Welcome to the Decentralization Research Center report, a monthly briefing on events and research relevant to decentralization, DAOs and governance.

This Month’s Updates

Key Notes

Coming into the new year, we take a closer look at how data governance and decentralized networks can enable a more equitable digital world.

This in-depth landscape report on data stewardship from Octavia Field Reid and Roshni Modhvadia at the Ada Lovelace Institute argues that inclusive data stewardship can disrupt private-sector monopolisation, rebalance power towards data subjects and those affected by data sharing and use, and support collective or public-interest outcomes.

Morshed Mannan, Nathan Schneider, and Tara Merk explore cooperative online communities, looking at decentralized technologies that are designed to limit centralized control, emphasize user voice, and foster participation. Their goal is to highlight “the potential for increasing effective forms of voice that emerges from coupling decentralized technologies and cooperative governance models.”

The BlockchainGov Knowledge Base is a unified archive, designed as a public good that serves as a shared foundation for researchers, practitioners, and anyone interested in the evolving landscape of blockchain governance

Divya Siddarth, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and E. Glen Weyl challenge concepts of “exitocracy” in their piece, Build Network Societies, Not Network States: “We can look forward to many things in a future where the power of distributed networks is much more central to our collective lives. Deeply atomized digital theocratic fiefs are far from the most promising.” 

The Full Rundown

Other stories and research we’ve been tracking for you:

• By enabling secure transactions, ensuring data integrity, managing identities, and coordinating actions through shared protocols, Wulf A Kaal argues that Web3 can foster a governance model that is adaptable, transparent, and responsive to the fast-paced changes characteristic of modern AI technologies.

• Gary Zhexi Zhang argues that in Post-War America, cybernetics inspired countercultural visions of wild complexity. Cybernetic’s Chinese legacy, in contrast, applied the science of technocratic nation-building. As the world tilts towards new geopolitical priorities, it is this latter legacy that may prove more prophetic.

• Project Liberty and Global Solutions Initiative have released their intermediary report on AI and data agency and argue that, At the heart of this challenge is the need to shift the balance — to place control back into the hands of individuals and communities, ensuring that they have a say in how their data, identities, and digital futures are shaped.

• Sandeep Vaheesan‘s new book, Democracy in Power, traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America, a history of cooperative practice that holds significant lessons for coops and DAOs today.

• “If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?” This is the premise of Maxwell Neely-Cohen ‘s exploration of century-scale storage systems, from vinyl to blockchain. However, regardless of medium, “the success of century-scale storage comes down to the same thing that storage and preservation of any duration does: maintenance. The everyday work of a human being caring for something.”

• Jaya Klara Brekke gives a sweeping review of how identity and labour interplay in digital systems and argues for selective disclosure. “Our identity is many things to many people. But increasingly, we are also many things to many systems.”  

• Looking at the future of human and AI labour, Matt Prewitt and Jack Henderson make the case that discussions around UBI need to be replaced by discussions around mutualized PCI: Post-Cognitive Income.

• This report by Claudia Chwalisz and Lucy Reid looks at the work of a growing network of people and places exploring and practising how governance and policy design can draw on more-than-human intelligences.

• Kelsie Nabben focuses on the practicalities of establishing and maintaining AI infrastructure, as well as the considerations for responsible governance. This research provides a foundational perspective to better understand algorithmic accountability and governance within organisational contexts. It also envisions a future where AI is not universally scaled but consists of localised, customised LLMs tailored to stakeholder interests

⁠Andy Hall is the Davies Family Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute. Andy joins Techquitable to talk about the future of decentralization, democracy, emerging tech, and his new paper on the use of liquid democracy for high-stakes decisions in online platforms.

If you’re working on related research or would like to get involved in our work, please reach out to us via [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

Connor Spelliscy
Executive Director
Decentralization Research Center