Distroid Issue 36

A newsletter for curated findings, actionable knowledge, and noteworthy developments from the forefront of innovation, governance, research, and technology (i.e., the frontier).

Jun 10, 2023

Introduction

Welcome to this week’s edition of Distroid, a newsletter for curated findings, actionable knowledge, and noteworthy developments from the forefront of innovation, governance, research, and technology (i.e., the frontier).

In this newsletter:

Digest
1. Table
2. Research
  1. When URL Meets IRL in Web3: Lessons for Decentralized Trust-Building Technologies in Democratic Governance
  2. Understanding Blockchain Governance: Analyzing Decentralized Voting to Amend DeFi Smart Contracts
  3. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – DAOs: The Convergence of Technology, Law, Governance, and Behavioral Economics
  4. Flocking to Mastodon: Tracking the Great Twitter Migration
  5. Computational Notebooks as Co-Design Tools: Engaging Young Adults Living with Diabetes, Family Carers, and Clinicians with Machine Learning Models
  6. Governor: Turning Open Government Data Portals into Interactive Databases
  7. Agent-based Model of Initial Token Allocations: Evaluating Wealth Concentration in Fair Launches
3. News
  1. SEC Sues Binance and CEO Zhao for Breaking Securities Rules
    Structure Without Capture
  2. From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You
  3. There will be one Rollup to rule them all!
  4. Governing in Nonlinear Time
  5. Taking a Look at the IP-NFTs Changing Science Today
  6. Understanding GPT tokenizers
4. Tools
  1. GroupOS
  2. Round
  3. LLM Garden
5. Books
  1. THE NEXT ECONOMY MBA: Redesigning Business for the Benefit of All Life
6. Events
  1. DWeb YYZ June Meetup
  2. CryptoEconDay @ EthCC
7. Videos & Podcasts
  1. In Conversation with Timnit Gebru and Melissa Chan
8. Tweets

Search Distroid

swimming pool near palm trees — Photo by Mo on Unsplash

Digest

Table

You can find the table for this issue here.

Research

When URL Meets IRL in Web3: Lessons for Decentralized Trust-Building Technologies in Democratic Governance

Helena Rong
Harvard Belfer Center's Technology and Public Purpose Project
2023-05-03

Executive Summary
Trust in democratic institutions has waned in recent years, stemming from insufficient transparency and representation in public decision-making processes, expanding social and wealth disparities, and growing apprehensions surrounding mis/disinformation fueled by the emergence of highly persuasive AI-generated content such as ChatGPT. Decentralized Web3 technologies such as blockchain emerged as instruments for creating an alternative “trustless” system that uses cryptography and decentralized consensus mechanisms to obviate the need for third party human intermediaries, but suffered significant setbacks due to massive frauds and speculations throughout the past decade of their evolution. Although it might appear counterintuitive to advocate for the potential benefits of these technologies in light of their evident failures, we assert that, before dismissing them, it is essential to differentiate the technological layer from the social layer in these instances and examine them with greater care and criticality. We argue that the recurrent failures of blockchain-based projects, as reported in the media and denounced by critics, are less indicative of the technology’s inherent weakness, and more a consequence of malicious actors exploiting the social layer within the system.
What is thus heavily lacking in the current Web3 landscape is the collaborative development and innovation in the social and institutional layer to build systems that genuinely enhance democracy and address the trust crisis society faces as a whole in a more sustainable way through leveraging the capabilities offered by decentralized technologies. As such, rather than perceiving these technologies as decentralized trust-replacing technologies, we consider them as “Decentralized Trust-Building Technologies” (DTTs). DTTs do not seek to replace trust, but instead serve to fortify trust through transparent and secure mechanisms combined with robust institutional designs.
In this report, we investigate a variety of case studies that showcase emerging efforts
to employ DTTs in the physical realities and the built environment of our social institutions. These empirical examples offer valuable insights – both inspirational and cautionary lessons – into the practical applications of DTTs in transforming our society and lived environments. From this empirical analysis, our goal is to establish a set of guidelines and best practices for current and future endeavors in fostering innovation within this space, ultimately paving ways for more resilient and sustainable lived ecosystems that harness the power of DTTs.
Key Takeaways
1. Decentralized Trust-Building Technologies (DTTs) offer a technical infrastructure to provide a tamper-proof source of truth, but this does not automatically lead to trust.
2. DTTs hold the potential to innovate across a range of social institutions, including identification, voting and governance, titling and rights management, collective ownership, financial transactions, record keeping, civic participation, and regenerative economies.
3. DTTs can help enable wider participation and coordination at scale, but they should balance between undifferentiated mass involvement and particularized local control.
4. DTT applications can be driven by institutions, grassroots initiatives, or collaborations among stakeholders to achieve different goals.
5. DTTs hold the potential to help foster a shift from extractive to regenerative economies, ultimately providing sustainable economic benefits to local communities.
6. To enhance the trustworthiness of both technology and institutions, it is crucial to build systems not just for the community, but collaboratively with the community in participatory design processes.
7. Policymakers need to better understand both risks and benefits of DTTs to effectively integrate them into our existing systems

