potential counterarguments in support of physiognomic AI.
Trade unions’ responses to Industry 4.0 amid corporatism and resistance
Valeria Cirillo et al.
Laboratory of Economics and Management Working Paper Series
2020-08-18
The aim of this paper is to shed light on the paths, directions, and ensuing degrees of technological adoption fostered by trade unions or, alternatively, forms of resistance thereof, in the so called ‘Italian Motor-Valley’, a distinctive technological district located in the outskirts of Bologna, Italy, specialised in the engineering/automotive industry. We find that the introduction of Industry 4.0 technology opens up a new space of action for trade unions in influencing firms’ decisions on technological adoption. However, this new scope can have ambiguous effects, depending on how the process is governed. On the one hand, trade unions’ involvement in said decisions might end up fostering corporatist tendencies, favouring the alignment of workers’ and managers’ objectives. On the other hand, such a major involvement can help both recompose old forms of dualism and revitalising workers’ role in the crucial issue of work organisation.
There is no Such Thing as Blockchain Art - A report on the current status of the intersection of Blockchain and art
Academia
2019-06
Introduction - Discussion, Actions and Approach
Thispaperistheconclusionofaseriesofactionsanddiscussionstakingplacewithinthe Ethereum community, with the intention to find a potential connection to the art community.
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⭐Spatial Software⭐
John Palmer
Darkblueheaven
2020-04-09
I published Spatial Interfaces about seven months ago. This is a follow-up on that essay, starting with some updates on the over-arching thesis from the original piece, then moving on to a framework for thinking about spatial software. I close by discussing some examples of spatial software I've used in the past few months.
To recap the thesis from Spatial Interfaces: Software applications can utilize spatial interfaces to afford users powerful ways of thinking and interacting. Though often associated with gaming, spatial interfaces can be useful in any kind of software, even in less obvious domains like productivity tools or work applications. We will see spatial interfaces move into all verticals, starting with game-like interfaces for all kinds of social use-cases.
Designing Reputation Systems for the Social Web
Boston University School of Management Research Paper Series
2010-06-13
Online Reputation Systems are a key, but under-appreciated, component of virtually every social web application. They play an important role in inducing user participation, good behavior and quality contributions. Despite their importance, however, their practical design and implementation has, so far, typically been the result of trial and error. This paper distills some of the design principles that have emerged after more than a decade of research and practical experience on the topic. I provide a practical overview of the promises and challenges of online reputation mechanism design, and how to implement the right incentives for good behavior, truthful reporting and resistance to manipulation.
Morals and Markets
Science
2013-05-10
The possibility that market interaction may erode moral values is a long-standing, but controversial, hypothesis in the social sciences, ethics, and philosophy. To date, empirical evidence on decay of moral values through market interaction has been scarce. We present controlled experimental evidence on how market interaction changes how human subjects value harm and damage done to third parties. In the experiment, subjects decide between either saving the life of a mouse or receiving money. We compare individual decisions to those made in a bilateral and a multilateral market. In both markets, the willingness to kill the mouse is substantially higher than in individual decisions. Furthermore, in the multilateral market, prices for life deteriorate tremendously. In contrast, for morally neutral consumption choices, differences between institutions are small.
Crowd Coach: Peer Coaching for Crowd Workers’ Skill Growth
Chun-Wei Chiang, Anna Kasunic & Saiph Savage
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
2018-11-01
Traditional employment usually provides mechanisms for workers to improve their skills to access better opportunities. However, crowd work platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) generally do not support skill development (i.e., becoming faster and better at work). While researchers have started to tackle this problem, most solutions are dependent on experts or requesters willing to help. However, requesters generally lack the necessary knowledge, and experts are rare and expensive. To further facilitate crowd workers' skill growth, we present Crowd Coach, a system that enables workers to receive peer coaching while on the job. We conduct a field experiment and real world deployment to study Crowd Coach in the wild. Hundreds of workers used Crowd Coach in a variety of tasks, including writing, doing surveys, and labeling images. We find that Crowd Coach enhances workers' speed without sacrificing their work quality, especially in audio transcription tasks. We posit that peer coaching systems hold potential for better supporting crowd workers' skill development while on the job. We finish with design implications from our research.
Toward a renaissance of cooperatives fostered by Blockchain on electronic marketplaces: a theory-driven case study approach
Tobias Kollmann et al.
Electronic Markets
2019-09-03
Currently, there is a disparity of value distribution on electronic marketplaces. This is because central platform operators benefit monetarily from collecting and matching electronic information from users. Although those platforms are fueled by user information, only a small share is distributed to their users. However, in turn, disruptive technologies such as the Blockchain technology have the potential to counteract this imbalance of benefits. Through a theory-driven case study approach, this study considers principles of cooperative theory as a foundation of Blockchain-enabled electronic marketplaces (BEEMs). Specifically, we show that using the Blockchain technology can foster a renaissance of cooperative principles on electronic marketplaces.
