Proposal for Metagovernance Project (MP) by Joshua Tan, Louis Kang, and Primavera de Filippi

August 7, 2019

Cyberspace is evolving. Competition, ideology, and technological advances have created the conditions for a new generation of MMOs (e.g. Seed, Minecraft Server Edition), social networks (e.g. Vingle), and collaborative platforms (e.g. DAOstack, Colony, and other blockchain-based applications). This new generation of online applications is changing the rules of online governance. In these worlds, users have the right to self-governance—the right to come together and organize their own social and political institutions. Our goal is to describe, support, and expand that right. To that end, we are organizing an interdisciplinary research group named the Metagovernance Project (MP) as part of a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. Through the project, we will (1) create new, portable tools that allow users to design and operate their own institutions for online governance and (2) conduct experiments to identify more effective and more scalable forms of online governance.

Meta-governance, or the governance of many worlds

In cyberspace, the right to self-governance is not a natural right; it is enabled and circumscribed by the architecture of the platform on which people interact. That same architecture also governs the interaction between separate user-generated institutions. Metagovernance describes these two related roles: (1) enabling and constraining users’ ability to create their own institutions, and (2) governing the interaction between separate institutions, whether they be small groups, large communities, or formal institutional structures. To build the right tool, we must articulate a precise theory of meta-governance. In particular, we must answer three questions:

1. What is the scope of (self-)governance? In other words, what kinds of organizations and agreements can users specify? To address this question, we must build an ontology of possible governance structures.
2. What is the right syntax for governance? A governance structure like “democracy” may mean very different things in a social network versus in a game. In order to build a portable governance tool that works across many virtual worlds, each with their own codebase, culture, and purposes, we need to specify a concise syntax of computer-interpretable primitives. Such primitives might include: contracts (as in blockchains), rights and roles (as in online games), or tasks (as in project management software like Basecamp or Colony).
3. How can we measure governance in virtual worlds? In order to study and compare the macroeconomic, microeconomic, behavioral, psychological, and societal aspects of many virtual worlds across different verticals—gaming and social, to start with—we will build new, flexible econometrics models and machine learning tools, including a scalable way to perform variable integration and conduct real-time impulse-response analysis. The analyses produced should categorize forms of governance across many virtual worlds, and, when provided to users, perhaps inspire new forms of governance.

A portable governance tool, module-by-module

Users want to click a few buttons and get a governance structure. We will build the tools to make this possible. Specifically, we will create a set of portable tools for specifying and implementing a government and economy in a wide range of virtual worlds—from MMOs to social networks—based on the constitution-making scheme originally designed by Lawrence Lessig for Seed. The toolset will include (in likely order of development): (1) an integrated identity system for players and groups separate from the user-identity system in the host world, (2) a extensible contract engine (think Jupyter notebooks) with support for various mechanisms of enforcement, (3) a constitution-writing UI for designing and amending complex institutions, incorporating a range of default laws and rights, (4) logic for voting and consensus, (5) a virtual currency tied to the contract engine, and (6) a dashboard for statistical analysis. The target audience for these tools would, typically, be the users as opposed to the operators of the virtual world. However, operators will be able to customize the tools to some extent.