 Hello and welcome to the law.mit.edu computational law reports idea forum on composable governance. Today we're going to hear from several invited speakers with some flash talks on the notion of composable governance, what it is and what it could be. For your convenience is our itinerary for this forum and without further ado, why don't we jump right in with Joseph and Natalie to learn more about Kataba and recent proposed regulation that speaking as the as a forum organizer, we hope you'll all take special notice of and if you're able to share your own ideas and get back to these folks. With answers to their questions. So with that, Joseph Natalie, please take it away. Hi everyone, it's an honor to be talking to all y'all just like to briefly tell you about the Kataba digital economic zone. So within the United States, state tribes by sovereign Indian governments have the same authority generally speaking as us states, and sometimes even higher, especially in the realm of economic regulation. So the Kataba Indian nation on February 19. They passed a law which created a special jurisdiction within their own reservation, which allows it to have its own unique distinct commercial code and regulatory body. And that regulatory body is capable of registering companies the same that Delaware Secretary of State is capable of registering companies and also issuing and promulgating regulations on top of their unique commercial code that regulates the conducts of businesses that are virtually domicile within the zone, also fairly similar to the Estonian ideal. And so what we're doing right now is we're issuing the initial regulations that put digital assets under existing law, as well as recognizing dows as different legal entity types that are recognized all across the United States in the world like LLCs or unincorporated nonprofit associations. The real key part of this in the digital asset space and in the digital governance spaces, ultimately governance and sovereignty is tied to land is tied to sovereigns. So unless you solve for that jurisdictional piece, a lot of the problems won't be solved. But the problem is with most governments, especially ones in the United States, especially our federal government. Those jurisdictions are unbelievably slow in the education process to get to the point where we can have solid statutes and regulations that meet the needs of frontier technology will take too little too long. Versus Native American tribes, and especially our model where we have a nimble five person commission creating regulations, we can move infinitely quicker than even the smallest state bodies. For instance, Wyoming, Wyoming is known for being the digital asset state. And while they have made great strides, ultimately, they are a body that relies on on that has 300,000 citizens that only needs two months out of the year and has, you know, thousands of businesses, some of them have existed for hundreds of years. And as a consequence, there's special interest that don't allow them to move as nimbly. Our body is able to move nimbly and focus on, you know, what are the best regulations for the industry as a whole and provide better solutions for everyone. And so one of the first things that we're focusing on through our advanced notice of regulation is that we're providing a regulation for dows to classify them as legal entities within the zone. So we invite all of you to come to our discord, one of the first governments in the world to use discord for their commenting period, where you can give feedback about So that was a time about, you know, upcoming down regulation answer the questions we'd love it to co create with you some of the best dial regulations and digital governance regulations in the world. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And we really do appreciate that bell going off and so let this jurisdiction be a model for all of us, not only in their policymaking, but also in their timekeeping. And so could you just let everyone know exactly where would people go if they would like to learn more about this and if they'd like to join the conversation and provide answers to the questions that you're showing here in your advanced notice of proposed rulemaking. So not only showing it on the screen in its own authority.io and you can look in upcoming regulations and you could have access to our online forum for the advanced proposal of rulemaking as well as enter our discord. Outstanding. That's perfect. Thank you very much. Okay, now. Next, Nathan Schneider, you are up, sir. Okay. So I'm not a lawyer. I, you know, come to the law to this conversation through the law of code. And I really appreciate the chance to to share some of the stuff I've been involved in a lot of the work in the past few years I've been doing has been framed around a kind of deepening historically grounded sense of how bad online spaces are for kind of the basic practices of democratic governance. So I've made some kind of passing observations about comparisons to basic civic associations, like my mother's garden club dealt into the historical context into why things like elections and rules that hold power holders accountable are just not present in online spaces. There are also kinds of interesting historical twists and turns that help explain why like some of the things we expect in ordinary civic and political life are just not present in online spaces. And this really matters, particularly as these spaces become so important politically and socially, as well as educationally, what are they training us for what kinds of politics. Are we learning to practice when we live in online space. Additionally, as I was developing this, this critique this this frustration, I came in contact with the meta governance project then a very nascent research collective, so are going to be hearing from as part of it as well. There's a group of practitioners and researchers who are exploring how to build governance layers for the internet. And one of our, our initial forays was a paper called modular politics, an exploration of what a preferable approach to governance and online space could look like and here's where we get to the composability stuff. We end up landing on this approach based on modularity where where different kinds of governance primitives can be integrated and subtracted and connected to each other to make governance a creative space akin to, you know, a plugging ecosystem or an app store. They