Distroid Issue 37

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

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 issue:

1. Digest

   1. Research

      1. Making Sense of Citizens’ Input through Artificial Intelligence: A Review of Methods for Computational Text Analysis to Support the Evaluation of Contributions in Public Participation

      2. Shifting tides: the open movement at a turning point

      3. Art and the science of generative AI

      4. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap

   2. News

      1. What Constitutes a Constitution?

      2. Peer Nominations for a More Diverse Funding Pipeline

      3. CFTC Wins Lawsuit Against Ooki DAO

      4. Case study on Amazon’s approach to innovation and competition in the knowledge economy

      5. Aragon Association Takes Action to Safeguard the Mission of the Aragon Project and its Community of Builders

      6. Crypto Value Investing

      7. AI Doesn’t Pose an Existential Risk—but Silicon Valley Does

      8. Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

      9. Superintelligence Is Not Omniscience

      10. Measuring Decision Making in Virtual Communities | State of the DAOs

      11. How AI could take over elections – and undermine democracy

   3. Tools

      1. Debate Map

      2. Chamu

   4. Events

      1. The "Decentralization in Organizations" (DiO) Conference, 2023

      2. Chainscience 2023

   5. Videos & Podcasts

      1. 4 dimensions of Ownership Economy: Ownco – with Spela Prijon and Sascha Kellert

   6. Tweets

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Photo by Sandie Clarke on Unsplash

Digest

Research

Making Sense of Citizens’ Input through Artificial Intelligence: A Review of Methods for Computational Text Analysis to Support the Evaluation of Contributions in Public Participation

Public sector institutions that consult citizens to inform decision-making face the challenge of evaluating the contributions made by citizens. This evaluation has important democratic implications but at the same time, consumes substantial human resources. However, until now the use of artificial intelligence such as computer-supported text analysis has remained an under-studied solution to this problem. We identify three generic tasks in the evaluation process that could benefit from natural language processing (NLP). Based on a systematic literature search in two databases on computational linguistics and digital government, we provide a detailed review of existing methods and their performance. While some promising approaches exist, for instance to group data thematically and to detect arguments and opinions, we show that there remain important challenges before these could offer any reliable support in practice. These include the quality of results, the applicability to non-English language corpuses and making algorithmic models available to practitioners through software. We discuss a number of avenues that future research should pursue that can ultimately lead to solutions for practice. The most promising of these bring in the expertise of human evaluators, for example through active learning approaches or interactive topic modelling.

Shifting tides: the open movement at a turning point

"At the turn of 2022 and 2023, we conducted a series of interviews with leading voices in the open movement. We spoke with professional activists, who address openness from varied perspectives and work in different fields of open. Some have been engaged in activism for decades, while others are looking at it with a fresh set of eyes. Many of our interviewees lead organizations advancing openness, and we were particularly interested in talking with those who have been exploring new approaches and strategies.

Our research aims to understand the current state of the open movement, as seen through the eyes of people actively involved in its endeavors and leading organizations within the movement. We want to make sense of shared positions and understand whether there are any clear division lines. We are particularly interested in identifying trends that transform the movement and understanding the challenges and needs of activists and organizations as these changes occur. The report signals a shift to what can be best described as a post-copyright approach to openness. However, while our focus is on how the movement is changing, this does not mean that the whole movement is subject to that shift. There still exists a need for copyright advocacy work in the movement, and many organizations maintain the course developed at the outset. Nonetheless, we hope that they, too, will find this report’s insights worth examining. 

We also want to understand how and whether the open movement can be perceived as a whole. There have been studies and reports focused on a single field of openness, such as Open Access or Open Data, but relatively few attempts to understand this broader activist space. To fill this gap, we have conducted two parallel studies that offer a view that connects the historical context of the movement’s development in the last 20-30 years, the current zeitgeist and technological landscape, and finally the perspective of future challenges. One of them, called Fields of open. Mapping the open movement, is an exploratory mapping of the movement, using network analysis methods and data collected from Twitter. The other one, the one you are currently reading, is a qualitative survey of Open Movement leaders. 

