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Open Grant Application: The Constitutions of Web3 #446

Closed thelastjosh closed 2 years ago

thelastjosh commented 2 years ago

Open Grant Proposal: The Constitutions of Web3

Name of Project: The Constitutions of Web3

Proposal Category: research

Proposer: Joshua Tan, @thelastjosh

(Optional) Technical Sponsor: Evan Miyazono @miyazono

Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this RFP and dual-license under MIT and APACHE2 licenses?: Yes.

Project Description

DAOs have been the focus of intense innovation and experimentation. As a result of this recent energy, there has been a proliferation of governance documents ranging from 300-word policy manifestos to 30-page legal charters to series of studiously-informal blog posts designed to evade legal scrutiny. Currently, there is huge heterogeneity among governance documents, leading to different expectations in terms of the range of content and the level of specificity. We have analyzed a range of these documents (which we will refer to as ‘constitutions’) in order to better understand DAO governance and to promote healthy norms.

In this project, we will collect, code, and analyze the constitutions of DAOs and other decentralized organizations, including Filecoin itself. We have already collected and examined 20+ such constitutions in our current data set on Govbase, and are in the process of (1) producing a preliminary analysis of this data, (2) collecting more constitutions, including historical data sets from open-source software, and (3) producing a standard template, along with metadata, that will improve the quality, discoverability, comparability, and legibility of these constitutions and, by extension, of DAO governance. Ultimately, we plan to synthesize these activities into a rigorous academic paper on DAOs and “computational constitutionalism” as a development within the larger political history of the internet.

Value

Every community needs to decide how to govern itself. In the context of highly remote and scalable internet-native organizations such as DAOs, much of what used to be tacit needs to be made explicit in order for these organizations to function.

What we are proposing is a data set, a qualitative analysis, and a standard that greatly lowers the friction of propagating good governance norms. If we get this right, we will have a piece of scholarship that community builders both within the Filecoin ecosystem and Web3 more broadly can use to design new community norms and institutions. If our standard gets adopted, we will also see DAOs think more carefully about governance. Here’s one example: as a result of our work, it becomes a norm within most DAOs to provide clear values, participant rights, and affordances for participation and engagement. As a result, instead of slow social decay within DAOs driven by founder burnout and/or the influx of speculative capital, we see more sustainable communities with fewer conflicts that can last longer and build better.

If we don’t get this right, norms around governance remain scattered, and the opportunity to unify community discussions around governance is squandered. New DAOs, without a clear constitutional standard to adopt, govern in an ad-hoc and potentially ineffective manner. Coordination is harder within the community and conflicts have a greater chance of sowing irreparable discord.

The main risk to project success will be the adoption of our analysis and standard. If our proposed standard isn’t seen or accepted by other groups, our work will be less useful. That’s why we’re taking special care to (1) build a rich, rigorous data set (inspired and informed by our collaboration with the Constitute Project, which curates an influential data set of national constitutions) and (2) partner with organizations like Verses (creators of the recent Declaration of Interdependence and Pluriverse.world) to build an accessible website that will display and allow exploration of the data set, the standard, and potentially new constitutions.

Deliverables

The project's deliverables include

Development Roadmap

  1. Data set gathering, cleaning, and coding, $20,000

Joshua Tan, Max Langenkamp, Ann Brody, Anna Weichselbraun (November 2021 - July 2022)

Collecting, labeling, and annotating governance documents from various Web3 organizations. The documents will be hosted in the Govbase GitHub and potentially a separate platform for easy public access and comparison. Collecting includes searching through different forums, reformatting and hosting the data. Labels include categories such as values, goals, and rights. The construction of label categories will be heavily informed by our experience in reading the documents, and we may construct new categories as we review more documents.

  1. Filecoin contract analysis, $2,500

Joshua Tan, Lucia Korpas (March 2022)

Analyze a Filecoin contract using the analytical governance lens we have created so far. This may provide a helpful bridge between analytical governance lens and the smart contract code.

  1. Blog post, $5,000

Joshua Tan, Max Langenkamp, Ann Brody, Anna Weichselbraun, Lucia Korpas (April 2022)

To contextualize our findings and lower the friction of information dissemination, the blog post will contain our analysis of constitutions in the space. The post will also introduce our template and guidelines around writing a constitution.

  1. Constitutional templates, $5,000

Joshua Tan (January - April 2022)

These will be outlines of what we feel are minimally useful guiding templates around writing a constitution. This includes section breakdowns and high level principles in approaching a constitution and at least one model constitution.

  1. Specialist development including web crawler & parsers, $5,000

People TBD - maybe external (April 2022)

To support access and broader creation of the dataset, we may create web crawlers and parsers that can create an index of the various governance documents on Web3.

  1. Jupyter notebook and related visualizations, $5,000

Lucia Korpas (May 2022)

As part of the analysis of the governance documents, we will also create visualizations that may be hosted in a Jupyter notebook. These may be interactive (e.g. allow the audience to sort by values or goals).

  1. Gitcoin grants, $7,500

Bounties to encourage community engagement. These can be through using Gitcoin or other methods.

Total Budget Requested

$50,000 over a 6-month period. This sum will support the researchers as well as Gitcoin grants for specialist tasks.

Breakdown of budget:

Maintenance and Upgrade Plans

This data set will be maintained as part of Govbase, a data warehouse for research projects in online governance, where it will be maintained and grown by a range of current and future researchers.

Team

Team Members

Joshua Tan Max Langenkamp Ann Brody Anna Weichselbraun Lucia Korpas

Team Member LinkedIn Profiles

Team Website

https://metagov.org

Relevant Experience

Metagov is one of the main organizations doing qualitative research on Web3 governance. We build software (https://gateway.metagov.org), write standards (https://daostar.one/), curate data (https://medium.com/metagov/introducing-govbase-97884b0ddaef), run ecosystem surveys (https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/01/11/the-10-tribes-of-crypto/), and oversee numerous other experiments related to online governance.

Team code repositories

See https://github.com/metagov, https://metagov.org, and https://github.com/thelastjosh/govbase.

Additional Information

This project is related to one of the projects proposed by Verses.xyz.

realChainLife commented 2 years ago

Hi @thelastjosh thank you for this proposal, we would like to fund the work outlined in this proposal. Please email devgrants@fil.org to discuss next steps.

thelastjosh commented 2 years ago

Yay! Thank you for the amazing news @realChainLife <3 Just emailed.