Distroid Issue 19
Thank you for reading the Distroid Newsletter, a monthly newsletter on convergence (connection and integration) in the Ledgerback Frontier (exemplified by Web3, Platform Cooperatives, Effective Altruism, Tools for Thought, and many other emerging fields), covering news, research, events, tools, courses, videos, podcasts, books, tweets, jobs, visualizations, slides and more.
Distroid is put together by Charles Adjovu, a member of the 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.
For more curated content, please check out the Distroid table on Airtable.
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Outline
Research
Articles
Books
Courses
Tools
Events
Videos & Podcasts
Career Center
Visualizations
Slides
Tweets
Get Involved
We are looking for curators, graphic designers, and an editor to help out with the Distroid newsletter. If you would like to help (for designers or editors), send an email to ledgerback@gmail.com, or (for curators) start contributing content for Issue 20 with this form.
Come and chat about the issue on Discord as well in the #distroid channel.
1. Research
In 1997, the Mexican government designed the conditional cash transfer program Progresa, which became the worldwide model of a new approach to social programs, simultaneously targeting human capital accumulation and poverty reduction. A large literature has documented the short and medium-term impacts of the Mexican program and its successors in other countries. Using Progresas experimental evaluation design originally rolled out in 1997-2000, and a tracking survey conducted 20 years later, this paper studies the differential long-term impacts of exposure to Progresa. We focus on two cohorts of children: i) those that during the period of differential exposure were in-utero or in the first years of life, and ii) those who during the period of differential exposure were transitioning from primary to secondary school. Results for the early childhood cohort, 18-20-year-old at endline, shows that differential exposure to Progresa during the early years led to positive impacts on educational attainment and labor income expectations. This constitutes unique long-term evidence on the returns of an at-scale intervention on investments in human capital during the first 1000 days of life. Results for the school cohort - in their early 30s at endline - show that the short-term impacts of differential exposure to Progresa on schooling were sustained in the long-run and manifested themselves in larger labor incomes, more geographical mobility including through international migration, and later family formation.
Maria Caridad Araujo, Karen Macours
HAL
2021-10-04
Should We Certify Platform Cooperatives?
Platform cooperativism is very much a movement in the making. It is expected to grow world-wide — more quickly than more established cooperative movements may expect and be able to react to. Most cooperative entrepreneurs taking steps towards generating projects that fall into new developed categories of “platform” or “data” cooperatives often find themselves with more questions than answers. At the same time, the academic community has been reflecting on the platform cooperative model, its governance, accompanying uses of data, and the impacts of
work generated by such cooperatives. As such, this moment presents an ideal opportunity to identify principles and features that are specific to platform cooperatives (of which ‘data cooperatives’ may be considered a subset), and to help build a common lexicon of concepts that convey the core values of the movement. One way in which to do this is the creation of platform cooperative ‘certifications’, with strong incentives for adoption, including but not limited to: access to a global network of platform cooperatives, guidance from practitioners and experts, and trust from businesses, clients, and consumers engaging with them. Even contributing to a general understanding of what ‘platform cooperatives’ mean, are, and could become would help more cooperatives generate and lead to policy / legal frames for them in the near future. Importantly, such certifications will only be made possible if a collective of theoreticians and academics is able to understand the needs of the practitioners and make sure that the certifying process becomes a
value adding process not only for academic reflection but for everyday cooperative work.
Ana Aguirre, et al.
Technology Ethics in Action: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
This special issue interrogates the meaning and impacts of “tech ethics”: the embedding of ethics into digital technology research, development, use, and governance. In response to concerns about the social harms associated with digital technologies, many individuals and institutions have articulated the need for a greater emphasis on ethics in digital technology. Yet as more groups embrace the concept of ethics, critical discourses have emerged questioning whose ethics are being centered, whether “ethics” is the appropriate frame for improving technology, and what it means to develop “ethical” technology in practice. This interdisciplinary issue takes up these questions, interrogating the relationships among ethics, technology, and society in action. This special issue engages with the normative and contested notions of ethics itself, how ethics has been integrated with technology across domains, and potential paths forward to support more just and egalitarian technology. Rather than starting from philosophical theories, the authors in this issue orient their articles around the real-world discourses and impacts of tech ethics—i.e., tech ethics in action.
Ben Green (ed.)
