The Constitutions of Web3 with Joshua Tan | Metagov

again James and his team but we'll be presenting something a little bit more wonky a little more more Dow focused and if you're into governance and public goods there's actually maybe worth sticking around for all right so the projects I'm gonna be giving a presentation on myself my collaborator Anna here is about the Constitutions of web 3 and specifically the Constitutions of many Dows this is a research project conducted at medicov which is a non-profit research Collective that builds standards and infrastructure in this space so really short tldr of what's going on in this talk uh well basically we did a study of constitutions and the reason is because constitutions complement smart contracts I know we care a lot about the code we care a lot about what is actually going inside a smart contract the rights it defines but it turns out you know you really need a constitution or some piece of text a Manifesto or something that defines the culture the rights the values of an organization to make it actually function and we're also going to what it means to actually write a constitution along with a set of recommendations for doing so uh you can find all this and more at constitutions.medicup.org uh there's a kind of long slightly more academic essay along with all the sort of repositories and the data set we use to build this research uh and just one last note this is still very much a work in progress we are still collecting constitutions so if you want to submit your own your or you plan on writing one please do get in touch all right so that was the introduction a quick overlay with the rest of this talk uh Anna will be covering digital constitutionalism and web 3 as well as our analysis of our data set constitutions I'll talk about the recommendations for how to write a dow Constitution as well as wrap up with a little bit of future work on what it means to have a computational constitution all right with that let me pass it to Anna thanks Josh um as some of you maybe know the open source software development has a long tradition of debating the terms of their engagement so we see constitutions as really fundamental to web three and the way we're thinking about it is drawing on a paper by some legal Scholars um who Define digital constitutionalism as a constellation of initiatives that have sought to articulate a set of political rights governance norms and limitations on the exercise of power on the internet so really exciting if academic paper if you're interested in that kind of stuff um so we uh in this research project are really thinking about constitutions as a window into how communities imagine themselves how they enunciate and enact the commitments of the group and they also provide a stable Anchor Point in a dynamic space so to then Define a digital constitution for the purposes of our project here it's a text that articulates a set of political rights governance norms and limitations on the exercise of power within an online community the data set that we collected was based on publicly available governance documents we were interested in selecting constitutions from a wide range of Institutions so we have constitutions or governance documents from large protocol Dao service Dows investment dows nft dows Etc that the diversity was more important to us than having all like the big players in the data set uh we cleaned and coded the data set for internal textual structure and we also coded for some of the content so the goals values and rights articulated in these governance documents um the one part of our analysis included looking at these constitutions as texts this textual documents as narratives as stories uh and we had you know a wide range so from the 300 word blog post to a 30-page legal Charter uh these documents are written in different genres and had different tones so some of them sounded very much like a proper Constitution others had more the kind of political tone of a Manifesto others read like software documentation and others or even more narrative sort of articulating a hero's journey the authorship or voice of these documents was was often in the first person plural they articulated a we bringing this community into being they defined beneficiaries often as all of humanity Global Society or you know just individuals or contributors to the project and there were also elements of exclusion anytime you articulate a Wii you're also excluding people that was done sometimes implicitly by stating values such as community over profit or explicitly by naming for example malicious actors um when we coded for the goals values and rights we ended up finding a few commonalities or the the top goals for example were to create technology spread technology and to create community and the definitions that we uh we also have definitions for these which you'll find at the longer essay online the values included open inclusive free and decentralization surprise uh the rights included create proposal dispute proposal harassment free experience and exit and one thing that we noted about this um that was where web 3 is perhaps different or is adding something to sort of the existing tradition of Open Source software is in the values of inclusiveness and then the right to a harassment-free experience which you know we can probably attribute to a changed political discourse um I have a short example from the one Hive Community Covenant which is significant because there have been a lot of projects that have forked from this Covenant so one of the goals for example is that the one Hive protocol is to foster a healthy Community economy by allocating a steady stream of Honey towards development maintenance and Improvement of the common goods that bring the most value to the one Hive community one of their articulated values was um are connected to the growth of the one Hive Community which they saw as directly related to the community's ability to Foster an inclusive and welcoming culture that people feel proud of and delighted to adopt as their own and then further down in the document there was an articulated right about how to submit a proposal that in order to do that you need to stake honey and that there's also the ability to dispute a proposal through various other kinds of processes thanks Anna So based on this analysis uh and a bunch of interviews including with the um the authors uh the ens Constitution the Dow house Constitution and the Tec Constitution we came up with five recommendations for Dows who are drafting new constitutions they should be digital amendable short expository and early and I'll go into what each of these means exactly but a key underlying fact or assumption that we make when we make these recommendations is that they're intended to produce constitutions that are actually get used in governance like actually useful constitutions I would be clear that there are other reasons you might want you for which like a project might create a constitution so you might be like talking to Regulators or trying to convince some lawyers or investors to hop on board uh or maybe just because you have too much time on your hand you want to write a 30-page legal document and that's like actually a you know Fair description of a lot of different constitutions