should be modular, expressive, so you can express a wide variety of governance practices portable so practices developed in one space might move to another easily and interoperable so different spaces can talk to each other and interact with each other. We present this as a framework through which we could see a kind of flourishing of creative governance experiments in in a variety of technical contexts and since developing this paper we've been exploring a few different implementations that we're going to share, just a couple of of of our experiments one is the medic of gateway which is built on the policy kit software project by developed by Amy John at the University of Washington. It's a API based system that allows you to embed governance actions that are programmable in popular social spaces from slack and discord and so forth also to spaces that carry financial resources like open collective. So you can actually make a decision through emojis and slack and open up approve a financial transaction on open collective. So enabling governability through these kinds of modular processes in popular social spaces. Another experiment that I've been leading is called mod Paul it's a plug in written in the language Lua for for online games. So Lua is a widely used language for online for extending online games. So mod Paul is a base layer framework to allow you to build modules to create governance in groups in in gameplay. So it was first built for this Minecraft clone called mind test we're next going to be developing a web interface. But again the idea is, can we bring this kind of composable modular governance system into into gameplay. So implementation not coming out of the meta governance project per se but people who are kind of friendly is zodiac which is a modular expansion pack for for dows run out of gnosis which is a popular multi signature wallet. So this is just an example of how others are starting to use some of these ideas, and, and make modular governance systems into a new normal. Thanks so much. And we'll be sure to share links to those resources on the event page when we publish it. So speaking of the event page in publishing. Next up we have our very own editor in chief of the MIT computational law report, the very publication that will be putting out the composable law special release. So let's take the hot seat. So thanks to everybody for joining really excited to have you all here with us and to to be around so many people who are experimenting with the same notions that we've been thinking about for for longer in in many cases I think than we have. What we really see as our role in trying to accomplish this is to get people to think about this in a in a critical way so we're we want to be a megaphone for everybody who's already out there doing great stuff. And to the extent that people are experimenting with this we want those experiments to be highlighted we want more people to participate with them and we want to really get into this, you know, kind of system design notion of like composability is something that deals with the interrelationship of all these different components, whether it's a component on a blockchain whether it's a component not on a blockchain because when you think about, you know, coming up with playbooks or toolkits or guides or, you know, wizards to set things up. You know, some of it might be the case that some things should be on a blockchain but I think in a lot of cases they're going to be instances where it would be much preferable to use less sophisticated technology less energy, consumptive technology, more informal technology. I think the way that technosolutionism is kind of taken hold and taken root and a lot of the areas of our society that have the biggest voices in the space is something that isn't driving the bus in the direction that we would want it to be. And so in order to counterbalance that in order to kind of provide some type of sense making function as well in addition to the megaphone for the great projects that are out there. We really want to do our part to make the to make all this more responsible and to that end, we decided to have this special release or this. What are we calling it? Are we calling it? Yeah, it's a special release on composable governance. And so we're just going to highlight as many papers as we can get to come through that discuss this topic. We're going to highlight as many experiments we're going to highlight as many as many projects as many questions as many videos as we can and we're kind of we started with the idea of doing something on like a timeline but now I think it's it's evolved to a point where you know this this will probably be something of an ongoing effort to continually provide that megaphone and that sense making ability in the space as it continues to evolve and grow because I think that's something that's going to be necessary. While all these new technologies are coming out and while people are still understanding what's the responsible way to do this. How do we do this without paying people's money without risking people's livelihood and without without degrading our value systems in a way that keeps us from putting the cart before the horse. And so that's kind of my, I don't know, gung ho called to contribute so I'm very excited and very grateful for you all and looking forward to looking forward to the rest of the talks here. And with that I'm giving, I'm seating my hot seat back to that. Thank you very much. Ed her in chief right there. Brian Wilson. So let's see. And we're on a roll with Brian's now. And so, next up, Brian month, who is just published a very interesting article exploring the shape and the, I guess, description of governance and doubts. And so Brian, thank you for joining us today and you've got the floor. Thank you Daza. So, essentially, myself and a group of colleagues from Canada and England came together to think about the aspects of corporate governance. And we looked at decentralization decentralized governance as a way of taking us into the next millennium you know into the into the future. And since this is what the current. And where it is in the current society decentralized finance blockchains and smart contracts and looking at it from a position of England and Wales. You have the law commission saying that smart legal contracts can be a recognized form of law, and they're currently doing research on the legal recognition of dows in