Journal of Social Computing
2021
Why many funding schemes harm rather than support research
To the editor — Researchers are spending an increasing fraction of their time applying for funding. However, despite extensive efforts invested in applications and evaluations, the current funding system appears to largely fail in its task of reliably ranking the relative research quality of proposals. Hence, the current funding system to a considerable degree represents a lottery — and a strikingly inefficient one at that.
Martin Dresler, et al.
Nature Human Behaviour
2022-01-31
Challenges and Success potentials of Platform Cooperatives: Insights from a Multiple Case Study
In recent years, an alternative concept to capitalist-oriented digital platforms has emerged: platform cooperatives. Platform cooperatives are jointly owned and democratically controlled platforms that promise a more social alternative to platform capitalism. However, platform cooperatives and their challenges and success potentials have received little attention in research. To this end, we conduct a multiple case study and shed more light on the challenges and success potentials that result from the characteristics of platform cooperatives. The results show that the greatest challenges include their complex governance and above all, their lack of funding. To leverage their success potential, platform cooperatives should extend regionality and further sharpen their cooperative identity and social profile. They should also pursue a differentiation strategy and find ways to keep democratic governance manageable. Ultimately, they would benefit from new financing instruments. Our results contribute to research on digital platforms and platform cooperatives.
Peter Philipp, et al.
ECIS 2021
2021
2. Articles
Anticapture: Towards a Framework of Capture-Resistant Governance
The promise of capture-resistant governance is managing shared resources in a way that prevents capture of those resources by bad actors. In so doing, it also unlocks a new frontier of what is possible together. The amazing fluidity, flexibility, and adaptability exhibited by early web3-native communities is testament to what’s possible when our governance structures avoid capture of shared resources without the rigidity of traditional approaches. This article introduces Anticapture, a framework for understanding capture-resistant governance. Anticapture seeks to understand the fundamentals of capture-resistant governance by examining how organizations – modeled as networks of agents – take actions to manage resources in service of their objectives. By the time you’re finished reading, you’ll be equipped with the beginnings of a taxonomy and a set of terminology to use in the context of DAOs, decentralized communities, and capture-resistant governance.
spengrah
spengrah
2022-02-04
When the Stagnation Goes Virtual
It was day three of NFT.NYC, and I had a headache. I had spent the night before in a series of Ubers from Brooklyn to Times Square and back again, fielding texts about which VC-sponsored rave was happening when. As I queued for this morning’s event, a “Digital Fashion Breakfast” on 6th Avenue, I was still trying to convince myself that all those parties counted as networking. NFT.NYC was a 5,000 person extravaganza described by The New York Times as a coming-out party for the emerging NFT subculture. The event itself consisted of a $600-per-ticket conference held in Times Square, as well as over a hundred satellite events spread across New York. Early adopters and speculators came to New York to revel in their newfound cachet and meet their internet friends in real life.
GINEVRA DAVIS
Palladium
2022-01-21
Research looks different when all the information you could possibly want is ungated and permissionless. Will you need a billion subscriptions to everything from the Wall Street Journal to JStor to the Pew Research Center to access information, like you needed as a Web2 writer? Thankfully, no. Does that mean that information is easier to find? Well…..also no. Actually finding information in Web3 is harder than it looks. This is because we lack the information aggregators and archeologists we’re used to relying on in the traditional world. Instead, you must be your own aggregator and archeologist. You get to do more than be a writer — you get to be an on-chain ontologist, a Discord-server deep-diver, and a Medium-article miner.
Samantha Marin
BanklessDAO
2022-02-11
Unions and Worker Co-ops: Why Economic Justice Requires Collaboration
Unions and worker cooperatives have a lot in common when it comes to passions and principles for democratic workplaces. Where they differ is in strategy and tactics. At this moment in history, it is clear to many that much needs to be torn down and much needs to be built up. To face this challenge and change our economic system to achieve genuine workplace democracy requires new ways of doing business and a multi-pronged approach.
Rebecca Lurie
Nonprofit Quarterly
2022-02-09
The NFT Ecosystem Is a Complete Disaster
For the past year, as NFTs have breached spectacular and speculative heights, we’ve seen a growing amount of skepticism. The most recent wave was touched off by a 138-minute video essay by Canadian media critic Dan Olson that condemned NFTs and other blockchain-based technologies as fundamentally broken and unworkable. In just over a week, it’s garnered more than 3 million views on YouTube. Regardless of your perspective on the video, it’s hard to deny that there’s a lot of bullshit percolating around NFTs. Even hardcore Bitcoiners agree. And despite what the loudest NFT boosters insist, the beatings have continued and morale has not improved. Any way you cut it, the NFT ecosystem as it stands is a disaster.