Under new management: Share ownership and the growth of UK asset manager capitalism
Adrienne Buller and Benjamin Braun
Common Wealth
2021-07-09
Over the past several decades, asset management firms – financial intermediaries who invest assets on behalf of ultimate beneficiaries such as pension holders or wealthy individuals – have surged to become the dominant shareholders in corporations throughout the global economy, supplanting individuals and other institutional investors such as pension funds. This growth has been accompanied by a second trend: significant concentration within asset management itself. BlackRock and Vanguard, the two largest asset managers worldwide, control $9 trillion and $8 trillion in assets, respectively – or more than four times the value of all UK corporations.
We argue the emerging dominance of asset managers constitutes a new corporate governance regime, a clear understanding of which is vital to addressing corporations’ roles in societal challenges from the climate crisis to wage stagnation and inequality. This new regime – asset manager capitalism - is the product of two related trends in ownership without historical precedent: the combination of significant reconcentration of ownership within a small top cohort of minority shareholders, and the universal nature of these shareholders, meaning their ownership of assets is distributed across all geographies and industries. In contrast to the image of the activist shareholder, on which the prevailing ‘shareholder primacy’ regime of corporate governance is based, asset manager capitalism is defined by a structure of ownership in which the dominant owners of a corporation are motivated not by the performance of individual portfolio companies, but by the accumulation of further assets under management.
In the US, the rise of the asset management industry and increasing domination of ownership by elite asset management firms of corporate shares, bonds, and numerous other asset classes is well documented. In the UK, this transition is less well documented. To address this gap, we analysed shareholding data in the FTSE350 index of UK companies from the end of 2000 to the end of 2020, assessing trends in ownership distribution as well as corresponding shifts in corporate behaviour. We found that although the total share of FTSE350 value controlled by the 10 largest investors remained relatively stable at approximately 20% over this period, concentration within the Top 10 became substantially more pronounced, with BlackRock and Vanguard now controlling 10%. At the level of individual firms, we found a substantial upward trend with respect to the fraction of shares outstanding held by the top 10 investors in a given firm. With respect to corporate behaviour over this period, our analysis found that while productive investment had declined, shareholder payouts as a proportion of profits had risen substantially, reaching nearly 80% of pre-tax profits at the end of 2020.
These results suggest the UK is following the US in the solidification of an economy defined by asset manager capitalism, with implications for policymakers and others concerned with corporations’ roles in inequality, productivity and sustainability.
Social Is the New Financial: How Startup Social Media Activity Influences Funding Outcomes
Fujie Jin, Andy Wu & Lorin Hitt
Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings
2017-02-07
Early stage firms increasingly use social media to communicate with their target stakeholders, such as customers and investors. In this study, we investigate whether the use of social media is associated with increased success in raising venture capital financing. We argue that social media can improve startup funding success through two channels: 1) enabling investor discovery of potential investment opportunities through reduction of search costs and 2) providing additional information to investors for a better evaluation of the quality of the ventures. Using social media activities on Twitter and venture financing data from CrunchBase, we find that an active social media presence and strong Twitter influence (followers, mentions, impressions, and sentiment) increase the likelihood a startup will close the round, the amount raised, and the breadth of the investor pool. In addition, we find that startup social media activity is associated with more investment from investors with less information channels (e.g., angels) and making less industry specialized investments in particular, consistent with the hypothesis that social media improves an investor’s ability to discover potential investments. Also, the effect size of social media is stronger for startups where quality information is less available, such as firms outside geographic venture capital clusters or where later investors do not have network relationships with early investors, consistent with social media acting as an additional information channel to inform startup quality evaluation.
Governance by Data
Fleur Johns
Annual Review of Law and Social Science
2021-04-23
Law and social science scholars have long elucidated ways of governing built around state governance of populations and subjects. Yet many are now grappling with the growing prevalence of practices of governance that depart, to varying degrees, from received models. The profusion of digital data, and the deployment of machine learning in its analysis, are redirecting states’ and international organizations’ attention away from the governance of populations as such and toward the amassing, analysis, and mobilization of hybrid data repositories and real-time data flows for governance. Much of this work does not depend on state data sources or on conventional statistical models. The subjectivities nurtured by these techniques of governance are frequently not those of choosing individuals. Digital objects and mediators are increasingly prevalent at all scales. This article surveys how scholars are beginning to understand the nascent political technologies associated with this shift toward governance by data.
Goldilocks: Consistent Crowdsourced Scalar Annotations with Relative Uncertainty
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
2021-08-04
Human ratings have become a crucial resource for training and evaluating machine learning systems. However, traditional elicitation methods for absolute and comparative rating suffer from issues with consistency and often do not distinguish between uncertainty due to disagreement between annotators and ambiguity inherent to the item being rated. In this work, we present Goldilocks, a novel crowd rating elicitation technique for collecting calibrated scalar annotations that also distinguishes inherent ambiguity from inter-annotator disagreement. We introduce two main ideas: grounding absolute rating scales with examples and using a two-step bounding process to establish a range for an item's placement. We test our designs in three domains: judging toxicity of online comments, estimating satiety of food depicted in images, and estimating age based on portraits. We show that (1) Goldilocks can improve consistency in domains where interpretation of the scale is not universal, and that (2) representing items with ranges lets us simultaneously capture different sources of uncertainty leading to better estimates of pairwise relationship distributions.
