Distroid Issue 17
Happy New Year!
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
Books
Courses
Tools
Videos & Podcasts
Project Updates
Career Center
Guides
Tweets
1. Research
Epic Games v. Apple: A Case Summary
Social Science Research Network
2021-10-11
At the heart of the legal battle between Epic Games and Apple is a set of restrictions Apple imposes on app developers. For instance, Apple prohibits the distribution of iOS apps outside of the App Store, which Apple fully controls. Apple similarly requires developers to exclusively use its own in-app payment system for app purchases and in-app purchases for digital content. Through this system, Apple automatically collects a 30% commission on all such transactions. Dissatisfied with these policies, Epic Games tried to use its flagship game Fortnite as leverage to convince Apple to open up its closed platform. After Apple refused, Epic Games violated the App Store rules by enabling its own payment method in the Fortnite iOS app on August 13, 2020. That same day, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store and Epic Games filed an antitrust suit in a federal district court in California. Apple soon thereafter countersued for breach of contract. A yearlong trial ensued, the result of which is a 185-page decision, which was handed down by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on September 10, 2021.
This summary condenses the Epic Games v. Apple decision into a six-page overview covering all the main parts of the decision. Part I of the summary covers the findings of fact, which includes the Court’s factual findings on the different product and geographic markets proposed by Epic Games and Apple, on the anticompetitive effects alleged by Epic Games, and on the business justifications put forward by Apple. Part II covers the application of the facts to the law and includes the Court’s legal market definition and market power assessment, its findings under federal antitrust law (Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act) and state antitrust law (California’s Cartwright Act and Unfair Competition Law), and its breach of contract findings.
Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS): automated retrieval of citation and author data
Nicole A. Cheung, et al.
bioRxiv
2021-12-25
Academic departments, research clusters and evaluators analyze author and citation data to measure research impact and to support strategic planning. We created a tool, Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS), to automate the retrieval of this bibliometric data for our research team. The project contains Jupyter notebooks (publicly-shared here) that take a list of researchers as an input to export a CSV file of citation metrics from Google Scholar and figures to visualize the group’s impact. SMS is a scalable, open and publicly-accessible solution for automating the retrieval of citation data over time for a group of researchers.
The Field Guide to Digital and/as Public Space
The Bentway & From Later
The Bentway & From Later
2021-11-19
This field guide is a catalyst for readers to sense what public spaces might yet do in an age of pervasive digital technologies. It’s a collaboration between From Later and The Bentway, with design by Nomadic Labs, documenting the Digital and/as Public Space initiative during the summer of 2021. During that time, a collaborative research channel was opened, a game for sensing, navigating, and making public space was developed, and a set of micro-residencies with artists, designers, developers, and writers was hosted. Throughout this guide, the projects of the micro-residencies are documented and framed alongside concepts and techniques that emerged from the research. Varied in their approaches and materials, the diversity of projects helped inspire the form of this guide: a draft-positive, polyphonic* approach to the futures of public spaces and digital technologies.
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The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement
Danny Hillis
Journal of Design and Science
2016-02-22
We humans are changing. We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make. We are our thoughts, whether they are created by our neurons, by our electronically augmented minds, by our technologically mediated social interactions, or by our machines themselves. We are our bodies, whether they are born in womb or test tube, our genes inherited or designed, organs augmented, repaired, transplanted, or manufactured. Our prosthetic enhancements are as simple as contact lenses and tattoos and as complex as robotic limbs and search engines. They are both functional and aesthetic. We are our perceptions, whether they are through our eyes and ears or our sensory-fused hyper-spectral sensors, processed as much by computers as by our own cortex. We are our institutions, cooperating super-organisms, entangled amalgams of people and machines with super-human intelligence, processing, sensing, deciding, acting. Our home planet is inhabited by both engineered organisms and evolved machines. Our very atmosphere is the emergent creation of forests, farms and factories. Our networks of commerce, power and communications are becoming as richly interconnected as ecologies and nervous systems. Empowered by the tools of the Enlightenment, connected by networked flows of freight and fuel and finance, by information and ideas, we are becoming something new. We are at the dawn of the Age of Entanglement.
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Electronic Visit Verification: The Weight of Surveillance and the Fracturing of Care
Alexandra Mateescu
Data & Society Institute
2021-11-16
In Electronic Visit Verification: The Weight of Surveillance and the Fracturing of Care, Data & Society Researcher Alexandra Mateescu finds that the surveillance of US home care workers through a state-funded mobile app called electronic visit verification (“EVV”) erodes critical support for people with disabilities and older adults while offloading significant, unacknowledged burdens onto both workers and service recipients.
Drawing on interviews with advocates, activists, and twenty workers and service recipients across the country, Mateescu describes how the rollout of EVV systems within Medicaid home- and community-based programs was built on a poor understanding of how services are actually provided.
EVV has contributed to the growing landscape of punitive technologies that target and criminalize both low-wage workers and public benefits recipients. EVV systems also extend legacies of devaluation and distrust of the homecare workforce, which is comprised disproportionately of women of color and immigrants. While EVV systems are a workplace management tool in principle, they operate within a service context where the electronic monitoring of workers also indirectly tracks their clients’ activities and movements. The author finds that monitoring through EVV systems not only evokes privacy concerns, but also creates an atmosphere of ambient criminalization that has had a chilling effect on disabled and older people’s daily lives.
Exploring legal mechanisms for data stewardship
Ada Lovelace Institute & AI Council
Ada Lovelace Institute
2021-03-04
Organisations, governments and citizen-driven initiatives around the world aspire to use data to tackle major societal and economic problems, such as combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Realising the potential of data for social good is not an easy task, and from the outset efforts must be made to develop methods for the responsible management of data on behalf of individuals and groups.
The challenges of the twenty-first century demand new data governance models for collectives, governments and organisations that allow data to be shared for individual and public benefit in a responsible way, while managing the harms that may emerge.
Produced by a working group of legal, technical and policy experts, this report describes three legal mechanisms which could help collectives, organisations and governments create flexible governance responses that can respond to different elements of today’s data governance challenge, for example by empowering data subjects to more easily control decisions made about their data by setting clear boundaries on data use, assisting in promoting desirable uses, increasing confidence among organisations to share data or injecting a new democratic element into data policy.
The three legal mechanisms discussed in the report are data trusts, data cooperatives and corporate and contractual models, which can all be powerful mechanisms in the data-governance toolbox.
Participatory data stewardship
Ada Lovelace Institute
Ada Lovelace Institute
2021-09-07
Well-managed data can support organisations, researchers, governments and corporations to conduct lifesaving health research, reduce environmental harms and produce societal value for individuals and communities. But these benefits are often overshadowed by harms, as current practices in data collection, storage, sharing and use have led to high-profile misuses of personal data, data breaches and sharing scandals.
These range from the backlash to Care.Data,[1] to the response to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s collection and use of data for political advertising.[2] These cumulative scandals have resulted in ‘tenuous’ public trust in data sharing,[3] which entrenches public concern about data and impedes its use in the public interest. To reverse this trend, what is needed is increased legitimacy, and increased trustworthiness, of data and AI use.
This report proposes a ‘framework for participatory data stewardship’, which rejects practices of data collection, storage, sharing and use in ways that are opaque or seek to manipulate people, in favour of practices that empower people to help inform, shape and – in some instances – govern their own data.
As a critical component of good data governance, it proposes data stewardship as the responsible use, collection and management of data in a participatory and rights-preserving way, informed by values and engaging with questions of fairness.
Drawing extensively from Sherry Arnstein’s ‘ladder of citizen participation’[4] and its more recent adaptation into a spectrum,[5] this new framework is based on an analysis of over 100 case studies of different methods of participatory data stewardship.[6] It demonstrates ways that people can gain increasing levels of control and agency over their data – from being informed about what is happening to data about themselves, through to being empowered to take responsibility for exercising and actively managing decisions about data governance.
Throughout this report, we explore – using case studies and accompanying commentary – a range of mechanisms for achieving participatory decision-making around the design, development and use of data-driven systems and data-governance frameworks. This report provides evidence that involving people in the way data is used can support greater social and economic equity, and rebalance asymmetries of power.[7]
It also highlights how examining different mechanisms of participatory data stewardship can help businesses, developers and policymakers to better understand which rights to enshrine, in order to contribute towards the increased legitimacy of – and public confidence in – the use of data and AI that works for people and society.
Focusing on participatory approaches to data stewardship, this report provides a complementary perspective to Ada’s joint publication with the AI Council, Exploring legal mechanisms for data stewardship, which explores three legal mechanisms that could help facilitate responsible data stewardship.[8]
We do not propose participatory approaches as an alternative to legal and rights-based approaches, but rather as a set of complementary mechanisms to ensure public confidence and trust in appropriate uses of data, and – in some cases – to help shape the future of rights-based approaches, governance and regulation.
The inherent inefficiency of grant proposal competitions and the possible benefits of lotteries in allocating research funding
Carl T. Bergstrom & Kevin Gross
Metascience 2019
2019
Grounding decentralised technologies in cooperative principles: What can “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations” (DAOs) and platform cooperatives learn from each other?
Kelsie Nabben, et al.
Social Science Research Network
2021-12-06
This working paper shares ideas presented in a research sprint exploring cooperative approaches to data ownership and governance led by Harvard University’s Berkman Klein and The New School, which we presented at the Platform Cooperative Consortium Conference, 2021.
Our research project explores the wealth of literature on platform cooperatives, to investigate what “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations” (DAOs) can learn from coops, as participatory data governance and coordination frameworks. We find that DAOs share a lot of similar challenges to those already experienced by platform coops and could borrow from cooperative principles to strengthen the parameters of governance design and inter-institutional relationships. Furthermore, we see room for further investigation of how novel technical governance mechanisms in DAOs may be utilised by platform coops to help them scale efficiently, while simultaneously retaining the practices of democratic governance.
What Does DAO 2.0 Tokenomics Look Like? (Part 2) - Introducing BUFF
Global Coin Research
Global Coin Research
2021-12-07
With the incoming wave of new social DAOs, this series aims to create a tokenomics framework for DAO creators and builders, using the Global Coin Research (GCR) token as an example.
In Part 1, we highlighted why it's crucial to 1) generate liquidity organically from the community, and 2) prioritize price stability from the get-go.
In Part 2, we discuss strategies and services to bootstrap liquidity for the DAO directly from the community and introduce a new concept called BUFF.
For Part 3, we discuss specific initiatives GCR exercises for its liquidity plan.
