The Redwood Parliament held during DWebCamp 2022 was collectively manifested over five days in late August, as a collection of workshops, an emergence of discussion threads, and an interweaving of interdisciplinary beings. We gathered to share research and experiences around governance and to learn from the four hundred attendees of this “Retreat in the Redwoods”. Our aspirational goal for this emergence and interweaving: to create “Governance Layers for the Internet.”
An imaginative initiative of the Internet Archive, DWebCamp is billed as a “collaborative space for people to connect, learn, share, and have fun as we work towards building a better, decentralized web”, a space “for builders and dreamers, to gather in nature to tackle the real world challenges facing the web and to co-create the decentralized technologies of the future.”
To restate the mission of the DWebCamp, and to focus in on ‘why decentralized?’, the goal is to create a web that actualizes the principles of trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness.
Framed from the perspective of these principles (with their focus on behavioral norms, mutual accountability, and the building of a more just and equitable world), the spirit and mechanics of governance are woven throughout the work of the DWeb community.
Alongside Cent Hosten, Community Lead for Metagov, I was invited to co-curate The Redwood Parliament, not as a separate gathering within a gathering, but as an extitutional intermingling of ideas and imaginations. Our thanks to Wendy Hanamura, our intrepid interlocutor-in-chief at the Internet Archive, who gave us a clear directive to endeavor towards the widest possible diversity of perspectives and participation that we could engender through our programming.
The Redwood Parliament Sessions
The following is a retelling (and a more detailed listing) of the workshops, games, gatherings and co-creative enablings that our invited friends and fellows brought together under the auspices of this first Redwood Parliament:
From open source ecosystems, to ecological governance patterns, our various sessions were mapping the connections and relationships between different efforts and modalities.
Decentralization, democracy and diversity as themes were considered alongside distributed care and deliberation, as more pathos-based mediums for governance, flavored with expressivity, the embodied self, zine workshops, and what it should feel like to build community; as much as data standards and interactions with algorithms might be mediators for our channeling and connecting of logos.
The Extitute as a home and way for these learnings to spread, a commons of pattern languages, tools, and conceptual frameworks for: collective financing; creative NFTs; composable governance; the designing of communities via community rule, rxc voice, policykit, the DAOGame, and in the context of end-to-end encrypted spaces.
The kinds of prompts and questions to ask when starting a cooperative, a community of equals, thinking outside the boss, were prismed through the lens of historic and current examples of governance by children, to inform the digital infrastructure we might co-create as scaffolding for the recognitions, agencies, and value-flows we would embed in the re-imagined systems that might make anew our relationships to one another, on the basis of human-scale dynamics of trust, respect, and intimacy.
Presencing the new sovereignties that our visions of governance might set the scene for, in the truest traditions of giants like Le Guin on whose shoulders we must surely stand to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling of our shared potential, sessions on interplanetary timekeeping and speculative worldbuilding and writing opened up the scope of imagination, and participatory live-action role-playing let that imagination run wild, all watched over by social scientists of loving grace.
These contributions and shared experiences wove in with a daily cadence of deliberative circles on how we might co-create “Governance Layers for the Internet.”
With deep and sincerest thanks to all who contributed to seed, steward, and facilitate the Redwood Parliament sessions, and all who attended and contributed across DWebCamp to help weave these collective potentials into reality.
Thank you also to the institutional partners involved in supporting the Redwood Parliament: Metagov, the Internet Archive, RadicalXChange, the Unfinished Network, and the National Science Foundation.
To learn more, and to receive updates on reflections and ongoing activities related to the Redwood Parliament sessions, you can join the Metagov community at https://metagov.pubpub.org/join. You can also view and comment on any of the session-specific GitLab repositories below.
A More Detailed Listing of the Redwood Parliament Sessions
Engine Change at 80MPH
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/45
This session goes through the process of planning a governance transition— a voluntary revolution from benevolent dictatorship to community rule. The workshop will cover influential cases, discuss theories of governance dynamics, and describe tools, all tied in with your own experiences, hopes, dreams, concerns, etc. Whether you are running an OSS project, a coin, a network, or a discussion forum, if your project is looking at its next governance metamorphosis, then this workshop is for you.