Consensus-Building on Citations in Peer-to-Peer Systems
Kensuke Ito
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
2021-08-27
This thesis aims at consensus-building on citations in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. Citations, a source of various quantitative measures for intellectual products (e.g., scientific publications, patents, web pages), are more robust and productive if autonomous peers in a P2P system can determine and construct their true structure. However, this consensus-building has remained unreliable due to three problems that preceding studies have not addressed simultaneously: free-riding, strategic misreporting, and reviewer assignment. Therefore, we combined random walks on graphs with peer prediction methods and proposed two incentive mechanisms (ex-ante and ex-post consensus) that reward reviewers who participated in consensus-building. Experimental studies support the usefulness of the two incentive mechanisms for all three problems, by showing that peers can (i) be reviewers more often as they get higher PageRank scores and (ii) maximize the expected rewards per review by always reporting true beliefs. Our proposal―rewards from the consensus-building on citation relationships―also contributes to open-access intellectual products as an alternative scheme to grants, royalties, and advertisements. On the other hand, potential applications require future studies to prevent spamming and Sybil attacks and make the reward a sufficient incentive.
Unirep: A private and non-repudiable reputation system
Ya-wen Jeng
Privacy & Scaling Explorations
2021-08-26
tl;dr: Unirep is a protocol that allows users to receive and give reputation anonymously and prove their own reputation on other platforms that support the protocol.
The origin assets of the digital antiquities market (NFTs)
WhiteRabbit1111
WhiteRabbit1111
2021-08-23
A Novel Framework for Reputation-Based Systems
Jad Esber & Scott Kominers
Future by Andreessen Horowitz
2021-09-30
Reputation systems present an opportunity for platforms to recognize—and thus incentivize—participants’ high-quality contributions, including content creation, moderation, community building, and gameplay. This is crucial to the growth and sustainability of any web3 project. Yet designing reputation systems requires complex considerations around reputation supply, distribution, credibility, and more. So while many are exploring this space—from DAOs like FWB to play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity and new social platforms like BitClout—builders have yet to agree on the best way to design these reputation systems.
Drawing on our knowledge of economic theory and game design, we argue for a reputation system design based on a pair of tokens—one for signaling reputation and the other for offering liquidity—which could serve as tangible representations of meaningful contributions.
3. Articles
Lawmakers want humans to check runaway AI. Research shows they’re not up to the job.
Issie Lapowsky
Protocol
2021-09-24
Legitimacy Lost: How Creator Platforms Are Eroding Their Most Important Resource
Every
2021-10-14
The Slow Demise of Loconomics
Danny Spitzberg
Danny Spitzberg
2021-04-28
Building the Wisdom Age
Roote
Roote
N/A
Social computing researcher views code as an engine for change
Molly Sharlach
Princeton
2021-10-14
Back to the future: preparing the exodus from the platforms
Alessandro Longo
Single Magazine
2021-10-13
Beyond Cryptoeconomics: Platform Cooperativism and the Future of Blockchain Governance
Nathan Schneider
Reboot
2021-10-14
The value of NFTs, explained by an expert
Terry Nguyen
Vox
2021-03-31
The Blue Pill
Weaver
Yearn
2021-07-29
The Dangerous Promise of the Self-Driving Car
David Zipper
Bloomberg
2021-10-12
How Greek Delivery Riders Are Fighting the Gig Economy
Iwan Doherty
Tribune
2021-10-12
The WAGMIGOTCHI Experience
Nicholas Ptacek
Nicholas Ptacek
2021-10-05
🎙 "NFTs Gave Me a Sense of Security and Economic Stability I Never Felt Before:" WoW Creator Yam Karkai
Camila Russo
The Defiant
2021-10-11
Holly Herndon Launches DAO-Controlled Vocal Deepfake Platform 'Holly+
Will Gottsegen
Decrypt
2021-07-14
The User Experience in Platform Cooperativism
Enric Sanebre & Ricard Espelt
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
2016-11-29
Decentralized Impact Organizations for the Climate
Olli Tiainen
Olliten
2021-09-02
Scaling DAOs Won’t Be Easy: Five Major Challenges to Overcome
Connor Spelliscy
The Defiant
2021-08=31
NFT startup Dapper Labs acquires virtual influencer startup Brud
Lucas Matney
TechCrunch
2021-10-04
Blockchains: building blocks of a post-capitalist future?