England and Wales as well. So we're looking at at this in terms of the future of corporate governance. The dows present themselves as a solution to the principal agent problem. And they, they are sort of appealing in that the membership, you can be any, anywhere in the world really. And at the click of a button, you join a doll, it doesn't have this sort of strenuous interview process or you don't have to have multiple qualifications to be part of that, as long as you share the objective and the agenda, and you have afford thinking sort of momentum towards something, you can literally all gather together and get it to happen. However, the law does not address the salient aspects of this in terms of governance and liability. So you have the BZX Dow case happening in the US right now, where it's just been filed and we're looking at the liability of members of the Dow, whether they're jointly or several severally liable. And it presents interesting questions, because people, there's been assumptions in the community that if it's not incorporated, then the default is that it's a partnership. But this has not been cited strongly in law. It's still very at early stage and people are making assumptions. So is it safe. In our study, we are trying to understand whether the dows can be safe for corporate governance, or is it just an illusion when it comes to corporate governance. So our sort of summation because we are further developing the our research, we are suggesting that it's not an illusion as much as it's in its infancy. There is still further research to be done. And the more you experiment with it and learn from the mistakes that have happened in the past. For example, looking at the instance of the Dow hack itself, or the Solana emergency powers that happened, the proposal that needed emergency powers that happened sometime on the, was it the 19th of June, sometime last week or last week but one. There are such elements. So the Dow is supposed to be fully automated. But we are seeing aspects of lots of human interaction with the dows. So is it safe to say that a fully autonomous Dow is restricted to X sort of work, and dows that have human participation could be set aside for why sort of work. And if we look at it together or separately, what does it do for the future of corporate governance so that's where we are. We're still exploring our research and we're trying to really go into the, you know, the heart of things and develop further on this. Thank you for that. Thank you so much, Brian. And we will link to that paper as well and look forward to your future, your future work raises some interesting questions. And so, I guess that is me next. Okay, and so since I'm already talking. Hi, as a Greenwood, and I, you know, what's been said so far has raised a lot of interesting, you know, kind of thought cascade. So let me just start by start with a couple of those and then tie it into my general topic, which is situating this idea forum and the special release on composable governance in the MIT computational our part in the broader MIT context. So start with, when Brian Mundo was just speaking, part of what I was just thinking was, okay, when we apply the notion of composable governance in the blockchain and specifically the Dow space, which is I think a lot of people's first assumption of what the context is. A, as Brian Wilson, I think, took care to point out, we're not speaking exclusively in Dow or even in a blockchain context necessarily when we ask the question what is or what could composable governance be. Certainly in that context and and I think because of all the innovation and the the rapid pace of innovation in the Dow space. The action is right now. And that's given us the opportunity to speak in fairly creative ways about composable governance, but, but it's important to say not exclusively there, but starting with that though, you know, D is for decentralized a is for autonomous and O is for organization. And when you look at dowes. I think each one of those words is we can be strained. Like they're not necessarily particularly decentralized in fact, they're not, you know, and that's just, you know, with some of that is because it's a journey toward decentralization fine. They're not autonomous, you know, they're they're heavily driven by people and then giving a lot of the actions and discord and, you know, they're not the dream of like, you know, of ultimate autonomous, you know, algorithmically self organizing kind of things. And, you know, with all due respect, some of them are barely organized. And so, so. And yet, as I said, and I hasten to add, like, it's really interesting and some of the stuff there, like there's so many diamonds in there. And I want to thank, among other people with seem and Zargum and others who have taken care to educate me about what's happening at the frontiers of this space and I've seen some, I've stood in the mountain, and I've looked over the horizon and I see that there's some good stuff. It's worth looking at. It's worth talking about. It's worth making, making usable. So, you know, I'll say one quick story. And then are you keeping time? Yes. Am I at time already? We're good. Okay. And so one quick story is in 1997. In the last century, when I started at MIT, my first project was something called, was something called Open Gov. And it started based on this local office that I was elected to something called town meeting, New England town meeting. And so we've got this holdover from pre-revolutionary days before the U.S. Constitution, where people in a given town would get together and they would, oh, I think it might be a different one. Anyway, it would get together and they would, if you lived in the town and you were an adult, you got one vote. And so it's still, basically, we'd get together once a year and we'd sort of set the local town tax policy. We figured out how much money is going to police and fire versus schools, which is like half the budget, you know, filling potholes with self-govern ourselves at the local level. It was basically a close to platonic ideal of democratic governance. People would stand up and they would say real stuff and we all knew each other and we would fight and we would agree and we would figure stuff out. And it mattered. And so I started in this first project basically seeing if we could translate the fundamentals of how we organized ourselves and came to these decisions to do so online, which