Distroid Issue 16
Thank you for reading the Distroid Newsletter, 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 an item summarized, please send a message to Charles Adjovu.
Outline
Research
Articles
Events
Tools
Videos & Podcasts
Jobs
Project Updates
Tweets
1. Research
Peritext: A CRDT for Rich-Text Collaboration
Geoffrey Litt et. al.
Ink & Switch
2021-11
Collaborative editors like Google Docs allow people to work on a rich-text document in real-time, which is convenient when users want to immediately see each others’ changes. However, sometimes people prefer a more asynchronous collaboration style, where they can work on a private copy of a document for a while and share their updates later. The algorithms underpinning services like Google Docs are not designed to support this use case.
In this article we present Peritext, an algorithm for rich-text collaboration that provides greater flexibility: it allows users to edit independent copies of a document, and it provides a mechanism for automatically merging those versions back together in a way that preserves the users’ intent as much as possible. Once the versions are merged, the algorithm guarantees that all users converge towards the same merged result.
We provide a detailed analysis of various edge cases that need to be handled in collaborative rich-text editors, and explain why existing algorithms for plain text collaboration are not able to handle them correctly. We then explain how Peritext handles these issues, and demonstrate our prototype implementation of the algorithm.
Magna Carta Scientiae
Atoms
Science is a catalyst for human progress. But a publishing monopoly and funding monopsony have inhibited research.
We intend to improve incentives in science by developing smart research contracts mediated by peer-to-peer review networks. These will collectively reward scientific contributions, including proposals, papers, replications, datasets, analyses, annotations, editorials, and more.
Long term, these smart contracts help accelerate research by minimizing science friction, ensuring science quality, and maximizing science variance.
Turing-Complete Governance
Saffron Huang
saffron
2021-11-01
Decentralized governance has been dreamed of and experimented with for a long time. From self-managed market socialism in Yugoslavia to revolutionary anarchists in Spain to the IETF’s use of rough consensus, plenty of people have sought new and better ways to make bottom-up decisions.
But doing so at scale has never been easy. It is fiendishly difficult to get lots of people to make decisions and work together both non-hierarchically and effectively. Because blockchain technology enables decentralized consensus at scale, the implications for human decision-making and coordination are immensely promising; if we can use it to scale decentralized governance, this could be a paradigm shift in how most of us live and work together.
…
A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review
Balazs Aczel, Barnabas Szaszi & Alex O. Holcombe
Research Integrity and Peer Review
2021
Background: The amount and value of researchers’ peer review work is critical for academia and journal publishing. However, this labor is under-recognized, its magnitude is unknown, and alternative ways of organizing peer review labor are rarely considered.
Methods: Using publicly available data, we provide an estimate of researchers’ time and the salary-based contribution to the journal peer review system.
Results: We found that the total time reviewers globally worked on peer reviews was over 100 million hours in 2020, equivalent to over 15 thousand years. The estimated monetary value of the time US-based reviewers spent on reviews was over 1.5 billion USD in 2020. For China-based reviewers, the estimate is over 600 million USD, and for UK-based, close to 400 million USD.
Conclusions: By design, our results are very likely to be under-estimates as they reflect only a portion of the total number of journals worldwide. The numbers highlight the enormous amount of work and time that researchers provide to the publication system, and the importance of considering alternative ways of structuring, and paying for, peer review. We foster this process by discussing some alternative models that aim to boost the benefits of peer review, thus improving its cost-benefit ratio.
A Legal Framework for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
David Kerr & Miles Jennings
The purpose of this paper is to identify a number of taxation, entity formation and operational issues pertaining to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (“DAOs”) and to suggest a domestic entity structure capable of addressing such issues, including filing and paying U.S. taxes, opening an entity bank account, signing legal agreements and limiting liability for DAO members. A threshold question for determining the most appropriate domestic entity structure for a DAO is to determine whether it has a for-profit or not-for-profit purpose. Not for-profit purpose is not equivalent to tax-exempt and although very few DAOs will qualify as tax-exempt organizations, many may meet the requirements of not-forprofits for state law purposes. Accordingly, DAOs that meet the requirements should consider registration as unincorporated nonprofit associations (“UNA”) in states that recognize such an entity form.
The following analysis raises the possibility of “wrapping” an entire DAO as a single UNA or “siloing” DAO activity between the treasury and the protocol, with the treasury being “wrapped” in an UNA and the protocol remaining regimeless or “wrapped” in a variety of possible entities, determined by the facts and circumstances of a particular DAO.2 This would bring all activities related to the treasury (e.g., grant programs, DAO funded development work, staking/liquidity mining programs, treasury diversification, etc.) under the treasury UNA, whereas the separate activity relating to the protocol (e.g., protocol smart contract modifications, decisions relating to protocol fees, etc.) would fall under the separate and distinct protocol structure. In either case, the proposed structures prioritize trustless and on-chain transactions, while mitigating the risks of regimeless and offshored structures.
While the use of either UNA structure addresses many of the immediate concerns of DAOs, there remains a significant need for federal and state legislators to modify existing legal entity structures to make them sufficiently flexible for DAOs. DAOs share characteristics with partnerships, corporations, trusts and cooperatives, but the operational and organizational functionality derived from the technology itself presents issues in being classified within those existing entity structures. DAOs are analogous to partnerships, and yet not partnerships; analogous to corporations; and yet not corporations; analogous to mutual agencies; and yet not mutual agencies. As such, clarifying the options available to DAOs to attain existence as an entity in the United States would be a significant benefit to the development of decentralized ecosystems by eliminating ambiguity and making the technology more accessible to the public at large. In addition, it would foster further development of this emerging technology within the United States and facilitate the payment of U.S. taxes, for which DAOs may already be obligated.
Yes: Affirmative Consent as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Imagining Social Platforms
Jane Im et. al.
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2021-05-06
Affirmative consent is the idea that someone must ask for, and earn, enthusiastic approval before interacting with someone else. For decades, feminist activists and scholars have used affirmative consent to theorize and prevent sexual assault. In this paper, we ask: Can affirmative consent help to theorize online interaction? Drawing from feminist, legal, and HCI literature, we introduce the feminist theory of affirmative consent and use it to analyze social computing systems. We present affirmative consent’s five core concepts: it is voluntary, informed, revertible, specific, and unburdensome. Using these principles, this paper argues that affirmative consent is both an explanatory and generative theoretical framework. First, affirmative consent is a theoretical abstraction for explaining various problematic phenomena in social platforms—including mass online harassment, revenge porn, and problems with content feeds. Finally, we argue that affirmative consent is a generative theoretical foundation from which to imagine new design ideas for consentful socio-technical systems.
Mapping the NFT revolution: market trends, trade networks, and visual features
Matthieu Nadini et. al.
Scientific Reports
2021-10-22
Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that represent objects like art, collectible, and in-game items. They are traded online, often with cryptocurrency, and are generally encoded within smart contracts on a blockchain. Public attention towards NFTs has exploded in 2021, when their market has experienced record sales, but little is known about the overall structure and evolution of its market. Here, we analyse data concerning 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs between June 23, 2017 and April 27, 2021, obtained primarily from Ethereum and WAX blockchains. First, we characterize statistical properties of the market. Second, we build the network of interactions, show that traders typically specialize on NFTs associated with similar objects and form tight clusters with other traders that exchange the same kind of objects. Third, we cluster objects associated to NFTs according to their visual features and show that collections contain visually homogeneous objects. Finally, we investigate the predictability of NFT sales using simple machine learning algorithms and find that sale history and, secondarily, visual features are good predictors for price. We anticipate that these findings will stimulate further research on NFT production, adoption, and trading in different contexts.