Hannes Gerhardt
ROAR
2020-11-06
Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs
Alex Heath
The Verge
2021-09-23
Come for the creator, stay for the economy
Patrick Rivera
Mirror
2021-04-20
Juul: Taking Academic Corruption to a New Level
David Dayen
The American Prospect
2021-07-07
A New AI Lexicon: Power
A New AI Lexicon
2021-09-09
A visual guide to decentralization
Josh Kramer
New_ Public
2021-07-07
Augmenting the continuity of experience
Animorph Co-op
Animorph
2021-09-21
OpenSea delists DAO Turtles project citing financialization concerns
Ryan Weeks
The Block
2021-10-11
Fight Carbon. With Coin.
Chris Taylor
Mashable
2021
Regen Network: Integration of climate change in the cryptocurrency ecosystem
Ubik Capital
Ubik Capital
2021-09-27
Competitive Compatibility: Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants
Cory Doctorow
Communications of the ACM
2021-10
A data ecosystem fosters sustainable innovation
Ruben Verborgh
Ruben Verborgh
2020-12-07
Intellectual Legitimacy
Samo Burja
Samo Burja
2021-12-20
Can Platform Co-ops Disrupt and Fix a Destructive Food System?
Shiro
Shiro
2020-12-20
A Media Ownership Model: Why Subscribe When You Can Invest?
Jarrod Dicker
Dark Star
2021-03-16
thoughts from my first year in crypto and on joining mirror
Andrew Hong
DeComposition Notebook
2021-08-30
The Architecture of a Web 3.0 application
Preethi Kasireddy
Preethi Kasireddy
2021-09-22
Reactive, reproducible, collaborative: computational notebooks evolve
Nature
2021-05-03
A new breed of notebooks is taking data visualization and collaborative functionality to the next level, with spreadsheet simplicity.
Introducing Automated Regression Markets (ARMs): A New Price Discovery Mechanism for Semi-Fungible Assets
Block Science
Block Science
2021-10-27
Tech investors should start backing worker-owned co-operatives
Tim Smith
Sifted
2021-10-15
Pods: The DAOnfall of Token Voting
MEET THE WINNERS OF THE EU SOCIAL ECONOMY AWARDS 2021
Social Economy Europe
Social Economy Europe
2021-10-18
International co-op research effort focuses on data and governance
Miles Hadfield
Co-op News
2021-10-08
Top 100 co-ops in the USA have a joint turnover of $226bn
Anca Voinea
Co-op News
2021-10-26
The Internet As Your Resume
Rushil
Rushil
2021-10-08
Zodiac: The expansion pack for DAOs
Kei Kreutler
Gnosis Guild
2021-09-14
Organization Legos: The State of DAO Tooling
Nichanan Kesonpat
1kx
2021-09-15
What's in a Token?
solsista
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Token Engineering
2021-10-24
Adobe Will Offer NFT Verification in Photoshop
Mike Dalton
CryptoBriefing
2021-10-26
Friends With Benefits (FWB) Case Study
Austin Robey & Eli Zeger
Forefront
2021-10-26
Big Hires, Big Money and a D.C. Blitz: A Bold Plan to Dominate Crypto
The New York Times
2021-10-29
DAOs and Progressive Decentralization of the CFO
Evan Fisher
Evan’s Substack
2021-09-13
4. Courses
Blockchain Fundamentals
Blockchain at Berkeley
Blockchain Education Network
Blockchain at Berkeley's course to surmount the steep learning curve of cryptocurrency.
BlueSky Ventures: The Entrepreneurship Mindset
Ethan Mollick
Wharton Interactive
In BlueSky Ventures, you'll learn the critical skills needed to assess business strategy. In this quick, interactive course, you will assist a group of investors in deciding which startup to back while learning vital skills drawn from the latest research on strategy and entrepreneurship.
5. Guides
DeFi Security 101
The Defiant Team
The Defiant
2021-02-01
✊The Defiant's Definitive Guide to DeFi
The Defiant
The Defiant
2021-03-01
At The Defiant, we are convinced finance will become increasingly decentralized and open. It just makes sense; our current financial system is running on infrastructure that was built in the 1970s; messaging networks like SWIFT and ACH that simply aren’t made to transact value.
…
6. Slides
DAOs: The New Coordination Frontier
Gitcoin DAO
2021-09
7. Games
Grid Garden
CodePip
Welcome to Grid Garden, where you write CSS code to grow your carrot garden! Water only the areas that have carrots by using the
grid-column-startproperty.For example,
grid-column-start: 3;will water the area starting at the 3rd vertical grid line, which is another way of saying the 3rd vertical border from the left in the grid.
Models of Impact
Matthew Manos, verynice
A Role-Playing And Ideation Game That Simulates The Process Of Launching A Social Enterprise
Datopolis
Jeni Tennison & Ellen Broad
Open Data Institute
The Open Data Board Game is a board game built around the creation of tools using data.
Dark Forest
A fully decentralized and persistent RTS (real-time strategy) game.
Dark Forest is an MMO space-conquest game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographically-specified universe.