itself was revolutionary. And so anyway, and then what I quickly discovered was that was kind of interesting, but it wasn't interesting enough for MIT, even though it still is an interesting thing. If you look at, you know, parliaments and other things like we barely can do Roberts rules online, but the question that it changed to, which I think is still relevant today was, yeah, sure, you could do something with, you know, like 150 people online. But what can we do with the unique properties of the internet and the web, which is burgeoning at that point, that that would allow something that we never could have done before. And so the question quickly became and has been ever since, how could we self govern ourselves at the scale of 10,000 people or 10 million people. Could we do that in a span of the same amount of time it would take to go to a New England town meeting of like several hours or a couple of days of a few sessions. You can't do that with people raising their hands and speaking one at a time would be here for 10,000 years. But we could do it in ways where we can start to collapse ideas or use collaborative filters or to use kind of rounds and voting mechanisms and clustering techniques and there's a lot of ways you could do it. These dows are providing a lot of interesting ways to collapse a lot of ways to do idea generation, selection of prioritization, you know, finding the ideas coming to decisions, and then even some of the more of the mechanisms of funding and things like that, we can, these are good things to be asking and there are ways there's got to be ways to do this is going to be various ways to do it that will be appropriate for different environments for public sector self governance for corporate self governance for unions for political parties for, you know, you name it for federations of universities for, for indigenous peoples, you know, for neighborhoods. And so I sincerely hope that we can use this time together and the special release to start to identify sort of like to Nathan's point in that article, what would some of the components be what would be some of the core capabilities that we would want to orchestrate and architect together to form different to compose different systems of governance. What are what are those questions, what are those capabilities where those functions, where do you draw the lines and how do they connect together. Those are, that's my, my, my big question. And we care about this here. And I might be partly because this is coming out of the media lab, which is a place that does try to do cross disciplinary or, you know, almost anti disciplinary work and law and economics and technology and sociology and all these things are are implicated with governance you know governance is not one thing and arguably it's the pointy end of the spear for everything. I mean for for like a lot of things. We talked about corporations, Brian didn't other things, and where at time. And so, and so, so this is part of our part of the portfolio of things in the media lab, where we bring people together from different disciplines, set a hard challenge and try to rapid prototype and and and rapid implementation for potential solutions. Last thing I'll say is, well Brian said this may be the beginning of of an ongoing conversation in the form of our publication. Of course, we punctuate that when we actually publish things. We're going to talk forever. So do submit your ideas on the form on a lot of MIT.edu forward slash composable governance will evaluate them and we will publish something we may continue to publish after that but but we are aiming in 2022 to wrap up package and like birth a standalone special release. Join us for that. And now desert. And so one of the bigger thinkers who I've ever met in the area that I would say broadly is sort of meta governance and engineering is Sarkam and thank you very much for taking time out of your day Z to join us and won't you please share some of your thoughts on composable governance. Yeah, I will do so. I think it's interesting we've talked a lot about automation and autonomy, because I'm like an automation engineer right I studied in a robotics lab, and I'm epistemic trespassing on governance and law hardcore here so feel free to check me there. But the first thing I want to point out is that you know this concept of code is laws prevalent in the sort of certainly in the Web three space but I think it's a really important question that sort of code structures the field of action for others or governments, but interestingly in this sort of estimation decision making kind of engineering field, we call our algorithms policies. And I've been sort of pushing this semantic shift from code is a lot to algorithms as policy, because it actually evokes a different mental model for the here. And I think it's more alignment aligned with reality. In practice, I frequently have to disambiguate what I mean when I say autonomy, especially because the right half of this tree is what I'm used to from estimation decisions or robotics world. You know we as designers sort of give the systems goals optimization objectives, essentially we imbue them with their purpose, and they have a degree of tactical autonomy. I might argue that we give we have strategic autonomy, or some goal setting power, even as engineers who design systems that actually imbue a degree of autonomy in the, in the actors to pursue those goals. And that stays in contrast to, you know the political notion of autonomy, which is generally intention between sort of the individuals making decisions for themselves, versus joining into sort of collectives that have their collective autonomy or the ability to accomplish things maybe that the individuals wouldn't be able to at the cost of sort of constraining themselves some. And so with this sort of juxtaposition of the more legal or governance view of autonomy and this more like technical, a more functional view of autonomy. I've been working for actually some years on frameworks for like sort of designing automations that respect the sort of input information from humans and that way in which the human decision making and machine decision making or algorithms might actually be coherent. So this is a brief overview of a working paper I'm writing with Shamsheet Shorosh and have been actually for years. The main points here is that we're taking the concepts from dynamical systems that are used for automation in an