Distroid Issue 30: Digital Public Goods
Brief overview of digital public goods, and monthly digest covering curated findings from the forefront of tech, governance, research, and technology (i.e., the frontier).
Introduction
Welcome to this month’s edition of Distroid, a newsletter for curated findings, actionable knowledge, and noteworthy developments from the forefront of tech, governance, research, and technology (i.e., the frontier).
In this month’s newsletter:
Digital Public Goods
Digest
The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet
DAO Harvard
Gitcoin Grants Donations
A Very Gentle Introduction to Large Language Models without the Hype
Data Cooperatives as Catalysts for Collaboration, Data Sharing, and the (Trans)Formation of the Digital Commons
Episode 058 - Making it Easy for Businesses to Leverage Equity to Drive Value With Stakeholders, with Tyler Morrey of Upside Cooperative
Arbitrum Walks Back $1B Proposal — But It Already Used Some of It
Digital Public Goods
Digital public goods (DPG), as defined by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), “are open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”
The DPGA has developed the DPG standard, a set of nine indicators to determine whether a solution is a digital public good. The DPG Standard’s nine indicators are:
Advance the SDGs;
Use of an approved open license;
Clear Ownership,
Platform Independence,
Documentation,
Mechanism for Extracting Data,
Adherence to Privacy and Applicable Laws,
Adherence to Standards & Best Practices,
Do No Harm by design (including steps to address privacy, security, inappropriate and illegal content, and protection from harassment)
The submission process to the DPG Registry requires an an authorized representative affiliated with the project owner(s) to nominate the solution by submitting a DPG application to the DPGA. Once nominated, the DPGA’s technical review team will assess whether the solution conforms to the DPG standard. If the solution conforms to the DPG standard, the solution is added to the DPG Registry.
The benefits of DPGs are:
Adoptability: DPGs can be freely adopted by governments or agencies.
Avoid Vendor Lock-in: Because DPGs are open source, they do not lock the user into one technology vendor to ensure compatibility.
Scalability: Adopting DPGs that have been successfully implemented at scale elsewhere can save countries and institutions resources and enable lower risk experimentation, piloting, and roll-out.
Adaptability: DPGs can be adapted to fit local needs which can also help build long-term ownership and agency of implementing countries.
Collaboration: Any users of a particular DPG can collaborate and share best practices, as is the case in most communities of practice.
Project sustainability: Adaptations and iterations in countries can be supported by open-source communities. New features and best-practices developed by implementing countries can be merged into the generic DPG.
Country ownership and capacity: DPGs can enable deep involvement of local expertise in country-specific implementations and can be deployed together with dedicated efforts to build long-term local capacity to maintain and iterate these implementations for future needs.
Transparency and accountability: The open-source licensing of DPGs means that their code base can be independently scrutinised and audited. This also facilitates accountability and public discourse around issues such as incorporating best practices and designing DPGs with the aim of doing no harm.
Two DPGs on the DPG Registry are Sunbird and Mozilla Common Voice dataset. Sunbird, developed by Ekstep Foundation, is “an open-source, configurable, extendable, modular, digital infrastructure for learning and human development that is designed for massive scale implementations.” The Mozilla Common Voice dataset, developed by the Mozilla Foundation, is “[a] multilingual open voice dataset created by Mozilla Common Voice, an initiative to help teach machines how real people speak.”
In Digital Public Goods: An Overview of Guidance for Development, Governance, and Stewardship, Jeff Behrends, Joshua Simons, Kevin Troy, and Harshita Gupta describe best practices for developing DPGs. The authors focus on three key areas:
Technology design
Governance
Funder accountability
The authors recommend that DPGs should be designed to avoid vendor lock-in. Governance-wise, the authors recommend that DPG developers utilize deliberative practices “as deeply as is possible at all stages of the design, deployment, and stewardship of DPGs.” Lastly, that DPG projects should develop measures to hold funders “accountable to the residents of countries in which those DPGs will be used.”
For a more in-depth guidance on developing DPGs, please read Digital Public Goods: Guidance for Development, Governance, and Stewardship, a long-form version of the authors recommendations.
Additional Readings
Digital Public Goods: Guidance for Development, Governance, and Stewardship
How Digital Public Infrastructure can serve as a building block for Data Free Flow with Trust
Digest
In this month’s digest:
The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet
DAO Harvard
Gitcoin Grants Donations
A Very Gentle Introduction to Large Language Models without the Hype
Data Cooperatives as Catalysts for Collaboration, Data Sharing, and the (Trans)Formation of the Digital Commons
Episode 058 - Making it Easy for Businesses to Leverage Equity to Drive Value With Stakeholders, with Tyler Morrey of Upside Cooperative
Arbitrum Walks Back $1B Proposal — But It Already Used Some of It
You can find the full collection for this issue here.