in this space either way uh we are those are good and valid reasons for creating a constitution those are not the recommendations that's not what these recommendations are geared towards so first off what does it mean to be digital really really straightforward you know we're publishing digital documents uh not like we're not in the 18th century writing something on a scroll uh so your Constitution should be in an accessible format such as a DOT MD file and should use hyperlinks to make it clear that this is what's going on it's not a legal document it is a digital document and you should use that fact uh it should be amendable that means there should be an accessible transparent process for amending or changing the Constitution often this shows up essentially as a as a section like a like a section that covers amendments uh it doesn't have to if you put your constitution on GitHub or gitlab or radical you know the Version Control and the management for change management in those repos basically makes it transparent how A change is happening and you can basically just put it there so it functions as a kind of amenability kind of section uh the Constitution should be short and we really really want to emphasize this do not write 30-page legal documents uh if you wanted to actually get read by any of your community members if you're already if you're involved in Dallas and we're involved in web 3 you know that engagement is such an issue you do not want this document to be an obstacle to engaging with your community with your Dao with your project so really make it as short as possible don't over specify uh you can always add more at a later Point through the through your amendments uh it should be expository that means each goal value or right should come with enough context uh and Exposition oftentimes through an example to sort of say like what exactly like why does this thing matter why does this particular right matter like how does that show up in your engagement with the Dow and it should be early so Constitution should be written and promulgated really at the beginning uh this is for like pretty obvious reasons if you think about it just if you let a community go on without something like this it'll often they'll come up with their own cultures and practices and then it's really really hard to roll those kinds of things back so if you want to make it have your Constitution make an impact it should really be there at the very beginning and uh oh all this has been synthesized into a nice convenient little markdown template that you can pop directly into your repo or into your Dao's website I'll give you a quick example so this is the full this is the entire ens Constitution uh at least Circa uh November 21st uh 2021 uh so I mean I won't go into that but it's just note it's like there's only five actual parts to the Constitution if you dig into a particular part for example name ownership you know there's a really simple description of it and then two examples that sort of described like what does this actually mean when it comes to governance what do we what kind of scenarios are we preventing from happening what does that mean for you as a participant in the ens Dow uh why don't you wrap up so we talked about digital constitutionalism and digital Constitutions are text and what we've done here is analyzed a bunch of text but dowels are also computational entities uh they have Smart contracts which are deployed on chain which actually you know Define governance Define rights right so that was as it says exemplary computational constitutionalism which is a practice of encoding constitutional rights and processes within computational artifacts and the smart contracts for that you know Governor Dow form a computational constitution what that means is in particular all the sort of stuff we've talked about so far all that text all these digital constitutions they're attached to a set of computational constitutions and this is for example uh a quick snapshot of all the sort of like uh you know all the text that we've analyzed this is the underlying contracts that underlies uh some of them is where I have Aragon dollhouse Gardens uh Governor safe snap Etc so some of the key questions when we think about text and computation and consider them alongside are you know for a given right can it be more easily and effectively guaranteed by a smart contract or by some a combination of the uh by a smart contract by a constitution or by some combination of the two like do we really need the smart contract if it's already articulated the right is articulated in the Constitution and vice versa uh right now in through our analysis we observed that constitutions commonly articulate rights that are already you know in the smart contracts like the ability to dispute something or to vote on something like clearly that's defined in the contract right but to what extent should constitutions continue to do this is it like actually really useful um perhaps because you know there are like norms and practices associated with voting that a contract can't actually Define so it actually is quite useful to the in addition Define these rights in a constitution uh and in one case it's sort of written Constitution our Charter defer to the contract uh and in what cases should the opposite be true um these are some like basic questions as we start to explore this idea of computational constitutionalism uh some future work as I mentioned before this is a very much work in progress more investigations needed we're trying to collect more data uh a follow-on project that's being developed in the context of medigov is a set of the governance surfaces of Dow Frameworks this is essentially all the parameters all the more technical sort of like aspects that Define these smart contracts and it cross-indexing that with the the textual study that we presented here uh and finally to submit the template the Dows for a constitution template as a dow Improvement proposal to the um to the downstart standards body I think that's it uh if you are interested in learning more you can grab this QR code or just go to constitutions.medical.org it'll have the essay the guide and the templates I'll give it a leave it up here a little bit longer okay just okay I think people are done um and I just want to give a shout out a shout out to our co-authors uh Max and ellucia and to our contributors uh Jackie and Jasmine from versus who'll put up the website for this uh Nick Johnson founder of UNS who really helps support uh and uh give us some insight into how they authored their constitution and finally Evan mi azano from protocol Labs who really uh encouraged Us in the development of This research project uh and thank you to our sponsors the filecoin foundation as well as uh supporting grants from the University of Oxford and the epsrc in the UK and EU and thank you for attending uh we have like uh two minutes left any questions happy to answer anything okay I guess we answer all the questions pretty complete presentation I mean to be fair I feel like we're used for academics when we're used to presenting an academic conferences and that is uh we're used to providing a little bit too much detail so maybe this is a good thing it was the bad thing here anyways thank you all again appreciate it