With: Seth Frey, Joshua Tan, Nathan Schneider, Amy Zhang
Building a governance layer for the internet: an algorithmically aided deliberation
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/64
Participants are invited to join a discussion assisted by both human and algorithmic facilitation, and centered around the question: What are the most important priorities in building a governance layer for the internet?
The session will start with a private survey of proposals and opinions, which will be dynamically converted into reports mapping the landscape of priorities, and areas of consensus and disagreement among the participants. These maps will set the foundations for a fully-offline, facilitated discussion.
With: Alex Randaccio, Jack Henderson, Angela Corpus, Matt Prewitt
Thinking Outside the Boss: Inquiries and Lessons from Community Organizing and Cooperative Development
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/75
Explaining the usefulness and practicality of cooperative governance within the context of this current political moment, highlighting its usefulness as a tool for historically marginalized communities in building some semblance of collective autonomy, sustainability, and how it has the capacity to act as a tool of resistance against enclosure.
This workshop will also utilize welcoming cards that we’ve dispersed throughout the camp which are indicators that help to ground one in spaces and foster trust. (Please refer to Session Rundown section for a list of these questions)
With: brandon king, Tony Lai
Designing your community with CommunityRule
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/50
How does power flow in your community, and how could it flow differently? This session provides a hands-on experience with CommunityRule, a tool for describing and designing community governance. Come with a community in mind that you are part of, and expect to come away with new ideas for how its governance might evolve.
With: Nathan Schneider, James Brennan
Distributed networks for community care
SCHED: https://sched.co/19Soa
Exploring frameworks for mapping and building distributed care networks for mutual aid, crisis care, and interdependence. A collaborative workshop where people can explore, map, and brainstorm different frameworks and formats for distributed care in our communities and beyond.
With: Riley Wong
A governance layer for the internet
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/66
What does it mean to have a governance layer for the internet? In this multi-session discussion series, we discuss the meaning and properties of this proposed governance layer, consider its relevance to platforms, open-source, DAOs, gaming, and other communities on the internet, report on prior work to build (pieces of) it along with learnings from that work, and identify new ideas and proposals for how to support more interoperability and better governance on the internet. Hosted by the Metagovernance Project.
• Day 2 (25th): what is a governance layer for the internet? mapping existing initiatives and evaluating evidence
• Day 3 (26th): alternative visions, identifying tradoffs, making plans
• Day 4 (27th): next steps; presentation of conclusions
With: Joshua Tan, Nathan Schneider, Primavera de Filippi, Lawrence Lessig, Seth Frey, Amy Zhang
The Extitute
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/54
In this discussion, we will explore the idea of setting up the Extitute of Research, a Web3-enabled university leveraging applied experience and skills. The Exitute is a research “institute” building on the Web3 ethos—we build on-ramps into research for hackers and builders of all stripes (or other patterns!). We do this by inhabiting and overlaying onto in-person experiences and extant institutions around the world (from hackathons to universities to world heritage sites) in order to create and/or identify immersive, context-specific learning experiences.
In these transformed spaces and institutions, we experiment with new methodologies of knowledge production through mutual learning and cooperation. We favor cross-pollination and bottom-up, collective learning over traditional top-down and one-directional teaching.