Multistability, intermittency and hybrid transitions in social contagion models on hypergraphs
Guilherme Ferraz de Arruda, et al.
arXiv
2021-12-08
Although ubiquitous, interactions of groups of individuals (e.g., modern messaging applications, group meetings, or even a parliament discussion) are not yet thoroughly studied. Frequently, single-groups are modeled as critical-mass dynamics, which is a widespread concept used not only by academics but also by politicians and the media. However, less explored questions are how a collection of groups will behave and how the intersection between these groups might change the global dynamics. Here, we formulate this process in terms of binary state dynamics on hypergraphs. We showed that our model has a very rich and unexpected behavior that goes beyond discontinuous transitions. In particular, we might have multistability and intermittency as a consequence of bimodal state distributions. By using artificial random models, we demonstrated that this phenomenology could be associated with community structures. Specifically, we might have multistability or intermittency by controlling the number of bridges between two communities with different densities. The introduction of bridges destroys multistability but creates an intermittent behavior. Furthermore, we provide an analytical formulation showing that the observed pattern for the order parameter and susceptibility are compatible with hybrid phase transitions. Our findings open new paths for research, ranging from physics, on the formal calculation of quantities of interest, to social sciences, where new experiments can be designed.
How AI Fails Us
Divya Siddarth, et al.
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
2021-12-01
The dominant vision of artificial intelligence imagines a future of large-scale autonomous systems outperforming humans in an increasing range of fields. This “actually existing AI” vision misconstrues intelligence as autonomous rather than social and relational. It is both unproductive and dangerous, optimizing for artificial metrics of human replication rather than for systemic augmentation, and tending to concentrate power, resources, and decision-making in an engineering elite. Alternative visions based on participating in and augmenting human creativity and cooperation have a long history and underlie many celebrated digital technologies such as personal computers and the internet. Researchers and funders should redirect focus from centralized autonomous general intelligence to a plurality of established and emerging approaches that extend cooperative and augmentative traditions as seen in successes such as Taiwan’s digital democracy project to collective intelligence platforms like Wikipedia. We conclude with a concrete set of recommendations and a survey of alternative traditions.
Digital Public Goods: Guidance for Development, Governance, and Stewardship
Jeff Behrends, et al.
Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative
2021-07-27
The flourishing of a nation’s residents depends in part on their ability to participate in social, economic, and political activities. That ability in turn increasingly depends on access to reliable technological systems, including digital systems that enable users to transfer money or verify their identity. While such systems have been designed and deployed in developed economies for some time, governments in emerging economies now also wish to implement them to connect residents to each other and to the wider global economy. While developed economies have tended to build digital infrastructure by contracting with private companies, governments of emerging economies fear such an approach risks compromising data sovereignty, lead to technological dependency, and miss an opportunity to up-skill their own residents. As an alternative, governments might instead make use of digital public goods (DPGs). DPGs are openly available digital tools that are non-rival and non-excludable public goods. DPGs can be either foundational, i.e. systems which are the backbone of service delivery across many sectors, or functional, i.e. systems which perform a particular service in a few limited sectors. This report describes the ethical considerations involved in designing and deploying foundational DPGs in emerging economies. In an increasingly complex world – in the scale and range of policy problems and the breadth of knowledge required to address them – ethical reasoning is both increasingly important and increasingly complicated. Reasoning of this kind includes learning about the various aspects of a decision-making context, assessing options and their likely effects, surfacing the diverse range of values at stake, and charting a course in light of a clear understanding of both. In complex contexts, that process rarely comes to a final stopping point. Even after setting out on a course, behaving ethically requires us to continually attend to the changing terrain and re-evaluate our decisions and the values they implicate.
…
The Open Innovation in Science research field: a collaborative conceptualisation approach
Susanne Beck, et al.
Industry and Innovation
2020-08-04
Openness and collaboration in scientific research are attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, a common understanding of these phenomena is hindered by disciplinary boundaries and disconnected research streams. We link dispersed knowledge on Open Innovation, Open Science, and related concepts such as Responsible Research and Innovation by proposing a unifying Open Innovation in Science (OIS) Research Framework. This framework captures the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of open and collaborative practices along the entire process of generating and disseminating scientific insights and translating them into innovation. Moreover, it elucidates individual-, team-, organisation-, field-, and society‐level factors shaping OIS practices. To conceptualise the framework, we employed a collaborative approach involving 47 scholars from multiple disciplines, highlighting both tensions and commonalities between existing approaches. The OIS Research Framework thus serves as a basis for future research, informs policy discussions, and provides guidance to scientists and practitioners.
Commons at the Intersection of Peer Production, Citizen Science, and Big Data: Galaxy Zoo
Governing Knowledge Commons
2014-09-12
The knowledge commons research framework is applied to a case of commons governance grounded in research in modern astronomy. The case, Galaxy Zoo, is a leading example of at least three different contemporary phenomena. In the first place Galaxy Zoo is a global citizen science project, in which volunteer non-scientists have been recruited to participate in large-scale data analysis via the Internet. In the second place Galaxy Zoo is a highly successful example of peer production, sometimes known colloquially as crowdsourcing, by which data are gathered, supplied, and/or analyzed by very large numbers of anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to an enterprise that is centrally coordinated or managed. In the third place Galaxy Zoo is a highly visible example of data-intensive science, sometimes referred to as e-science or Big Data science, by which scientific researchers develop methods to grapple with the massive volumes of digital data now available to them via modern sensing and imaging technologies. This chapter synthesizes these three perspectives on Galaxy Zoo via the knowledge commons framework.
Decentralized governance in DeFi: Examples and pitfalls.
Katerina Stroponiati, et al.
Monday Capital & DappRadar
2021-10-29
The DeFi field experienced an incredible surge this year, driven primarily by the popularization of governance token mining. Despite their decentralized infrastructure, most DeFi projects end up highly centralized. In this paper, we analyze the most prominent DeFi DAOs: the structures they have implemented, how they became centralized and the associated risks posed to the projects and the ecosystem.
The resilience of the cooperative model: How do cooperatives deal with the COVID-19 crisis?
Adrien Billiet, et al.
Strategic Change
2021-03-10
The centrality of user-members in cooperatives and cooperatives' embeddedness in their community and in a global network influence positively their resilience in times of crisis, as illustrated by cases of cooperatives that acted entrepreneurially during the COVID-19 crisis. Cooperatives are hybrid organizations that maximize value, instead of profit. They are owned, governed, and controlled by their members. They are more resilient than the conventional enterprises in times of crisis, thanks to their peculiar governance characteristics that ensure member centrality. Next to member centrality, the embeddedness of cooperatives in their local environment and a global movement enhances mission centrality as well as trust and solidarity among their members, local communities, and other cooperatives.
Managed by Bots: Data-Driven Exploitation in the Gig Economy
Worker Info Exchange
Employment in the so-called gig economy has boomed in recent years with the TUC reporting that 4.4 million people in the UK now work in the sector at least once per week. Large digital platforms have disrupted traditional players particularly in the taxi, private hire and logistics sector with a business model of digitally mediated work and flexible labour terms.
The sector has been an employment rights battle ground as platforms sought to misclassify workers as independent contractors so as to avoid employer obligations, as well as tax and national insurance contributions. Having a huge workforce engaged on completely flexible terms has allowed platforms to rapidly scale and build competitive advantage from an excess supply of unpaid and underpaid workers who wait for work, while depressing their own wages.
A 2018 New School study of New York City drivers found that only 58% of a driver's time at work is utilised serving passengers. The rest of the time is spent waiting, unpaid, yet providing valuable immediacy to the platform. As the Employment Tribunal ruling in Aslam v Uber put it: "Being available is an essential part of the service drivers render to Uber.” The ruling went on to quote Milton to illustrate the point: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
In the UK, Uber has chosen to cherry pick the recent Supreme Court ruling to refuse to paying for waiting time. At the same time, our report shows that drivers are surveilled and subjected to algorithmic control even during this waiting time. Profiling used for automated work allocation determines how long or short the waiting will be for individual drivers. And where there is management control, there is an employment relationship which attracts rights for workers.
As case law has developed and platforms matured, employers have become more adept at hiding management control in automated algorithmic processes. The employment misclassification problem continues, but the mask rarely slips. To sustain the rights already hard won and to further secure the right of employment status, in one form or another, workers need to evidence management control.
The current situation for precarious workers in the gig economy is a dual challenge. Employment law and institutions of enforcement have been slow to tackle abuses of platform employers. Data protection law offers tools to protect the rights of individuals, however, there has not yet been adequate legal protection for digital rights at work, for individuals or the collective as represented by their trade unions.
For these reasons Worker Info Exchange was set up in 2019 as a digital rights NGO dedicated to research and advocacy of digital rights for workers and their trade unions. This report is an accounting of our experience so far in helping workers exercise their digital rights in the UK and the Netherlands, as well as other territories that have a European based data controller, including Australia.
Our aim is to develop a data trust to help disparate and distributed workforces to come together to aggregate their personal data at work and with a common understanding, begin the process of building real collective bargaining power. We believe worker data trusts and greater algorithmic transparency can go a long way to correcting the balance so workers can have a fairer deal.
However, just as gig economy platforms have resisted their responsibilities under employment law, our experience shows their compliance with data protection law has been poor. We have processed more than 500 subject access requests over the last eight months on behalf of workers at Amazon Flex, Bolt, Deliveroo, Free Now, Just Eat, Ola and Uber.
The persistent and widespread lack of compliance with data protection laws has hindered worker access to data and yielded almost no meaningful algorithmic transparency over critical worker management functions such as recruitment, performance management, work allocation and dismissals. The obfuscation and general lack of compliance has prevented us from reaching scale with a worker data trust. Instead, we have had to turn to strategic litigation across international boundaries to help workers once again secure their workplace rights.
On the other hand, driven by increasing pressure by transport regulators such as Transport for London and maturation of technology, we have seen widespread proliferation and a disproportionate use of worker surveillance in the name of fraud prevention. In our opinion, the management of ‘fraud’ is often conflated with performance management rather than detection of actual criminal fraud. An example of this is where worker fraud probability scores are inappropriately used in automated work allocation decisions by a number of apps.
In the UK, these already weak digital rights for workers will be fatally compromised if the government’s proposals on GDPR divergence are passed into law. The proposals would give employers more discretion in how or whether to respond to data access requests and to charge a fee for doing so. There is also a proposal to strip out the current Article 22 protections that allow workers to know how they have been subjected to automated decision making and the likely effect of such, the right to challenge such decisions and the right to give your point of view.
The government also plans to reduce the obligation on employers to prepare data protection impact assessments (DPIA) before the processing of highly sensitive personal data, which is routinely carried out by gig employers for facial recognition identity checks, location tracking and anti-fraud surveillance. This would be a hammer-blow for precarious workers who already have long been denied basic employment rights who could now be robbed of the means to hold rogue employers to proper account.
