Welcome to the monthly Decentralization Research Center update.

This monthly briefing will keep you updated on invitations for events and research relevant to decentralization, DAOs and governance.

If you’re working on related research or would like to get involved in our work, please reach out to us via info@thedrcenter.org. We’d love to hear from you!

Connor Spelliscy
Executive Director
Decentralization Research Center

Listen

🎙️ How Congressman Wiley Nickel is promoting openness and accessibility for emerging tech — Missed our 2024 Equitable Tech Summit last week? You can listen here for our fireside chat with Congressman Nickel, which we recorded at the summit. Congressman Nickel speaks to his recent leadership in tech policy, the importance of decentralization, and how academics can best influence policy.

🎙️ RadicalxChange(s): Frank H. McCourt Jr. on reclaiming the internet — In this episode, the founder of Project Liberty draws parallels between the early public oversight of television and the current state of the internet. He advocates for new protocols and a movement inspired by historical fights against oppression to secure genuine data rights and agency online.

Attend

We are still buzzing after the success of the June 6th Equitable Tech Summit in Washington D.C. and would like to thank all the amazing contributors who spoke and attended (see recap, here). Our next event is coming up soon, the DAO Workshop, August 6th, in NYC, presented by the DRC in partnership with Metagov and Tally, where we will explore updates on DAO research and development. See here for more information and to apply to attend.

Hosted by our friends at Public Knowledge, Emerging Tech 2024 is just around the corner on June 14th and will be in the spirit of the D.C. summit. Apply here to attend.

And if you’re interested in digital identity, we highly recommend you attend the online event held by our friends at the Harvard Ash Center tomorrow, June 13th from 12:00 - 1:15 pm ET entitled The Silent Strings of Proof of Personhood. Register here.

Read

Some of the most relevant work on decentralization from the last month, including pieces by DRC Fellows, Affiliates, and Researchers, as well as the wider community:

• Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and the Plurality community present their vision of how technology and society can create a new era for democracy.

• Project Liberty announces the publication of a draft Governance Framework (v.1) for the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP).

• Alex Goh argues for the decentralization of AI on technical, philosophical, ethical, and economic grounds.

• Nathan Schneider outlines the implicit feudalism inherent in our interactions with the internet and one another. “I call this feudalism ‘implicit’ because people carry it out unconsciously. People use their online spaces to talk about democratic politics, and tech companies often say they are ‘democratizing’ something, whether it is free speech or food delivery. But in practice, democracy is usually missing in these spaces.”

• Algorithmic Pluralism offers a structural approach toward achieving equal opportunity in systems of algorithmic decision-making, with authors Shomik Jain, Vinith Suriyakumar, Kathleen Creel, and Ashia Wilson.

• Taming the "institutional privacy dilemma," Eric Alston and Sofia Cossar explore the tension between privacy rights, encryption and public institutional enforcement in the digital age, and the role of ZKPs.

• Members of the Collective Intelligence Project and AnthropicAI present Collective Constitutional AI and the first LM fine-tuned with collectively sourced public input.

See you next month.

The DRC Team