The envisioned culmination of these experiences is a degree native to the web3 ethos of peer-based, open collaboration. At the end of the program, participants who can demonstrate necessary knowledge and insight will be provided with institutional recognition and accreditation: a traditional accredited diploma and an NFT-based diploma (“DAOploma”)
With: Primavera de Filippi, Joshua Tan, Jessy Kate Schingler
DAOStar: Data standards for decentralized organizations
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/59
DAOStar is a multi organization and multi disciplinary group from the DAO space, collaborating on standards for discovery, collaboration, reputation and more. We published EIP 4824 to establish a baseline reporting standard for DAOs to share their constitutions, members lists, proposals, activity, and other data related to indexing. We also have groups working on portable reputations & contribution tracking standards
Many of the concepts we introduced for taxonomy are inspired by the work done in the Decentralized Identity community, specifically Verifiable Credential JSON-LD. In this session we intend to present the spec, whiteboard a view of the DAO space today, and solicit feedback from participants
With: Isaac Patka, Michael Zargham
Creative (Common) NFTs
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/55
The Remix NFT protocol is a new standard created to generate a value model based on the philosophy of the Creative Common licensing. The protocol incentivizes artists, collectors, and speculators to behave in a way that maximizes value for participants while promoting the Creative Commons values of free and open culture. This is accomplished through three modules:
1. A perpetual auction system to ensure remix rights are always accessible and negate IP ‘squatting’
2. A royalty chain to flow value to parent works
3. On chain management of licenses & remix rights
The goal of the session is to present the Remix NFT protocol to the workshop participants and then brainstorm together about how to turn this protocol into an actual platform for CC / copyleft artists to engage with NFTs in a way that is consistent with their value.
With: Primavera de Filippi Isaac Patka
Collective Financing for Technology Startups
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/43
In this discussion, we introduce developing practices for startup financing including exit to community, regenerative finance, capped returns, windfall distributions, voluntary taxes, various forms of worker and stakeholder equity, foundation ownership, perpetual purpose trusts, etc. As a group, we’ll (1) share peoples’ experiences as founders and funders and (2) explore these alternative financing strategies through the lens of bonding companies to communities.
With: Divya Siddarth, Luke Miller, Joshua Tan
Four examples of successful self-governance by children
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/46
As our society inches closer toward recognizing the autonomy and political rights of children, it becomes important to question our basic assumptions about them, such as the assumption baked into William Goldman’s “The Lord of the Flies”, that children left to themselves become barbaric. Children can self-govern, and the governance failures they demonstrate are probably on par with those of adults. In this session we will introduce four cases from around the world of children falsifying the findings of the Lord of the Flies. These include cases from a Maori shipwreck, a Rajastani school district, a Polish orphanage, and the videogame Minecraft. We will conclude the session by trying to keep the general open discussion from spiraling into the subject of consent in child-rearing.
With: Seth Frey
No Attention Without Representation! Can we combine decentralization with democracy and diversity?
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/84
This will be a facilitated discussion exploring the implications of other D’s that are arguably threaded throughout DWeb beyond just Decentralization: Democracy and Diversity (pluralism). How might we best combine them across the web—and where must we make hard choices?
We will have a guided conversation primarily focused on two questions:
Q1: What do we want? (in the web and its governance)
Q2: What are the tradeoffs? (of system design choices).
In other words: What does it mean for an information ecosystem to be well governed? What properties should it have? What properties should it not have? The goal here is to help articulate and understand what a rubric for success might look like—to deepen and concretize our implicit aspirations.
Where can we have our cake and eat it too—and where is that not possible? Where do we want to prioritize decentralization/federation rules/norms/systems, interoperability (~exit), individual empowerment/choice/agency, and where do we want to prioritize shared/global rules/norms/systems, democratic participation (~voice), and collective choice/agency? Where do we want safe silos vs. pluralistic messiness?
To keep things tangible during the discussion, we’ll introduce several frameworks that we can build on (or demolish) in order to help us explore these questions, and may explore specific case studies of approaches from a core facilitator that aim to navigate some of the tradeoffs (sortition/sampling for governance, bridging-based ranking for pluralism).
With: Aviv Ovadya, Jessica Yu, Christina Bowen
Design Patterns and Principles for Ecological Governance
Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/90
This workshop will introduce the DWebCamp community to the stack of projects and mechanisms currently being designed around collective governance of our ecological heritage, and seek the community’s input to guide their ongoing development. In avoiding the pitfalls of the existing carbon commodification systems, these projects seek to embed principles around equitable governance and stewardship to ensure community ownership of accounting, science, and market infrastructure.