Understanding Blockchain Governance: Analyzing Decentralized Voting to Amend DeFi Smart Contracts

Johnnatan Messias, Vabuk Pahari, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Krishna P. Gummadi, Patrick Loiseau
2023-05-28

Smart contracts are contractual agreements between participants of a blockchain, who cannot implicitly trust one another. They are software programs that run on top of a blockchain, and we may need to change them from time to time (e.g., to fix bugs or address new use cases). Governance protocols define the means for amending or changing these smart contracts without any centralized authority. They distribute instead the decision-making power to every user of the smart contract: Users vote on accepting or rejecting every change. The focus of this work is to evaluate whether, how, and to what extent these protocols ensure decentralized governance, the fundamental tenet of blockchains, in practice. This evaluation is crucial as smart contracts continue to transform our key, traditional, centralized institutions, particularly banking and finance. In this work, we review and characterize decentralized governance in practice, using Compound -- one of the widely used governance protocols -- as a case study. We reveal a high concentration of voting power in Compound: 10 voters hold together 57.86% of the voting power. Although proposals to change or amend the protocol (or, essentially, the application they support) receive, on average, a substantial number of votes (i.e., 89.39%) in favor, they require fewer than three voters to obtain 50% or more votes. We show that voting on Compound governance proposals can be unfairly expensive for small token holders, and also discover voting coalitions that can further marginalize these users. We plan on publishing our scripts and data set on GitHub to support reproducible research.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – DAOs: The Convergence of Technology, Law, Governance, and Behavioral Economics

André Guskow Cardoso
2022-09-15

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – DAOs constitute a new form of collective organization in the digital era. They usually relate to the use of blockchain technology, that ensures decentralization. DAOs rely on smart contracts to define their functioning rules and their operation. In general, DAOs are not related to traditional corporate forms and are not necessarily registered or recognized by law as corporates or associations. In any case, DAOs enable a new kind of governance, a governance based on technology and based on the use of smart contracts deployed on a blockchain network. In this sense, they could represent a revolution on collective governance. A revolution that could shape governance in the digital era. For this reason, DAOs could be the governance tool of Web3. The use of tokens as means of participation and voting by the members of a DAO provide a new technology tool that can combine law, governance, game theory, and behavioral economics. DAOs themselves could be viewed as technology tools that could transform governance in general and even democratic participation. The paper examines these issues and try to critically evaluate the potential and possible caveats of using DAOs as a governance tool. It demonstrates that the idea of decentralized governance in DAOs is similar to decentralization of governance of open-source software. The paper also highlights that the notion of modularity present in the open-source scene is also present in the blockchain technology realm and could be transposed to governance in DAOs. This modularity also contributes to the disruptive nature of governance in and by DAOs. As demonstrated in the paper, DAOs are true catalysts of law, governance and technology and represent the future of governance systems. The article refers that DAOs enable the coexistence of multiple democratic governance stacks. In any case, also mentions that some problems could arise from these multiple governance instances, as the fragmentation of the collectivity, the difficulties associated with the choice of the governance modules, the risk to the democratic principles in creating partial democratic instances, and the risks associated with a technocracy. At the end, considering all the benefits and risks related to the use of these new digital collective governance tools, the article concludes that DAOs can be considered the future of governance systems.