At Open Future, we talk about the future of open and the need to redefine and reimagine some of our goals and activist strategies. We believe that having a perspective that connects the different fields of open activism is valuable. A shared movement identity and a shared advocacy agenda can make our collective effort stronger. With this study, we aim to see whether this perspective is shared and whether it can form a basis for building a shared movement agenda for the decades to come.

We are grateful to following people, who were interviewed for this study: Lila Bailey (Internet Archive), Carolina Botero (Fundacion Karisma), Justus Dreyling (Communia Association), Claudia Garad (Wikimedia Europe), Jan Gerlach (Wikimedia Foundation), Jennie Halperin (Library Futures), Heather Joseph (SPARC), Julia Kloiber (Superrr Lab), Angela Odour Lungati (Ushahidi), Stefano Maffulli (Open Source Initiative), Ton Roosendaal (Blender), Olivier Schulbaum (Platoniq), Paul Stacey (Open Education Global), Catherine Stihler (Creative Commons), Jeni Tenisson (Connected by Data), Michelle Thorne (Green Web Foundation), Harry Verwayen (Europeana), Emilio Velis (Apropedia), and Stephen Wyber (IFLA). 

We would also like to thank others, who have provided valuable feedback and advice: Nicole Allen, Renata Avila, Anna Mazgal, and Mai Ishikawa Sutton."

Art and the science of generative AI

The capabilities of a new class of tools, colloquially known as generative artificial intelligence (AI), is a topic of much debate. One prominent application thus far is the production of high-quality artistic media for visual arts, concept art, music, and literature, as well as video and animation. For example, diffusion models can synthesize high-quality images (1), and large language models (LLMs) can produce sensible-sounding and impressive prose and verse in a wide range of contexts (2). The generative capabilities of these tools are likely to fundamentally alter the creative processes by which creators formulate ideas and put them into production. As creativity is reimagined, so too may be many sectors of society. Understanding the impact of generative AI—and making policy decisions around it—requires new interdisciplinary scientific inquiry into culture, economics, law, algorithms, and the interaction of technology and creativity.

Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT4, are making new waves in the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, due to their emergent ability and generalizability. However, LLMs are black-box models, which often fall short of capturing and accessing factual knowledge. In contrast, Knowledge Graphs (KGs), Wikipedia and Huapu for example, are structured knowledge models that explicitly store rich factual knowledge. KGs can enhance LLMs by providing external knowledge for inference and interpretability. Meanwhile, KGs are difficult to construct and evolving by nature, which challenges the existing methods in KGs to generate new facts and represent unseen knowledge. Therefore, it is complementary to unify LLMs and KGs together and simultaneously leverage their advantages. In this article, we present a forward-looking roadmap for the unification of LLMs and KGs. Our roadmap consists of three general frameworks, namely, 1) KG-enhanced LLMs, which incorporate KGs during the pre-training and inference phases of LLMs, or for the purpose of enhancing understanding of the knowledge learned by LLMs; 2) LLM-augmented KGs, that leverage LLMs for different KG tasks such as embedding, completion, construction, graph-to-text generation, and question answering; and 3) Synergized LLMs + KGs, in which LLMs and KGs play equal roles and work in a mutually beneficial way to enhance both LLMs and KGs for bidirectional reasoning driven by both data and knowledge. We review and summarize existing efforts within these three frameworks in our roadmap and pinpoint their future research directions.

News

What Constitutes a Constitution?

With a rapidly-growing number of blockchain communities in the process of drafting formal, written constitutions for their projects, it is becoming apparent that an advanced understanding of the structure and function of constitutions is not being adequately applied. The ways that the common conceptualization of constitutions falls short in effectively guiding blockchain governance, however, highlight the precise places where this conceptualization is most in need of revision.

This article outlines how we can re-apply these concepts to questions of governance unique to the context of blockchain communities — and will see how the more robust understanding of the structure and function of constitutions offered in this article can provide novel answers to the unique set of questions posed by the governance of distributed networks.

Peer Nominations for a More Diverse Funding Pipeline

Instead of exacerbating biases with the standard playbook, peer nominations help funders build a more efficient, equitable, and impactful pipeline.