Web3 design patterns around coordination and interoperability are being embedded in smart contracts and NFT frameworks to support:
• artistic expression and representation of the unique biodiversity vitality of a bioregion;
• embedding of transparent and equitable resource distribution mechanisms aligned with local governance and empowerment;
• representation of Digital MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) data flows (and corresponding royalty/licensing mechanisms), including from earth observation satellite data and on-the-ground crowdsourced data, verified and validated to standards required by evolving carbon and ecological impact offset programs; and
• the ability to compose these into special drawing rights and other financial mechanisms that express fungibility, thus potentiating widely acceptable “EcoCoins” that would enable a viable full-cost accounting system for the biosphere.
Participants will take away a sense of how Dweb infrastructure provides a seminal opportunity to affect our collective coordination capacity around ecological diversity and vitality, on a local and global level, and hopefully see their own potential role emerging and connecting.
With: Tony Lai, Chris Lejeune
Governance in End-to-End Encrypted (E2EE) Online Social Spaces
SCHED: https://sched.co/19otL
This session will be primarily a discussion focused on how desirable governance principles, from transparency to democracy to accountability, can be reconciled in privacy-conscious, E2EE spaces.
Participants will learn about some of the techniques and strategies developed thus far in the E2EE space to enable certain governance mechanisms, and how to consider the different vulnerabilities these strategies have in the face of different forms of malicious activity. We will contrast the design decisions for E2EE communities compared to non-encrypted social spaces and discuss the tradeoffs inherent to E2EE and potential ramifications for regulation.
With: Amy Zhang
Design and Governance of Interplanetary Timekeeping
SCHED: https://sched.co/199us
This session will explore the possible establishment of a neutral time reference to support interplanetary networks. We will start with an orientation to the process for establishing and distributing accurate time on Earth, the role of time in networking, and the current state of thinking about timekeeping for lunar networks. Lunar networks will be our target application area because the Moon is the first place we will establish a persistent network away from Earth and in-situ time will be a necessary component. Lunar networks are under active design and development these days, so the discussion is also timely. With this context we will contemplate governance protocols for time distribution and synchronization that anchor in time as an apolitical public good for interplanetary activities.
With: Jessy Kate Schingler
Composable Governance at Each Layer of a Stack Decentralized
Sched: https://sched.co/1A03E
What can we learn from the 1990’s CommerceNet future vision of the 7 layer business stack and how could we use principles of composable governance to organize and operate such decentralized systems? We aim to elicit the sharing of good existing examples or new ideas on how to apply composable governance to decentralized organizations and other multi-party systems.
With Michael Zargham, Dazza Greenwood
RxC Voice Hacker Hall Station
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/61
In this session, we will discuss two digital democracy tools—pol.is and Quadratic Voting—and show participants how they can use these tools to aid decision-making processes in their own communities.
We hope that these tools will be helpful to groups who are looking for ways to deliberate at scale, navigate polarized issues, and efficiently identify areas of agreement that can serve as fertile ground for healthy conversations and compromise.
With: Alex Randaccio, Jack Henderson
What should community governance feel like?
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/17
By exploring experimental prototypes for online governance, with CommunityRule, this talk will pose questions about what kinds of assumptions we should integrate into tools for self-governing communities.
With: Nathan Schneider
As Below, So Above: The embodied self as an impactful lever in bringing about radical futures
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/-/issues/69
This lightning talk invites attendees to feel inward, and to understand their embodied self as one of the most important sites and levers for shifting what’s possible in the future of governance and how humans exist together. I boldly posit that only in reclaiming our own agency through courageous excavation and transformation, are we able to create worlds where equitable agency is possible.
With: Taylor Ferrari
Systems Mapping Governance
SCHED (E01): https://sched.co/19clo
How should community-led, decentralized governance work? What might it look like at the scale of the global internet? Does the way you and your teams make decisions and approach governance make sense to others? What patterns, processes, and tools can help a community transition from founder management to community management? This session, working in collaboration with the Redwood Parliament governance track here at dWeb Camp, will bring small groups together for an hour each day to explore these and other questions around decentralized governance. Come bring your questions and insights and get a taste of collaborative strategy mapping!