Monetary Transition: The Case for Money serving the Common Good
Institut Veblen & Etopia
2021-07-27
The monetary landscape is turbulent. Alongside monetary innovations such as cryptocurrencies and local currencies, various proposals are being developed aimed at reforming the monetary system, on either an ad hoc or a structural basis. These proposals include concepts such as “helicopter money”, the cancellation of public debts held by central banks, monetary “donation”, and Modern Monetary Theory. In response to the financial and pandemic crises, central banks are, for their part, pursuing “unconventional measures” at odds with their normal mode of action, providing unprecedented amounts of money to banks and financial markets.
In some respects, this monetary turbulence resembles the turmoil of the 19th century, when the innovators of the time, heralds of the “banking principle”, called for a monetary system adapted to the needs of a fast-growing economy, freed from the gold standard, while the conservatives, defenders of the “currency principle”, clung to the traditional metallic definition of money.In the eyes of today’s critics, the deterioration of living conditions and social and environmental degradation are the consequences of financial and commercial hypertrophy supported by the monetary system. In the wake of this observation, their proposals aim to put central bank money at the service of the common good, the ecological and social transition, or public investment.
Although they have their differences, most of the proposals for reforming the monetary system agree on the need to develop a new mode of money creation, in which the central bank—or an issuing institution—decides, within a framework of democratic governance, to issue the amount of central bank money required to achieve stated objectives by allocating it to a particular sector (the government, households, companies, etc.) and assigning it to a specific purpose (support for household income, business activity, public investment, ecological transition, etc.). In this note, we refer to this as the “voluntary mode of central bank money creation”, and we define the transition to this new mode of issuance as the “monetary transition”.
This form of money issuance would be different from current ones in two key aspects:
it would not be associated with any repayable loan or credit, or with any purchase of securities that could be resold, and would therefore be “without counterpart”;
and since no counterpart due in the form of reimbursement would cause the money created to return to the central bank, it would be “permanent” rather than temporary.The debate begins. In our view, it is part of a historical pattern: whenever society has needed to, it has transformed the monetary system to suit its needs. As such, the “banking mode of money creation”, which stems from the banking principle, has supplanted the “feudal mode of money creation” and has responded, in turn, to the rising power of the market. Times have changed. Repairing social injustice, accelerating the ecological transition, guaranteeing employment and ensuring a minimum standard of living are all priorities and needs to which the market-based system is unable to respond. Proponents of this reform argue that transforming the mode of money issuance would do.
Based on our analysis, we argue this transformation has already begun. It started with quantitative easing, one of the unconventional monetary policy measures that involves central banks buying up financial assets. At present, the central bank creates more money by purchasing financial securities than by lending to banks. This transformation supports the financial sector, boosting its power by financialising money. The line between money and securities has never been so thin: issuers of securities now know that by issuing securities they are issuing quasi-money. However, quantitative expansion has shown that it is possible to move away from the banking mode of money creation; that debt is not necessarily the inevitable counterpart of money.
By being totally released from this counterpart, money could be used to serve the common good, oriented towards the spending needs of the real economy, of households, of companies, and of governments in particular, to support them and allow them to make the investments that are essential for the ecological transition. This new, voluntary mode of money issuance would not replace but complement current modes of money creation involving the granting of loans (banking mode) or purchase of securities (acquisitional mode). This coexistence would enable better distribution of monetary power and protect against its monopolisation by the financial sector.
We argue that this proposed reform would also involve adapting some central bank accounting rules to allow for the accurate recording and control of “permanent central bank contributions to public objectives”. Similarly, this new mode of money creation should be accompanied by new monetary tools for managing the volume of money in circulation and the absence of reflux. Finally, in our view, this method of issuance would lead to a more or less radical transformation of the independent and technocratic central bank into a democratic monetary institution, whose governance would involve all stakeholders.
In conclusion, societal transformations have always involved transformations of the monetary system. From our point of view, this means that society will not achieve its new objectives, first and foremost the ecological and social transition, without a monetary transition. More than ever, society needs money, once again, to be put at its service.
Governance in Decentralized Networks
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
2020-05-21
Effective, legitimate and transparent governance is paramount for the long-term viability of decentralized networks. If the aim is to design such a governance model, it is useful to be aware of the history of decision making paradigms and the relevant previous research. Towards such ends, this paper is a survey of different governance models, the thinking behind such models, and new tools and structures which are made possible by decentralized blockchain technology. Governance mechanisms in the wider civil society are reviewed, including structures and processes in private and non-profit governance, open-source development, and self-managed organisations. The alternative ways to aggregate preferences, resolve conflicts, and manage resources in the decentralized space are explored, including the possibility of encoding governance rules as automatically executed computer programs where humans or other entities interact via a protocol.
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science
Johan S. G. Chu & James A. Evans
PNAS
2021-10-12
In many academic fields, the number of papers published each year has increased significantly over time. Policy measures aim to increase the quantity of scientists, research funding, and scientific output, which is measured by the number of papers produced. These quantitative metrics determine the career trajectories of scholars and evaluations of academic departments, institutions, and nations. Whether and how these increases in the numbers of scientists and papers translate into advances in knowledge is unclear, however. Here, we first lay out a theoretical argument for why too many papers published each year in a field can lead to stagnation rather than advance. The deluge of new papers may deprive reviewers and readers the cognitive slack required to fully recognize and understand novel ideas. Competition among many new ideas may prevent the gradual accumulation of focused attention on a promising new idea. Then, we show data supporting the predictions of this theory. When the number of papers published per year in a scientific field grows large, citations flow disproportionately to already well-cited papers; the list of most-cited papers ossifies; new papers are unlikely to ever become highly cited, and when they do, it is not through a gradual, cumulative process of attention gathering; and newly published papers become unlikely to disrupt existing work. These findings suggest that the progress of large scientific fields may be slowed, trapped in existing canon. Policy measures shifting how scientific work is produced, disseminated, consumed, and rewarded may be called for to push fields into new, more fertile areas of study.
Trusting the Value of Impact Tokens for Higher Level Social Problem Solving
Emergence: Michael Cooper
Emergence: Michael Cooper
2021-10-27
The role of Impact Tokens to help address common social problems is partly dependent on the ability of Oracle providers to accurately measure the cumulative alleviation of the social problem. Any alleviation of the problem results in new benefits which define the Outcome State represented by the Impact Token. As Impact Tokens are used as tools to help alleviate different types of social problems, Oracle providers will need to diversify their methods to account for increasing levels of complexity that enable these problems and the new benefits that result from the problem being solved. Measuring Outcome States is synonymous with measuring the benefits that result from the problem being alleviated. Expanding the universe of measurement methods and principles used by Oracle providers to reliably communicate the types and scope of these new benefits is important for establishing trust that the Outcome State is an improvement over the status quo.