The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet
Research
Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, Michael Sugarman, Ethan Zuckerman
2023-03-29
Executive Summary
At the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, we believe that a truly sustainable and resilient digital public sphere is possible and is actively being created. We envision a public sphere supported by these three legs:
1. Consists of many different platforms with a wide variety of scales and purposes;
2. Users can navigate with a loyal client that aggregates, cross-posts, and curates;
3. Is all supported by cross-cutting services rooted in interoperable data.
In this paper, we illustrate our vision for a healthier digital public sphere by exploring what we believe are its three constitutive parts.
First, we propose a pluriverse consisting of existing platforms alongside a flourishing ecosystem of Very Small Online Platforms (VSOPs) that serve conversations and communities that are poorly served by today’s digital public sphere. Just as we do not exclusively gather in shopping malls in the physical world, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not the right place for every community and conversation online. We argue the need for civic-centered VSOPs like our platform Smalltown. We highlight existing VSOPs like Letterboxd and An Archive of Our Own and discuss what it takes to develop a new VSOP, using our work on Freq, a VSOP dedicated to music discovery and discussion, as a case study.
Second, we sketch out a “loyal client” for navigating the digital public sphere. Akin to an email client like Apple Mail or a chat client like ICQ, our loyal client aggregates, filters, and posts to a person’s various social media feeds, be those VSOPs or established platforms like Twitter or Reddit. Such a tool depends on people being able to delegate authority to a loyal client, which comes with challenges related to privacy, adoption, and usability.
Third, we introduce the “friendly neighborhood algorithm store.” This is a marketplace that VSOPs and loyal clients can rely on for curation and Trust & Safety, tools which no single VSOP or loyal client could develop on their own, and which large platforms have developed over decades with significant resources. These include recommender systems, spam detection, anti-abuse tools, and powerful filters for CSAM and terrorist content.
We believe this moment, when people are so dissatisfied with the platforms that have dominated for the past decade-and-a-half, presents a unique opportunity to build a digital public sphere where people and communities with different preferences and purposes can participate accordingly."
See also SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT CAN IT SCALE? by Paul Keller.
DAO Harvard
Events
Harvard Belfer Center's Technology and Public Purpose Project, Harvard University's Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics
2023-04-02
The DAO Harvard conference will bring together an interdisciplinary set of stakeholders across academia, government, and industry to explore the various implications of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) in society. Below is an outline of the conference focus:
- Day 1: Research. Day 1 will gather experts across multiple institutions to discuss ongoing academic research efforts regarding decentralized social technologies. Researchers will have the opportunity to present their recent work, as well as align on future research priorities.
- Day 2: Law. Day 2 will gather lawyers, academics, and practitioners to identify the current pain points that DAOs encounter when trying to interface with the legal system, understand the current legal approaches being experimented with, and reflect on how legal frameworks could evolve to accommodate their needs. Topics include how various jurisdictions are currently handling incorporation (e.g. Wyoming DAO LLC), liability, taxation, and more.
- Day 3: Policy. Day 3 will be an intimate gathering of leaders across policy, business, and academia to discuss the role organizations such as cooperatives, open-source communities, and DAOs are playing in enabling equitable ownership and presenting antidotes to some of the harms caused by Big Tech. We will also discuss the hurdles these organizations are facing in realizing their potential, and how novel entities like DAOs may improve outcomes in the US.
Gitcoin Grant Donations
Analytics Dashboard
0xdatawolf
The purpose of this dashboard is to understand behavior and attributes of the donors. It also looks at Gitcoin Grants as a whole and not segmented by chain (unless there's a need to)
Note that this pertains strictly to funding relating to grant rounds that are approximated by the donations that occurred during a Grant Round. It does not include any matching as well thus the figures would tend to be lower than figures reported by Gitcoin
The dashboard is broken down into 4 sections
Grant Descriptive Stats looks at some descriptive summary statistics regarding the grants.
Donations Trend slices the data through time as we understand donation performance
User Retention looks at new vs existing users in count and in volume. We also look at retention where we evaluate how much users are coming back to donate
About the donors is a quick segmentation to understand what kind of users are donating and the amount donated along with the top 50 donors and recipients.
