Closed shibacomputer closed 1 year ago
shibacomputer
commented
1 year ago Hi all, happy new year! Looking over this grant application list, it's clear there's a lot going on. Sensitive to this, I'm writing to see if the FF team has had a chance to look at our proposal? I'm happy to answer any followup questions or clarifications about this, either here or via the Filecoin Slack.
Thanks, and kind regards!
Cade
ErinOCon
commented
1 year ago Hi @shibacomputer, I know it has been a considerable amount of time since your proposal was submitted - thank you for your patience! Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with a grant at this time, but we look forward to learning of your progress.
Wishing you all the best as you continue to build!
Open Grant Proposal:
Memory in Uncertainty: Responding to systemic threats to decentralisationMemory in Uncertainty: Responding to systemic threats to decentralisation
Proposal Category:
researchProposer: @shibacomputer / @newdesigncongress
Technical Sponsor: Dietrich Ayala (@autonome)
Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this RFP and dual-license under MIT, APACHE2, or GPL licenses?: All work completed as part of this project will be published as per all New Design Congress publications – a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Software produces as part of this project will be open-sourced, but the license is TBD. (So Yes)
Project Description
Today’s decentralised protocols and the applications built on top of them require new paradigms for data ownership, communication and identity. In many cases, the risks of decentralisation are not yet fully understood and solutions or mitigation strategies have not been identified or developed. In a rapidly destabilising world, the need for decentralisation has increased, and these risks have become more urgent. These risks include, but are not limited to:
This is a proposal to operate a research programme to identify and act upon protocol and platform risk. We intend to complete this research with a multi-stakeholder collaboration with Filecoin and the IPFS protocol, projects that use IPFS as an underlying technology and wider technology and climate resilience partners. This broad collective project provides the foundation to identify and mitigate these risks at a systemic level.
Background
When we completed our Devgrant collaboration with Webrecorder, we delivered a report that identified concerning systemic socio-technical findings for web preservation[^1]. Our findings show that today’s decentralisation protocols and platforms threaten the quality and resilience of web archives and the integrity of digitally-archived material. They also have profound implications for the physical safety, legal standing and mental health of archive practitioners and communities subjected to archiving.
We believe these issues extend beyond web preservation into other use cases for decentralisation. This includes IPFS as a protocol, and the platforms or projects that use IPFS. At best, these challenges limit user growth through complexity. At worst, these projects risk reproducing or accelerating adverse social and political outcomes, hindering user safety across the entire ecosystem.
Because these issues have such a wide material impact on users and societies, attempts to understand and address them are overwhelming. Almost all of the participants in our research expressed frustration at the lack of a cohesive response to the problems they described. After publication, we heard similar concerns from potential collaborators and broader experts who read the report — both from within the IPFS community and beyond. Of all of the frustrations raised, lack of inter-organisational coordination, fractured funding and knowledge siloing were the most common.
As such, this proposal with Filecoin is part of a larger multi-stakeholder collaboration project. This research will solicit expertise and resources from a wide cohort of interested supporting partners from within and beyond the IPFS community, including: Webrecorder, OpenArchive, Aspiration, Superbloom, Bauhaus Earth (proposed) and the European Forest Institute (proposed). There are four other additional partners who have not been named in this proposal, as their work does not yet immediately pertain to this specific grant proposal.
Value
Our research is key to making the underlying protocols like IPFS and Filecoin effective in achieving their goals while at the same time ensuring that the applications built atop them can successfully meet the needs of their users. To accomplish this, we need to focus on both IPFS protocol itself and the projects that rely on IPFS.
The value of this research programme would be:
We believe the biggest risk to the success of this research is cultural. This work will only have an impact as part of a shift towards accountability and inclusivity by protocol and platform designers. If we are unable to accomplish the goals of the research lab, the greatest risk is a continuation or acceleration of technology-mediated socio-political and environmental harms that caps the adoption of IPFS or IPFS powered applications, or leave IPFS vulnerable to weaponised design, human rights abuses, economic injustices or infrastructural fragility. We believe that our multi-stakeholder approach to this research will encourage accountability between participating interests and encourage this cultural shift.
Deliverables
The core deliverables are:
Alongside regular delivery of research updates, prototypes and one-on-one consultations, we will hold regular ‘town-hall’ events to summarise work completed and encourage new consultations from collaborators.
For IPFS-powered platforms who have also expressed interest in participating, such as OpenArchive or Webrecorder, deliverables will be research collaborations to answer engineering or strategic questions, threat modelling and other forecasting activities, and design sprints.