Community Currencies as Crisis Response: Results from a Randomized Control Trial in Kenya
frontiers in Blockchain
2021-10-21
This paper presents the results of what may be the world’s first randomized control trial on community currencies, focusing on Grassroots Economics' Community Inclusion Currency (CIC) model run on the xDAI blockchain. Beneficiaries in Nairobi, Kenya were sent the equivalent of $30 in cryptocurrency tokens, enabling a level of impact evaluation usually unfeasible for most cash and mobile-money based transfer programs. Results show that CIC transfers of $30 are associated with a $93.51 increase in beneficiaries' wallet balance, a $23.17 increase in monthly income, a $16.30 increase in monthly spending, a $6.31 increase in average trade size and a $28.43 increase in expenditure on food and water. However, the difference in treatment effects for males versus females suggests gender imbalances persist. This study serves as an important prototype for novel cash transfer models and presents some of the first quantitative evidence in the area of “crypto for good”.
Can I use this publicly available dataset to build commercial AI software? Most likely not
Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur et. al.
ArXiv
2021-11-09
Publicly available datasets are one of the key drivers for commercial AI software. The use of publicly available datasets (particularly for commercial purposes) is governed by dataset licenses. These dataset licenses outline the rights one is entitled to on a given dataset and the obligations that one must fulfil to enjoy such rights without any license compliance violations. However, unlike standardized Open Source Software (OSS) licenses, existing dataset licenses are defined in an ad-hoc manner and do not clearly outline the rights and obligations associated with their usage. This makes checking for potential license compliance violations difficult. Further, a public dataset may be hosted in multiple locations and created from multiple data sources each of which may have different licenses. Hence, existing approaches on checking OSS license compliance cannot be used. In this paper, we propose a new approach to assess the potential license compliance violations if a given publicly available dataset were to be used for building commercial AI software. We conduct trials of our approach on two product groups within Huawei on 6 commonly used publicly available datasets. Our results show that there are risks of license violations on 5 of these 6 studied datasets if they were used for commercial purposes. Consequently, we provide recommendations for AI engineers on how to better assess publicly available datasets for license compliance violations.
Climate change and the legitimacy of Bitcoin
Ellie Rennie
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
2021-11-07
This paper examines the ways in which Bitcoin miners are responding to external pressures associated with climate change and what this means for the legitimacy of Bitcoin. Using the experiences of four miners with very different energy use practices, the paper unpacks the various motivations and choices that underpin Bitcoin mining, including factors that can be obscured in economic and data models. Miners make decisions based on cost, local partnerships, the preferences of capital investors, energy market dynamics, technology upgrades, and the regulatory environment. In responding to these pressures and events, some miners are providing services and innovations that may help the viability of clean energy infrastructures for energy providers and beyond, including the data and computing industry. The paper finds that if Bitcoin loses legitimacy as a store of value, then it may result in lost opportunities to accelerate sustainable energy infrastructures and markets.
Cryptoanarchism and Cryptocurrencies
Usman Chohan
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
2017-12-01
The aim of this article is to examine cryptoanarchism as a branch of anarchist thought, using the lens of cryptocurrencies to frame the praxis of cryptoanarchist instruments within the writings of earlier anarchist thinkers and practitioners. It argues that cryptoanarchism, despite being omitted from many typologies of anarchism, reflects in various important ways what is in fact a superimposition of anarchism in a digital context, and is thus increasingly pertinent as individuals build and navigate the cyberspatial realm. The article traces the anarchist antecedents of cryptoanarchism, and then draws attention to the Cypherpunk movement which predicted the evolution of cryptocurrencies and other cryptoanarchist mediums. The article then draws upon features of cryptocurrencies to compare them with key anarchist characteristics, and argues through the lens of cryptocurrencies that cryptoanarchism is reflected and embedded in their structures. Areas of future research are thereafter identified, inviting scholars of anarchism to engage with the digital conceptions of cryptoanarchism as a path forward in weaving new conceptualizations of anarchism.
tbDEX: A Liquidity Protocol v0.1
@TBD54566975
tbDEX is a protocol for discovering liquidity and exchanging assets (such as bitcoin, fiat money, or real world goods) when the existence of social trust is an intractable element of managing transaction risk. The tbDEX protocol facilitates decentralized networks of exchange between assets by providing a framework for establishing social trust, utilizing decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credentials (VCs) to establish the provenance of identity in the real world. The protocol has no opinion on anonymity as a feature or consequence of transactions. Instead, it allows willing counterparties to negotiate and establish the minimum information acceptable for the exchange. Moreover, it provides the infrastructure necessary to create a ubiquity of on-ramps and off-ramps directly between the fiat and crypto financial systems without the need for centralized intermediaries and trust brokers. This makes crypto assets and decentralized financial services more accessible to everyone.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BLOCKCHAIN LAW
Global Blockchain Business Council
2021-11
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Over the past years, blockchain technology has been recognized as a multi-faceted technology which may be beneficial in a variety of use cases. Its greatest potential lies in the creation of value for individuals and groups where trust is either expensive or non-existent. However, blockchain technology does not always fit neatly within existing legal norms and regulatory principles. Among the innovative and disruptive artifacts of blockchain technology are decentralization, pseudonymity/anonymity, immutability/ finality and, particularly in the context of smart contracts, automation, that is the lack of a third-party intermediary to assume control and responsibility. These characteristics are often the root cause of difficult legal questions. Blockchain technology will have a significant impact on the field of law. We are only at the very beginning of understanding how this nascent technology intersects with longstanding jurisprudence in the global community. Will current law bend to new use cases inspired and enabled by blockchain technology or will we see new laws enacted, especially in such areas as contract, intellectual property, regulatory, and antitrust law? We aim to explore these issues and much more here. The International Journal of Blockchain Law (IJBL) is presented in an accessible language and format; written by lawyers for lawyers and professionals dealing with blockchain technology. The IJBL is published online and available to GBBC members and non-members. It aims to cover thrilling legal topics related to blockchain, and across various jurisdictions. We hope the IJBL educates and, most importantly, offers food for thought. The IJBL’s editors have rich and diverse blockchain-related experience, and each brings a unique perspective to the publication. I encourage you to review their backgrounds here. As for me, I will draw from my experience as co-editor of the Handbook of Blockchain Law (published by Wolters Kluwer in 2020) to bring high quality articles on far reaching blockchain-related topics that inform and challenge our current thinking. I want to thank Sandra Ro and the GBBC for taking the IJBL under its umbrella. Without her dedication and support the IJBL would never have left the design and concept phase. In our inaugural issue, we have collated a great collection of articles on topics ranging from decentralized finance (DeFi) (from both SEC Commissioner’s and practitioner’s perspectives), the viability of crypto securities in the U.S., the novel legal issues arising from disputes involving Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (or DAOs), the use of NFTs by celebrities, and smart derivative contracts. I look forward to continuing to present cutting-edge blockchain-related articles from around the globe to assist and support your legal blockchain journey.
