The Metagovernance Project is an interdisciplinary research collective. We build standards and infrastructure for digital self-governance. Our collaborations include:
- , an API gateway for digital governance services
- DAOstar, the standards body of the DAO ecosystem
- Agreement Engine, a tool for building net-native agreement systems
- (new) AI Palace, a residency for open-source, public, and decentralized AI
- (new) Calm Technology, a standards body for aligning attention with technology
- CommunityRule, a user-friendly governance toolkit for great communities
- Composing games into complex institutions, a research paper
- Constitutions of Web3, analysis and guides for DAO constitutions
- Cryptopolitics, a study of politics and ideology in crypto
- DAOchem, a holistic view of DAO governance
- Govbase, a set of research data sets in online governance
- Govbase Labs, a weekly lab meeting
- Governance Experience Design, a living manifesto for online spaces
- Governance Surfaces, a tool for analyzing DAO contracts
- Groundwork Fellowship, internet infrastructure design and marginalization
- (new) Grants Report, a breakdown of 13 grant programs in Web3
- LARP Governance, speculative governance play, ethnography, and history
- MetagovDAO, a funding body for research on DAOs
- Metagovernance Seminar, a weekly seminar
- Modular Politics, a paper outlining a governance layer for the internet
- Modpol, a governance mod for Minetest
- (new) OSS Transitions, an NSF-funded collaboration
- PolicyKit, an engine for building governance in online communities
- (new) Public AI, a proposal and coalition for a new form of AI
- Redwood Parliament, a governance convocation event
- Telescope, a Discord bot for ethical, responsive digital ethnography
- Validators and their governance participation, a report
- Validator Commons, a cryptopolitical party of validators and allies
Metagovernance, or the governance of many worlds
Online governance is evolving. Competition, ideology, and technological advances have created the conditions for a new generation of games (e.g. Minecraft, Seed), social networks (e.g. Mastodon), and collaborative platforms (e.g. Ethereum, Aragon). This new generation of online communities is changing the rules of online governance. In these worlds, users have the right to self-governance—the right to come together and organize their own social and political institutions. Our mission is to describe, support, and expand that right.
But on the internet, the right to self-governance is not a natural right; it is enabled and circumscribed by the architecture of the platform on which people interact. That same architecture also governs the interaction between separate user-generated institutions. Metagovernance describes these two related roles: (1) enabling and constraining users’ ability to create their own institutions, and (2) governing the interaction between separate institutions, whether they be small informal chat groups on Telegram, open-source communities on GitHub, billion-dollar protocols on a blockchain, or traditional institutions like courts and contracts that have been transposed to a new digital realm.
About
The Metagovernance Project is an open, collective effort organized around a vision of a governance layer for the internet. Our research is led by a group of principal investigators:
- Federica Carugati, King’s College London
- Amber Case, DAODAO
- Primavera De Filippi, Harvard / CNRS
- Seth Frey, University of California, Davis
- Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School
- Ellie Rennie, RMIT
- Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado Boulder
- Divya Siddarth, Collective Intelligence Project / Oxford
- Joshua Tan, University of Oxford
- Nick Vincent, Simon Fraser University
- Philipp Zahn, 20squares / CyberCat Institute
- Michael Zargham, BlockScience / WU Vienna
- Amy Zhang, University of Washington
Our team includes:
- Rashmi Abbigeri, Frontend Developer
- Hazel Devjani, Research Assistant
- Val Elefante, Research Assistant
- Jenny Fan, Product Designer
- Ammar Manla Hasan, Wanjiru Ngure, Pumsuanhang (Michael) Suantak, ngọc triệu, and Stacco Troncoso, Groundwork Fellows
- Cent Hosten, Community Manager
- Brandon Jackson, Product Manager
- Eugene Leventhal, Interim Executive Director
- Luke Miller, Research Contributor
- Marcel Minutolo, Community Research Fellow
- Jack Murray-Brown, Frontend Developer
- Kelsie Nabben, Research Contributor
- Michael Holton Price, Decentralized Governance Research Scholar
- Isaac Patka, Research Fellow
- Joni Pirovich, Research Fellow
- Julija Rukanskaite, Product Designer
Advisors: Scott Moore, Connor Spelliscy
Board: B Cavello, Primavera De Filippi, Nathan Schneider, Joshua Tan, Michael Zargham
Alumni: Miriam Ashton, James Brennan, Ann Brody, Lance Davis, Lucia Korpas, Max Langenkamp, Tucker McLachlan, Nick Stares, Toby Weed, Or Zubalsky
We would like to thank our collaborators and the many participants of the Metagovernance Seminar for their contributions to the project, including Louis Kang, Jules Hedges, Tara Merk, Ed Saperia, and Ricardo Saavedra.