Flocking to Mastodon: Tracking the Great Twitter Migration

Haris Bin Zia, Jiahui He, Aravindh Raman, Ignacio Castro, Nishanth Sastry, Gareth Tyson
2023-02-28

The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has spurred controversy and uncertainty among Twitter users. The move raised as many praises as concerns, particularly regarding Musk’s views on free speech. As a result, a large number of Twitter users have looked for alternatives to Twitter. Mastodon, a decentralized micro-blogging social network, has attracted the attention of many users and the general media. In this paper, we track and analyze the migration of 136,009 users from Twitter to Mastodon. Our analysis sheds light on the user-driven pressure towards centralization in a decentralized ecosystem and identifies the strong influence of the social network in platform migration. We also characterize the activity of migrated users on both Twitter and Mastodon.

Computational Notebooks as Co-Design Tools: Engaging Young Adults Living with Diabetes, Family Carers, and Clinicians with Machine Learning Models

Amid Ayobi, Jacob Hughes, Christopher J Duckworth, Jakub J Dylag, Sam James, Paul Marshall, Matthew Guy, Anitha Kumaran, Adriane Chapman, Michael Boniface, Aisling Ann O'Kane
Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2023-04-19

Engaging end user groups with machine learning (ML) models can help align the design of predictive systems with people's needs and expectations. We present a co-design study investigating the benefits and challenges of using computational notebooks to inform ML models with end user groups. We used a computational notebook to engage young adults, carers, and clinicians with an example ML model that predicted health risk in diabetes care. Through co-design workshops and retrospective interviews, we found that participants particularly valued using the interactive data visualisations of the computational notebook to scaffold multidisciplinary learning, anticipate benefits and harms of the example ML model, and create fictional feature importance plots to highlight care needs. Participants also reported challenges, from running code cells to managing information asymmetries and power imbalances. We discuss the potential of leveraging computational notebooks as interactive co-design tools to meet end user needs early in ML model lifecycles.

Governor: Turning Open Government Data Portals into Interactive Databases

Chang Liu, Arif Usta, Jian Zhao, Semih Salihoglu
Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2023-04-19

The launch of open governmental data portals (OGDPs) has popularized the open data movement of last decade. Although the amount of data in OGDPs is increasing, their functionalities are limited to finding datasets with titles/descriptions and downloading the actual files. This hinders the end users, especially those without technical skills, to find the open data tables and make use of them. We present Governor, an open-sourced[17] web application developed to make OGDPs more accessible to end users by facilitating searching actual records in the tables, previewing them directly without downloading, and suggesting joinable and unionable tables to users based on their latest working tables. Governor also manages the provenance of integrated tables allowing users and their collaborators to easily trace back to the original tables in OGDP. We evaluate Governor with a two-part user study and the results demonstrate its value and effectiveness in finding and integrating tables in OGDP.

Agent-based Model of Initial Token Allocations: Evaluating Wealth Concentration in Fair Launches

JOAQUIN DELGADO FERNANDEZ, TOM BARBEREAU, ORESTIS PAPAGEORGIOU
2022-08-15

With advancements in distributed ledger technologies and smart contracts, tokenized voting rights gained prominence within Decentralized Fi- nance (DeFi). Voting rights tokens (aka. governance tokens) are fungible tokens that grant individual holders the right to vote upon the fate of a project. The motivation behind these tokens is to achieve decentral control. Because the initial allocations of these tokens is often un-democratic, the DeFi project Yearn Finance experimented with a fair launch allocation where no tokens are pre-mined and all participants have an equal opportunity to receive them. Re- gardless, research on voting rights tokens highlights the formation of oligarchies over time. The hypothesis is that the tokens’ tradability is the cause of concen- tration. To examine this proposition, this paper uses an Agent-based Model to simulate and analyze the concentration of voting rights tokens post fair launch under diﬀerent trading modalities. It serves to examine three distinct token allocation scenarios considered as fair. The results show that regardless of the allocation, concentration persistently occurs. It conﬁrms the hypothesis that the disease is endogenous: the cause of concentration is the tokens tradablility. The ﬁndings inform theoretical understandings and practical implications for on-chain governance mediated by tokens.