A/B Street
Dustin Carlino (dabreegster@gmail.com), Yuwen Li (UX) & Michael Kirk
A traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers.
8. Videos/Podcasts
What are Digital Cooperatives and How do they Work? | DAOs 101
dOrg
YouTube
2021-04-29
Chris Hartgerink | Modular Research and Cooperative Ownership
Science Better
YouTube
2021-06-22
The peer-reviewed paper is the de facto unit of scholarly research. Hartgerink and his team at Liberate Science are re-thinking that premise and rebuilding from first principles for the digital age. Their first product, Hypergraph, introduces a modular research architecture that allows the different aspects of the scientific process — hypothesis, study design, results, etc — to live as distinct and separate units. This model promises easier replication, streamlined collaboration, and a framework for incentivizing contributorship (as opposed to authorship).
Matt Stephenson | NFTs for Science
Science Better
YouTube
2021-06-29
Cryptoeconomics is poised to reshape how we fund ideas and curiosity at the earliest stages, but only if we creatively explore that potential. Matt Stephenson is helping to make that future. Through his writing and experimentation, he's showing us all a better way to think about NFTs for science.
Ariel Waldman | Create Upward Mobility for Citizen Scientists
Science Better
YouTube
2020-11-23
Ariel Waldman is a trailblazing citizen scientist, creating paths and onramps to the scientific process for the world to follow. She’s brought this participatory ethos to working in the depths of space and, more recently, under the ice in Antarctica. Always worth following, her ongoing adventures are a testament to the power of a curious and creative spirit.
Cultivating Economies of Abundance, Will Ruddick
Cryptowriter
YouTube
2020-11-23
Blox Populi's Brandon Lovejoy makes his return in an intriguing new interview with Will Ruddick of Grassroots Economics.
https://www.grassrootseconomics.org/
Will Ruddick is a development economist focusing on currency innovation, and consults on community currencies worldwide. Mr. Ruddick has pioneered Community Currency programs in Kenya since 2010 and is the founder of the award winning Sarafu and Bangla-Pesa programs. In this episode, Lovejoy and Ruddick span a range of topics from Will's decade plus experience innovating community currencies in Kenya, the promises and limitations of blockchain, tokenized voucher investments, impact claims, how we can design systems that reveal the natural flow of value in local economic systems, and the re-emergence of gift economies.
Content referenced during the show:
THE SERVICEBERRY, An Economy of Abundance, by Robin Wall Kimmerer https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/t...
The Future of Money, by Bernard Lietaer https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/...
Kubernetes: The Documentary [OFFICIAL TRAILER]
Honeypot
YouTube
2021-10-14
The official trailer of the Kubernetes documentary. Inspired by the open source success of Docker in 2013 and seeing the need for innovation in the area of large-scale cloud computing, a handful of forward-thinking Google engineers set to work on the container orchestrator that would come to be known as Kubernetes– this new tool would forever change the way the internet is built. These engineers overcome technical challenges, resistance to open source from within, naysayers, and intense competition from other big players in the industry. Most engineers know about “The Container Orchestrator Wars’’ but most people would not be able to explain exactly what happened, and why it was Kubernetes that ultimately came out on top. There is no topic more relevant to the current open source landscape. This film captures the story directly from the people who lived it, featuring interviews with prominent engineers from Google, Red Hat, Twitter and others. Kubernetes exists as a testament to the power of open source software.
Blockchain & Cloud Computing - Akash Network W/ Greg Osuri
Arcane Bear
YouTube
2021-10-12
I am always trying to learn more about the tech sector. It was never really an interest to me, but now, I basically love learning about everything. Today we drop in with Akash Network to learn more about the cloud computing space and how they are offering better services for cheaper for the same products Amazon AWS offers.