Given the threats to and shortcomings in GDPR implementation, many jurisdictions, such as the EU as well as some US states, are currently considering greater employment rights protections for gig workers that address the issues arising from algorithmic management. In the UK, the TUC have published an AI Manifesto, proposing a series of amendments to employment and data protection law to promote greater transparency and equality in digitally mediated work. We strongly support the call for greater digital rights protections.
A Blockchain-Based Approach for Collaborative Formalization of Mathematics and Programs
Jin Xing Lim, et al.
arXiv
2021-11-21
Formalization of mathematics is the process of digitizing mathematical knowledge, which allows for formal proof verification as well as efficient semantic searches. Given the large and ever-increasing gap between the set of formalized and unformalized mathematical knowledge, there is a clear need to encourage more computer scientists and mathematicians to solve and formalize mathematical problems together. With blockchain technology, we are able to decentralize this process, provide time-stamped verification of authorship and encourage collaboration through implementation of incentive mechanisms via smart contracts. Currently, the formalization of mathematics is done through the use of proof assistants, which can be used to verify programs and protocols as well. Furthermore, with the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning, we can apply automated AI reasoning tools in these proof assistants and (at least partially) automate the process of synthesizing proofs. In our paper, we demonstrate a blockchain-based system for collaborative formalization of mathematics and programs incorporating both human labour as well as automated AI tools. We explain how Token-Curated Registries (TCR) and smart contracts are used to ensure appropriate documents are recorded and encourage collaboration through implementation of incentive mechanisms respectively. Using an illustrative example, we show how formalized proofs of different sorting algorithms can be produced collaboratively in our proposed blockchain system.
Policies for Cooperative Ownership in the Digital Economy
Trebor Scholz
Berggreun Institute & Platform Cooperative Consortium
2021-12-03
The past decade gave rise to the so-called ‘gig economy’—a cluster of service sector jobs contingent workers fulfill through digital platforms. Firms like Uber, TaskRabbit, and GrubHub established themselves as two-way intermediaries between workers and customers with the promise of revolutionizing work itself. While the gig economy has provided some convenience and savings to customers and flexibility to workers, the rise of the gig economy has also been disastrous. Using legal loopholes, well-funded lobbying efforts, and publicity campaigns, platform companies have eroded labor protections, worsened environmental conditions, and undermined public services. In contrast to the early, high-minded dreams of a ‘sharing economy,’ the gig economy is in effect defined by precarity and exploitation.
On the one hand, these problems have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis. Gig workers were on the frontline of the emergency, delivering groceries, cleaning supplies, and preparing food. They were, however, also the workers who were most exposed to the economic dislocation of the pandemic.
On the other hand, effective government response has caused a tightening labor market that leaves some platforms without a sufficient supply of cheap labor. The promise of tech companies was that they would become hegemonic service providers, and thus their losses would be justified with long-term profits. Many of these already unprofitable firms face a real danger of failure just as their aggressive expansion has weakened public infrastructure, leaving vital gaps in essential services.
Our report provides a path forward at this critical juncture: the active promotion of platform cooperatives. Platform cooperatives are democratically-governed organizations owned by workers, customers, and other stakeholders. These entities match workers and customers and return a greater share of income to workers, increase worker protections, and build communities. Though still early in their development, platform cooperatives build on the proven business models of cooperatives to establish alternatives to the gig economy and its supporting digital infrastructure.
Platform cooperatives are critical to creating a fairer economy and building back better from the pandemic. However, they require active government intervention to be able to compete with well-funded and established private platforms.
This report suggests that governments on every level, from national to municipal, can take measures to empower platform cooperatives through actions including but not limited to:
• Procurement policies to provide preferential treatment of platform cooperatives over privately-owned platforms.
• Public solidarity lending to finance early-stage platform cooperatives as part of national, regional, and municipal development strategies.
• Public participation in multi-stakeholder cooperatives via direct state ownership of co-op shares that provide a public voice in cooperative management.
• Conduct legal research and review to ensure that laws governing cooperative enterprises reflect the changing realities brought by digital technology.
• Create a system of public benefits available to the workers of platform cooperatives such as healthcare, childcare, and worker training.
• Establish a network of public spaces that can be used explicitly by platform cooperatives to serve as hubs.The ultimate goal of these policy prescriptions is to create a more level playing field for platform cooperatives by reducing the risks their members bear through the provision of collective goods.
Such basic services allow alternative economic institutions to compete with often unprofitable platform companies flush with venture capital funds.
The policy suggestions found throughout this report are the results of rigorous case studies on government policies toward platform cooperatives and their effects in the following localities:
• California, United States of America
• Kerala, India
• Barcelona, Spain
• Bologna, Italy
• Berlin, Germany
• Paris, France
• Preston, United KingdomWe selected these localities because of the presence of platform cooperatives in their economies and to offer diverse geographical, legal, political, and economic perspectives. Each case study examines the status of platform cooperatives and corresponding government policies towards cooperatives and suggests specific improvements and additional actions that local and national authorities can pursue to foster a cooperative ecosystem.
2. Articles
Social Networks & Sociable Protocols
Richard Burton
ric.eth newsletter
2021-05-12
Holding in Common
Kei Kreutler
Gnosis Guild
2021-12-28
How you spend the time in your life is precious. The question of how we should be living differently is a gift.
Reflecting on the work of the past year, it’s clear that attention is building. As a recent tweet said, “The first rule of Web3 fight club is you must always talk about Web3 fight club”. The signal-to-noise ratio may be lower than ever, but at the same time, acronyms like DAOs begin to take on public meaning. The question of how we should be working differently repeats.
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DAOs Wrapped 2021
zkchun, Julia Rosenberg & Gresshaa Mehta
Orca Protocol
2021-12-22
2021 has been one of the most interesting years so far for DAOs. As DAOooooors, it is important that we take proper time to look back, reflect and introspect. Maybe we missed out on an airdrop here and there, maybe we burned a bridge or two. But DAOs have shown us their unstoppable power to bring people together, who otherwise would never meet, to build innovative products and grow wholesome communities. We would like to shine light back on some of these memorable moments.
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Beware of Greeks bearing grifts
Jay Pinho
networked
2021-12-21
Coinsights #13: $SOS 🚨
Shekar Ramaswamy
Coinsights
2012-12-26
Web3? I have my DAOts
Jay Pinho
networked
2021-12-06
Katrin Becker on Lex Cryptographia
Evgeny Morozov
the crypto syllabus
2021
As I began making sense of the broader philosophical and legal implications of blockchains, my initial instinct was to reach out to Alain Supiot at the Collège de France. In addition to writing many interesting books on the philosophical and anthropological foundations of law, Supiot has recently explored the impact that cybernetic thinking and computer technologies have had on what he calls “governing by numbers.” An interview with Alain is already in the works; both of us have important pieces in the upcoming issues of New Left Review – my own directly engages with his work – so perhaps we’ll chat after they are out.
In the meantime, Alain pointed me to the work of Katrin Becker, who has published some remarkable scholarship at the intersection of law, literature, and culture. Even a brief engagement with Becker’s texts reveals the vast breadth of the theoretical and intellectual resources that she draws upon, from Kafka to Lacan. It was, thus, very interesting to see how she has recently taken an interest in the world of blockchains (a big piece in Le Monde signaled that new interest to the wider public). Unlike most of the legal scholarship on the blockchain that comes from the Anglo-Saxon context and draws on Law & Economics and Cyberlaw, Becker’s work builds off a distinctly French tradition, her main references being Alain Supiot himself, Pierre Musso, and Pierre Legendre.
Katrin was kind enough to share some of her yet unpublished articles, which I’ve enjoyed reading in preparation for this interview. Our conversation touches upon the broader philosophical and ideological implications of blockchains for how we think about law, democracy, the role of the state, the privatization of various legal systems, and the necessity to offer a counter-project of some kind.
Throughout, we also take our conversation as an opportunity to introduce the broader public to the ideas of Supiot, Legendre, and especially Musso, whose work (sadly, still not translated in English) on “industrial religion” – and the usurpation of our imaginary by the ideas drawn from corporate management – is particularly worth reading today, when everyone is so excited about DAOs.
You might also want to check our Background Reading List on Privatization of Law, before or after reading this interview.
Bram Büscher on Nature3
Evgeny Morozov
the crypto syllabus
2021
Do crypto technologies offer a radical new way to fix the problems related to climate change and other forms of environmental destruction? Or are they just another set of “non-transformative” solutions that feed off technological optimism and solutionism? Making sense of claims advanced by climate-focused projects in the crypto space could be difficult: while many of them do sound well-intentioned and benign, they are also keen to invent new (and often bombastic) terms to describe practices for which older, already discredited terms do exist.
For example, one hears about the cool new trend of "regenerative finance" (or ReFi; see here for an accessible recent overview by some of its proponents) but without much reference to either “impact investing” or “social enterprise” or “market-based conservation” – some of the many earlier approaches on whose failed legacies ReFi advocates are building (even if they themselves are not fully aware of it). As a result, one tends to overestimate the novelty of their solutions while downplaying the ambiguity surrounding their potential efficacy: we do know such models do not work. On the plus side – at least for those involved – "you can make more money than you ever dreamt possible fighting the climate crisis" (as one ReFi advocate recently put it).
Seeing ReFi as just another manifestation of the underlying trends in neoliberal conservation allows one to mobilise many of the earlier critiques. That markets are now mediated by blockchains and tokens doesn’t change the underlying reality that market-based efforts to reverse climate change and conserve nature have not worked to date. (To get a taste of things to come, once NFTs become fully operational in this space, see here).
To discuss these matters, I’ve turned to Bram Büscher, a prolific scholar of the political economy of conservation, who has published widely on how the mainstream neoliberal discourse around conservation mobilised market-based and technological solutions to boost its legitimacy. Bram’s work is full of provocative concepts like “fictitious conservation” and “liquid nature”; we discuss their origins in the interview that follows. Personally, I have found the concept of “accumulation by conservation” – introduced in an article that Bram co-wrote with Robert Fletcher – extremely useful in grasping some of the "solutionist" dynamics involved in unleashing the forces of global financisalised capitalism to “save” nature.
I thought of interviewing Bram as I recalled reading his 2014 article on Nature 2.0, which argued that the emancipatory discourses around Web 2.0 were also influencing how we thought about conservation. This piqued my interest: as we are now facing the prospect of web3, what kind of Nature3 would be associated with it?