News

SEC Sues Binance and CEO Zhao for Breaking Securities Rules

Austin Weinstein, Allyson Versprille, Lydia Beyoud Bloomberg 2023-06-05

Regulator says firm operated unregistered securities exchange
Binance routinely flouted basic KYC rules, SEC alleges

Structure Without Capture

David Ehrlichman, spengrah, nintynick
Hats Protocol
2023-03-09

DAOs could be amazing.
But they’re falling short of their potential.
Why? One of the biggest issues I see is that DAOs, like all non-hierarchical organizations, don’t have a good way to delegate roles, responsibilities and authorities to get things done.
There’s been a lot of talk in this space about voting delegation and its importance in DAO governance -- giving your voting power to a delegate who will vote in DAO governance on your behalf. I’m talking here about operational delegation -- giving people and small groups revocable authority so they can act on behalf of the organization and get things done efficiently.
Currently only hierarchies are good at this. And so many DAOs either end up larping as a decentralized network but really are controlled by a small group, or they wallow in the tyranny of structurelessness, unable to get things done with any level of coherence and consistency.
I believe this is one of the most important problems in the space that we need to address. This post presents a framework for how we can think about and solve this issue.
The good and bad news is this problem is not unique to DAOs. It’s following the same pattern seen in decentralized organizations, cooperatives, and networks of all kinds, which I wrote about in the book Impact Networks. Over and over again I’ve seen collaborative efforts that have so much promise, but something is getting in the way of them really fulfilling their potential: the tragedy of the responsibility commons.

From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You

Jon Keegan, Joel Eastwood
The Markup
2023-06-08

A spreadsheet on ad platform Xandr’s website revealed a massive collection of “audience segments” used to target consumers based on highly specific, sometimes intimate information and inferences

There will be one Rollup to rule them all!

Nakul Kelkar
Nakul Kelkar
2023-05-14

The race is on to see who will win the L2 wars
The current consensus around rollups is that there will be several rollups, each one with its own tradeoffs. Some will cost more but will be faster, some will cost less but will be less secure, some will do everything but will not be optimized for anything, some will be ZK some will be Optimistic, some will be Valadium, etc.
This is classic builders trap. Just because there are multiple possible solutions suiting multiple possible needs, doesn’t mean that there will be multiple possible viable solutions that the market would find appetizing. Rollups invoke another market phenomenon called network effects.

Governing in Nonlinear Time

Nathan Schneider
Zine
2023-06-08

"Most organizations in our lives want time to flow the same kind of way. It’s capitalism at work: the only way to survive is to grow, up and to the right. Corporations want more profits and higher stock prices, countries want more GDP, and families want more income so the children can do better than the adults. One way or another, growth has to be continuous with time, and hopefully predictable. These are interesting times to live in, but time itself has become boring.
Among aspiring decentralized autonomous organizations, I have noticed a departure from this pattern: DAOs have been renaming the units and flows of time. They often demarcate their governance or operations in metaphors like “seasons,” “epochs,” “cycles,” “phases,” and “waves.” In practice, these may differ little from the “quarters” of conventional corporations. But the turn to fresh language invites us to rethink the flows of time altogether in how we self-govern. What if we take the renaming seriously?
Back in 2019, I coined the concept of “exit to community.” The idea was that, rather than conventional startup “exits” to an acquisition or stock offering, founders should aspire to guide their companies toward ownership by their communities. In some respects, the idea is radical. But it doesn’t go very far in rethinking time. It involves a linear progression from more centralized ownership of a project (among founders and investors, most likely) to more distributed ownership (among workers and users, for instance). In the years I have spent studying and working with cooperative businesses, however, I have seen how that linear story is only the beginning."