Edward Ongweso Jr
Vice
2022-02-01
The ESG benefits of cooperatives
Much has been made of the “E” and “S” of ESG in recent years. From biodiversity loss to lead pollution in pipes, environmental impacts that are inextricably linked to negative health outcomes and social injustice have made it into mainstream business metrics. The “S” measures have also seen an uptick, especially after the 2020 proliferation of COVID-19 and the systemic racism awakening among investors, lenders and consumer-facing brands. As the ESG trend continues and sharpens, the “G” appears to be far behind in consideration. What makes for good governance that lowers risks and improves opportunity for and impact on market participants? In no small part, cooperatives have a key role.
Marilyn Waite
GreenBiz
2022-02-08
Thinking about crypto and web3, I’m constantly reminded about the ideological battles fought over the big digital platforms and Web 2.0. A decade ago, some of us easily saw through the hype promoted by the likes of Eric Schmidt or Mark Zuckerberg. But the reason why the ideological premises of Web 2.0 were so hard to dismantle was because for every Eric Schmidt, with his commitment to US-led global domination of the planet, there were five Stanford undergraduates who wanted to build an app to feed the hungry children of Africa or teach Syrian refugees how to code or stop violence against women. Most of these apps failed but they did provide the ideological and political context in which the likes of Google and Facebook could flourish; without the former, the latter would never enjoy the legitimacy that they did – as long as both belonged to the unstoppable force of nature that was Web 2.0, our collective disempowerment by the digital platforms was the price to be paid for helping the Global South code itself out of underdevelopment. Surveying the many promises of crypto and web3, I see a very similar dynamic: whatever it is that venture capitalists like a16z are doing in this space is whitewashed through the whataboutism regarding the blockchain's promises to also help us prevent the climate catastrophe or heal the planet or redistribute resources more wisely. Let me make a prediction here: when all these solutionist projects fail, as they inevitably will in the next 5 years, all that will remain standing is a16z. With the crypto community not professing great interest in the broader history of failures to fix development or facilitate conservation or solve the climate problem through market-based interventions, I thought it’s important to talk to someone who could connect the dots. So I turned to Pete Howson, a scholar with the rare talent for clear exposition, who has written both on the failures of various market-based instruments to address social problems and also on the uncritical embrace of the blockchain technology by many development organizations. His critique of “cryptocarbon” is really worth a read.
Evgeny Morozov
The Crypto Syllabus
TBD
Braintrust: Fighting Capitalism with Capitalism
As you know, my brain can get out there, and an imagined future in which we rely more heavily on digital assets and would like to own and transact with those assets wherever we go in digital space was enough for me to buy in to the web3 vision. But I also understand that many people want to see “real use cases” before getting too excited. “Just show me one thing that a normal person would use in their everyday life,” these people reasonably demand, “that is better than the existing alternative because of the use of web3 tools.” Allow me to introduce Braintrust. Braintrust is a user-owned talent network that is growing fast and reaching real scale just eighteen months after launching the public beta of the protocol last June. $37 million in Gross Service Value (GSV) – what Clients pay Talent – has flowed through the network, with nearly twice that contracted for the coming months.
Packy McCormick
Not Boring by Packy McCormick
2022-01-31
A SPECULATIVE SKETCH OF A DAO, WITH OPEN COLLECTIVE
This post describes a possible new system of DAO governance that emerged in conversations between RadicalxChange Foundation and Open Collective. Open Collective is exploring how to transition from a privately owned organization to one that shares power and money with its vibrant network of stakeholders. This sketch leaves many questions unanswered. But we thought it worth sharing, even in this embryonic stage, to invite both the RadicalxChange and Open Collective communities to join the conversation. Let us know your thoughts, and let’s figure out together whether there is something worth exploring further here. And even if this doesn’t make sense for Open Collective, it might be something other organizations can iterate on!