Imagining Human-Machine Futures: Blockchain-based “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations”
Kelsie Nabben
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
2021-10-30
Blockchain-based “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs) communities risk perpetuating the 1990s Californian Ideology of techno-elitism in their imaginary of “autonomy” via technological determinism, free-market economics, and “engineering” approach to social and political challenges (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). Imaginations include algorithmic governance via Artificial General Intelligence agents running on decentralized blockchains, hiring labor in DAOs, and bartering payment in cryptocurrency. The role of humans in this imaginary is limited. This piece explores autonomy in blockchain-based DAOs to investigate visions of algorithmic assemblages. Do DAOs imagine a different future where the role of humans is one of symbiosis and augmentation with machines? I draw on cybernetic interpretations of DAOs as “autopoietic” organisms to imagine a co-constitutive relationship between people and algorithms in the information age. By understanding the promises and practices of blockchain technology and decentralized governance, we can better engage with these emergent objects of social and policy inquiry.
MOTIVATING FACTORS INFLUENCING THE DECISION TO CREATE WORKER COOPERATIVE BUSINESSES
Brandon Alexander DeBalsi
ResearchGate
2021-09
While there is a growing body of literature on the subject of worker cooperatives in the field of economics that compares them to conventional capitalist firms, there has been little literature to date looking at lives of the workers within these enterprises. This study investigates the self-stated reasons for why worker-owners of worker cooperative firms chose this form of employment. In unstructured interviews, a sample of thirty-seven current and former worker-owners were asked why they chose to become worker cooperatives members. The responses are grouped into three categories based on their self-reported motivations: Idealists, Economists, and Drifters. Implications for future research into the anthropology of cooperatives are discussed.
2. Articles
A Clubhouse Conversation: Your Customer Community Is NOT Yours
AcornOak
Statistics are straight-forward: a 5% improvement in customer retention can increase profits anywhere between 25% to 95%.
In a Clubhouse “Tuesday Tiger Talk” event hosted by LARVOL, a leader in healthcare and life sciences intelligence reports and SaaS solutions, Virginie Glaenzer, Co-founder of AcornOak, shared her cutting-edge thinking on how to build successful customer communities.
Virginie believes that strong brands of the future will be community-driven: “The brands that will survive and thrive in our new disrupted economy will be the ones nurturing a community.”
Having a community means, above all, creating relationships between members and the brand and co-creating value for both. And, that’s when it gets tricky. Many online articles provide the fundamental steps to building a community, however, no one writes about the real challenges of creating a customer community.
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What supply chain mess? For Buy Nothing devotees, it’s not a problem
RONALD D. WHITE
Los Angeles Times
2021-11-22
Imagine not worrying about supply chain delays or the likelihood that your e-commerce order is stuck somewhere on a cargo ship.
That’s what life is like for members of the Buy Nothing Project, the terribly unfun name for a movement in which folks give away stuff they don’t need: children’s clothing, backyard produce, knickknacks, electronics, even big-ticket items such as cars.
The Buy Nothing ethos has been surging by providing goods and personal connection during a time when both have been in short supply. Lately, there’s the added impetus of a holiday shopping season marred by fears of product shortages and high prices.
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ConsenSys AG Shareholders Readying Legal Action Over Share Valuation
Andrew Thurman
Coindesk
2021-11-02
A group of former employees and shareholders of Ethereum development firm ConsenSys are alleging ConsenSys AG, led by billionaire Joseph Lubin, improperly valued key assets in its portfolio prior to an asset transfer involving banking giant JPMorgan.
According to documents seen by CoinDesk, the group intends to request that a Swiss court review an asset transfer between ConsenSys AG and ConsenSys Inc., with a particular focus on Web 3 wallet MetaMask and blockchain infrastructure product Infura, two of the most foundational pillars of the present-day Ethereum ecosystem.
A debt burden – a $39 million personal loan founder Joseph Lubin made to ConsenSys AG (also known as Mesh) – was also reportedly swapped with the assets.
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The chicken or the egg? How Gro DAO is launching governance
Gro
Gro
2021-09-21
This article sets out how Gro DAO will launch on-chain governance before the Gro DAO Token has been distributed, and what the DAO can expect to vote on in the coming weeks.
Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure
Aviv Ovadya
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
2021-10-18
Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms make incredibly impactful decisions about the speech of billions. Right now, those decisions are primarily in the hands of corporate CEO’s—and heavily influenced by pressure from partisan and authoritarian governments aiming to entrench their own power.
We propose an alternative: platform democracy. In the past decade, a new suite of democratic processes have been shown to be surprisingly effective at navigating challenging and controversial issues, from nuclear power policy in South Korea to abortion in Ireland. These processes have been tested around the world, overcome the pitfalls of elections and referendums, and can work at platform scale. They enable the creation of independent ‘people’s mandates’ for platform policies—something invaluable for the impacted populations, the governments which are constitutionally unable to act on speech, and even the platforms themselves.
A new form of CV for researchers
Anthea Lacchia
Nature Index
2021-08-03
A new narrative-based CV that reflects skills and experiences better than a grant and publication record is being piloted across six funding schemes overseen by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the UK’s central research funder.
Résumé for Researchers looks set to be adopted widely, after seven UK science funders, including UKRI, committed on 23 July to discussing together how a shared approach towards using it could work.
Their joint statement came after the UK government vowed the day before to drive adoption of the résumé as part of its R&D People and Culture Strategy.
….
Worker-Led Alternatives: A Line of Hope for New Platform Futures
Botpopuli
2021-10-27
During the pandemic, as dominant platforms captured vital data infrastructure and strengthened their market hegemony, platform workers around the world continued to confront an increasingly precarious future of work. However, workers are conceiving new solidarities and imaginaries to challenge and mitigate against the logic of the platform economy.
This article explores one such notable movement within the digital economy – that of ‘platform cooperativism’, with examples of novel initiatives from across the Global South. Despite being a genuine force seeking to reclaim digital technologies for the people’s interests, cooperatives face an uphill battle to viability, particularly due to the data disadvantage of most Global South nations.
Therefore, to tap into the radical potential of platform cooperatives, the legal and economic terrain must allow them to flourish. Some concrete steps in this direction can include establishing an enabling policy environment, facilitating access to new and sustainable sources of finance for cooperatives, instituting regulatory frameworks for the protection of data rights, creating consumer awareness, and incentivizing participation in these enterprises.
A complementary currency for the common good
Philippe Derudder
Etopia
2021-09-14
The coronavirus crisis that the world has known since 2020 has shed light on how fragile and non-resilient the economic model that human societies have built. All it took was this tiny grain of sand to put a lasting stop to the hyper-efficient producto-consumerist machine that was our pride.
But this health crisis is not the only one that humans have to face. Added to this is the climate crisis, that of the destruction of biodiversity, the scarcity of non-renewable resources, rampant pollution, poverty, inequalities ...
The good news is that they are not a “natural disaster” type; they are of a "causal" nature, in other words they are the effect of an identifiable cause common to all, that of the economic and financial model that humanity has adopted. The question is to choose between the insanity that Einstein defined as the fact of "believing that by doing the same thing, one can obtain a different result", or having the courage to question the model.
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Decentralization may be key to protecting our digital identities
Debra Farber
VentureBeat
2021-11-06
The internet as we know it is broken. When it was originally created with the primary objective of facilitating information sharing, this meant that security and user privacy were little more than an afterthought. The original data architectures were based on the concept of stand-alone computers, which companies used to store data centrally on a server that could be sent or retrieved by a second counterparty. To reap the benefits of the internet both on an individual level and at a societal level, each user needs a digital identity.