engineering setting, and trying to apply them in a sufficiently abstract way that we get some of their powers for problems above and beyond in physical systems, and a big part of that has been foregoing a degree of predictability around what people will do, and focus on what can be done, and doing what we call reachability analysis and contract theorists, computational economists and some of our example explorations have included things like insurance contracts and other topics. I'm not sure if that's the example that will a fifth appear in the paper that we're working on right now. We're like, kind of thinking we're going to break out examples from foundations and then do something later on a range of examples. But since the theme today is composable governance, I kind of want to point out quickly what composability looks like in this world so this is a kind of canonical like automation problem you have a plant in a sensor, and you're able to sort of this plant is the way the system sensors how you measure it, but that thing can then be augmented naturally to something like this, which includes some sort of computation of an error or a gap from a desired outcome and a decision making actor like a controller. This kind of composability of the logical blocks is the benchmark for the engineering sort of automation world, and it doesn't necessarily mean that there's no information about the outside world. So my main point today is that I believe it's actually really important to a distinguish what we mean about sort of how we come to decisions and set goals, versus how we design systems that pursue or attempt to fulfill those goals, and then ultimately leaving more in the humans to make decisions about whether or not the system that they are participating in is actually achieving achieving its goals, or whether the measurements that we're currently using of those goals are still in line with our desired outcomes and that brings us back around to algorithms as policy, because what I showed you is actually what we would call a control policy, and a control policy pursues a goal, and it can be evaluated against that goal and changed if and when it's So, you know, regardless of whether we're talking about algorithms implemented by governments that represent the policies that they passed in a legislative branch, whether we're talking about the algorithmic policies for, let's say, a moderating content in a Web two platform, or whether we're talking about something like a crypto economic policy and Web three in all of these cases we're actually talking about algorithmic policies and very much they are composed. That's the end of my little talk. Thank you so much. Before we go on to what seemed, could you go back, could you slide share again please and go back to the second to last slide, and for the Lucid chart for the Lucid chart and specifically the diet, the engineering diagram, where you showed this before yet after that after that this one. Um, could you just say a couple of words for those people that may not be familiar even with a different screen parameter space and state space and just you know how the arrows show a state change and what a parameter Yeah, so sorry this was meant more as a visual aid but so this is a like pretty canonical dynamical system it's actually describing a linear time invariant canonical form control system and the difference between the parameters and the states here are that they sort of represent the things that are flowing so this is a, you know, a thing that can act it's doing like if you were looking at a data feed generated by this, it would look like the states, but points in the state space, X, you why and E, and you would see a sequence of changes in Y's and E's over time as it evolved, but the parameter space these are the descriptions of, let's say the physical characteristics if this is a physical system and they're going to be mostly constant or in practice they're constant in this representation, unless you create a higher level model that is a physical system. Now, there are engineering cases where you have another higher level system that's job is to actually estimate these values, because in a lot of engineered systems we don't have the degree of certainty that most people think we have a, an abstract representation of the system, but we're constantly trying to update our best estimate of the current description of that system. So, there's a whole, you know, fields that sort of is predicated on this kind of construction, and it's generally the field that's used for for automated decision making. So, I thought it was relevant. And so just to, and just to bring it home a little bit one, one could imagine. If one was a grad student suffering in my class in 97, looking at like Robert's rules, for example, a rule for parliamentary debate and identifying parameters that would go into discussions. You know, the inputs and state changes like from a proposal to an amendment to, to, you know, something being adopted or rejected, for example, I mean it depends what level of abstraction we're looking like in arguably you could go super micro and one of those parameters has its own, you could assign states to it. And you know, but, but, but an engineering diagram is precious and being able to understand something from genuine engineers and begin to bring that into legal practice and into product design and and into into a broader specific conversation even about self governance and governance systems I think is is just so very, very valuable. So thank you for taking the moment to use that as a visual aid but also to give us like a little bit of a flavor of some of what goes into an engineering diagram because I do think that there's some amount of fluency everybody can have about about the processes and systems that we live within. And ultimately, you know, self governance is going to be a matter of engineering to the extent that we live in cyberspace. So, oh, enough of that and there I am talking again. And so now we have in the healthy was seen the technology editor of the MIT computational law report. Everybody, I won't take too long, because I think it'd be nice for us to have a little bit of time to discuss and chat after we've heard from everybody has been really nice session so thanks for, thanks for coming. And I just while we've been talking I don't have any planned remarks but I was just thinking, had the phrase in my mind going around live by