Matt Prewitt
RadicalxChange
2022-01-21
Research: How Entrepreneurship Can Revitalize Local Communities
Much has been written about the potential for entrepreneurship to spur economic growth — and yet time and time again, we’ve seen business-driven revitalization programs fail to make a real, lasting impact on their local communities. What will it take to foster ventures that actually revive the economies in which they’re founded? The authors discuss the results of an eight-year investigation into two organizations that took opposing approaches to supporting entrepreneurs in Detroit. They argue that if the goal is to harness the power of entrepreneurship to revitalize impoverished places, business leaders and policymakers must shift away from a focus on scaling up, and that they must instead encourage founders to “scale deep” — that is, to grow slowly and become strongly embedded into the local economy, rather than growing as quickly and broadly as possible. This means investing not only in ventures that offer strong financial returns, but also in those that lift up their communities to achieve sustained self-reliance.
Suntae Kim, Anna Kim
Harvard Business Review
2022-01-17
What We Learned from Our Research Sprint on Cooperative Data Governance
In the fall of 2021, The New School's Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) and Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) collaborated on a nine-week, research sprint exploring cooperative approaches to data governance. Members of the research cohort, a dozen early-career scholars and leaders in the cooperative movement, had diverse academic and professional backgrounds, including law, computer science, education, social work, business, and ethnography. Across nine time zones, participants convened with founders of data coops, municipal policymakers, community leaders, and scholars each week to discuss pressing topics at the intersection of cooperatives and technology while also working in groups to produce three research papers. Participants presented early versions of these outputs at The New Common Sense: Forging the Cooperative Digital Economy conference in Berlin. (Video of the panel is accessible here.)
Berkman Klein Center
2022-02-10
How Software in the Life Sciences Actually Works (And Doesn’t Work)
Genomics is projected to require up to 110 petabytes (PB) of storage a day within the next decade—for reference, if you were storing all of that data on 1TB hard drives, you’d need 110,000 of them per day. This would make genomics one of the largest data generating endeavors on the planet, topping other contenders such as Youtube (3-5 PB/day), and Astronomy (3 PB/day). Genomes are not the only “-ome” being measured at breakneck speed, as multi-omic studies are now generating enormous catalogs of different cellular measurements. High-resolution microscopes routinely generate terabytes (1012 bytes) of rich spatial data. In the modern life sciences, quality analytical software is utterly essential for making sense of this enormous amount of new data. Biology is changing. While biology is changing, our leviathan funding structures have remained the same. It has been estimated that tens of billions of dollars worth of global life sciences R&D depends on software tools for analyzing new types of biological data like genome sequences. While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is uniquely positioned to support scientists developing this crucial infrastructure–with a budget of $51.96 billion this year–direct grant opportunities for this type of work remain practically nonexistent. Because of the lack of direct funding opportunities, many of the most widely used analytical software tools compete for smaller philanthropic support such as the $11.1 million dollar Essential Open Source Software for Science grant opportunity from the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative. Part of the absence of sustained software funding in the life sciences can be explained by studying history.
Elliot Hershberg
New Science
2022-01-30
Minimum Viable Salaries for a fairer Web3
In web3, bounties and grants have proliferated as reward mechanisms for contributors. This was partially due to both bounties and grants being relatively simple from a technical perspective: they are a one-off transfer. However, there could also be a cultural reason at play, inherent to the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon cultures (like the US) from which many contributors come and also biased by a certain comfort that wealth and social capital provide. Here we seek to provide a broader model for DAO design, one which seeks to enable a broader group of humans to participate comfortably thanks to a key innovation: Minimum Viable Salaries.
0x8B580433568E521ad351b92b98150c0C65ce69B7
0x8B580433568E521ad351b92b98150c0C65ce69B8
2021-12-13
🌍 Giving (carbon) credit where it’s due
Fusion energy. Electric airplanes. Fertilizer from air. The world of climate tech overflows with mind-bending technologies. But perhaps the most mind-bending of all? The voluntary carbon market. The scientific consensus that we need to drain the bathtub (in addition to turning off the tap) couldn’t be clearer. Nearly every legitimate corporation has pledged to be Net Zero, but won’t get there through emission reductions alone. Funding rounds and job postings alike for “CDR” startups are white-hot with VCs and candidates tripping over themselves to be a part of carbon drawdown. Yet, fundamental open questions around definitions, regulation, and verification make any hard predictions about the voluntary carbon market a fool's errand. But where there’s uncertainty, there’s upside.