What’s New in Co-op Media? Growing Pains in the Digital News Co-op World
Tom Stites
Nonprofit Quarterly
2021-12-01
Earlier this year, I wrote about the rise of an emerging business model: the digital news co-op. Now, eight months later, taking a second look, we have seen two important developments. First, newly launched news co-ops are gathering steam in Baltimore and West Virginia. At the same time, the nation’s first such co-op, in Akron, Ohio, has stopped publishing.
The good news: Bloc by Block News maryland, in Baltimore, fresh from shaping its business plan as part of the Start.coop accelerator program, began publishing a weekly newsletter in April that presents headlines, summaries, and links to stories selected from many area news organizations. It started with only 60 subscribers—mostly personal contacts of founder Kevon Paynter. But a short 31 weeks later, the list is approaching 2,000 people, and the venture has launched a website where fresh curated material can be posted daily.
Nor is the Baltimore publication a unique case. Black by God | The West Virginian (BBG), led by founder Crystal Good and aiming to serve Black residents throughout the state, is close behind with a weekly newsletter, and it has just distributed its second quarterly print publication. BBG has applied to be part of the next Start.coop class, as has The Pittsburgh Independent, led by Brian Conway, who is assembling co-founders.
Taking Local Currency Digital: A New Experiment Emerges
Jared Spears
Nonprofit Quarterly
2021-11-17
Back in 2006, the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, a nonprofit where I work, helped to established BerkShares, Inc. a local currency issuer. Then as now, the idea behind BerkShares was to galvanize residents in Pittsfield, Great Barrington, and surrounding areas to purchase more goods and services locally. The local currency could be converted into US dollars but is designed to be spent directly in the area. The theory of change involves both encouraging local economic activity—increasing the economic multiplier effect, in technical parlance—while fostering bonds of community.
A local currency seeks to encourage recirculation and reinvestment within the community. These currencies are not new—they were quite common during the period of the Great Depression—but had fallen out of fashion. When the BerkShares currency launched in 2006, it involved something of a gamble: that a moribund tradition of local currency issue could still work to bolster local economic activity in the 21st century.
The experiment proved successful. BerkShare currency notes—printed in signature colors and sporting portraits of local historical figures—have become a point of pride among many area residents. The one BerkShare note honors the local Mohican nation; W.E.B. Du Bois is on the five BerkShare note; agricultural activist Robyn Van En on the 10, and so on. You can spot BerkShares in circulation at area farmers’ markets, Main Street storefronts, auto repair shops, and professional offices. Today, over 400 area merchants accept BerkShares for payment, revealing an enduring intention in residents’ choice of where and how to do business.
Finance 3.0: DeFi, Dapps, and the Promise of Decentralized Disruption
Kevin Werbach
The Reboot
2021-07-15
Atruism of Silicon Valley is that startups succeed when they find “product-market fit,” the elusive alignment between their offerings and customer demand. Many never do. Often the product that takes off looks very different from the one that was originally envisioned. More than a decade after the launch of the Bitcoin network, we may at last be witnessing a killer application for blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It is called decentralized finance, or DeFi.
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The Top Universities for Blockchain by CoinDesk 2021
Coindesk Staff
Coindesk
2021-10-04
This year’s ranking rates 230 schools internationally, expanding the sample from just U.S. schools in our first university ranking last year.
Overall, the National University of Singapore is in first place as a result of its multiple blockchain research centers, its frequently hosted blockchain-themed conferences, its many blockchain clubs, its company partnerships and its masters program in digital financial technology.
Also representing Asia in the top 10 are Hong Kong Polytechnic, Tsinghua University and Chinese University of Hong Kong. RMIT in Melbourne comes second while representing Europe are the University of Zurich, UCL and ETH Zurich.
The top U.S schools are Berkeley (third) and MIT (fifth). Cornell, which was second last year, is now in 17th place. Stanford, which placed fourth in 2020, is now in 12th. Harvard, which was fifth last year, is now 49th, reflecting stronger competition this time, and that schools with strong overall reputations aren’t always the best performers when it comes to blockchain.
The Statecraft of Digital IDs: An Annotated Bibliography
Kim Fernandes & Ranjit Singh
Points
2021-11-30
How do digital IDs mediate the relationship between a datafied state and its citizens?
This question has simultaneous social and moral implications: social, because interacting with citizens through digital IDs requires work, organization, and the discipline of infrastructuring data into their everyday lives; moral, because using digital IDs as a means to resolve questions of access and inclusion in state services inevitably raises practical and normative questions of fairness, accountability, and justice.
This annotated bibliography is meant as an orienting resource that can broadly situate a reader in the emerging research on Digital IDs. Although it is in no way intended to be exhaustive, we hope that the list can be a starting point from which individual explorations and collective conversations will follow. If you have resources that you would like to add to this bibliography, please write to us at statecraftofdigitalids@gmail.com.
DWeb Meetup Nov 2021 — Centering Respect, Trust and Equity in the DWeb
Ese
Internet Archive Blogs
2021-11-29
At the November 2021 DWeb Meetup, we heard the latest from a range of projects across the DWeb ecosystem and from our featured speaker, Coraline Ada Ehmke, on what a DWeb built on the foundation of mutual respect, trust and equity would look like. You can watch the recording of the event and learn more about the speakers below. You can also read the chat stream that accompanied the discussion here.
Crypto Theses for 2022
Ryan Selkis
Messari
2021
I’ll keep this brief, since the rest of this report is not. The Theses started as a tweet thread four years ago on New Year’s Day. Along with the rest of the crypto industry, the report has exploded in size and complexity each year since. I write it for our team - to highlight the amazing work they’ve done throughout the year, and to synthesize the crypto chaos for any new hires. I write it for myself - to organize my monkey mind and create a mental model for crypto and an index of the best available research. And, of course, I write for you. Whether you’re a crypto novice or a multi-cycle veteran, I try to deliver a free, comprehensive 201-level crypto course with 101-level intros and links as an annual holiday gift to those who will find it helpful. In return, you get to yell at me for typos (thanks!), mis-summarizing your favorite coins (do better marketing!), omitting the #246 asset by market cap (I’m not a short-seller!), and copy pasta-ing other people’s ideas throughout (good artists copy, great artists steal).
How to Structure a Protocol’s Treasury
Helloshreyas
Crypto & Society
2021-03-10
How should a protocol like Uniswap or Compound structure its treasury? This post covers the principles of protocol treasury management, fiscal policy, asset allocation, ways to diversify the treasury, and responsibilities of a treasury committee.
DAOs and Democracy: Voting Mechanisms in Web3 🗳️🏛️
Accelerated Capital
Accelerated Capital
2021-07-30
Lotteries, Gachapon (ガチャポン), and Metaverse Loot Boxes ✨🪙
Accelerated Capital
Accelerated Capital
2021-09-20
What do we mean by data? – a moment for creative discussion at the ATARCA Untitled Session
ATARCA
2021-12-07
What if we looked at data as we do at water, sunlight, or currency? As digital data is a relatively new phenomenon, it is fruitful to consider the implications of treating it as we do the more established parts of our economic and social systems, such as labour, oil, and currency. This thinking exercise may highlight challenges and new questions about the position of data in our current economic paradigms, and societies, and what this means for anti-rival economic thinking.
Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them
Aaron Sankin, et al.
The Markup & Gizmodo
2021-12-02
Between 2018 and 2021, more than one in 33 U.S. residents were potentially subject to police patrol decisions directed by crime prediction software called PredPol.
The company that makes it sent more than 5.9 million of these crime predictions to law enforcement agencies across the country—from California to Florida, Texas to New Jersey—and we found those reports on an unsecured server.
The Markup and Gizmodo analyzed them and found persistent patterns.
Residents of neighborhoods where PredPol suggested few patrols tended to be Whiter and more middle- to upper-income. Many of these areas went years without a single crime prediction.
By contrast, neighborhoods the software targeted for increased patrols were more likely to be home to Blacks, Latinos, and families that would qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program.
These communities weren’t just targeted more—in some cases they were targeted relentlessly. Crimes were predicted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes in multiple locations in the same neighborhood: thousands upon thousands of crime predictions over years. A few neighborhoods in our data were the subject of more than 11,000 predictions.
The software often recommended daily patrols in and around public and subsidized housing, targeting the poorest of the poor.
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Types of specification problems in forecasting
Juan Gil
Rethink Priorities
2021-07-20
In this post, I’ll describe three major categories of specification problems on forecasting platforms, discuss how they’re related to one another, and outline how you might mitigate or trade off some of the costs. Note that these categories are not “crisp”; they are related to one another and a question can simultaneously have problems in different categories.
Ambiguous - a specification might not be tight enough for it to be clear how it should resolve, which imposes costs on forecasters and people using those forecasts in their decision-making
Misaligned - a specification might be misaligned with what the question-asker cares about such that they get less information from the forecast
Uncompelling- a question might just not be interesting or important enough to incentivize forecasters to think about it, especially in settings like Metaculus where interest or desire to help are primary motivators (rather than e.g. financial incentives).
In particular, I’ll explore how these problems impose costs on both forecasters and question-askers. (Note: I’ll use “question-asker” to refer to any party that benefits from accurate predictions on a particular question.)
Issues with futarchy
Lizka V
Rethink Priorities
2021-10-07
This post collects possible issues with futarchy, a proposed form of governance based on prediction markets. (Possible benefits of futarchy are listed in the paper that introduces the idea and in my summary of it, among other places.) The post also lays out my main takeaways and a rough explanation for why I think futarchy should not be a focus for the EA community.
A prediction market is a way to facilitate bets on different possible future outcomes. Prediction markets tend to aggregate those bets and their underlying beliefs reasonably well (and better than just averaging forecasts) — they push back against some biases and weigh different bettors’ beliefs by their confidence levels (and other factors, like the size of their bankroll and their tolerance for risk). A decision market sets up a number of prediction markets that are conditional on certain events happening. The difference in prices can then be used to infer the possible outcomes of those events and to inform decisions.
If you don’t know what a prediction market is, what a decision market is, or what futarchy is, you should probably do something like skim my earlier post before reading this one.[1] I do not spend time explaining these concepts, and use more jargon in this post than in that one.
Why I wrote this
A number of people in the EA community seem excited about the idea of futarchy (or related forms of governance). Those excited seem to believe that futarchy has a significant chance of being a serious improvement over current forms of democracy (e.g. the US model), if only one could implement it. They conclude that this means we should invest in the idea.[2] This post pushes back on this, exploring some possible risks and weaknesses of futarchy (and by extension of prediction and decision markets) from an EA perspective. The resulting list of weaknesses can also provide possible research directions. This post was part of a project for my internship at Rethink Priorities.