Taking a Look at the IP-NFTs Changing Science Today

Ella McCarthy-Page
molecule
2023-06-08

On the 17th of August 2021, the first IP-NFT was traded, ushering in a new way of funding research. Since then, a total of six projects have been funded through the Molecule system.

Understanding GPT tokenizers

Simon Willison
Simon Willison's Weblog
2023-06-08

Large language models such as GPT-3/4, LLaMA and PaLM work in terms of tokens. They take text, convert it into tokens (integers), then predict which tokens should come next.
Playing around with these tokens is an interesting way to get a better idea for how this stuff actually works under the hood.
OpenAI offer a Tokenizer tool for exploring how tokens work
I’ve built my own, slightly more interesting tool as an Observable notebook:
https://observablehq.com/@simonw/gpt-tokenizer
You can use the notebook to convert text to tokens, tokens to text and also to run searches against the full token table."

Tools

GroupOS

Station

GroupOS is modular toolkit powering digital collectives to own, govern, reward, and grow their networks.
GroupOS is comprised of four core building blocks: Members, Vault, Tokens, and Insights. Each building block can be used independently as its own tool, but the combination is greater than the sum of the parts."

Round

Lab 0324

Use Round to grow and reward the contributors in your community. Rounds are onchain and great for community bounties, micro grants programs, hackathons and more.

LLM Garden

TensorOps, BLATTNER TECHNOLOGIES, Superwise

With so many Large Language Models (LLMs) released daily, we put together a list of everything available so we can easily search and compare our options.
Have an LLM to add or update? Let us know!

Books

THE NEXT ECONOMY MBA: Redesigning Business for the Benefit of All Life

Ryan Honeyman, Phoenix Soleil, Erin Axelrod, Kevin Bayuk, Shawn Berry
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
2023-05-23

This radical and rigorous rethinking of the traditional MBA program combines solid business principles with a commitment to environmental and social justice.Many current and aspiring entrepreneurs are looking for a solid business education that also deeply aligns with their progressive values. Based on a course field-tested with over 500 students, this book fills that gap. It covers traditional topics such as business strategy and structure, finance, marketing, recruiting, and branding from a socially just and environmentally regenerative perspective. And it also touches on topics such as strategies to reverse climate change, nonviolent communication, self-managing organizations, locally self-reliant economies, racial justice, and more.Traditional MBA programs are based on outdated principles that were developed during the Industrial Revolution--and they can be hugely expensive. Sustainable MBA programs, while laudable, are too incremental to make a sufficient impact. The Next Economy MBA is for entrepreneurs seeking to make business an active force for good. It draws on the authors' experience of working with over 300 social enterprises, from small organizations like Winona's Hemp and Heritage Farm to household names like Ben & Jerry's and Patagonia.Our current economy, what the authors call the "Business as Usual Economy," has created a massive wealth gap, a climate crisis, racial division, and needless housing, food, and healthcare shortages. This book shows how businesses can pave the way to a Next Economy that meets the basic needs of all people and restores and protects the planetary ecosystem.

Events

DWeb YYZ June Meetup

Max Veytsman, Serena Peruzzo, Mauve
2023-06-15

Mauve will run a workshop introducing folks to using peer to peer web APIs in the Agregore Web Browser. Bring your laptop and a keyboard and be prepared to do some light HTML/CSS/JavaScript!

CryptoEconDay @ EthCC

Solaris, CryptoEconLab
CryptoEconLab
2023-07-19

CryptoEconDay is a gathering of Web3 researchers and practitioners sharing findings, lessons learned, and answering some of our most challenging questions around the topic of cryptoeconomics. This is the third event of our four-part series for 2023 and we are honored to host this side event during EthCC!

Videos & Podcasts

In Conversation with Timnit Gebru and Melissa Chan

Timnit Gebru, Melissa Chan
Access Now
2023-06-07

Join Timnit Gebru in conversation with our Studio Host, Melissa Chan, as they reflect on building an alternative vision for the development and use of AI, and the work of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) in materializing this vision.

Tweets

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