Sponsors
Metagov is a 501(c)3 nonprofit in the US. Our work is generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, One Project, the Grant for the Web, these Gitcoin grants, the Filecoin Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, the EPSRC / University of Oxford, GnosisDAO, Aragon, Radicle, Metacartel Ventures, NEAR, Commonwealth, the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab, and many Metagovernors through our membership program. Our finances are hosted publicly on Open Collective.
News
- Find more detailed news at our newsletter.
- July 3-10, 2023: we organized AI Palace, a residency for open-source, public, and decentralized forms of AI.
- June 21-25, 2023: we helped organize the governance and AI tracks at DWeb Camp in partnership with OpenAI, the Foresight Institute, and the Internet Archive.
- April 2-4, 2023: we helped organize DAO Harvard in partnership with Harvard’s Belfer Center, the Safra Center, the DAO Research Collective, and Blockchaingov.
- Sep. 1, 2022: we are organizing DAO Day as part Stanford’s Science of Blockchain Conference, in partnership with the DAO Research Hub.
- August 24-28, 2022: we are organizing the Redwood Parliament as part of Dweb Camp, in partnership with the Internet Archive, RadicalXChange, and the Unfinished Network
- June 9, 2022: we launched the Validator Commons at Consensus 2022!
- Apr. 18, 2022: we organized a workshop called “Open Problems in DAO Science” as part of Devconnect and the DAOist in Amsterdam.
- Feb. 1, 2022: Cent Hosten is joining us a community manager supporting both the community as well as the Gateway project!
- Jan. 11, 2022: we just released a preliminary report from the Cryptopolitics project.
- Dec. 2, 2021: Ellie Rennie is joining us as a core group member!
- Dec. 1, 2021: Lucia Korpas is joining the team as a data scientist working on Govbase. Welcome, Lucia!
- Nov. 26, 2021: we received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation
- October 25, 2021: we posted the first Metagov newsletter (finally) on Substack
- October 21, 2021: we released the Cryptopolitical Typology Quiz at Liscon!
- September 26, 2021: Nathan just posted an article on cryptoeconomics and governance. Here’s Vitalik’s reply.
- June 6, 2021: we partnered with NEAR to host the Open Web Governance Challenge. Congratulations to the winners of the challenge!
- June 1, 2021: Shauna Gordon-McKeon is joining us as a senior research engineer (and core group member). Welcome, Shauna!
- May 17, 2021: Luke Miller and Nick Stares are joining us as summer interns working on the Agreement Engine and a game-theoretic contract library, respectively.
- January 14, 2021: Josh will be joining Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab as a Practitioner Fellow, working on Metagov.
- December 1, 2021: Miriam Ashton is joining us as a research engineer. Welcome, Miriam!
- October 20, 2020: we were awarded a Flagship Grant from the Grant for the Web!
- June 19-21: we ran a workshop on Metagov (video) at RadicalXChange, as well as a workshop on narratives of Internet governance.
- May 19, 2020: we published an article on DAOs as a new kind of institution, in collaboration with Commons Stack.
- April 3, 2020: Nathan hosted an online conversation about modular politics at Columbia Journalism Review’s Galley. Here is the roundtable and interviews with Josh, Seth, and Amy.
- January 20, 2020: Josh recorded an episode of DAOcast.
Get involved
The Metagovernance Project is an open, collective effort, by many people, to build a governance layer for the internet. Our community has different modes of involvement, with some folks choosing to join the weekly seminar, some just browsing discussion in Slack, and others working full-time on internal collaborative projects.
If you would like to get involved or join Metagov (including our Slack), read more here or fill out this form. You can also subscribe to our newsletter on Substack. For all other inquiries, please use the contact form below.