Sophie Purdom, Kim Zou
Climate Tech VC
2022-02-04
Build Finance DAO suffers 'hostile governance takeover,' loses $470,000
Build Finance DAO has fallen foul to a ‘hostile governance takeover,’ according to the project. The perpetrator appears to have made off with around $470,000 in funds.
Tim Copeland
The Block
2022-02-14
Don’t sell your governance tokens
DAOs need capital to acquire labor so they can accomplish work. The more capital they have access to, the more products they can build, which consequently produces more capital. This flywheel effect of capital fueling growth shows the importance of funds to the success of a DAO. Currently, a prominent way DAOs raise money is by selling their governance token. There are many issues with this approach, which were brought to light when 0xMaki proposed SushiSwap raise money by selling SUSHI, their governance token.
Jordan Meyer
Porter
2021-10-29
Algorithmic recommendation systems (also known as recommender systems and recommendation engines) are one of the primary ways that we navigate the deluge of information from products like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and TikTok. We only have a finite amount of time and attention, and recommendation systems help allocate our attention across the zettabytes of data (trillions of gigabytes!) now produced each year.
Aviv Ovadya
Perspectives on Public Purpose
2022-02-04
3. Books
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
At the core of A Pattern Language is the philosophy that in designing their environments people always rely on certain ‘languages,’ which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a formal system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable making a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. ‘Patterns,’ the units of this language, are answers to design problems: how high should a window sill be?; how many stories should a building have?; how much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees? More than 250 of the patterns in this language are outlined, each consisting of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature and human action as much in five hundred years as they are today.
Christopher W. Alexander, et al.
Oxford University Press
1977-08-25
Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech
Whoever controls the platforms, controls the future. Platform Socialism sets out an alternative vision and concrete proposals for a digital economy that expands our freedom. Powerful tech companies now own the digital infrastructure of twenty-first century social life. Masquerading as global community builders, these companies have developed sophisticated new techniques for extracting wealth from their users. James Muldoon shows how grassroots communities and transnational social movements can take back control from Big Tech. He reframes the technology debate and proposes a host of new ideas from the local to the international for how we can reclaim the emancipatory possibilities of digital platforms. Drawing on sources from forgotten histories to contemporary prototypes, he proposes an alternative system and charts a roadmap for how we can get there.
James Muldoon
Pluto Press
2022-01-20
4. Courses
Greetings! Welcome to Bankless Academy. We’re excited to guide you on your journey into Web3. To get started, you will need some essential equipment: a digital wallet. A digital wallet is your passport to exploring the various worlds of Web3. This tool grants you access to incredible new possibilities while safeguarding your assets and identity. In this lesson, we’ll introduce you to digital wallets, how they work, and how to set yours up to safely embark on your Web3 journey. Once you’ve completed the lesson and have your wallet connected, you’ll also earn your first digital badge—known as a POAP—as proof of your achievement in the Bankless Academy. Let’s get started!
Bankless Academy
Bankless Academy
Alternative Data Futures: Cooperative Principles, Data Trusts, and the Digital Economy
The Alternative Data Futures: Cooperative Principles, Data Trusts, and the Digital Economy Research Sprint was launched by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the The New School’s Platform Cooperativism Consortium in October 2021.[1] The Research Sprint model developed by Berkman and its collaborators is a highly intensive 4 to 9 week period of seminars and workshops led by subject matter experts on an overarching thematic area of focus related to technology, ethics, and policymaking. In general, participants are early-career academics or practitioners who are tasked with working in small groups to develop outputs (e.g. white papers, data visualizations, policy playbooks) related to a set of questions or challenges.
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, The New School’s Platform Cooperativism Consortium
Wikiversity
5. Tools
Your personal encyclopedia. Google Alerts meets a note-taking tool to help you remember and stay informed about things you are interested in.
Recall
Turn everyday's flood of information into your superpower
Media Lab Bayern at LLIS – University of Stuttgart
A web app that combines mind mapping with the power of networked note-taking. Organize & connect all your thoughts in one place. As if Miro and Obsidian had a baby!
Scrintal
Conclave is a peer-to-peer, real-time, collaborative text editor built from scratch in JavaScript. Intrigued by collaborative text editors such as Google Docs, we set out to build our own. This case study walks you through our journey from the initial idea to our research of current academic literature and finally to our design and implementation of the final product.