A Very Gentle Introduction to Large Language Models without the Hype
News
Mark Riedl
Mark Riedl
2023-04-13
This article is designed to give people with no computer science background some insight into how ChatGPT and similar AI systems work (GPT-3, GPT-4, Bing Chat, Bard, etc). ChatGPT is a chatbot — a type of conversational AI built — but on top of a Large Language Model. Those are definitely words and we will break all of that down. In the process, we will discuss the core concepts behind them. This article does not require any technical or mathematical background. We will make heavy use of metaphors to illustrate the concepts. We will talk about why the core concepts work the way they work and what we can expect or not expect Large Language Models like ChatGPT to do.
Here is what we are going to do. We are going to gently walk through some of the terminology associated with Large Language Models and ChatGPT without any jargon. If I have to use jargon, I will break it down without jargon. We will start very basic, with “what is Artificial Intelligence” and work our way up. I will use some recurring metaphors as much as possible. I will talk about the implications of the technologies in terms of what we should expect them to do or should not expect them to do.
Let’s go!
Data Cooperatives as Catalysts for Collaboration, Data Sharing, and the (Trans)Formation of the Digital Commons
Research
Michael Max Bühler, Igor Calzada, Isabel Cane, Thorsten Jelinek, Astha Kapoor, Morshed Mannan, Sameer Mehta, Marina Micheli, Vijay Mookerje, Konrad Nübel, Alex Pentland, Trebor Scholz, Divya Siddarth, Julian Tait, Bapu Vaitla, Jianguo Zhu
2023-04-07
Network effects, economies of scale, and lock-in-effects increasingly lead to a concentration of digital resources and capabilities, hindering the free and equitable development of digital entrepreneurship (SDG9), new skills, and jobs (SDG8), especially in small communities (SDG11) and their small and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”). To ensure the affordability and accessibility of technologies, promote digital entrepreneurship and community well-being (SDG3), and protect digital rights, we propose data cooperatives [1,2] as a vehicle for secure, trusted, and sovereign data exchange [3,4]. In post-pandemic times, community/SME-led cooperatives can play a vital role by ensuring that supply chains to support digital commons are uninterrupted, resilient, and decentralized [5]. Digital commons and data sovereignty provide communities with affordable and easy access to information and the ability to collectively negotiate data-related decisions. Moreover, cooperative commons (a) provide access to the infrastructure that underpins the modern economy, (b) preserve property rights, and (c) ensure that privatization and monopolization do not further erode self-determination, especially in a world increasingly mediated by AI. Thus, governance plays a significant role in accelerating communities’/SMEs’ digital transformation and addressing their challenges. Cooperatives thrive on digital governance and standards such as open trusted Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that increase the efficiency, technological capabilities, and capacities of participants and, most importantly, integrate, enable, and accelerate the digital transformation of SMEs in the overall process. This policy paper presents and discusses several transformative use cases for cooperative data governance. The use cases demonstrate how platform/data-cooperatives, and their novel value creation can be leveraged to take digital commons and value chains to a new level of collaboration while addressing the most pressing community issues. The proposed framework for a digital federated and sovereign reference architecture will create a blueprint for sustainable development both in the Global South and North.
Episode 058 - Making it Easy for Businesses to Leverage Equity to Drive Value With Stakeholders, with Tyler Morrey of Upside Cooperative
Videos & Podcasts
Jahed Momand, Martin Smith
The Ownership Economy
2023-04-19
In episode 058, Jahed & Martin sit down with Tyler Morrey of Upside Cooperative. In the conversation, we cover how difficult it really is for companies to share their equity with a large number of stakeholders, the state of the art for equity ownership for SMEs, ESOPs, and legal structures, and the innovations that Upside Cooperati[v]e is unlocking by making legal innovation broadly accessible with the Hedera blockchain and ecosystem. We hope you enjoy the episode.
Arbitrum Walks Back $1B Proposal — But It Already Used Some of It
News
SHALINI NAGARAJAN
Blockworks
2023-04-03
The team admitted it could have made its intentions behind the governance vote clearer, and is now set to introduce new AIPs
Web LLM
Tools
Machine Learning Compilation
This project brings large-language model and LLM-based chatbot to web browsers. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and accelerated with WebGPU. This opens up a lot of fun opportunities to build AI assistants for everyone and enable privacy while enjoying GPU acceleration. Please check out our GitHub repo to see how we did it. There is also a demo which you can try out.
Tweets
https://twitter.com/tokengineering/status/1641017354938138625
https://twitter.com/DAOResearchCo/status/1645462175895412743
Thank you for reading!
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As always, thank you for reading Distroid, and see you next time.