With: Christina Bowen
The Modules – A Blackbox Live Action Role Play by Black Swan
SCHED (E01): https://sched.co/19o2J
The strip between the ocean and the mountains holds the largest torrent of phi in the Fornica region. It arises near the lower slopes in the north and runs hundreds of miles south, draining the upper valley, bending through the city, and eventually, flowing into the ocean. The abundance of phi made Fonica rich with life and opportunity and has kept the region settled since the beginning of time. On the backbone of this abundance, the institutions of Fonica were built. Without phi, nothing could exist as it exists now.
The Administration of Fornica, having long studied the movement of phi to manage its flow and distribution, now reports a shockingly low level. Unable to determine the best path forward, The Administration calls upon orgs residing in Fornica to perform a speed run through varied strategies for re-distributing phi. They invite Local Org, Online Community, and Platform to play the Game of the Modules, to work together and apart to monopolize or equilibrize the phi that remains. In the recesses of the flow, disparate people gather around the Game of the Modules, divinating their world back into existence.
What are the varied affordances of and differences between the governance of software platforms, online communities, and local on-the-ground collectives? How do decision-making processes adapt and mutate according to the task at hand? What strategies are best suited for managing meta coordination and complex decision-making contexts?
At DWeb Camp, Black Swan will devise a new LARP, in which players by speed run different organizational modules to test their psycho-social affordances.
With: Calum Bowden, Laura Lotti, Ellie Rennie, Kola Heyward-Rotimi
zine workshop!
SCHED: https://sched.co/199qE
An easy and lightweight workshop for how to create zines with limited materials, with time to co-create and collaborate with making zines together! attendees will leave with at least one zine or zine template in hand 🙂
With: Riley Wong
Worldbuilding: a Speculative Fiction Workshop
SCHED: https://sched.co/19SLF
This speculative fiction/governance workshop will engage participants in an experiment with collective worldbuilding. By developing a future chronology of a waterlogged, near-future Earth filled with regional powers vying for survival, the participants will generate a cloud of artifacts that render alternate governance systems on the micro scale. Vignettes, news articles, device schematics, and more will be generated to render the speculative scenario.
With: Kola Heyward-Rotimi, Ellie Rennie
Peer-based social science in the wild
SCHED: https://sched.co/19nw4
Social Observatory is conducting a survey exploring people’s relationship with commoning, social behaviors and self-governance. The survey is comprised of different modules based largely on existing ethnographic research. The survey takes about 30 minutes to complete. We propose to gather submission for this survey through a survey station and/or by going around in Very Important Social Scientist outfits (white lab coats) to survey people in the field. The experience will be accessorized so as to make it fun! Participants who complete the survey will receive a governance token for a data trust implemented in a DAO. We will also host 1-2 design sessions discussing this DAO and soliciting input and feedback.
With: Jessy Kate Schingler, Zarinah Agnew
Co-Creating Online Community Policies with PolicyKit
SCHED: https://sched.co/19ot1
This session is a hands-on introduction to PolicyKit, a tool for building a wide range of governance structures into your online community software. We will go over the common platforms used today for hosting online communities and the ways in which they explicitly encode an autocratic governance model. We will then explain how PolicyKit works to allow communities to design and enact into the software of their chosen platform any governance of their choice, including more democratic and participatory models. We will discuss the kinds of policies your community would like to have enacted in code, and work to implement and deploy some of these policies using PolicyKit in a test community.
With: Amy Zhang
DAO Game
SCHED: https://sched.co/19wHK
DAO Game is a paper tabletop game that simulates nuances of building, running and hacking a DAO. It’s easy to play for up to 2-8 players. We will use the game to discuss and bootstrap notions of governance, fairness, collaboration, hacking and other emergent topics related to DAOs. Participants will learn about a larger spectrum of DAO types, participation methods and security issues around DAOs, and hopefully some ideas for running DAOs in new ways!
With: Amber Case
This is the second of a few reflections on The Redwood Parliament and DWebCamp.
You may also enjoy A Redwood Parliament poem.