The Fintech Briefing: Everything you need to know about cryptoassets
Sarah Kocianski
Founders Factory
2021-11-23
NFTs, Bitcoin, Ethereum. Words and concepts that might have once been at the periphery of our technological awareness now firmly occupy the centre. Barely hours go by without the latest product launch, cryptocurrency craze, or NFT drop hogging the headlines.
It would be fair to say that we’ve reached a point where certain cryptoassets are widely known of—and yet they’re poorly understood by most. “Getting into crypto” is something consumers, founders, and corporates all talk about doing, but when it comes to reality, many don’t have the knowledge to effectively tap into the market.
For founders looking to capitalise on cryptoassets and their manifold opportunities, we’re diving into some of the drivers behind growing consumer engagement with cryptoassets, the impact of those drivers on behaviours and attitudes, and what opportunities they present for founders looking to enter this space.
Kickstarter Will Move Its Crowdfunding Platform to Blockchain
Jackie Davalos
Bloomberg
2021-12-08
For more than a decade, Kickstarter PBC has convinced the public to pay people to follow through on their ideas to build a gadget, make a film or create a piece of art. It was, in some ways, a harbinger of today’s digital economy built around cryptocurrencies, decentralized organizations and NFT art.
On Wednesday, Kickstarter plans to unveil a project that will merge the two worlds. It’s hatching a standalone company to build a crowdfunding system much like Kickstarter’s but based on blockchain technology. When it’s ready, Kickstarter will switch its own website to the new infrastructure, and the new company will make the tools available for anyone to create a competing crowdfunding site.
The new company does not yet have a name. Development is slated to begin in the first quarter of next year, and Kickstarter expects to transition its site to the new protocol sometime in 2022. The change will take place entirely behind the scenes and shouldn’t affect how people use the site, the New York-based company said.
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Conversations around co-op identity and climate change anchor World Cooperative Congress
NCBA CLUSA STAFF
NCBA CLUSA
2021-12-08
More than 1,000 cooperators gathered onsite in Seoul, Korea with hundreds more attending virtually last week for the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA)’s 33rd World Cooperative Congress.
This year’s congress marked both the 125th anniversary of the ICA, which was founded in 1895 to promote the interests of cooperative worldwide, and the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the ICA Statement on the Cooperative Identity, which was adopted in September 1995.
Co-op identity featured prominently at the global event, with discussions on how embracing our shared identity can broaden and accelerate the movement’s impact, and whether the the cooperative community should revise its principles and values in the context of 21st century social and economic realities.
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A Practical Framework for Applying Ostrom’s Principles to Data Commons Governance
Anouk Ruhaak, et al.
Mozilla Foundation
2021-12-06
When a group of people collectively decide to organize a system to govern a shared data resource and their use of it, a data commons arises. A data commons is a system of stewardship through which data resources are managed involving processes of sustainable and ethical production, use, re-use, and redistribution — and governed through collaboration among stakeholding users and/or data producers.
In this system of stewardship, how do stakeholders govern themselves? What drives their endeavour? How do they make decisions? How do they make sure conflict does not tear them apart?
The answers to these questions will look different for every data commons. Some might seek revenue by selling insights based on the data, while others might want to share it openly, and yet others might want to keep most of the data private or impose copyleft-like or non-commercial conditions on re-use. They may also use different mechanisms to make decisions, which raises questions about decision-making processes, delegation of responsibility, and sanctions for improper use. Some data commons may have members who vote on the important questions, and others might elect representatives to help manage the day-to-day.
Despite a wide range of possible organizational structures, it is possible to identify some core principles that characterize healthy commons — in order to guide the stakeholders of a data commons through the process of designing and adapting their institutional arrangements accordingly.
Fortunately, we do not have to start from scratch. We can use the foundation laid by Elinor Ostrom in her seminal work on commons governance and pull from her empirical study of how communities stewarded both physical and, eventually, information-based commons. This work focuses on the regenerative and sustainable potential of commons governance, in contrast to the oft-touted ‘tragedy of the commons’, and identifies practices shared by successful and enduring commons. In the past few decades, the eight principles that she and her collaborators have put forth have acted as a starting point for determining appropriate governance strategies for a range of collectively-governed resources, including extending these principles to purely digital spaces such as open-source software and digital public goods.
Building on this work, we here present an attempt to translate these principles to the specific case of data commons, bringing them down to earth in tangling with questions of ownership, storage, use, privacy, and regulation. In conversations with practitioners and community members, we’ve found that there is a desire to apply the tenets of commons-based approaches, but there still exists a usability gap with the principles as articulated. Thus, our translation includes not only a treatment of the principles themselves, but also a set of accompanying questions, to steer communities in productive directions as they negotiate the tradeoffs and nuances of dealing with data commons.
This body of work relies heavily on previous efforts to translate Ostrom’s design principles to the contexts of data commons by the Ada Lovelace Foundation. In addition, we were heavily inspired and influenced by earlier work done by SustainOSS that embarked on a similar translation of the design principles focused on the governance of Open Source Software projects.
Why a Little-Known Blockchain-Based Identity Project in Ethiopia Should Concern Us All
Elizabeth M. Renieris
Centre for International Governance Innovation
2021-12-07
Ethiopia has been making international headlines due to the steep escalation of a nearly year-long civil war in its northern Tigray region and ensuing humanitarian crisis, with millions teetering on the brink of famine and genocide. At the same time, we are beginning to recognize the role that technology companies and platforms can play in exacerbating such crises. For example, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) and Twitter have been implicated in worsening matters by inciting violence and amplifying hate speech against certain ethnic groups in the region. Meanwhile, an offshore “Web 3” project with ambitions to build a national ID system in Ethiopia based on a suite of much-hyped blockchain technologies is going virtually unscrutinized by journalists, scholars and activists, even as such a system comes with significant risks for people in Ethiopia and in countries eyeing similar plans.
The project, known as Cardano, is actually run by a cluster of offshore entities — the Swiss-based Cardano Foundation, Hong Kong-based development arm IOHK and Japan-based venture arm EMURGO. Founded and led by the 34-year-old Charles Hoskinson, who previously co-founded Ethereum, Cardano raised more than US$62 million in an offshore initial coin offering from 2015 through 2017 designed to evade the reach of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Hoskinson, whose ultimate ambition is to build a national ID system for Ethiopia, recently struck a deal with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education for a blockchain-based ID pilot involving five million secondary school students. As he describes it, “Every one of these students will have a digital identity — a DID. That DID carries with it information — metadata — that will travel with them throughout their academic life, and follow them into the economic world.”
Lina Khan Cashes In Her Chips
David Dayen
The American Prospect
2021-12-07
The anti-monopoly (or “New Brandeis”) movement’s emergence has been far too narrowcast in traditional media as a movement consumed with opposition to Big Tech. You see this vividly in Sheelah Kolhatkar’s recent takeout on the movement in The New Yorker. Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the subject of the story, explains pretty clearly that her interest in monopoly extends across a wide range of industries; the list also includes agriculture, medical supplies, even chocolate bars. But the only enemies Kolhatkar highlights in her piece are the dominant tech platforms.
Would that it were only tech. The current $1.8 trillion merger wave (and that’s just between January and August of this year), in addition to being a major source of profits for that former outsized villain, the Wall Street mega-banks that handle these transactions, has crossed virtually every industry. Not every buyout is a tech industry phenomenon; in fact, far more are coming from the world of private equity. The biggest acquisitions in recent weeks have come in health care and newspapers. Conflating anti-monopoly and Big Tech is a serious category error that misunderstands and limits the project of the New Brandeisians.
If you want to know how Khan is actually approaching her job, take a look at the lawsuit filed last week to block a merger between semiconductor firms Nvidia and Arm, a deal estimated at $75 billion. Not only does this show Khan’s broader interest in taming monopolies, including those that arise through vertical combinations of different aspects of production, but the entire commission’s broader interest: The vote of the FTC commissioners to move forward with the lawsuit was unanimous. Despite complaints from pro-monopoly forces that Khan is out of step with decades of the stunted bipartisan practices of antitrust, in this case she moved the establishment, including the two recalcitrant Republicans on the commission, to her line of reasoning.
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What Tech Futurists Get Wrong About Human Autonomy
Noema Magazine
2021-12-09
A specter is haunting our technological imaginaries: the specter of autonomy. The problem is that we can’t quite decide from what or for whom.
Two movements with transformational aspirations are dominating the tech world today: the first around blockchain and the second around AI. These are animated by two very different concepts of autonomy. AI promises to usher in an era of peace and plenty for humanity that frees us from the burden of labor and need, provided we play our cards right to avoid the risk of existential catastrophe. Meanwhile, blockchain provides the infrastructure for, we are told, the unparalleled exercise of both individual and collective agency, opening the doors to automation, self-governance and global coordination.
At first, these concepts may seem at odds. The AI worldview prizes an autonomy of outcome with minimal active decision-making input, while its crypto counterpart desires an autonomy of process, with outcomes contingent on individual will and participation throughout the design of technological infrastructures. While the blockchain community holds decentralization as a core normative value, AI often pushes toward centralization as necessary for scale and safety.
But as much as they differ, they both share an underlying desire: to implicitly or explicitly abstract away human fallibility in service of a fully automated vision of perfection. In this, they risk falling prey to the mistaken belief that automation can achieve any meaningful autonomy at all.
In an age of human-led mass extinction and climate catastrophe, the dream of a technological higher power saving us from ourselves is tempting. In an era of coordination failures and corruption at the highest levels, the aspiration toward decentralized coordination between empowered individuals is similarly so. Combining these collective visions of technological and scientific progress paints a seductive vision of freedom, both from the constraints of the natural human self and the constraints of emergent human society.
Yet the aim to transcend that which makes us human is not the path to serving humanity.
Autonomy is necessarily circumscribed by community and society. Meaningful independence only exists through interdependence, one that is impossible in the worlds these technological visions imagine.
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The Permissionless DAO
Gideonro
Token Engineering Commons
2021-12-07
Onboarding community members into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) isn’t like hiring people at a traditional company. One of the main reasons this is so is that DAOs are “permissionless.” Much the way you don’t need permission to send transactions on a public blockchain, you also generally don’t need permission to join a DAO.
Like many other DAOs these days, the Token Engineering Commons (TEC) is experiencing the challenges of running a permissionless organization. In this article, we’ll explore why onboarding is so tough in these new organizations and how the TEC uses a combination of automation and personal touch to engage new members in our mission.
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How to Join and Contribute to a DAO
Weeze
Index Cooperative
2021-11-19
The booming DAO ecosystem has played a significant role in coordinating the recent rise of DeFi and NFTs. But with so much innovation taking place across Web3 right now, nearly all DAOs are growing and in need of talent. In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can join a DAO and make meaningful contributions.