composability died by composability so I wonder if, like we can find some cautionary models, like, you know, and I'm principally a specialist in the kind of blockchain milieu. And I think at the very least that depending on the regardless of what your opinion about blockchains is, at the very least, we know that we can build toy models with them. Like and we can exemplify various economic models or governance models or whatever else from that. And so, yeah, I wonder if we could think about some of those because there have been quite a few interesting shenanigans like things happening in the last few weeks. And so, what with the economic realities of these networks changing quite suddenly. And so I was just reading a Twitter post by the not pseudonymous researcher has to earlier, where they're making some proposals for make it out governance. And in there, they were talking about this concept of a governance supply chain, which I think is not that far away from what both as argument does or just talking about. So they broke them down, broke this governance supply chain into four stages. The first one is vision, then strategy and tactics, then implementation. So I think it's kind of a general kind of a schema of how to think of like the pipeline of governance, you know, how to make governance to be how we decide about the stuff that we do. I also think it's interesting to think about scale. Yeah, and also like as you're talking about outcome evaluation. Yeah, so we close that loop rather than having just as a flow. And I think, you know, in terms of the we talked also about kind of, you know, what kind of systems or communities are we governing. And we heard from Katalba, which is actually really interesting example because I think that's a fairly kind of let's say like governance system. It's not a small collective. It's not a nation state somewhere in the in the middle. I think that's, that's very interesting. And so, yeah, so for me I can see on this kind of access of scalability or if you've got like, you know, done bar scale or something, you've got like the individual, then you've got like small groups you might call those colleagues, squads, you've heard people call them, then you might scale up to communities and then you might scale up to this notion of a public, you know, people at large. And so I also think that it's it's important for us to think about what we're governing and what's what scale the system is meant to govern. And that will inform like how we design and apply the most appropriate tools. And just to look back to this idea I had at the start of the kind of live by, live by composability and die by composability. So I was thinking about this concept of interdependency which has been around for a long time, but it's been kind of growing in its kind of gravitas, particularly in the in the web three space. And interdependency sounds like it's the sort of thing that sounds great. And I think when the sun is shining, the idea of interdependency is great. You're kind of building resilient systems, one on top of each other. It's not about when the winter comes, you know, it seems that we're in some kind of winter now, at least in the world of blockchains, and do does this kind of interdependency, then start to lead to fragilities, like more fragilities than you would have in a less composed or less composable system. And, you know, I think we may have, you know, most of us have probably noticed that the, the change in sentiment in the crypto markets was triggered by a few quite large catastrophic events. And some of those events were made worse, because of the governance rights attached to certain tokens. I'm thinking about a terror and lunar here, where at one point in that process of that project, and unwinding was that there was a huge mint of token supply to avoid a potential governance attack. There was a worry that a whale or a malicious actor could pick up a whole bunch of tokens at a very low price and execute, you know, a basic takeover, political takeover of the network. And usually these things kind of end with the treasury being reassigned to the entity that did the attack and then cashing out. Fortress was another example of that kind of thing happening. So yeah, I just wanted us to bear in mind this idea that, you know, composability is, can just like many things in technology and organizational philosophy, it can be a blessing and a curse depending on the And the last thing I want to say is like the concepts that we've developed through 10 to 13 years of blockchain thinking can be applied outside the blockchain domain. So we can use some of these ideas and notions templates and, you know, so we can try to leverage what we think of as the affordances and idiosyncrasies of the systems, whilst perhaps side stepping some of the limitations or the constraints. And so this is an interesting kind of Web 2 meets Web 3, I guess, interface. And there's an interesting example which I'll just point to now, which is called the black swan Dow. And this is kind of arts focused project, which is using the logics of blockchains. So there's kind of like discretized time like block time logic, looking at using things like quadratic voting so different kinds of voting mechanisms, but they're doing that on Web 2 technological substrates. So they're not using the blockchain per se. And so, yeah, I will yield and hopefully we've got a bit of time to throw open for discussion on the floor. Thank you so much. That's cool. That really got me thinking. So, we'll take this moment to thank everybody that has provided a flash talk for this inaugural initial, I guess I should say, I don't want to suggest it'll be annual. This initial idea forum on composable governance and and again encourage you everybody to learn more and to submit your own ideas for the for the upcoming special release at law.mit.edu forward slash composable governance. Okay, and now so that gives me an opportunity to have an edit point where I can sort of wrap that up and publish it. And now it's fun time where we get to talk to each other. If it's okay with everybody I'll keep recording just in case somebody like drops a gem out there that will all regret not being able to replay and forever on infinite loop. So I want to, I want to welcome Susanna, who has was able to join us partway through. And I hope we'll be able to provide a flash talk at a future one of these for she and I met when when you're at consensus, and