The rise of techno authoritarianism - The use and employment of technology to violate rights
Data Privacy Brasil
YouTube
2021-10-07
Over the past few years, governments and authoritarian actors all over the world are increasing their reliance on personal and sensitive information under the banner of improving public policies and services. The result is a widespread use of biometric data (including for mandatory identity cards), facial recognition in combination with the monitoring of public spaces, centralized databases of citizens personal data, among others technologies and practices. Technologies and practices that can pave the way for techenabled human rights abuses, one of the main outcomes of a process called techauthoritarianism. And they also raise concerns about the disproportionate collection and processing of personal data by governments that are not compliant with data protection and privacy frameworks. The result of which may be health indicators being used to identify and capture groups that deviate from gender or political norms, e.g. LGBTQI people, and the use of other kinds of data to apply some measurement of political censorship or doxxing practices directed at antifascist groups. We believe that it's most important for practices of data processing to reinforce human rightsrespecting bases regarding personal data as well as pertinent data protection principles, such as data minimisation, purpose limitation, data security, data accuracy, and data relevance. Our session will, therefore, discuss the practices that characterize technoauthoritarianism, the downsides to the disproportional use of data by governments and in which ways it affects our Democracies. Additionally, we are interested in understanding what are the particular effects of violations and abuses of the right to privacy caused by this event. Participants: Bruna Santos (Data Privacy Brasil), Javier Pallero (AccessNow), Jhalak Kakkar (Center for Communication Governance), Mahsa Alimardani (Article 19) and Rafael Zanatta (Data Privacy Brasil)
Digital artist Pplpleasr explains the meaning of Fortune’s DeFi cover and the future of NFTs
The Scoop
Spotify
2021-09-24
Digital artist Pplpleasr believes that the production and dissemination of art represent just the first phase of NFT technology adoption. This week on The Scoop, PplPleasr joined host Frank Chaparro to break down how she created Fortune Magazine's DeFi cover and the role of NFTs in Web3 and the broader art space. Earlier this year, Pplpleasr was commissioned by Fortune to create its first NFT cover. That cover image is a tribute to the NFT community, featuring a number of different well-known avatars. The cover's depiction represents a stark contrast to the often gloomy imagery one typically associates with Wall Street, juxtaposed instead with the colorful, dynamic universe of the online crypto community. Pplpleasr remarked: "The Fortune magazine was something that I think is a special moment for all of us because it sort of represents one of these pivotal moments of traditional media representing the entire community." Still, PplPleasr admits that it's early days for NFT's and platforms on which they can trade — they're are often clunky and have complicated user interfaces.
"The technology doesn't even exist yet for us to trade, let's say, assets between different games," said Pplpleasr. "Like, if I wanted to trade an asset from a Riot game to a Blizzard game, that just is not possible. But I do obviously imagine a future with NFT's where that is possible." Today, Pplpleasr sees an opportunity to unlock the power of NFT's in her own way by making it easier for women and people outside the art world to launch their own careers. She recently announced a partnership with the Grammy-nominated musician Steve Aoki to create NFT artworks to be offered at auction at Sotheby's. A portion of the auction proceeds will go to support the careers of women NFT artists.
Episode 58 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded in studio with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Digital Artist Pplpleasr. Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken, and Exodus Bakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more information About Kraken Whether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today. About Exodus Exodus is leading the world out of traditional finance by building beautiful and user-friendly crypto products. Forget having to learn the nuances of different cryptocurrencies. Exodus is designed for everyone and hides the complex details behind a beautiful and intuitive interface.
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Secure, manage, stake, and exchange all of your favorite cryptocurrencies from one wallet. No account registration is required. Download Exodus at Exodus.com or directly from Google Play and the iOS App Store and you’re ready to go.
Mint & Burn Episode 25: ‘The Decentralization Formula’ with Dr Thibault Schrepel, Dr Aaron Lane & D. Prof. Jason Potts
Mint & Burn
Spotify
2021-10-12
In this episode, we catch up with legal scholar Dr Thibault Schrepel to discuss his new book, "Blockchain + Antitrust". We dive in to competition law and policy, explore why blockchain and antitrust law have the same agenda for decentralization, and why they are ultimately complimentary.
How do data scientists get into blockchain? How to build a career by networking online, Greg Osuri
The Data Scientist Show
Spotify
2021-10-08
A seasoned open-source developer of 25+ years, Greg Osuri is the CEO and co-Founder of Akash Network, an open-source decentralized cloud that provides a fast, efficient, and low-cost application deployment.
Prior to Akash Network, Greg founded AngelHack, the world’s largest hackathon organization with over 200,000 developers across 164 cities across the globe. At AngelHack, he helped launch several developer companies including Firebase, which was acquired by Google in 2014.
Greg launched his career at IBM and later designed Kaiser Permanente’s first cloud architecture. As an expert in open-source, distributed systems, and blockchain development, and an applied economist, Greg is a featured international speaker and has spoken recently at events including Kong Summit, Block-Con, and Block to the Future.
His work has been featured in top-tier publications including BeInCrypto, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Forbes, TechCrunch, and Yahoo! Finance. Greg was instrumental in the passing of California’s first Blockchain law, providing the first expert-witness testimony at the Senate.
About Akash Network: Akash Network, the world's first decentralized and open-source cloud, accelerates deployment, scale, efficiency and price performance for high-growth industries like blockchain and machine learning/AI.
Greg's Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregosuri
building a credibility layer in web3 w/mike elias
armada dao
Spotify
2021-05-16
show notes discussing building a credibility layer in web3 w/ @harmonylion1
why is a credibility layer important?
what does the world look like with a credibility layer?
how does credibility intersect with governance?
Parisi’s Metaverse Manifesto: Unpacking His Seven Rules for the Metaverse
Voices of VR Podcast
Voices of VR Podcast
2021-10-23
Tony Parisi published really great Metaverse manifesto on October 22nd titled The Seven Rules for the Metaverse, which attempts to rein in some of the more hyperbolic musings about what the Metaverse is or could be.
