Distroid Issue 34
Findings on decentralized social networks, policy considerations for DAOs, global deliberation on AI, the fall of Newchip, and Funding the Commons
Introduction
Welcome to this week’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 newsletter:
Digest
🌇 The summer of decentralized social
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and Policy Considerations in the United States
Nine considerations for effective global deliberation on AI
This Austin accelerator made big claims; employees and customers say it didn’t deliver
Funding the Commons Paris
Toots
Tweets
Digest
🌇 The summer of decentralized social
News
Sam Liebeskind
New_ Public
2023-05-14
A decentralized social network is one that’s not owned and controlled by one private business or central entity. Instead of something like Twitter where one group of people is building the app, making all the moderation decisions, and hosting all of the data, a decentralized social network is made up of different services and apps that all use the same ‘protocol’ - aka speak the same language - so that they’re interoperable with one another.
You can think about it more like how email or the internet itself works. A lot of buzz over the last several years has equated “decentralization” with Web3 or blockchains, but using blockchain technology is just one approach to decentralization — and many of the networks I’m most excited about don’t rely on blockchains whatsoever.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and Policy Considerations in the United States
Research
Sarah Hubbard
Harvard Belfer Center's Technology and Public Purpose Project
2023-05-03
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) can be defined as global, digitally-native organizations which enable people to coordinate and govern shared resources and activities through the use of smart contracts on blockchains. The explosive growth of DAOs since 2020 has led to experimentation, speculation, and investment in this emerging organizational framework. There are an estimated 6,000 DAOs as of June 2022, with participation from contributors around the world and an aggregate treasury value of an estimated $25 billion.
While the web3 space has been marred by scams and bad actors, there are legitimate use cases for DAOs.
Early applications include focuses on fractionalized ownership and control, incentive alignment, resilient operations, and collective action. DAOs demonstrate innovative potential and are producing new forms of tax revenue and employment for the U.S. States have taken various approaches towards legislation, including establishing a DAO LLC.
The U.S. government needs a comprehensive strategy for addressing DAOs as novel organizational structures to retain domestic innovation and protect consumers. Future policy solutions should consider the following:
DAOs have technical and operational uniqueness that should be taken into account by legislators and regulators.
The United States must provide legal clarity to retain domestic innovation.
The friction of existing organizational formation should be reduced and adapted.
A multi-pronged approach is needed across the federal-level, state-level, and industry self-governance practices.
This report aims to serve as an accessible primer for United States policymakers to understand the unique opportunities and challenges DAOs present, and how these organizations may be addressed in the regulatory landscape of the U.S.
The first section of this report establishes the societal context in which DAOs have emerged, with an emphasis on the trends in organizational frameworks and working conditions to which DAOs respond. The second section describes the underlying technical and structural components that DAOs are built upon. The third section outlines the key purposes and applications of DAOs and shares findings from case studies and semi-structured interviews with 12 DAOs and 20 DAO contributors. The final section provides an overview of existing legislation and concludes by outlining directional considerations for policymakers.
Nine considerations for effective global deliberation on AI
News
Tim Davies
Connected by Data
2023-04-05
What could global deliberation on AI governance look like? And what can we learn from this for thinking about collective and participatory data governance?
On Wednesday last week, Richard Bartlett, co-founder of collective decision making platform Loomio, posted a simple tweet:
so OpenAI CEO @sama said his dream scenario for how to align AI is to run a global deliberative democracy process to define the boundaries of the system and ah… I have friends who know how to do that. who can I talk to make this more likely to happen?
In sparked quite the thread, and yesterday, thanks to a few local Stroudie connections, I found myself in a conversation that picked up on that message, with a rather inspiring group of thinkers and doers of deliberative and digital democracy exploring the what, and the how, of global AI governance deliberation.
In this post, I’ve tried to capture some of my reflections from that call, in the form of nine elements that may be important to consider for both a pragmatic, and principled, approach to global deliberations on AI in the hope both that these are useful to the collaborators from yesterday’s call, and for my own thinking aloud about how these ideas might also be applied to broader data governance deliberations.
This Austin accelerator made big claims; employees and customers say it didn’t deliver
News
Mary Ann Azevedo, Christine Hall
TechCrunch
2023-05-19
Newchip, an online accelerator promising to help startups, has filed for bankruptcy and is now facing insolvency amid employee and client discontent.
Dozens of employees of the troubled organization staged a walkout on May 4, demanding that founder Andrew Ryan step down as CEO.
Ryan — who previously went by the name of Ryan Rafols — started Austin-based Newchip in 2016 after spending more than seven years as a city commissioner in Austin, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Funding the Commons Paris
Events
Theresa Therriault, David Casey
2023-07-15
The 6th edition of Funding the Commons will take place on 15-16 July with the beautiful backdrop of Paris, France. The event is hosted at the renowned Sorbonne University.
Funding the Commons is focused on new models of sustainable public goods funding and value alignment in open source networks. We bridge the public goods community across Web2, Web3, research, philanthropy and industry. We do this by convening builders, academics, and funders in both traditional conference and ""open space"" formats.
Toots
Tweets
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