There are many interpretations of the term “digital identity” which range from email addresses and social media accounts to actual forms of digital identification such as passports or driving licenses used for authentication in real-life scenarios. As the UN strives to ensure that everyone on the planet has a legal identity by 2030, the topic of digital identification has become more pertinent, prompting companies like Microsoft and Accenture to look at ways to provide digital identities to the 1.1 billion people around the world with no official documentation.
….
DappRadar Exclusive Report: Play-to-Earn Revolution Leaps Beyond Axie Infinity with New Games and Tokens
DappRadar
The Defiant
2021-11-01
Generating income while playing a game sounds like a utopia for most of us. However, thanks to the play-to-earn movement, that scenario is not far from reality.
Since May 2021, blockchain-based games have enjoyed a significant amount of success. The number of accounts or wallets connected to blockchain games reached 754,000. When compared to Q2, the game-connected unique active wallets (UAW) increased in 25%, and an impressive 509% year-over-year. Even though the number of UAW is an on-chain metric that does not necessarily translate into users1, there is enough evidence that supports a growth in the demand.
It finally seems that people have started to realize the potential behind the combination of games with blockchain technologies. Especially with intriguing concepts like the metaverse gaining visibility across mainstream media. But what exactly is play-to-earn? What were the main drivers behind the surge of this latest trend in the game sector? And, where is the blockchain game industry heading?
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Introducing the Celo Climate Collective
Celo Foundation
Celo
2021-10-06
Today, the Celo community is stepping up in the fight against climate change by competing for the $100M carbon removal challenge by XPRIZE. To achieve this ambitious goal, we are launching the Climate Collective, a community driven effort to fight climate change by tokenizing rainforests and other carbon sequestering assets. The collective, which features ten companies at launch including Curve Labs, Kolektivo, Moss, and Regen Network, will propose that over the next 4 years, these tokenized trees be added to the Celo Reserve so that Celo stablecoins can be backed in part by rainforests, which are essential in the fight against climate change.
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Three simple reasons crypto will dominate charitable giving in the future
CryptoAltruism
2021-09-01
There is no doubt that cryptocurrency in the charitable giving space is on the rise. With more wide scale adoption, this is something that will come naturally, but there are also many benefits that make cryptocurrencies a winner over using fiat currency to donate to charitable causes.
There is a laundry list of reasons why cryptocurrency is a better option for charitable giving and will eventually dominate the social impact sector in the not-so-distant future. However, for the purpose of this blog, I’m going to focus on three simple reasons why, sooner rather than later, cryptocurrency will be the financial instrument of choice for charitable giving.
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Etherisc – Using blockchain technology to deliver agricultural insurance
CryptoAltruism
2021-07-21
As the world’s climate continues to warm, we will inevitably see more volatile weather including heat waves, floods, droughts, and extreme weather events. These weather events can have large impacts on farmers, especially smallholder farmers in developing countries who may not have access to adequate protections. Poor weather conditions can drastically impact yields, thus resulting in food shortages and revenue shortfalls for farmers.
One way to mitigate the impacts of unpredictable weather events is through the use of agricultural insurance. Agricultural insurance helps protect farmers by insuring them against losses due to environmental causes. Despite the value of agricultural insurance as a risk management tool, only 3% of smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa use it.
There are many reasons why this number is as low as it is including expensive premiums, issues with trust, and a lack of transparency among insurance providers. It is clear that traditional insurance isn’t working for this population, and that an alternative is needed. This is where Etherisc comes in.
ascribe for NFT Archaeologists
Trent McConaghy
2021-11-09
ascribe was a protocol, backend, and app for blockchain-secured digital art (“NFTs”) starting in 2013. It was built on Bitcoin; Ethereum didn’t exist yet. It grew to 13,500 users and 31,900 registered works. Despite the traction, it was too early. It’s been dormant since 2018, though I have a feeling that it has interesting chapters ahead.
Since the explosion of NFTs in 2021, self-described “NFT archaeologists” and others have been asking me more than ever about ascribe and the related works. To give everyone more thorough answers, this post brings together previously-scattered information to help NFT enthusiasts learn more.
The rest of this post is organized as follows.
Section 2 has a timeline spanning blockchain pre-history, to ascribe early years and growth, to the 2021 NFT explosion.
Section 3 highlights ascribe users and features, such as the first museum to add an NFT to its collection.
Section 4 describes ascribe technology, including the SPOOL ownership protocol overlaying Bitcoin, how users control their own keys, and pointers to open-source frontend & backend open-source on GitHub.
Section 5 concludes. Section 6 has further data for those wishing to go deeper yet.
For those who prefer audio, check out the recent podcasts with Mat & Holly and with Adam McBride which are complementary to each other. And, here’s a short twitter thread. What follows is a full-detail version.
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How NFTs Create Value
Harvard Business Review
2021-11-10
How much could a cluster of pixels possibly be worth? More pointedly, why is it worth anything at all? The explosion of NFTs and their accompanying marketplaces have left many baffled, incredulous, and deeply skeptical. But while NFTs may be fetching eye-popping, eyebrow-raising valuations, there is a logic to how — and when — they create value. By creating a system of verifiable digital ownership NFTs fundamentally changed the market for digital assets, creating the possibility for new types of transactions. Amidst a flood of new ventures, however, it can be hard to tell which are creating value and which are just riding the hype. The companies that have been most successful on this new frontier have a few things in common: They make meaningful use of the NFT technology itself, leverage a community of users, generate confidence that they can continue executing on the project to maintain ongoing community engagement, offer accessible “on-ramps” for new users, and are able to weather crypto market swings
How Carbon Offsetting Can Build a Forest
Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR)
Nov. 9, 2021
“This thing used to be the size of a chicken coop,” Cacique Matsulu said to me as we arrived to ACATISEMA's new offices in Cumaribo. “Now look at it.” A Sikuani man in his early 50s with a tight flat top, kind eyes and generous smile, the Cacique—or Chief—is the Selva de Matavén’s Zone 1 coordinator, one of its most important leaders.
The Cacique proudly toured us around the modern, two-story building—including several offices and meeting spaces. Upstairs, two women were crunching numbers on Excel spreadsheets. “We're working on next year's budget,” explained accountant Neila Parra, accounting for requests submitted by the reserve's 16 sectors and 315 communities. The sale of carbon credits from the REDD+ project accounts for 100 percent of ACATISEMA's operating budget, around $5 million in 2022. In addition to covering the salaries of the Indigenous guard, stationed throughout the reserve to protect the forest, the project finances programs for potable water, food security, education, solar power, and transportation.
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Governance Minimization
Paradigm
2020-10-28
“THE BEST GOVERNMENT IS THAT WHICH GOVERNS LEAST” — UNKNOWN
Those who read my blockchain governance post from 2017 know I was excited about crypto exploring different forms of governance, especially on-chain governance. In the 3 years since, on-chain governance has gone from obscure to a popular component of many important protocols. Despite this traction, I think the most widely used protocols will trend towards governance minimization.
Why? Governance minimization allows stakeholders to depend on a protocol. This creates a virtuous cycle of adoption, enabling scale that would otherwise be unachievable. Look no further than successful traditional internet protocols like HTTP and SMTP to see this power today. Their governance minimization has allowed them to become standards everyone depends on, generating levels of use far exceeding what any company could achieve.