Tim Sweeney & Epic Games have been talking a lot about the metaverse, but the hype train really left the station after Mark Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on July 22nd, “I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.” There was CNBC’s Jim Cramer trying to explain the Metaverse on July 29th, and then an explosion of companies talking about “our metaverse” or “enterprise metaverse” or “metaverses.” This led to a series of Tweets from Parisi from August 11th to 29th incrementally laying some boundaries and principles for what would become The Seven Rules of the Metaverse, which formally wrote up and published yesterday.
Parisi’s Seven Rules for the Metaverse
1. There is Only One Metaverse.
2. The Metaverse is for Everyone.
3. Nobody Controls the Metaverse.
4. The Metaverse is Open.
5. The Metaverse is Hardware-Independent.
6. The Metaverse is a Network.
7. The Metaverse is the Internet.
013 - Haad and Mark Henderson on OrbitDB
The Runtime
The Runtime
Rafael is joined by Mark Henderson and Haadcode to talk about OrbitDB, a distributed database / data mesh for use in peer to peer applications. They talk about what it is like developing in the peer to peer field, talk about developing an oplog CRDT, complain a little bit about safari and browser storage limitations, and discuss how one of the core innovations in developing for p2p applications is finding the capacity to "think in a distributed way".
- https://orbitdb.org/
- Equilibrium: https://equilibrium.io/en/
- Jon Sarkin's Art: jonsarkin.com
- Distributed (c): https://distributedc.org/
- A Post about Watchit: https://dev.to/geolffreym/watchit-2b88
- Watchit App: https://watchitapp.site/
- Mark on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aphelionz
- OrbitDB on github: https://github.com/orbitdb/orbitdb.org
- OrbitDB on Matrix: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#orbit-db:matrix.org
All Things Co-op: The Eva Cooperative
Democracy at Work
YouTube
2021-05-04
[S4 E07] The Eva Cooperative In this episode of All Things Coop, Cinar and Kevin talk with Dardan Isufi, the Chief Operating Officer of the Eva Cooperative, a rideshare cooperative based in Quebec, Canada. To learn more about Eva Coop check out their website -
https://eva.coop
**All Things Co-op is a @Democracy At Work production. We make it a point to provide the show free of ads. Please consider supporting our work. Donate one time or become a monthly donor by visiting us at democracyatwork.info/donate or become a patron of All Things Co-op on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/allthingscoop. Your contributions help keep this content free and accessible to all.
The social implications of Ethereum, with Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis
The Gigabyte Weekly
Gigabyte Investment
2021-10-03
9. Tools
Minimum Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI)
Barry WhiteHat et al.
Minimum Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) is a base layer for bribery-resistant, secure, and private digital voting.
Craft
Luki Labs Ltd
Built for digital devices from the ground up, Craft brings back the joy to writing.
Meta
Meta is a note-taking tool for visual learning.
HASH
Hash
HASH is an open-core platform for creating and exploring digital-twins of our complex real world. This allows for safe, low-cost learning and experimentation in realistic virtual environments.
Murmur
Murmur
Scale your culture.
Murmur helps teams shape and evolve the way they work together using written agreements.
Turn noticings into norms in record time. Fully asynchronous. No meetings required.
Rubrix
Rubrix
Rubrix is a production-ready Python framework for exploring, annotating, and managing data in NLP projects.
Fuse
Fuse
The Infrastructure for Open-Source Money
Build community-centric, mobile-first payment systems with zero coding
experience on a low-cost, DeFi platform.
Portal
Simple Software Corp
Portal is a new kind of notebook tool that helps you see the connections between your notes. You create your own system of "links," and then you use those links to traverse your notes when you want to find something later.
Portal is built on a set of helpful primitives. They are [[Thoughts]], [[Topics]], [[Intersections]], [[Links]], and [[Entities]]. You can click into any of them or go to [[Portal Primitives]] to read more about each.
librelingo
Daniel Kantor
an experiment to create a community-driven language-learning platform
Memo
an open-source, programming-oriented spaced repetition software (SRS) written in Flutter.
Ebisu
intelligent quiz scheduling
Lazycard
Lazycard is a simple flashcard application utilizing spaced repetition and cards are formatted with Markdown.
Obsidian Spaced Repetition
Fight the forgetting curve & note aging by reviewing flashcards & notes using spaced repetition on Obsidian.md
Carden
Carden is a Chrome Extension that helps you turn the content you consume into long-term knowledge. Create flashcards in context, view in-depth stats, collect points and level up, and much more
SciScore
SciCrunch, Inc.
the best methods review tool for scientific articles
Hashnode
LinearBytes Inc.
Hashnode is the easiest way to start a developer blog on your personal domain 🌏 for free and connect with the readers through our global dev community!
10. Project Updates
Seeking a New Kind of Public Good: Opening a Door, Closing a Chapter
Gitcoin
2021-10-11
Two months ago, Gitcoin put out a call for proposals for new kinds of public goods. We sought proposals that went beyond open source code, to address different types of public spheres driven by a wide range of values.