CFTC Wins Lawsuit Against Ooki DAO

The regulator's victory serves as proof decentralized entities can face legal consequences for their dealings, contrary to popular beliefs.

Case study on Amazon’s approach to innovation and competition in the knowledge economy

Amazon is generally regarded as one of the most innovative companies in the world (Reed, 2017). In considering how Amazon approaches innovation within the knowledge economy we’ll frame the analysis of new technologies by looking at McKinsey’s research on disruptive technologies that have potential for economic impact, how Amazon has approached innovation in each of these new technologies, and consider how innovation has impacted Amazon’s revenue growth.

Aragon Association Takes Action to Safeguard the Mission of the Aragon Project and its Community of Builders

Aragon Association asserts it will secure its treasury against RFV Raiders and others targeting its use for personal profit, to ensure it stays in the hands of builders

Crypto Value Investing

Crypto has, for most of its history, eluded traditional valuation methods. As a currency and as a medium of exchange, it had neither a physical resource to back it nor a government to lend it de jure value. However, over the past decade, crypto currencies have become the single greatest engine for wealth creation since the advent of the internet. As the crypto space expands to include Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and companies (Decentralized Autonamous Organizations) that operate entirely within thecyberspace, traditional valuation methods are starting to become less and less applicable to protocols that collect rents, generate returns and charge fees for their services. This is the fundamental value of companies and their assets, as laid out by Warren Buffet and Benjamin Graham. While many of these projects may be deemed to be overvalued by traditional metrics in current market conditions it is important to understand how these entities create value for token holders. This allow investors to build positions in these companies based on their theses of what will happen in the crypto space, and understanding the true value of these assets can bring in a whole new kind of investor into crypto.

AI Doesn’t Pose an Existential Risk—but Silicon Valley Does

A coalition of the willing has united to confront what they say is a menace that could destroy us all: artificial intelligence. More than 350 executives, engineers, and researchers who work on AI have signed a pithy one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” But like the target of the last infamous coalition of the willing—Saddam Hussein and his mythical “weapons of mass destruction”—there is no existential threat here.

This isn’t the first letter to sound the alarm. It features prominent figures in the field—such as Sam Altman, chief executive of Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Generally, the warnings about AI are straightforward: It poses immediate risks like discrimination or automation as well as existential ones like a superintelligent Skynet-like system eradicating humanity.

These claims of an extinction-level threat come from the very same groups creating the technology, and their warning cries about future dangers is drowning out stories on the harms already occurring. There is an abundance of research documenting how AI systems are being used to steal art, control workers, expand private surveillance, and seek greater profits by replacing workforces with algorithms and underpaid workers in the Global South.

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

Sketchy ideas for interfaces that play with the novel capabilities of language models

Superintelligence Is Not Omniscience

It is often implicitly assumed that the power of a superintelligence will be practically unbounded. There seems like there could be “ample headroom” above humans, i.e. that a superintelligence will be able to vastly outperform us across virtually all domains.

By “superintelligence,” I mean something which has arbitrarily high cognitive ability, or an arbitrarily large amount of compute, memory, bandwidth, etc., but which is bound by the physical laws of our universe.1 There are other notions of “superintelligence” which are weaker than this. Limitations of the abilities of this superintelligence would also apply to anything less intelligent.

Measuring Decision Making in Virtual Communities | State of the DAOs

Many of us have heard some version of “decision making drives results”. While the premise of this phrase is simple — how an organization makes decisions affects its performance — measuring the ways in which communities make decisions is notoriously difficult.

In traditional organizations, decisions-making processes tend to be centralized. Contrast this, of course, to decentralized communities where the regular mantra is that decision making is more inclusive and hierarchies are flatter. And while this may be true in a relative sense, it’s equally accurate to say that DAOs are ripe with centers of soft power.

Understanding decision making in decentralized organizations requires that we measure the relative influence of community members. To do this, researchers at RNDAO have created the Spread of Influence score to measure soft power. As Katerina writes this week, “[t]he Spread of Influence score gives the community a sense of key influencers, whether the larger member base is disconnected, and in general how discussions are undertaken within the community.”