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Why not Harberger tax?
Dean Eigenmann
ENS
2018-11-22
The current method to obtain ENS domains involves an auction that many users have discovered to be a confusing process. In order to improve the overall UX a new system needs to be put in place to obtain domains and rent them for a desired amount of time. It was always part of the roadmap to move away from the current model, but finding something which works and is considered to be fair by users can be rather tricky.
In a domain name system it is important that there is a cost associated with obtaining a name. This is due to the fact that cost is one of the first steps of deterring squatters, it is a simple method to disincentivize a user from registering every possible domain on day one. However, this brings on issues such as determining what the fair price for a given domain is.
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What Every Machine Learning Company Can Learn from the Zillow-pocalypse
Zillow has lost a reported $381 million after a data science model went rogue, according to Bloomberg.
Last week, the company indicated it will have to let go 25% of its workforce. Zillow is also trying to divest over 7,000 homes with a combined asset value exceeding $2.8 billion that it had acquired.
For most people, this will be their first exposure to how even routine machine learning models can go horribly wrong when mismanaged.
This article will explore the sequence of events leading up to Zillow Offers being shut down, including bad decisions and structural flaws (not unique to Zillow) that should be a lesson for companies embracing machine learning.
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Employee Ownership Still Rarely Taught in Business Schools
Adria Scharf
Fifty By Fifty
2021-10-15
With few exceptions, today’s business schools are failing to teach about employee ownership. Their lapse limits the expansion of shared-ownership models and it harms the American worker by limiting future business leaders’ exposure to an idea proven to significantly increase the wealth of working people and improve company performance.
There are exceptions among business and management schools. The Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, the Beyster Institute at the Rady School of Business at University of California-San Diego, and the new Baker Center of Excellence for Employee Ownership and Business Transformation at Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania all have strong institutional commitments to teaching about employee ownership. But for the most part, at other institutions, individual faculty are on their own to decide whether and how to introduce the concept to their students.
Faculty Find Student Interest Growing, along with Teaching Materials
Fortunately, some professors are taking the lead; they’re intentionally integrating employee ownership into courses, and they’re doing so not only in offbeat elective classes but in core required classes. Many of these professors are finding that that the topic syncs well with and enriches business school courses including Strategy, Organizational Behavior, Accounting, Governance, Human Resources and Entrepreneurship. They’re discovering a well-organized body of curriculum content to assign, from videos to case studies, and they’re finding, consistently, that the topic of sharing ownership sparks genuine student interest.
DEATHGUILD COMPENDIUM— ISSUE #18
Travis Wyche
Travis Wyche
2021-12-11
People expressing their opinions online with their money? Is that what it is? How do you trust someone that you’ve never known IRL when you don’t know if they’re using their real name, or if anything that they tell you is trustworthy, or if they are even human? I imagine that hard and soft used in this way comes from the cultures of science and technology, right? Thinking about religion, what comes to mind is Moses descending from Mount Sinai carrying stone tablets, the Word of God written as codified commandments… Was that Moses? God’s voice is the creation and destruction of the universe, so how did Moses even hear the creator in the first place? Could there be a more humble or self-deprecating way of proceeding — in a Wittgensteinian sense — where the code remains law while we exercise humility before the fallacious or tragic reliance upon that code, to recognize the imperfection and act in accordance to an understanding of the imperfection of the code?
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Common Good
Matan Field, et al.
DAOstack
2021-09-08
A common good (CG) is a product or an outcome which benefits almost everyone in a certain community,¹ may it be a neighborhood, the Ethereum ecosystem, a nation state or entire civilization. As such, everyone in that certain circle has the interest to see the common good produced, while no one has the incentive to produce it on their own. The total benefit to all people in a community gained from a common good goes above its total cost, by the definition of a common good; but, its gain per individual or entity is much lower than the cost of its production. The inability to act on it is a mirror manifestation of the tragedy of the commons.²
Today, countries, municipalities and NGOs are the entities that supposedly take care of common goods, but their capacity to do so is very limited due to their centralized structure. They are limited by the relative ineffectiveness of centralized constructs — in sense-making, scalable action, engagement and alignment of interests, and more severely, by the personal interests of the people steering them, which often override their interest to take care for the benefit of the community they are in charge of steering. Indeed, neglecting such common goods is one of the biggest problems of humanity in almost every possible domain and circle we can think of.
In the future envisioned here, decentralized networks play the role of governments, municipalities and intentional commons, fostering common goods. It is possible to produce common goods when a big-enough community cooperates to bear the cost of production and its implementation; but this, correspondingly, requires large-scale coordination, and large-scale coordination is generally a very hard problem. In this article we introduce Common Good, a blockchain-based application that solves this problem by enabling the coordination and motivation of different relevant actors for achieving a desired common good, by providing it with a “business model” just as in the profit-seeking sector. Our solution takes inspiration from the Social Impact Bonds (SIB) model.
Exclusive Report: Solving the Riddle of the DAO with Colorado’s Cooperative Laws
Jacqueline Radebaugh & Yev Muchnik
The Defiant
2021-12-16
Self-governing entities like Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are unique and largely incompatible with traditional U.S. legal entities.
Absent the adoption of a new legal entity structure that serves the novel needs of DAOs, we discuss why we believe, at present, the Limited Cooperative Association (LCA) provides the most ideologically aligned legal framework for DAOs.
The LCA integrates cooperative principles and values that are similar to core DAO principles and provides a legal framework for DAOs seeking to wrap a portion or all of their related activities in a legal structure.
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Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly
2021-12-13
There’s been a lot of talk about Web3 lately, and as the person who defined “Web 2.0” 17 years ago, I’m often asked to comment. I’ve generally avoided doing so because most prognostications about the future turn out to be wrong. What we can do, though, is to ask ourselves questions that help us see more deeply into the present, the soil in which the future is rooted. As William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” We can also look at economic and social patterns and cycles, using as a lens the observation ascribed to Mark Twain that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
Using those filters, what can we say about Web3?
…
Small Group of Insiders Is Reaping Most of the Gains on NFTs, Study Shows
Bloomberg
2021-12-06
Non-fungible tokens are one of the hottest things in cryptocurrencies right now, with the prospect of big gains should the latest collection rise in value. But a new study from Chainalysis shows that a small portion of participants reap most of the gains.
Investing frequently in a wide array of collections appears to lead to the highest profits, Chainalysis said in its report. It added that whitelisting -- the practice of allowing a certain set of followers or others to purchase new NFTs at a much lower price than other users during minting events where a digital file is turned into a digital asset on a blockchain-- helps those people significantly.
Users who make the whitelist and later sell their newly-minted NFT gain a profit 75.7% of the time, versus just 20.8% for users who do so without being whitelisted, Chainalysis said, citing Opensea data. The data suggests it’s nearly impossible to reap outsized returns on minting purchases without being whitelisted, the study said.
…
Credit Unions Seek Regulator Approval to Hold Crypto Assets
Allyson Versprille
Bloomberg via Yahoo
2021-12-21
Credit unions are looking for approval to hold digital assets like Bitcoin directly, after a federal regulator clarified they can provide cryptocurrency services to customers by partnering with third parties.
Web3 is Bullshit
Stephen Diehl
Stephen Diehl
If you read tech journalism you’ll probably hear the fuzzy term web3 bandied about in the press. Sprinkled around all these articles are all manner of idealistic and utopian ideas about how we can rebuild the internet to reflect our aspirations of a more humane and egalitarian society. However the journalists never quite drill down into the details on the mechanisms of how the internet will be remade. Because after all tech writers are in the storytelling business and a myth about the rebirth of cyberspace makes for a ripping yarn far more than mundane skepticism of a hyped technology.
…
The DAO of decentralization: Can co-ops thrive on the blockchain?
Robert Raymond
Shareable
2021-12-21
If you’re anything like me, you might be impulsively suspicious of claims that digital technologies such as cryptocurrency and blockchain can produce radical decentralization, personal empowerment, and assuage the wounds of capitalism.
However, the latest string of letters to emerge from the depths of the blockchain universe — DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations — might have something to offer to those interested in advancing the power of labor, specifically when it comes to employee ownership.
…
We used Coordinape to pay our DAO. Here’s what we found
DAO Masters
DAO Masters
2021-12-22
Let’s talk about salaries
Salaries are predictable; they allow companies to calculate cash flow and employees to understand what they’ll be taking home at the end of the month.
But what if you don’t have employees?
What if you’re not able to predict how many hours people will work, or even what work they’ll do?
Well, that’s the challenge we face in DAO Masters, a decentralized community dedicated to helping the next million people find, contribute to, and run DAOs.
That’s why we decided to run a little experiment, opting to use Coordinape, a tool that empowers DAO contributors to decide how their peers should be compensated, for our first season.
Let’s take a look at how Coordinape works and any repercussions this method of compensation can have on a DAO.
Before we get on to that, though, let’s remind ourselves of several compensation options open to DAOs.
…
No Ethical Activism Under Capitalism: DAOs, DeFi, and Purity Politics
Emmi Bevensee
Center for a Stateless Society
2021-12-17
Quit your purity politics and pay attention to things outside of your camp or else you’ll get wrecked by a changing world and miss meaningful opportunities.
As such, one space I’ve been paying attention to is that of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Despite the fact they often have relationships with Evil naughty bad boy things like speculative finance and artificial scarcity, DAOs have the potential to significantly impact the global economy over the next few decades.1 Even if you think that DeFi and crypto are horrible (and there are good reasons to feel that such as scams and carbon emissions), you should still be paying attention to them if only because they have a much greater likelihood of dramatically impacting the global economic system than, say, neo-Stalinism in our lifetime. A major reason is that despite the public association of cryptocurrencies with right-wing libertarians and/or finance bros, there are powerful innovations in governance and public goods allocation being written in the marginalia that should be of serious interest to anyone sincerely committed to helping others.
…
Where’s all the long carbon?
John Mulliken
Carbonware
2021-06-24
How cooperative gig economy companies managed to flourish during the pandemic
KRISTIN TOUSSAINT
Fast Company
2021-12-12
In the Italian city of Bologna, bicycle couriers delivery bread, freshly baked at local bakeries, to nearby businesses every morning. The same network of couriers deliver books from the city’s libraries and food from grocery stores to residents’ homes. Unlike other delivery platforms, businesses don’t pay a commission to be a part of the delivery service, and the riders earn about 9 euros ($10.19) an hour after taxes versus the traditional gross hourly wage of 5.5 euros ($6.23) that workers for other apps like Deliveroo or UberEats make; they also get insurance for both accidents and illnesses.