This post explains governance minimization, where governance remains important, and speculates on implications.
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Patterns for cooperative networks and associations
John Duda
The Next System Project
2019-04-24
Recently, we teamed up with CoLab Cooperative, a worker-owned digital agency building online infrastructure for the democratic economy (including thenextsystem.org!) for a research project to explore the many options for how cooperatives can grow and scale without letting go of key values around democratic participation and shared culture. As a rapidly growing distributed digital worker cooperative spanning three continents, CoLab felt they were in uncharted territory, and reached out to our team to help create a map that could guide their future path towards bigger scale and bigger impact. In the spirit of movement generosity, they agreed to structure this project in a way that would allow much of the research to be contributed back to the commons—the result is below. [-john]
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Every Design Studio Should Be a Worker-Owned Studio
Design Action Collective and Partner & Partners
AIGA Eye on Design
2021-10-25
Earlier this year, AIGA Eye on Design republished an article about worker-owned cooperatives featuring interviews with members of Design Action Collective and Partner & Partners.
While we were glad to see the national design industry take note of worker co-ops, we were disappointed to see Pentagram mentioned in an article featuring cooperatively owned design studios. Though Pentagram refers to the heads of their teams as “partners”—a commonly used term to describe co-owners in the co-op space—they stop short of actually operating as a cooperative. Only the partners, a small percentage of the firm’s employees, hold ownership and decision-making power. We believe including a large agency in an article about co-ops is misleading and indicative of a general misunderstanding that often finds its way into conversations and articles about worker-owned studio models.
Which brings us to a larger point: Amidst growing interest in the co-op model, it’s imperative that the design industry and the design press remains thoughtful in its usage of the language around cooperative labor and shared ownership, and critical of attempts from corporations and large agencies to appropriate that language and empty it of meaning.
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How to improve Karl and Vitalik’s really good idea
Ellie Rennie
Ellie Rennie
2021-08-03
Retroactive public goods funding uses tokens and incentives to encourage developers to work on projects that benefit the ecosystem. In this post, I look back at a similar approach from the field of welfare policy called ‘social impact bonds’. I propose that we commence trials of retroactive public goods funding with projects that involve complex social dynamics.
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From contemptuous to indifferent to curious to pretty damn excited: my journey to web3
Adam Davidson
Adam Davidson
2021-11-17
My public introduction to crypto: going on the Colbert Report and saying nobody should buy Bitcoin
The easiest thing is to mock me.
I went on The Colbert Report on April 17, 2013, and said--quite confidently and emphatically--that nobody should ever buy Bitcoin. You can watch me say it here.
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DAOs: Communities of the Future
Lisa Xu
Lisa Xu
2021-11-10
To say that there has been a lot of excitement around Web3 lately would be an understatement. If you live in New York like I do, you may have noticed that the city was absolutely buzzing with activity (read: parties) last week around NFT.NYC. It certainly feels like we are in the midst of a technological and cultural movement and at the forefront of something truly big.
Ultimately, everyone will explore and enter the Web3 ecosystem in their own way. For me, what has been most fascinating in Web3 has been the communities. Earlier this year I wrote about the importance of community teams and software in the modern enterprise, as well as the opportunity for infrastructure to democratize digital community building.
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Worker-Owned Home Care Co-ops Growing Despite Challenging Industry Environment
Katrina Kazda
Fifty by fifty
2021-11-17
Worker-owned home care cooperatives continue to grow impressively year by year, according to the third annual survey done by the ICA Group, in partnership with the Cooperative Development Foundation. While the first 30 years of home care cooperative development was slow, the past decade has seen a significant uptick, and since 2016, two or more cooperatives have consistently been added to the sector each year, with very few closings. Additionally, six start-up initiatives are currently underway in as many states.
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To work for everyone, the Metaverse must be decentralized
Ariel Shapira
Cointelegraph
2021-11-10
What’s in a name? A whole metaverse is what one could be led to believe when looking at the buzz around Facebook’s recent transformation into Meta. In reality, of course, there is more to the new name than that — there is also the whistleblower scandal, alongside the previous controversies tarring the company’s image, as well as the encroachment of rivaling social media platforms that are more popular with young people.
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Bumble is swiping right on Web 3.0 and the metaverse
Kristin Majcher
The Block
2021-11-11
Dating and friendship app Bumble is exploring how to integrate the metaverse and Web 3.0 into a relaunch of its platform for finding friends, executives said this week.
While many details about Bumble’s blockchain strategy remain unclear, the Austin, Texas-based tech company appears to be taking the metaverse -- a term that refers to virtual worlds and integrated digital experiences and assets -- into consideration as it embarks on revamping its Bumble BFF platform for finding platonic friendships.
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Tool Use and Language Skills Are Linked in the Brain: Practicing One Improves the Other
2021-11-11
Language has traditionally been considered a complex skill which mobilises brain networks specifically dedicated to linguistic processing. But in recent years, neuroscience research has returned to this idea and offered new insights.
Notably, studies have suggested that areas of the brain which control certain language functions, such as processing the meaning of words, are also involved in the control of fine motor skills.
Syntax, the ability to correctly structure words into a sentence, is one of the most important features of language. While evidence had yet to link syntax skills specifically with motor control in the brain, research published in 2019 revealed a correlation between having good syntactic ability and being skilled at using tools.
With this in mind, our international research team was interested to know whether the use of tools engages parts of the brain similar to those mobilised when we’re thinking about the construction of sentences.
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Web 3.0 can repair the attention-driven digital economy
Doug Petkanics
TechCrunch
2021-11-08
From imbalanced creator economics and poor security, to centralized control and disgruntled communities — Web 2.0’s flaws have been on full display these past couple of months.
First, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified to Congress last month that the social media giant “chooses profits over safety.” Then, as if on cue, Facebook’s centralized services went down worldwide. The outage was so widespread that Facebook couldn’t even access the servers itself.
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The Rising Consumer Demand for Data Privacy and Autonomy
Konstantine Buhler
Sequoia
2021-11-18
From decentralized finance and NFTs to DuckDuckGo and Signal Messenger, the last 18 months have exposed exploding consumer demand for greater autonomy and privacy in the way they search, collaborate, and conduct business.
Big tech platforms and unproven challengers have pivoted to incorporate privacy-respecting features or build more decentralized web3 products. In the April 2021 iOS 14.5 update, iPhone users were given the option whether or not to be tracked across apps. A staggering 96% chose not to be tracked, indicating that when given the choice, users choose privacy.
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⚡ Where Algorithmic Transparency Meets Community
Reboot
2021-11-19
⚡ Putting Workers in the Driver's Seat
Jasmine Sun
Reboot
2021-08-06
The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books
Daniel A. Gross
The New Yorker
2021-09-02
Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks—i.e., “digital content.” In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as “heart-wrenching stories” from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: “The responsible thing to do—and the best way to serve our patrons right now—is to help minimize the spread of covid-19.” The library added, “We will continue to offer access to e-books.”
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
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#9: Decentralised Tech & the Future of Organising
Richard D. Bartlett
What I’m paying attention to
2021-11-19
‘Crypto-States’ Will Compete With Corporates in the Metaverse
Kelsie Nabben
Coindesk
2021-11-23
What kind of metaverse would you like to live in?