you've gone on to do some really interesting things in the, I guess, in the space, let me just say so, if you'd like to introduce yourself, please do and then the floor is open for anyone that would like to make any remarks or ask any of the other speakers. Any questions or any other comments. Thank you, it's good to be here and sorry, I was not able to join for the flash talks. Ironically, here at the Austin Convention Center where we're going to be holding the independent convention. In October for the next upcoming election here in the United States, and we're sitting in prayer with indigenous peoples here. And it's kind of interesting that the parallel between this discussion with these evolved forms of governance and structures that we can plug people into. So I'm really curious to hear what came through here and this during this workshop. And yeah, a little bit about myself I've worked across many different sectors after consensus I started a nonprofit called peace accelerators and really activated local communities to create solutions to solve global global challenges, short in finance and philanthropy and now currently creating a think tank called the Institute of Natural Law and Governance. And with communities that we are touching will be co creating a new economic framework called the rights of nature economic framework. And I'm curious about how we can utilize web three and smart contracts to enable natural ecosystem to be participants in our economy and enter in our governance. So that's my current focus right now. Also working on an NFT docuseries called never forget this and building out a fund called the regeneration fund. But really guided by original principles of the indigenous peoples have been practicing for centuries. And so I were learning from these indigenous peoples to codify those principles into these frameworks and yeah excited to figure out how we can collaborate. You're here. Thank you so much and she only scratched the surface that's a lot more than that. And I encourage you, Suzanne to connect with could one of the folks from Kataba maybe put a link into your project again here because she may not have access to the prior chat. So you should check out these folks from Kataba who I'm meeting now only live for the first time but they're doing really interesting stuff with Native American tribe and and a new kind of economic autonomous zone focused on possibly thousands from other things that are compatible with what you're interested in. I encourage you Suzanne to if you, if you don't mind to also answer the questions that they published in a, in a request for responses to notice a proposed rulemaking. You can find at the link that they provided. Okay, so with that done. Now that everyone knows each other at our cocktail party. Discuss, I'm going to go on mute so I'm not the one talking. Nathan, do you want to jump on the, do you want to jump on the mic and ask you another question. Oh, I didn't really, I didn't really have a question. So much is just saying that I was curious about the natural learning more about the natural rights framework I've been. And in the chat there an essay I've been, I just published on human rights, encoding human rights and blockchains and, and, you know, I think it's relevant to this discussion just in the sense that it's an attempt to kind of wedge open the question What kinds of policies are we not putting in protocols that we could be and perhaps should be what, what kinds of rights are protocols already recognizing what kinds of rights should we be expecting that they recognize particularly when we start to imagine the kinds of abuses they could introduce. Super pertinent to the work I'm doing thank you for sharing Nathan. I forgot my, my email and chat and anyone wants to reach out. I'd love to schedule a call. Thank you. Is there really, I do have a question I guess since there's a little bit of a low. What's the relationship between the work, Natalie that you had done with sea steadying. And, and that take on jurisdictions that are not, you know, tied to traditional, you know, like nation states, and what what's happening now with top. So they are similar and different similar in the sense that they are both approaches to regulations that focus on the local aspect, but they are different in their approach. I think it is more alternative type of governance, see steadying bears to special economic zones are embedded within a nested structure of governance from and thinking about scale, global. We're going to talk about nations being at the center by global nations cities and special economic zones at the same level. So the, yeah, and they both have different approaches to to how they see Terry, Dory to, and, but definitely zones. There's already 5,400 of them across the world, different types of zones. And so one is more idealistic and versus zones is actually something that already exists and we are very familiar with them you have things like Dubai, Shenzhen and free trade zones all across the world. So, yeah. I think we're experiencing. Oh, enlightenment again. And then, and Joseph, I saw just looking at your LinkedIn that there was a theme that I think you referred to as competitive governance. Could you maybe just say a few words about what that phrase means. I also prefer the term innovative governance but the point being is for one trying to provide the best service for citizens or residents or people that you're providing governmental services to, rather than treat them as you know just, you know someone that that you're not accountable to, and oftentimes that means taking some principles common in startups and nimble organizations and applying it to the principles of governance. And especially economic zones like ourselves. That's innate to the case because if you don't provide a better governing services and let's say Delaware or Wyoming will simply say well I'd rather just register a company in Delaware they provide better service but if we can provide better technology for them to have a more experience, provide better regulations that are more accommodating to in the market, then we'll be able to have larger market share than if we just simply treat that as a given, like many other governments do. So I kind of want to jump in we were talking about sort of the various scales of governance and one thing that I've observed and people can jump in if they've observed differently but historically we think of governance