…
Bitcoin’s ‘One Percent’ Controls Lion’s Share of the Cryptocurrency’s Wealth
Paul Vigna
The Wall Street Journal
2021-12-20
It’s good to be the bitcoin 1%. The top bitcoin holders control a greater share of the cryptocurrency than the most affluent American households control in dollars, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The study showed that the top 10,000 bitcoin accounts hold 5 million bitcoins, an equivalent of approximately $232 billion.
…
The future of work is forcing an evolution in leadership
Stephen Bailey
Fast Company
2021-12-21
You are undoubtedly a different leader now than you were pre-pandemic. Managing a workforce has inherent challenges. Managing a remote workforce has additional unique challenges, even in the best of circumstances. When you layer on the relentless uncertainty, anxiety, and fatigue caused by COVID-19, the past 18 months have been a master class for leaders in how to pivot to meet a series of significant shifts.
Unfortunately, class isn’t over.
We have hit an inflection point with the future of work. It’s not months or weeks ahead of us—it starts today, with long-unaddressed considerations that were accelerated by the events of 2020 and are now affecting organizations of all sizes. Your success as a leader in the future of work will depend on how prepared you are to manage more change.
…
3. Books
Knowledge Games: How Playing Games Can Solve Problems, Create Insight, and Make Change
Karen Schrier
John Hopkins University Press
2016
Are games the knowledge-producers of the future?
Imagine if new knowledge and insights came not just from research centers, think tanks, and universities but also from games, of all things. Video games have been viewed as causing social problems, but what if they actually helped solve them? This question drives Karen Schrier’s Knowledge Games, which seeks to uncover the potentials and pitfalls of using games to make discoveries, solve real-world problems, and better understand our world. For example, so-called knowledge games—such as Foldit, a protein-folding puzzle game, SchoolLife, which crowdsources bullying interventions, and Reverse the Odds, in which mobile game players analyze breast cancer data—are already being used by researchers to gain scientific, psychological, and humanistic insights.Schrier argues that knowledge games are potentially powerful because of their ability to motivate a crowd of problem solvers within a dynamic system while also tapping into the innovative data processing and computational abilities of games. In the near future, Schrier asserts, knowledge games may be created to understand and predict voting behavior, climate concerns, historical perspectives, online harassment, susceptibility to depression, or optimal advertising strategies, among other things.
In addition to investigating the intersection of games, problem solving, and crowdsourcing, Schrier examines what happens when knowledge emerges from games and game players rather than scientists, professionals, and researchers. This accessible book also critiques the limits and implications of games and considers how they may redefine what it means to produce knowledge, to play, to educate, and to be a citizen.
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective
Springer
2015
Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity.
Finite and Infinite Games
James Carse
Free Press
2013-01-05
“There are at least two kinds of games,” states James P. Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. “One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change—as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end.
What are infinite games? How do they affect the ways we play our finite games? What are we doing when we play—finitely or infinitely? And how can infinite games affect the ways in which we live our lives?
Carse explores these questions with stunning elegance, teasing out of his distinctions a universe of observation and insight, noting where and why and how we play, finitely and infinitely. He surveys our world—from the finite games of the playing field and playing board to the infinite games found in culture and religion—leaving all we think we know illuminated and transformed. Along the way, Carse finds new ways of understanding everything, from how an actress portrays a role to how we engage in sex, from the nature of evil to the nature of science. Finite games, he shows, may offer wealth and status, power and glory, but infinite games offer something far more subtle and far grander.
Carse has written a book rich in insight and aphorism. Already an international literary event, Finite and Infinite Games is certain to be argued about and celebrated for years to come. Reading it is the first step in learning to play the infinite game.
A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
Jeff Hawkins
Basic Books
2021-03-02
One of the Financial Times' Best Books of 2021
A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI.For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence?
Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world-not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.
A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the understanding of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word.
Identity Cycle
Ian Grigg
Best Print Co. Ltd
2021-09
Identity Cycle is a book in four parts exploring the nature of identity and how it might or might not fit in a digital world.
This book was around 5 years in the writing, from 2015 to 2019. It is now finally self-published in PDF, eBook, Mobi and also paper! Many thanks to Rhian Lewis, André Bonello and Arthur Doohan for assistance in that process.
Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism
Kean Birch & Fabian Muniesa
The MIT Press
2020
How the asset—anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism.
The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable economic rent from them rather than make a killing on the market. Assetization examines how assets are constructed and how a variety of things can be turned into assets, analyzing the interests, activities, skills, organizations, and relations entangled in this process.
The contributors consider the assetization of knowledge, including patents, personal data, and biomedical innovation; of infrastructure, including railways and energy; of nature, including mineral deposits, agricultural seeds, and “natural capital”; and of publics, including such public goods as higher education and “monetizable social ills.” Taken together, the chapters show the usefulness of assetization as an analytical tool and as an element in the critique of capitalism.
Contributors
Thomas Beauvisage, Kean Birch, Veit Braun, Natalia Buier, Béatrice Cointe, Paul Robert Gilbert, Hyo Yoon Kang, Les Levidow, Kevin Mellet, Sveta Milyaeva, Fabian Muniesa, Alain Nadaï, Daniel Neyland, Victor Roy, James W. Williams
4. Courses
Blockchain-based Systems Engineering – Lecture Slides
In this lecture, we provide an overview about Blockchain systems and systems engineering, focusing on technical details and applications of blockchain systems. We introduce cryptographic hash functions, and present their properties. Then the data structure and the working principles of the Bitcoin blockchain are investigated in detail. We analyze the Proof of Work consensus mechanism of Bitcoin and illustrate the mining scheme. Following this, we demonstrate the system architecture of the Ethereum blockchain with a focus on the Ethereum Virtual Machine and smart contracts. Subsequently, the Solidity language is explained in terms of syntax, types, and design. Ethereum decentralized applications(dApps) are illustrated with current standards and frameworks, and specifics to dApp developments are introduced. Alternative approaches to distributed ledger technologies in the enterprise space are also discussed. Accordingly, the concepts and architecture of Hyperledger Fabric and Corda are explained. We inspect the risks, challenges, and limitations of distributed ledger technologies and present an overview of the current state of the blockchain ecosystem.
Co-ops 101
Canadian Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan
Co-operatives First
The Co-ops 101 online course is all about co-ops.
This unique six-week course explores the history of the co-operative model, how co-ops come about, and potential future uses of the model. Designed by the Canadian Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan, the course includes materials that cover a broad range of topics and mini lectures from leading researchers in co-op studies.
FREE to enroll
Takes about 6 weeks to complete if you do one module per week (roughly 2-3 hours per module)
5. Tools
Esteroids
A search engine for the decentralized web
Noisecraft
NoiseCraft is a visual programming language for sound synthesis and music that runs in your web browser, loosely inspired by Pure Data and Max/MSP. It's a tool that allows you to build your own synthesizer by creating new nodes and connecting them together. By connecting nodes with edges, you control how audio data and control signals flow from one node to another and how sound is generated. NoiseCraft is ideally suited to play with additive, subtractive and FM synthesis.
For those who are new to synthesizers and sound synthesis, A Beginner's Guide to the Synth is a good introduction to the basic concepts involved. Please don't hesitate to ask any question, offer feedback or report bugs, by opening an issue on our GitHub repository. We also welcome open source contributors, although we ask that you please communicate with us first before opening pull requests for new features, as we are selective as to what changes will be merged.
Quillbot
QuillBot's paraphrasing tool helps millions of people rewrite and enhance any sentence, paragraph, or article using state-of-the-art AI.
Your words matter, and our paraphrasing tool is designed to ensure you use the right ones. With 2 free modes and 5 premium modes to choose from, QuillBot’s paraphraser can rephrase any text in a variety of different ways, guaranteeing you find the perfect language, tone, and style for any occasion. Just enter your text into the input box, and our AI will work with you to build the best paraphrase from the original piece of writing.
Tldraw
A tiny little drawing app
Cooperative Decision-Making Toolkit
We are delighted to have you join us for this deep dive into Integrative Consent. Generative and cooperative decision-making is an ongoing process and with the right tools, you can continuously hone in on key facilitation skills and get into healthy flows through this decision-making process.
We believe that when this tool is put into practice along with the other tools we’ve designed, a collaborative organization becomes a reality. “Collab”, the whole toolbox, gives us the structure we need to nurture the whole person while still getting things done.
Part of the inspiration for this toolkit was our work with another cooperative, Loomio. We co-created a guide for their users to follow in order to make their remote decision-making practices both effective and democratic. See more here!
Clarity
The simplest workspace for decentralized teams
Easily plan projects, track tasks, and stay organized with a single collaborative workspace that combines freeform documents with structured project management.
Litmaps
Discover Science Faster
Visual research navigation, citation network search, and team synchronization.
The ultimate science discovery platform.
6. Videos & Podcasts
Vitalik Buterin on effective altruism, better ways to fund public goods, the blockchain’s problems so far, and how it could yet change the world
80,000 Hours
2019-09-03
Historically, progress in the field of cryptography has had major consequences. It has changed the course of major wars, made it possible to do business on the internet, and enabled private communication between both law-abiding citizens and dangerous criminals. Could it have similarly significant consequences in future?
Today's guest — Vitalik Buterin — is world-famous as the lead developer of Ethereum, a successor to the cryptographic-currency Bitcoin, which added the capacity for smart contracts and decentralised organisations. Buterin first proposed Ethereum at the age of 20, and by the age of 23 its success had likely made him a billionaire.
At the same time, far from indulging hype about these so-called 'blockchain' technologies, he has been candid about the limited good accomplished by Bitcoin and other currencies developed using cryptographic tools — and the breakthroughs that will be needed before they can have a meaningful social impact. In his own words, *"blockchains as they currently exist are in many ways a joke, right?"*
But Buterin is not just a realist. He's also an idealist, who has been helping to advance big ideas for new social institutions that might help people better coordinate to pursue their shared goals.