With the announcement of Facebook’s rebrand to “Meta” – where the social media giant designs and builds “the metaverse” and claims the next digital frontier – the battle for the future of cyberspace is on.
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NFT MAKERS ARE TRYING TO BUILD THE NEXT DISNEY
Adi Robertson
The Verge
2021-11-17
In the online auction market OpenSea, you can pay around $600 to buy a portrait of a robot in streetwear — and, if you’re lucky, a stake in a new media empire.
The robot is called a TARS, and it’s part of the Voguverse, an elaborate 37th-century mythos involving space arcologies, a nuclear war, and interstellar travel. The portrait is one of countless digital assets being sold as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. But by pairing its fictional universe with a blockchain-based ledger, the creators think they can tap into a new way to tell stories.
As NFTs explode in popularity, entrepreneurs are imagining an entire media industry that’s built around them. At its most ambitious, the vision is sometimes dubbed a “decentralized Disney”: a world of fictional crossovers like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its many spinoffs but where different characters and creative properties are owned by a panoply of fans, not a single company. Talent agencies, comics authors, and countless NFT enthusiasts are buying in.
What does owned mean? Many are still figuring that out.
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The future we share. On platform cooperativism, data commons & Web3 - in coversation with Jan J. Zygmuntowski
Marta Brewer
Golem Foundation
2021-11-19
Hi! At Golem Foundation we’re all about discovering different ideas for creating a better digital future in which the user is put first. To explore some of them, we recently sat down with Jan J. Zygmuntowski - a Polish economist, PhD candidate at Koźmiński University, Director at the CoopTech Hub and President of the Instrat Foundation. We talked about cognitive capitalism, why and how we can try changing the current set up through ideas such as platform cooperativism and data commons, and how joining forces with Web3 might bring about great things, not just utopian visions.
In your book Kapitalizm sieci (Network Capitalism) you explain that we’re living in the times of cognitive capitalism. What is this incarnation of the ‘regime of accumulation’ about? What are we accumulating?
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Pathways for Open Collective’s “Exit to Community”
Pia Mancini
Open Collective
2021-11-24
How might we free Open Collective for the commons? Part 2 of …
The not-so-secret dream of our strange beast called Open Collective is to be infrastructure for the commons, owned by our community, which I talked about in part one.
Open Collective is committed to making that dream a reality. But ownership can be tricky. How can a for-profit company be owned by everyone? To pull it off, we need a legal structure that allows the community to become stewards of Open Collective on behalf of the commons.
The Network State
Balaji Srinivasan
1729
2021-11-11
A network state is a social network with a clear leader, an integrated cryptocurrency, a definite purpose, a sense of national consciousness, and a plan to crowdfund territory.
An Engineer's Hype-Free Observations on Web3 (and its Possibilities)
Dave Peck & the PSL Team
Pioneer Square Labs
2021-11-23
The Web3 ecosystem has been variously described as a collective hallucination, a massive grift, an environmental disaster, a decentralized renaissance, and the future of the Internet.
That’s a lot to live up (and down) to.
Here in the PSL Studio, our veteran engineering team (hi, nice to meet you!) has been building fun new Web3 projects. Along the way, we’ve been taking notes on what we’ve learned, what the underlying technologies do (and do not) enable, and where we see opportunities in the future.
We thought it’d be worthwhile to distill this list of observations and publish them here.
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‘Buy the Constitution’ Aftermath: Everyone Very Mad, Confused, Losing Lots of Money, Fighting, Crying, Etc.
Jason Koebler & Jordan Pearson
Vice
2021-11-22
The community of crypto investors who tried and failed to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution last week has descended into chaos as people are realizing today that roughly half of the donors will have the majority of their investment wiped out by cryptocurrency fees. Meanwhile, disagreements have broken out over the future of ConstitutionDAO, the original purpose of the more than $40 million crowdfunding campaign, and what will happen to the $PEOPLE token that donors were given in exchange for their contributions.
Over the weekend, the next steps of the project repeatedly changed. In the immediate aftermath of the Sotheby's auction, in which ConstitutionDAO lost to hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin, the founders of the project asserted on its official Discord that, though they lost, "we still made history tonight."
"We have educated an entire cohort of people around the world—from museum curators and art directors to our grandmothers asking us what eth is when they read about us in the news —about the possibilities of web3," an admin of the project posted on Thursday.
Many donors are indeed getting an education about Ethereum and web3, but it's certainly not all positive as the community tries to quickly come up with a reason it should exist at all after failing in its initial goal.
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Why are some nonfungible tokens so expensive?
Kristie Pladson
DW
2021-11-27
Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) burst onto the scene earlier this year when some of them started pulling in millions of dollars at auctions. A confusing and controversial new digital asset is on the rise. DW's own experiment selling an NFT made a smaller splash. Which made us all the more curious: Why are some so expensive?
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3. Events
G-Research Crypto Forecasting
G-Research
Kaggle
Over $40 billion worth of cryptocurrencies are traded every day. They are among the most popular assets for speculation and investment, yet have proven wildly volatile. Fast-fluctuating prices have made millionaires of a lucky few, and delivered crushing losses to others. Could some of these price movements have been predicted in advance?
In this competition, you'll use your machine learning expertise to forecast short term returns in 14 popular cryptocurrencies. We have amassed a dataset of millions of rows of high-frequency market data dating back to 2018 which you can use to build your model. Once the submission deadline has passed, your final score will be calculated over the following 3 months using live crypto data as it is collected.
The simultaneous activity of thousands of traders ensures that most signals will be transitory, persistent alpha will be exceptionally difficult to find, and the danger of overfitting will be considerable. In addition, since 2018, interest in the cryptomarket has exploded, so the volatility and correlation structure in our data are likely to be highly non-stationary. The successful contestant will pay careful attention to these considerations, and in the process gain valuable insight into the art and science of financial forecasting.
G-Research is Europe’s leading quantitative finance research firm. We have long explored the extent of market prediction possibilities, making use of machine learning, big data, and some of the most advanced technology available. Specializing in data science and AI education for workforces, Cambridge Spark is partnering with G-Research for this competition.
Tech and Harm Reduction Symposium: January 11, 2022
Brave Technology Cooperative
2022-01-22
We invite you to join us for a day of sharing knowledge and ideas, a time to be in community and learn from each other. We envision this day as a true symposium - what can being in community together for a day teach us?
Using technology to make drug use safer is nothing new. People using drugs have long relied upon technology to get information about safer use techniques and learn about underground safe use sites. Phones have been used for remote safer use for decades, and still continue to be used today, albeit with additional technological advances.
In the 1990s harm reductionists in San Francisco distributed phone cards and voice recordings that urged intravenous drug users to "fix with a friend." Naloxone, capable of reversing opioid overdose, has been long referred to as a "technology of solidarity," and being able to distribute it effectively and affordably has relied on tech boosts and advancements along the way.
It is now easier than ever for information to spread through electronic means, and tech is increasingly being used to disseminate critical knowledge into communities. Tech can boost harm reduction efforts, detect overdoses, and connect people to life saving resources in their communities.
To submit an abstract, please fill out the form to the right of this page. You can submit your abstract in the area below the form where it says Choose File, which will allow you to upload your file directly. Please keep submissions under 300 words and in PDF format.