Development Roadmap
The schedule for deliverables could look something like:
Month 1 –Establishment of open access infrastructure for the programme, via Discord and a publicly-accessible knowledge garden. Town hall.Month 3 –Town hall.Month 4 –Delivery of report Evaluating the Integrity & Resilience of the Carbon Sink City, examining the resilience of decentralised storage for climate intervention. (produced as part of the wider multi-stakeholder collaboration)Month 5 –Town hall.Month 7 –Draft delivery of a landscape review of popular decentralisation protocols as a socio-technical risk assessment, presented at a town hall.Month 9 –Town hall.Month 11 –Town hall, presentation of findings as part of the Memory in Uncertainty phase 2 report and recap of prototype code repository.Month 12 –Delivery of Memory in Uncertainty phase 2 report, which includes collected research, the deliverable from Month 6, and future recommendations. Final delivery and PR campaign for the repository of interface prototypes, case studies with IPFS projects, and the shared knowledge resource.Regular workshops and smaller deliverables with collaborating projects are not listed here but included as deliverables.
This deliverables roadmap should be considered over the course of a year, with an expressed intent to extend the roadmap by an additional year. All deliverables here are proposed, and are subject to change over time.
Total Budget Requested
For this grant, we request a budget for the two lead researchers (listed in the team below) for 1 year, with an additional year subject to review of the project at the end of 2023.
$80,000USD * 2.= $160,000 USD.The budget would be divided across 12 months as 12 payments of $13,300.
Our planned budget for the research programme is
$485,000 USDp/year, provided by a range of stakeholders. This proposal is one part of a multi-party funded effort.Team
Team Members
Cade Diehm Benjamin Royer New Design Congress
Team Member LinkedIn Profiles
Cade Diehm: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shibacomputer/ Benjamin Royer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-royer-5b815723/
Team Website
https://newdesigncongress.org
Collaborators
Webrecorder - https://webrecorder.net/ OpenArchive - https://open-archive.org/ Superbloom – https://superbloom.design/ Bauhaus Earth (proposed) - https://www.bauhauserde.org/ European Forest Institute (proposed) - https://efi.int/ Aspiration - https://aspirationtech.org/
Relevant Experience
We are an independent, member-funded research group confronting the gap between what appears to be happening and what is actually happening in digitised societies. We work with universities, internet subcultures, at-risk communities, non-profits, environmentalists, policy makers and technologists to produce ambitious, actionable alternative forks — new paradigms for digital identity, online safety, information integrity, network and economic resilience, and climate response. Our central theory of change - alternative forking - takes problems of the present, finds under-explored historical and contemporary alternatives, and develops real-world, applicable “forks”. To achieve this, we combine a decade of institutional understanding of digital security, systems theory, and strategic thinking with a participatory and international congress of collaborators drawn from diverse regions, cultures, and subcultures. New Design Congress is a fiscally sponsored project of Superbloom, a US-based 501(c)3 non profit.
Cade Diehm
Website / CV – https://shiba.computer Cade is the founder of The New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. He studies, writes, consults and speaks regularly on topics such as digital power structures, privacy, information warfare, resilience, internet economies and the digitisation of cities. With a multi-disciplinary background in information security, interface politics and digital systems, Cade and his team at New Design Congress work tirelessly to tease out and weave threads that can be pulled together to build a truly hopeful future.
In 2018, his influential essay On Weaponised Design, introduced the concept of Weaponised Design, a term that describes designed systems that harm users while behaving within normal parameters. Since 2020, Cade has developed Anxiety Games, an approach to empathetic and accessible threat modeling. His critiques on design ethics, decentralisation and open source bring nuance to the complexity of digital infrastructure. His work on the Para-Real, a term that describes the collision-point between digital platforms and the real world, is the focus of a research series about subcultures and solidarity networks building livelihoods in spite of platform exploitation, austerity and crisis.
Benjamin Royer
Benjamin is a researcher at the New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. Focusing on the political dimension of human-computer interactions, Benjamin combines insider knowledge on the tech, design and consulting industries with a sharp critical framework drawn from philosophy, anthropology and sociology. His work has taken the form of collaborations with Ink & Switch, PEN America, Mozilla, Webrecorder and Junkipedia. Benjamin translated Adam Greenfield's book Radical Technologies, The Design of Everyday Life in French on behalf of Verso Books and Presence(s) Editions for publication in mid-2022.
Before joining the New Design Congress, Benjamin had ten years of experience in the field of human-machine interactions, information architecture, user-experience and user-interface for such benefactors of the world as BCG, McKinsey or the British governement.
Team code repositories
https://code.undersco.re/newdesigncongress https://code.undersco.re/dana https://github.com/dana-apps https://members.newdesigncongress.org/
Additional Information
This proposal is submitted as a result of the successful collaboration between Webrecorder and New Design Congress, and the recognition by both parties and others that further work is necessary in this field.
Contact: cade@newdesigncongress.org
Footnotes
[^1]: For details about this please refer to the III. Key Findings and IV. Recommendations chapters of our report, Memory in Uncertainty: Web preservation in the polycrisis. The report, along with our threat modelling, continues to inform the design and development of the Webrecorder project.