We received over 70 responses from organizations of all kinds, and from across the world. We were wowed by the diversity of the proposals, which ranged from climate impact advocacy to public art to education projects seeking to make crypto more accessible. While we selected just 7 projects to award a grant to, we are inspired by and grateful for everyone’s contributions, and energized by the ambition and excitement around this proposal process.
Not only did this process lead to some amazing proposals, it has helped spark a thriving community of public goods advocates, and, we hope, helped demonstrate how other organizations and treasuries in the web3 ecosystem can pursue projects that expand the vision of what we’re trying to achieve.Here is the list of projects and proposals we’re awarding. Over the next few months we’ll be publishing these pieces on the Gitcoin blog. In the meantime, you can read the abstracts below..
Thank you again to the selection committee, including Ellie Rennie, Yancey Strickler, Sara Constantino, Nathan Schneider, Xena Ni, Cierra Peters, Dena Yago, Carson Salter, and Toby Shorin, for all of their hard work in helping us pick these awardees.
Flux #56 | October Roundup
Junto Foundation
2021-10-10
Highlights
After careful deliberation, we’ve made some changes to our governance structure. Junto Foundation will remain, but as a parent nonprofit that stewards the open source development and eventually funding of projects in its ecosystem.
Our decentralized app has been rebranded as Flux and exists as its own LLC. Junto Foundation will own the voting rights of Flux, which will be the flagship product of the Junto ecosystem.
There will be an opportunity for everyone to invest for ownership in Flux through our upcoming Wefunder campaign. For investors that want to participate before we release the equity crowdfunding campaign, feel free to reach out at eric@junto.foundation
…
KlimaDAO Launch Announcement
Klima DAO
Klima DAO
2021-10-11
Head over to the KlimaDAO Community Hub to get started on your Klima journey.
You can also join our Discord and follow our Twitter to get ongoing updates as we launch.
Remember to always double check all contract addresses with the ones from official KlimaDAO channels.
…
Amphora: A Major Merge Milestone
Tim Beiko
Ethereum Foundation Blog
2021-10-15
Earlier this year, the Rayonism hackathon kicked off to protoype the architecture for Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake. The transition, often refered to as The Merge, will keep the existing beacon chain (eth2) and execution layer (eth1) clients, and “merge” both chains by making the beacon chain drive the execution layer’s consensus. This approach is the most recent in a series of iterations to the Ethereum roadmap (more on that here).
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API3 Enterprise Development Report, August/September 2021
Gio Lesna
Gio Lesna
2021-09-16
This is the first progress report for the Enterprise Development team — DAO Cycle #4.
For our avid API3 readers, Enterprise Development’s goal is to target large organizations in partnering or adopting API3 technologies while assisting enterprises in solving their use-case and proof of concepts (POC). These requirements pivot around bringing real-world off-chain data to the on-chain environment. This involves long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and higher levels of risk. An enterprise-first mind-set is needed whereby knowing the enterprise’s needs, concerns and monetization models are centre stage throughout the Enterprise Development process.
In addition, the Enterprise Development team pursues highly strategic and important areas that touch all verticals in the API3 DAO. These relationships lay the foundation for growth and amplification while thinking holistically from data source through to dApp.
DistributedTown: Retroactive Introduction
DistributedTown
DistributedTown
2021-08-30
Ok, let’s be honest: for a passionate, hyper-active, 1-year-old project — we know, we’ve definitely taken too long for an “Intro about DistributedTown.”
11. Events/Hackathons
A Better Tech-a-thon
New York University, Code for America & DemocracyLab
2021-10-14 to 2021-10-15
Online
A Better Tech Public Interest Technology Convention and Career Fair is a virtual hands-on event for professionals, researchers and students interested in creating a better world through technology. It is the first convening of its kind in the US, bringing together the country’s most talented students and leading researchers with organizations and companies that are at the forefront of creating responsible and accountable tech that serves the public interest. The event is being convened by New York University, with a grant from the Public Interest Technology University Network.
FutureProof Tech Summit: Building World-Positive Companies Conference
Startup and Society Initiative
Run the World
2021-10-22
The FutureProof Tech Summit is for founders building the next generation of influential technology companies who want to better center public in addition to commercial interests. Hear from fellow founders who have been in your shoes — prioritizing ethics, social responsibility, and impact while also making payroll, satisfying investors, and growing their company. Learn practical tools, frameworks, and best practices for building world positive tech companies.
12. 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
Call for Papers (CfP): Disinformation-for-Hire and Click Farming around the World @ Social Media + Society
13. Tweets
14. Glossary
Zoöp
an organisation whose board includes a representative for the voices and interests of non-human life
By Het Nieuwe Instituut
Algoactivism
Individual and Collective Resistance of Algorithmic Control
By Katherine C. Kellogg, Melissa A. Valentine & Angèle Christin
Looking for more cool terms? Then take a look at the Glossary!
15. 🤔Questions
Some questions on my noggin:
Is there a possible way to converge (connect and integrate) the Zoöp model with Regen Foundation?
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