In assessing the results, “[w]hat one should look for is an optimal score, which promotes participative discussion but does not hinder the speed of decision making or overburden members with participating in conversations.” Armed with this information, community leaders can assess the health of a community and take steps to improve decision making processes and help ensure the longevity of an organization.

This week’s DAO Spotlight focuses on Opolis, and organization dedicated to helping DAO contributors thrive, and we conclude, as always, with a TL;DR on some of the most recent DAO ecosystem takes and thought pieces, making it easy for you to cut through the noise and learn everything you need to know about the current state of the DAOs.

Contributors: Katerina, Chameleon, angelspeaks, Quilia, KingIBK, Vi-Fi, boluwatife, Kornekt, HiroKennelly, siddhearta

How AI could take over elections – and undermine democracy

Could organizations use artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT to induce voters to behave in specific ways?

Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters.

Altman did not elaborate, but he might have had something like this scenario in mind. Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election.

While platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube use forms of AI to get users to spend more time on their sites, Clogger’s AI would have a different objective: to change people’s voting behavior.

Tools

Debate Map

The Debate Map project is a web platform aimed at improving the efficiency of discussion and debate. It's crowd-sourced and open-source, and welcomes reader contributions.

Chamu

Sharing files and notes made easy.

Events

The "Decentralization in Organizations" (DiO) Conference, 2023

We are excited to announce the first Decentralization in Organizations (DiO) mini-conference, organized by Ying-Ying Hsieh (Imperial College London), Mike Lee (INSEAD), Phanish Puranam (INSEAD), and PK Toh (UT Austin). Recent years have seen a proliferation of decentralized forms of organizing: Platform ecosystems, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and less hierarchical organizations (self-managing or bossless organizations). Decentralization stands as a key ingredient in many important contemporary organizational phenomena. However, research on decentralization in organizations remains much fragmented.

We have assembled an exciting lineup of scholars who work in this space, across levels of analysis and using different methods, to present and discuss their work. The goal of the conference is to spark dialogue and build some common understanding about the concept of decentralization across these streams of research. Speakers include (in alphabetical order):

Oliver Alexy (TUM), Carliss Baldwin (HBS), Ethan Bernstein (HBS), David Clough (UBC), John Eklund (USC), Annabelle Gawer (U. of Surrey), Lindy Greer (U. Michigan), Vivianna Fang He (U. of St. Gallen), Michael Jacobides (LBS), John Joseph (UCI), Ronald Kilngebiel (Frankfurt School), Wesley Koo (INSEAD), Tobias Kretschmer (LMU), Saerom (Ronnie) Lee (Wharton), Natalia Levina (NYU), Hila Lifshitz-Assaf (Warwick/ HBS), Siobhan O'Mahony (BU), Markus Reitzig (U. Vienna), Melissa Schilling (NYU), Sonali Shah (UIUC), Deepak Somaya (UIUC), Charlie Williams (Bocconi), Trevor Young-Hyman (U. of Pittsburg)

The conference is scheduled to take place on June 21-22 at Imperial College Business School with a small group of in-person attendees. Much as we would have liked to have a larger conference, we were severely constrained in how many participants we could physically accommodate. However, in the spirit of decentralized participation, we would like to open up the conference to virtual participation via zoom. We will find ways to integrate the online and offline conversations as best as we can – so we do hope you will consider joining the conference virtually. 

Chainscience 2023

"Blockchain and AI technologies already impact the ways our technological and institutional environment will be shaped for decades to come. The integration of AI has the potential to further revolutionize how blockchain networks operate, enhance their efficiency and unlock novel use cases. ChainScience is an event aimed at addressing the deepest and most challenging questions that remain unresolved about distributed systems, decentralized protocols and autonomous services.

Most blockchain conferences target either academic researchers or industry practitioners, which means these two audiences don't often get the chance to share their work and ideas across this divide. Our purpose is to create a platform that bridges this gap: to encourage cross-pollination of ideas, where theoretical insights inform practical applications and real-world challenges inspire new research."