Nitin Savant, Elise Olivares, Sun-Li Beatteay
A web3-native Trello with token payments, credentialing, bounties and more
Lonis
Feeling Venturely? Then you are just in the right place! Venturely equips you with tools and step-by-step guidance to help you bring your business ideas to market
Business Model Design Lab
Strategy for the Self-Taught. Are you unclear about what to do and why? Are your plans creating more confusion than clarity? Do you end up second-guessing yourself as a result? Show your work! Make a Wardley Map!
Hired Thought
6. Events
The 2022 ReFi Summit is an INVITE ONLY gathering of 50 Web3, Technology and Sustainability leaders meeting in-person for two days in Seattle, Washington.
Rex St John, Jinger Zeng, Tessa Mero
2022-05-11
4th Blockchain International Scientific Conference ISC2022
ISC2022 is the annual flagship event of The British Blockchain Association. We are DELIGHTED to announce that the registrations for the *4th* Blockchain International Scientific Conference #ISC2022 are now OPEN!
THE BRITISH BLOCKCHAIN ASSOCIATION
Airmeet
2022-03-14
The open web is rapidly growing, increasing the need for contributors from all fields and backgrounds. Codeless Conduct is an event to learn and experiment with all things web3, by deep-diving into different protocols and completing no-code bounties. Participants will engage with a passionate community of like-minded creators who are driven by the desire to shape the future of this space. Regardless of your skill set - let's get inspired, share ideas, and celebrate web3 culture together! YOU DON'T NEED CODING SKILLS TO ADD VALUE TO THE OPEN WEB. Our goal is to gather a collective of curious, creatives, artists, users, writers, and thinkers to learn from each others' unique perspectives. Our mission is to make this space as inclusive as possible.
1kx
7. Videos & Podcasts
Episode 33: Howard Rheingold on Predicting Technology’s Future
Our guest for this episode is Howard Rheingold, a critic, writer, and teacher who specializes in the cultural, social, and political implications of modern communication media. Howard wrote about the earliest personal computers at Xerox PARC, and he was also one of the early users of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or The WELL, an influential early online community. In 1994, he was hired as the founding executive director of HotWired. He is the author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.
In this conversation, Howard talks about transitioning from typewriters to computers and the potentials of virtual communities – to both serve as think tanks and form personal connections. He talks about recognizing “signals” of what was to come with telephones and computers and the early collective action that the smartphone encouraged. Finally, he describes five media literacies that everyone should master if they want to use social media well.
Click here for this episode’s transcript, and here for this episode’s show notes.
Web Science Trust
Untangling the Web
2022-01-21
Episode 35: Inventing – and Transforming – the World Wide Web with Tim Berners-Lee
In this season finale, our guest is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim is a professorial fellow of computer science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He directs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the web. He also co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation and founded the Open Data Institute and the Web Science Trust. In 2004, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for services to the global development of the Internet.
In this episode, Tim talks about the interdisciplinary nature of web science and the future of the web. He discusses misuse of the web, including the production of fake news and violent discourse, and hypothesizes ways to encourage more collaborative and democratic processes on the web and to hold social networks accountable. Finally, Tim discusses his efforts to decentralize the web – again – and his role in helping to create an ecosystem of institutions that nurture the growth of the web.
Click here for this episode’s transcript, and here for this episode’s show notes.
Web Science Trust
Untangling the Web
2022-02-18
14. The Past Decade of Computational Social Science Research with David Lazer
In this episode, we talk with David Lazer, the University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and the Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. We discuss two seminal papers in computational social science he co-authored a decade apart: "Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science" (Science 2009) and "Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities" (Science 2020).
David shares with us events in his long and distinguished CSS research career. In the early 2000s, he helped gather a small group of people working on new "data streams" and how they intentionally created the term computational social science. He also talks about his own struggles on the academic job market, advice for aspiring CSS researchers, and a wish for better data availability structures.
Katherine A. Keith, Lucy Li
Diaries of Social Data Research
2022-02-20
For this interview I spoke to @againstutopia he’s known as on anarchist and crypto Twitter. He has a background in working in tech, platform cooperatives, and is one of the stewards of PrimeDAO. We had followed each other online but finally had the opportunity to meet in person during The DAOist in Lisbon a few months ago. During the interview we discuss why he thinks the anarchist community is split on crypto, the interesting DAO tools being built at PrimeDAO for DAO2DAO interactions, and the limitations of criticizing technology from an ideological lens instead of speaking to the practice of how it’s used. We also talk a bit about regenerative finance, why he’s become “cosmos-pilled”, and his new podcast on the ownership economy.
