 Hi, I'm Daza Greenwood from MIT Media Lab and also executive director of law.mit.edu, which is the convener of today's workshop, the eighth annual MIT computational law workshop. Let's, let's get right into it. So my name is Brian, as I mentioned, you know, I work at a, I work as a legal engineer at a company called Upside that helps organizations launch and manage tokens. To that, I'm working pretty closely on a project that is actually launching a social media DAO with over 1.5 million users in the next couple of months. So a bit of a user and social media network that is actually governed by through a DAO with multiple tiers of voting. And then also work as a co-founder for a tokenized real estate fund that is gearing up to launch sometime in Q2 that helps transform rental relationships and real estate deals by making it so that investors are paid off earlier than they usually would be at a stated rate of return that's comparable to what they would normally expect. But in these deals in our model, the tenants actually buy a fractional interest in the property each month instead of paying rent. So it goes from being something of an adversarial relationship to one that's more generative. And both of these examples get to this kind of underlying hypothesis that I have around governance, which is that it can be composed and hence the notion, composable governance. And when I finish my slides, I'll hand it over to Basim and he'll be able to do his intro and talk, expand a little bit more on what I'm talking about. So throughout history, people have used different legal instruments as a means to engineer societal outcomes. So I think everybody's familiar with the code of Hammurabi and how the code of Hammurabi was actually really notable because it gave people notice about what was happening, what the laws were, what the penalties were, and this was a really big transformation. And each of these at a rudimentary level, each of these outcomes can actually be engineered. So all of these different tools can kind of be combined with a business, a legal, a technical, and a cultural level to help the communities get to closer to where they actually want to be. So I think a really great example of this is with precious metal currencies like gold. So the business case for gold, gold has a measurable value. As a legal tool, it reduces transactional complexity by having these denominations that it can be meted out in and traded with. And kind of at the technical level or the architectural level or the properties of gold are such that it can be melted, it can be recast, it doesn't corrode. It's not so heavy as to become unbearable to carry. And as a kind of cultural phenomena, the use of gold and trading increased transactional velocity and predictability and certainty within these bazaars and in markets that were spanning very big geographic distances. So it became easier for trade to happen more globally than locally. And I think as we're getting to this idea of digital contracts and with smart contracts, we're kind of going even further. So among others, the inventions of Bitcoin and Ethereum helped the world realize two things. So first, the concept of a blockchain created a new tool for recording transactions. I don't think I'm telling any tall tales here, but it made it more explicit and more viable to operate without a centralized intermediary. And second, and perhaps more importantly, the creative use of smart contracts built for the needs of individuals demonstrated an ability to explicitly program transactional systems to achieve specified types of outcomes. So because a centralized intermediary is no longer required, it then becomes possible for communities to specify the types of incentives that they want to build into their communities. So this idea is powerful because it shows that communities are able to be composed with explicit sets of rules using various of the tools previously referenced as a mean of affecting the will of groups of all different sizes. So it can be big, it can be little. And this was really the motivating factor for why we wanted to do the special release on composable governance. And we have a bunch of great articles that were published in the initial cohort of this composable governance special release. I will let everybody go to law.mit.edu to check these out more. I was going to spend a bit more time on some of these, but we're kind of time pressed at the moment. And so with that, I'm going to hand it over to Waseem and have him kind of expand on the on these foundations. Yeah, thanks, Brian. I guess we'll take a step back. So just very quickly introduce myself. So I'm Waseem Alcindy. I'm the Technology Editor at the MIT Computational Law Report. And I suppose I'm a bit more familiar with the computational side than the law side. So I'm a guess interdisciplinary scholar using various lenses from scientific, philosophical and artistic traditions to study peer-to-peer headless decentralized systems such as blockchain-based networks and systems. And so, yeah, so we've been talking about this concept of composable governance as we've been preparing to release the papers that Brian just introduced. And we had over the summer, one of our kind of free flowing discussion sessions and idea flow on composable