Videos & Podcasts

4 dimensions of Ownership Economy: Ownco – with Spela Prijon and Sascha Kellert

Špela Prijon and Sascha Kellert join us to share the latest news from Ownco - a platform that combines the best aspects of cooperatives, DAOs, and traditional startups to make shared ownership and the ownership economy more fluid and accessible.

Ownco’s approach to distributing ownership moves along four key dimensions – Upsides, Status, Influence, Redemption – and is an approach born through testing hypotheses and assessing the actual results produced by early adopters. 

For example, through Ownco’s credit system companies can issue ownership credits that can be backed – through a legal bridge – with exit proceeds, providing ownership-backed incentives for contributors.

Ownco believes that achieving ownership sharing can be done with existing legal contracts, while at the same time, the potential impacts of Web 3 may be significant in the long term.

Špela Prijon and Sascha Kellert are the co-founders with Harry Wilson (not on this podcast) of Ownco.

Špela Prijon has been active with startups for a long time, as a founder and team member. Most recently Špel was Head of CX at Ledgy, leading implementation of all types of equity plans for 100s of startups from seed to IPO stage, in jurisdictions all over the world and it was with such an intimate knowledge of the processes of sharing ownership.

Sascha Kellert is a serial entrepreneur who studied Systems Theory at Bayes Business School in London with a thesis exploring how to design viable businesses using patterns and blueprints from nature. Over the last decade, he has been developing practices and tools for the alternative ownership economy, while building his last two VC-funded SaaS/platform startups.

In this episode, we delve into several practical use cases, talk through regulatory and governance issues, and explore Ownco’s vision of boundaryless, networked organizations, with micro-teams connected through smart contracts and programmable ownership sharing. 

Enjoy this practical and inspiring conversation with two of the passionate founders of Ownco. 

Key highlights

- There are more ways to promote co-ownership than developing full-fledged DAOs

- The future is in networks of micro-companies

- Ownco’s four dimensions of co-ownership: Upsides, Status, Influence, Redemption.

- How trust is essential in the time between issuing and fulfilling a contract 

- Web3 as enabling inter-company collaboration 

- The future of Ownco as an embedded capability rather than a single product

- Ownco’s customer journey starts by asking “What is the progressive decentralization path that they can embark on?”

Topics (chapters):

00:00 Building Loyalty in Business Communities

01:00 Špela Prijon and Sascha Kellert introduction

02:35 Ownco: Making Equity More Powerful and Leveling the Playing Field 

05:31 The Ownership Economy and the “credits” model

15:55 Legal Bridges: Sharing Ownership Without Complexities

21:31 The Growing Demand for Shared Ownership: Ownco’s Unique Approach

25:55 Building Boundaryless Organizations

34:58 Distributing power and ownership within an organization

39:18 Spela Prijon and Sascha Kellert’ breadcrumbs

To find out more about Spela and Kellert’s work:

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/OwnCoApp       

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/owncoapp       

- Website: https://www.ownco.org

Other references and mentions:

- World Freestyle Football Association and Ownco: https://thewffa.org/innovative-community-owned-governance-ownco-tokens/

Spela and Kellert’s suggested breadcrumbs (things listeners should check out):

- Man’s Search for Meaning  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning 

- Systems Thinking – Managing Chaos and Complexity https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123859150/systems-thinking

Recorded on 28th April 2023.

Get in touch with Boundaryless:

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_

- Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music

Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music"

Tweets

1. https://twitter.com/divine_economy/status/1663537310128824320

2. https://twitter.com/guiribabrb/status/1657712123730853889

3. https://twitter.com/AragonProject/status/1656028386307743748

4. https://twitter.com/marty/status/1668054519383748608

5. https://twitter.com/patrickxrivera/status/1658511903382204417

6. https://twitter.com/kellyimpactopia/status/1666407103198638087

7. https://twitter.com/KevinAFischer/status/1662853371118641154

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Thank you for reading Distroid!

I hope you enjoyed this week’s issue.

Please send a message to ledgerback@gmail.com or @distroid_ if you have any questions, comments, or other feedback on this week’s newsletter or on Distroid in general.