All submissions should be received by December 8th, 2021 for first consideration.
A Centralized East and a Decentralized West
Balaji Srinivasan
1729
2021-12-01, 9:00 PM Pacific Standard Time
Online
Our goal is not merely to describe what a network state looks like but to actually build the first one, an open source project we're calling 1729.
If you are interested in mathematics, cryptocurrencies, seasteading, transhumanism, space travel, life extension, and initially-crazy-seeming-but-technologically-feasible ideas, you should enjoy this.
Just a few years ago it was considered impossible to start a new global currency. Now anyone can do it from a laptop. We are looking for the kinds of people who are interested in extending the ideas behind cryptocurrencies to cryptocountries.
Lectures are at 9:00 PM Pacific Standard Time ( apply now ).
Product Hunt's Virtual Web3 Panel
Product Hunt
Online
2021-12-01
The future is now. Literally. Right now.
And you’re invited.
Welcome to our first virtual event all about crypto, for the web3 evangelists to the person thinking about buying their first bit of bitcoin (and asking “what’s web3?”).
The entire event takes place in Topia, a virtual world where you can meet other people, network, and socialize — or simply listen to our panel of experts. ).
Our live panel will dive deep into everything from blockchain applications to DeFi to NFTs and more. You’ll get a chance to ask questions and get answers from people in the top of their field.
Here’s the details you’ll need, but don’t forget to RSVP now!
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Product Hunt’s Web3 Panel - An Entirely Virtual Experience
Date: Wednesday, December 1, 11:30am EST (Panel begins at noon)
Panel Guests
Moderator: Laura Shin (@LauraShin - Crypto journalist. Host of The Unchained Pod.)
Amber Baldet (@AmberBaldet - Co-founder and CEO of Clovyr. Previously led JPMorgan's blockchain efforts and was on 2017’s Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list of the most influential young people in business.)
Chris Perkins (@Perkinscr97. President and Managing Partner of @Coinfund_IO. Former Global Co-Head of Futures, Clearing and Foreign Exchange Prime Brokerage (FXPB) businesses at Citi.)
Andrew Levine (@Andrarchy - CEO of Koinos Group, whose mission is to accelerate decentralization through accessibility. Cointelegraph's Top 100 Notable People in Blockchain in 2021)
RSVP now for your space and for all of the information. HODL! And we’ll see you there.
4. Tools
Topia
Bring people together.
Topia is a social engagement platform with fully customizable virtual worlds.
Natto
natto.dev
write JavaScript on a 2D canvas
→ examples
→ interactive tutorial
→ changelog(code update 11/22)
→ discord
You are looking at very alpha software. Things may change and break!
Let's explore the future of code. Follow updates and send feedback @_paulshen
HAL
Connect your wallets, tokens and dApps in new ways with powerful automations
Appflowy
AppFlowy is an open-source alternative to Notion. You are in charge of your data and customizations. Built with Flutter and Rust.
Skiff
Private & decentralized workspace.
Everything on Skiff is end-to-end encrypted. Your most sensitive data is private, decentralized, and truly owned by you.
Neeva
Welcome to Neeva, the only ad-free, private search engine
Created by ex-Google execs, Neeva only shows you real results. No ads or affiliate links ever.
Skittish
A playful space for online events
Collab.land
COMMUNITIES WITH SKIN IN THE GAME
Collab.Land leverages the power of identity through crypto currency to create a social space unique to a specific network of humans.
Once you add the bot to your Telegram group or Discord guild, they will manage your people for you. Depending on their token holdings they will be allowed to join the community. If they sell, the bot boots them.
Glamorous Toolkit
Glamorous Toolkit is a live notebook. A fancy code editor. A software analysis platform. A data visualization engine. A knowledge management system. All in one.
And it's free and open-source.
5. Videos/Podcasts
Tools for Thought Rocks: October 2021 Meeting
Tools for Thought Rocks
2021-10-29
NFTs with Nathan Schneider and Cory Doctorow (In Conversation)
Upstream Podcast
2021-11-25
A new, more decentralized way of work
Yasmine Amer
National Public Radio
2021-11-08
The way we work has been upended by the pandemic. Some have found a new, more decentralized way of working through a DAO.
WBUR's Yasmin Amer explains how it works.
This segment aired on November 8, 2021.
How to use open source knowledge to spark innovation
Impact Podcast
2021-07-28
At 127 million documents, and counting, the patent system is a vast reservoir of publicly available information that can drive product development and innovation around the world.
Patents are written by lawyers however, in ways that only other lawyers can understand.
The patent system was supposed to be a platform for sharing useful discoveries. Instead, they stay hidden.
“Access to it, even though it is not copyrighted, has been jealously guarded because people could,” grumbles Richard Jefferson, CEO of Cambia, a nonprofit that has vowed to democratize innovation.
…
6. Jobs and other Opportunities
Request for Open Web Fellowship Applications, Q4 2021
Opscientia
The Opscientia Open Web Fellowship is a 12-week program that provides a stipend for talented undergraduates, students, and post-doctoral scholars to work on open source software development and basic research that aligns with the Opscientia mission.
Fellows must submit a proposal for review with a detailed problem statement, solution, plan of execution, and timeline for their project. Mentors may work with applicants to help them prepare their proposal. Selected projects will receive continued mentorship through weekly check-ins, performance review, and code review to help fellows approach milestones in their development timeline.
Research Associate, Token Economy
The Alan Turing Institute
Dark web marketplaces (DWMs) are major actors of illicit online trade, with millions of users producing an aggregated revenue of billions of US dollars. Recent research by the Dr Andrea Baronchelli, the Principal Investigator (PI), and his team revealed a rich user dynamic around DMWs.
The successful candidate will investigate the network dynamics of transactions occurring between DWM users. While the market acts as a fundamental meeting point for users, preliminary research by the PI and his team has revealed that it also favours the emergence of direct transactions between users (for simplicity, P2P network). Thus, the star-like network representation in which a central marketplace is connected with otherwise isolated peers does not capture the real dynamics of DWM ecosystems.
The successful candidate will have the opportunity to contribute to the project with their current expertise while deepening their knowledge of methods required to deal with large time-evolving networks. They will interact with scientists from other disciplines in order to embed the project results into a genuinely interdisciplinary setting. With time, the postdoc will have the opportunity to assume a leading role in the project implementation and dissemination (including publications), as well as in designing new research.
The research is sponsored partly through a generous gift from PayPal and it is anticipated that there will be frequent interactions with the PayPal Team working on topics of common interest. In London, the postdoc will be based primarily at The Alan Turing Institute and secondarily at City University of London.
7. Project Updates
The road to Muse 2
Muse
Muse Memo
2021-11-10
Muse 2.0 will include a native Mac app and local-first sync between iPad and Mac, launching in spring of 2022. Read on for the full vision, and how you can help.
Govbase
Govbase is now collecting constitutions created by Web3 projects.
You can find more information here.
8. Tweets
Founded in 2018, the Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative (LDCRC) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit cooperative association coalescing a socially-aware research community for advancing knowledge in the decentralized web and related fields (i.e., the Ledgerback Frontier) through research, education, technology, advocacy, and monitoring.
If our mission is aligned with your work, please considering supporting our non-profit.
Learn more about us via the links below.
Links
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