governance. So I thought I'd just spend a few minutes recapping some of the interesting things that came out of that and also taking a step back about, like, you know, why do we want to move towards composability for governance? And what does it mean? What do we get these in terms of affordances and potentials? And then also just a couple of examples from different spheres that might guide away to some of our possible futures. So, yeah, on the screen is just like a few cliff notes where we're, you know, thinking about what we're really trying to do here. So especially with the peer-to-peer headless decentralized system where there is no kind of ordained authority, we're trying to find some kind of way of having this, you know, whatever this assemblage, this kind of patchwork of different entities that aren't necessarily connected, aren't necessarily sharing the same interests or outlooks. How do they come together to the extent that they can find a common path forwards through a community? And so, you know, there have been different kinds of business like business, legal and organisational templates that have attempted to give this kind of coordination affordance over time. And, you know, we're just going to kind of, you know, stay to the present and maybe look to the near future where I'm sure a lot of the people on the call are familiar with the concept of trusts. And we talked about fiduciary duties earlier. And we're also going to talk about DAOS, decentralized autonomous organisations, which I'm sure most of the people on the call are probably familiar with by now. Try to look at some similarities and differences and also commonalities and intents and purposes. And so, yeah, we are doing legal and technical engineering here. Yeah, thanks, Brian. Let's take a step back and think about what do we mean by composability, how are we trying to engineer systems that can give us some kind of new, finer-grained affordances in terms of flexibility and adaptability? And so, yeah, here are four kind of axioms, I suppose you could say, that come from the method of modular politics paper, which is quite seminal work in this area. I highly recommend anybody check it out if they haven't already. And we kind of reduce down the desiderate to like four key categories. So modularity, so that we have this kind of ability to hop, swap and plug and play with different kinds of features and capacities. This could be like a voting system. It could be a consensus mechanism. It could be any one of a series of things put into a like a supply chain, you could say, of governance or a loop in a more cybernetic sense. So expressiveness, the layer should be able to implement as wide a range of processes as possible. So this is again about the breadth, like bringing breadth from the flexibility, portability, so that we can kind of have this kind of platform agnostic sense that I can take a tool from one place, apply it relatively simply in another context and interoperability so that the different parts of these different systems can talk to each other so we can then make networks of networks and systems and systems because we can all see that's where everything is going, right? Everything is getting more connected. And even though the individual entities, individually, like the people or the business entities or institutions, they could be of different sizes, but the connectivity, the measures that we're creating, are the things which are expanding. And next slide, please, Brian. And so, yeah, moving a little bit from theory to practice, so building on the work from, let's take up modular politics, there was this interesting paper on CorePolitikit which is trying to put a lot of this into practice. And so this is kind of like a governance supply flow that I was just talking about, I was talking about it in an abstract sense. Here's something that is kind of like specified and codified. And there are sample models, little bits of code on GitHub repositories. So I highly recommend people navigate over to the MetaGov website to take a look at some of those resources and affordances. Next slide, Brian. And this is a project called Zodiac, which is coming out of Gnosis, which is like a very early DeFi project on Ethereum, which moved more towards collective governance when its initial specification, its initial brief of trying to build prediction markets, it was a bit too difficult to do at the time. So what's been great is they've kind of really wholeheartedly taken a leading role in building a lot of the tooling and infrastructure, not just on Ethereum, but that's like platform agnostic. So it's being used in all kinds of different places. So this is like an app store, like it's an app, you know, self smart contracts, which in itself then creates sort of kind of an app store, like, you know, on your phone or on your tablet. And people are starting to write sub apps or whatever you want to say in there that have different capabilities, like a rage quit feature or a link to an oracle on a chain link to get some external some information external to the blockchain. And so, yeah, this is and then now this is an open ecosystem. So like the community that uses these tools can build more tools. And then that's kind of the the virtuous cycle you really