Brave Co-op: Saving lives with technology
Co-operatives First
The Common Share
2021-12-10
This New Cooperative Business Model Could Change Everything
The Laura Flanders Show
YouTube
2021-12-12
Many of the world’s most successful businesses began as someone’s good idea. But the path from startup to conventional financial success typically involves going public, prioritizing shareholders’ interests, and ultimately selling to a giant conglomerate whose intentions are far from the original mission of the business’s founders. In this episode, Laura interviews guests who say this conventional path of success is desperately in need of an overhaul. Why must new and innovative ideas come to market through old and undemocratic platforms? What if rather than selling out, successful businesses became community assets that put ownership and governance in the hands of workers and even consumers? Could a startup become a means of building community wealth, economic justice, and accountability over our technology? Our guests explain how. GUESTS Pia Mancini, Co-Founder & CEO, Open Collective (
https://opencollective.com/
) Lauren Ruffin, Co-Founder, Crux (
https://www.laurenruffin.com/
) Nathan Schneider, Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder (
https://nathanschneider.info/
) CREDITS Executive Producer: Laura Flanders Creative Director: Matt Colaciello Communications Director: Jeremiah Cothren Editors: Charlotte Carpenter, Nat Needham Radio & Podcast Producer: Jeannie Hopper Co-Director Development: Dominic Marcella Story Producer: Sabrina Artel Motion Graphics: Nat Needham Digital Content Creator: Leigh Friedman Production Assistant: Ryan Hotes Interns: Janet Hernandez, Adelle Villarente, Te Maia Wiki DONATE at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/the... SUBSCRIBE to our newsletter:
http://www.lauraflanders.org
FOLLOW The Laura Flanders Show Twitter: https://twitter.com/thelfshow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theLFshow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelfshow/ ACCESSIBILITY This episode is closed captioned.
Cooperatives 101
Courtney Berner & Margaret Bau
University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives
2019-02-16
An introduction to cooperatives, this webinar will describe what a co-op is, how people form cooperatives, types of cooperatives, and member structures. Presenters also share the seven cooperative principles and values. Attendees will understand the difference between cooperatives and other business structures.
I’m starting a cooperative business (aka a worker owned co-op)
Vivek George
Mind Home
2021-03-09
📼 I'm starting a cooperative business also known as a worker owned co-op and I'm excited to share my journey with you. In this video I provide details and tips about starting a co-op based on my own experience. I hope this video will be helpful and can answer some questions and concerns. If you are thinking about starting a worker owned business and you'd like to learn how to do it, this is the right place. Cooperative businesses aka a Co-op have quickly become a passion for me and are growing in popularity globally. As an entrepreneur I'm always looking for new solutions to problems and in the past year I have became more and more interested in this type of business model and I truly believe that co-ops are the key to a healthy economic future for all. 📰 Links to sites mentioned in the video: * How Newman’s Own Built a Billion-Dollar Company by Doing Good https://bettermarketing.pub/how-newma... * Steps To Starting A Worker Co-op https://institute.coop/sites/default/... * If you are in NY, ICA Group and NYC Collective Of Worker Cooperatives are both extremely helpful orgs (there are similar ones around the US and abroad).
https://icagroup.org
https://nycworker.coop/home/ 🧩 Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:05 Inspiration to start a cooperative 03:46 Researching how to start cooperative 04:56 Three main challenges of starting a new co-op 06:09 Encouragement 08:18 Summary 🎥 OUR OTHER VIDEOS YOU MAY LIKE: * Why start a CO-OP and what a cooperative company really is.
* How living with awareness can make you happy.
💚 LINKS TO FIND US: Join our community at - https://www.mindhomenyc.com/ Follow us on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thesustaina... Follow Vivek on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vivekmgeorge If you found this video helpful Subscribe to our channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMXi... to receive all our weekly updates!
Worker Democracy
Unlearning Economics
Unlearning Economics
2021-12-04
An overview of the evidence surrounding worker democracy. In summary: it's good, but far from perfect. Hope you enjoy the video and the new animations. Those beautiful voices you are hearing are @Saint Andrewism , @Zoe Bee , and @JohntheDuncan My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/unlearneconomics My Twitter: http://twitter.com/UnlearnEcon The Discord: https://discord.com/invite/jy8CNzDsgf Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnlearningEc... Produced by Hobbie Stuart Animations by Grim Friberg Artwork by Jacob Cob © 2021 Unlearning Economics
122. Going DAO the Rabbit Hole
Jathan Sadowski & Edward Ongweso Jr.
This Machine Kills
2021-12-09
We kept ignoring DAOs and web3 hoping it would go away, but sadly it hasn’t. So we pick apart each part of the acronym—decentralized, autonomous, organization—and discuss the techno-politics of their promise and practice. We get into blockchain, smart contracts, and corporate governance. Some stuff we reference: ••• Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law | Karen E.C. Levy https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/107 ••• DAOs are interesting, likely, and terrifying | Jason Prado: https://venturecommune.substack.com/p/daos-are-interesting-likely-and-terrifying ••• Zealots of the Blockchain | David Golumbia: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/zealots-of-the-blockchain-golumbia ••• Mapping the NFT revolution: market trends, trade networks, and visual features | Matthieu Nadini et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-00053-8 ••• Digital extraction: Blockchain traceability in mineral supply chains | Filipe Calvão, Matthew Archer https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096262982100041X Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)
Cooperative Structures and Organizations
All Things Co-op
All Things Co-op
2021-10-12
In this first episode of Season 5, Larry, Kevin, and Cinar share their thoughts on the status of co-operative organizations, the need for more overtly political co-operative organizations, and how big a role co-operative organizations should play in attempting to build the institutions that could serve as a part of an institutional challenge to the status quo.
Platform Cooperatives with Minsun Ji
All Things Co-op
All Things Co-op
2021-12-21
In this episode of All Things Co-op, Cinar, Larry, and Kevin talk to Minsun Ji, a labor organizer and Co-op expert. They discuss what a platform cooperative is, how it differs from a corporate or capitalist platform, and its connection with the larger labor movement. Minsun also talks with the ATC guys about the growth of the social economy and cooperatives in Korea, and shares her take on the popular Netflix series Squid Games and what it reveals about the reality Korean workers are faced with today.
21. JASMINE SUN: UTOPIAS + VALUE PLURALISM
Chase Chapman
On The Other Side
2021-12
Jasmine Sun runs Reboot, a community of reclaiming techno-optimism for a better collective future. Jasmine talks the role of utopias in building web3, techno-optimism, value pluralism, and building spaces for productive disagreement.
Follow Jasmine on Twitter (@jasminewsun)
Subscribe to Reboot at http://joinreboot.org
Follow Chase on Twitter (@chaserchapman) + share your thoughts on the show :)
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On the Other Side is sponsored by RabbitHole.
Learn more about RabbitHole at rabbithole.gg
Follow RabbitHole on Twitter at @rabbithole_gg
23. MARK BEYLIN: ABUNDANCE IN WEB3 + DANGERS OF LINKING SELF-WORTH TO TOKENS
Chase Chapman
On The Other Side
2021-12
Mark Beylin is an Ethereum OG and the co-founder of Myco. Mark talks web3 social, linking tokens to self-worth, crypto as a catalyst for spiritual growth, fair compensation frameworks, and so much more.
Follow Mark on Twitter (@MarkBeylin)
Follow Chase on Twitter (@chaserchapman)
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Links from the show:
Mark’s Twitter thread on abundance:Earlier today I had a wonderful conversation with @vsinghdothings about what it means to build abundant web3 communities, and I thought it might be useful to share with the twitterverse here’s a thread on A B U N D A N C E ↓Check out Myco: https://twitter.com/mycodotspace
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On the Other Side is sponsored by RabbitHole.
Learn more about RabbitHole at rabbithole.gg
Follow RabbitHole on Twitter at @rabbithole_gg
Where Data Lives in an IPFS/Filecoin World with Mikeal Rogers
Kevin Rose
Modern Finance
2021-12-08
Kevin is joined by Mikeal Rogers, engineering manager at Protocol Labs, the team behind Filecoin and IPFS. Here, they try to answer the important questions around decentralized storage, like where our NFTs and data live in a Web3 world — especially when a marketplace (like Hic et Nunc) goes down. Also, they discuss what Filecoin is and how it works with IPFS, when major browsers will support IPFS, how we can speed up IPFS image loading, and much more.
7. Project Updates
Welcome to the GIVeconomy
Lauren
Giveth
2021-12-24
It is our great pleasure to officially introduce the GIVeconomy — an economy that rewards and empowers those who give to projects, to societies, and to the world.
….
Introducing Overchute
Overchute
Overchute
2021-12-14
A decentralized application for crowdfunding the release of digital products as public goods under open licences
…
QuartzOA Pilot Project
Quartz Open Access
Quartz Open Access
2021-12-23
Hi friend ! 🙋♀️
Seasons greetings! We hope you'll spend great time with your loved ones and have a good rest during the upcoming holiday season! We are going to have some rest too after an eventful year but, before, we want to share some more exciting news with you :)
🚀Our first pilot is officially launched, cheers to that!
🥳Pre-registration for the browser extension is open!
📺 Our 3-minute animation video is live!
🎉 Our community is growing - join us!
🤓 and we continue introducing our team
... so read on!
8. Career Center
DAOexchange
DAOexchange
This is a public board where DAOs post tasks that anybody can claim, in exchange for tokens. Click on a card to learn more details. DAOs can submit a new task here.
Postdoc Fellowship on Decentralized Gig Work Platforms
Human-Computer Interaction Lab and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton
The Human-Computer Interaction Lab and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton are looking for a postdoc interested in joining a new research initiative to study and develop decentralized technologies to support public-interest open gig work platforms.
Millions of people rely on and work for gig work platforms to deliver goods and services, from food delivery to transportation. However, these platforms are typically highly-centralized, undemocratic, and not designed in the public interest. The Open/Decentralized Work Platform Project aims to create and critically study the ecosystem of socio-technical tools (e.g., DAOs and dApps) designed to empower communities of local stakeholders (e.g., couriers, patrons, local businesses, and government) to operate self-governed networks and marketplaces.
We welcome multidisciplinary applicants with a passion for working on public-interest technology research with direct real-world impact. You will be joining a diverse team of engineers, designers, and social scientists.
This will start as a 12-month appointment, commencing on or about September 1, 2022, and can be renewed for a second year.
The research is in collaboration with the Drivers Cooperative, a driver-owned ride-hailing cooperative in New York City, and Nosh, a food delivery platform owned by local restaurants in Colorado.
Qualifications:
A PhD in computer science or related fields.
Eagerness to have a direct impact in the world.
Strong software engineering skills, preferbaly with social computing systems and decetralized technologies.
Experience publishing in HCI venues such as CHI, CSCW, and UIST.
For more information, please get in touch with Dr. Andrés Monroy-Hernández at andresmh@cs.princeton.edu.
9. Guides
WEB3 STARTER PACK
Crypto, Culture & Society
At CCS we’re creating a space for people who care about the broader societal and cultural impacts of web3 and we challenge our members to ask the “so what?” questions about crypto. But before you can meaningfully engage in deeper conversations, it’s helpful to know the basics of web3 and the parts that make it up like DAOs, NFTs and DeFi.
10. Tweets
See you next month 👋
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