The Blockchain Socialist
The Blockchain Socialist
2022-02-13
Data Cooperatives – Presenting Results from the PCC/BKC Research Sprint
The participants of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium/Berkman Klein Center (Harvard University) Research Sprint present preliminary findings on data cooperatives based on research conducted during the sprint. Facilitated by Trebor Scholz (Platform Cooperativism Consortium) Recorded on November 18, 2021.
Platform Cooperativism Consortium/Berkman Klein Center (Harvard University) Research Sprint
Platform Cooperativism
2022-01-24
Today's guests are Raphaël Haupt, Co-Founder & CEO, and James Farrell, Co-Founder & CTO, of Toucan Protocol. Toucan aims to build a regenerative financial system — one that nurtures the beauty of the Earth rather than exploiting it. They are leading the way in discovering how the open internet can help tackle climate change. Earlier this year, Raphaël and James rebranded and launched Toucan Protocol, public infrastructure for carbon markets running on open blockchains. While the co-creators plan to start with carbon markets, their vision is much bigger: they intend to kickstart a regenerative finance ecosystem based on Web3 technologies and values to make DeFi work for the planet (DeFi stands for “decentralized finance”, it’s a new global financial ecosystem running on public blockchains like Ethereum). In February 2020, Raphaël and James hacked together CO2ken, a prototype carbon offsetting system for Ethereum. Since then they joined the Blockchain For Social Impact incubator and were awarded a grant by Polygon to deploy the Toucan Protocol on the network. In the episode, Raphaël and James explain what ReFi is, the origination of Toucan, and a brief overview of Web3. We also dive into why they are applying ReFi's key principles to carbon markets, the existing carbon market and the problems associated with it, and the role Toucan plays in addressing the climate crisis. Raphaël and James are excellent guests with a wealth of knowledge about Web3 and ReFi.
Jason Jacobs
Myclimatejourney
2021-12-09
In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Nathan Schneider, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at UC-Boulder, the co-author of Exit to Community, and principal invesigator of the Metagovernance Project. In the conversation, we cover the history of the cooperative movement, what DAOs and cooperatives can learn from each other, the perils of digital governance design, and the future of community-based democratic governance.
Martin Smith, Jahed Momand
The Ownership Economy
2022-02-09
8. Career Center
The creative and flexible use of systems ideas in conjunction with frameworks from other disciplines and sectors can contribute a great deal towards the effectiveness of change interventions in complex situations. Although, systems thinking is sometimes perceived to be an academic topic, many professionals working in general management, consultancy, and social change are using systems concepts and approaches for aiding problem-structuring and decision-making. Prominent projects in several areas such as ecological management, social innovation, sustainable energy, regenerative farming, and holistic wellbeing significantly draw from ideas that are fundamentally systemic
Create an app to crowdsource and crowdfund collaboration on maps of problems.
Ocean Protocol, Protocol Labs, Sonophilia Foundation, Foresight Institute
Ends on 2022-03-01
Artificial Intelligence Accountability Reporting Grants Program
The Pulitzer Center is seeking to support freelancers and newsrooms focusing on in-depth AI accountability stories that examine governments' and corporations’ uses of algorithms to guide decisions in policing, medicine, social welfare, the criminal justice system, hiring, and more.
The Pulitzer Center
The Pulitzer Center
9. Visualizations
An interactive visualization about our evolving relationship with technology. You will learn about the technologies and systems affecting how humans and machines interact as described in four related stories. Each story explores the technologies differently, using a branching interface in which the reader chooses the direction of narrative and learn about differing technological readiness levels.
Arthur Soares, et al.
Envisioning, DEFTECH
10. Slides
Regenerative Finance in Crypto
In our current economic system we recognize negative actions as mere externalities, governments subsidize extractive actions. Yet, we can redesign economies to recognize our interconnectedness to the earth– it not logical to pollute or throw something away, such away is our planetary household.
T.R. Price, Jade, Ale Borda
11. Tweets
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Founded in 2018, the Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative (LDCRC) is a 501(c)(3) virtual research institute promoting scholarship on the Ledgerback Frontier (LF).
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