want to see if you're trying to help bootstrap a community. Next slide, please, Brian. And here's a project that's coming a bit more from the art world called Black Swan Dow. This is very interesting because it's using a lot of the logics and the affordances and the concepts which we've realised through 10 years of blockchain governance research, but it's not actually using the blockchain as the infrastructure to enact them. So we're using the blockchain logics and we're using Web 2 infrastructure. And in some ways, if you if you're taking the right things from both places, you might end up with the best of both worlds. So this is a project which is prototyping using collective governance mechanisms for fairer and more equitable distribution of resources in the art world and they're using things like quadratic voting, which I'm sure has been like on many people, many people's minds. And it's something that's come out of what's been popularised by its use in the wild in the blockchain space as a way of trying to mitigate Plutarchies or oligarchies in these systems when one token means one vote. We often end up with very unequal supply distributions of these tokens. And so then the tendency towards Plutarchies is always there. So you can use composability as a means to mitigate against some of these things. So, yeah, this is like a little bit of flavour on this slide. I don't think you'd be able to pick out many of the details here, but the Black Swan project is very interesting because they're pulling concepts from all kinds of areas of the philosophical and technical spectrum to try and kind of spark creative imaginations of people in the art world. And you can imagine that those then feed back into the capabilities and the possibilities of the technology in the future. It's very often the most interesting laboratory for frontier work in technology, surprisingly, perhaps, because the stakes are so low. So in the legal world, if you put a tool out in the wild and it's being used in the practice in the field, then there are stakes there. There's liability, there's lawsuits and all the rest of it. In the art world, it's a bit different. So very interestingly, you can often find in the art world like a sign as to where things might be going. The next slide, please, Brian. And so, yeah, it's coming back to maybe like the flip side. So we've kind of we've had this very positive picture of like, wow, we can compose, we can do, we can use governance tools in new excited ways and have these positive sun win-wins. Well, I mean, it's not all roses. Like I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that. And, you know, sometimes crypto economics is kind of, you know, using the incentives in these blockchain networks with tokens to try and enact behavioral goals. Sometimes it doesn't go the way the designs of the systems intended. So, you know, we've treated these things like uniform solutions like, you know, it's a hammer and all of a sudden what we see in nails. You know, the systems don't necessarily engender trust and confidence in themselves. Like it's not just if we build it, they will come. People need to have faith in the system. However, they reach that. Yeah, there's a tension between accountability. Oh, go ahead, doesn't. Yeah, if we could, I just want to make sure we can leave at least a moment for a question or a reaction. Sure, I'll yield and we'll leave this on the screen as a food for thought. Yeah, was there any final thing you wanted to say by way of rap? I'm sorry, I interrupted you mid sentence. I mean, just really that there's two sides here. Like so if we can live by composability and we get all these affordances, but also like on the flip side, you know, when things go wrong, they can go more wrong because interdependency also breeds contagion. So like I want to say that we can live by composability, but it also might mean we die by it. So just a cautionary tell. Yeah, and and and my my outro will be. Both the discussion on composable governance and chat GPT really get at this idea that law that that our or our P.I. Sandy Pentland has put out that law itself is actually an algorithm. You know, you can think of it as an algorithm with different, you know, different functions, different inputs, different outputs and some of those outputs have traditionally been from people. Some of those are increasingly done by technology. There's an appropriate place and appropriate use for different tools in different locations. And what we should be really thinking about is how we can, how we can design these systems, how we can test these systems, how we can measure these systems and how we can sort of reiterate upon these systems in order to meet the unmet need and unmet demand that exists in the marketplace as it is today. Here here. Thank you so much for that quick update. I know there's a lot more to say. Everybody, two things. Number one, stand by for the second and final batch of articles that that our editorial team is hard at work. And I know some of the authors are here, so I promise you we're hard at work and we will publish that number two. We had a pre-meet and we're going to do a kind of a composable government's focused session once we've published the entire special release. So stand by for that as well.