as being sort of like scale like you know sort of local and then you've got regional and you might have a national stage or then ultimately some sort of, you know, diplomatic protocols that govern a global stage but you know in the modern era. And the, the networks are not quite so clean, nice daggs right we have, even if you're just incorporating in a state somewhere like Delaware because you like the, the particular affordances of that states and corporation laws. So we're already starting to see lots of like cross wiring and I think that the technological implementations of various, let's say policy regimes are increasing the degree to which these graphs have a vastly different topology, than they might have historically had again, this is a governance topology where you know jurisdictions have direct interactions through, let's say shared constituents, variety of other ways that they might have interactions within a graph. And I make this observation because having worked on estimation decision control systems embedded in networks, one of the most important findings is actually that the graph topology matters a lot. So even the same sets of processes can create different emergent behaviors on significantly different graph topologies. I love this point and I'm curious riffing off what Natalie was saying to like how just thinking through how people will self organize using this kind of decentralized technology across borders as we currently know it to collectively manage resources, something that I'm also exploring to create more, more of the, of the comments. So, yeah curious, are you, are you focused on that work right now see and Natalie in terms of like, exploring how those new borders will look like I don't know for straight word for it, but I imagine people self organized across bio regions in the future. Well, so Natalie do you mind if I take this care. Yeah, so with with the project. One of the things that, you know, we're we're centralization Maximus we do at least we believe in a variety of the topology versus you know the fairly centralized standard that we have currently. But we obviously needs to be done responsibly and with the understanding that the topology is for better or worse dependent on jurisdiction and land. So there needs to be a middle point a bridge to get to the point where you have true variation in governance. You can simply just create an online protocol I mean to a certain extent you can. Bitcoin is a very good example of you can make real governance changes without having to directly interface with with with a jurisdiction all the time, but still ultimately the natural persons that own Bitcoin and the companies interact with Bitcoin are still dependent on Bitcoin. So if you have a friendly jurisdiction that's kind of a middle point between the digital world and in the world of the West failing type system, then you can provide an acceleration that variation of governments that I think a lot of people here would like to see. And my answer is really that I'm working much more on on the tech side of the design of mechanisms and sort of institutional patterns, but I am sort of very much seconding the appeal to institutional biodiversity. That's sort of a main, I guess, finding of the extrapolating from my field on to governance as I'm epistemic trespassing from engineering is that actually I strongly believe that these health these systems are healthy and resilient if and only if they have a kind of sort of cultural and institutional biodiversity. You touch on a great point and it reminds me of what brought me to think about different types of governance systems ones that were optimized for the type of social interactions economic interactions that they place in human communities. This is a nature's topologies nature has billions of years in expertise in designing self organized distributed decentralized systems and why not taking example from from from the best. Yeah. Yeah, there's a. There's a, there's a really good book by. I forget her name. Julia Watson called low tech, but tech is spelled tk and stands for traditional ecological knowledge. It's literally a book about building things with nature. And it's kind of like an interesting foundation to start from because I think if we begin with a with a, if we begin from a place where we're taking into account nature and taking into account all of these different systems that we are operating in, then we can sort of start mapping out that taxonomy that ontology into something that looks like a project that came out of a thing that I know Nathan has worked on. I don't remember the name of the community government something. But then, if, if we want to play around with you know does this work how does this work, you can get to something like this cool product that I've worked with a little bit recently called machinations, where you can literally design how the mechanisms work and then you can run simulations to see, are they achieving the goals that we want, where are their vulnerabilities, and have a new sort of tooling available to you to visually see you know to what extent. Are we achieving the goals that we set out or what are we missing or what are we not thinking about what externalities are out there that might be important to accommodate and future types of governance structures. So I think. Yeah, they also have a whole web three thing with automated market makers. And I've been using it in that context like how do you, how could you create an automated market maker that is biased towards outcomes that benefit a particular system. And that project is actually working with some computational neuroscience people to do free energy minimization with based on a certain number of parameters in order to, you know, say hey we've got all this data about land quality and we've got all this data about traffic and we've got all this data about the amount of money generated by toll booths. What can the regulation of traffic tell us about how all these things are fitting in together. And so I think that piece is something that's pretty interesting but you could, you could apply it to any number of systems that have sufficient number sufficient amount of data that can be can be ingested and composed in that kind of way that we've been talking about and so I think this is this this kind of evolution of of governance as you begin to think about it from computational perspective like you were saying with the project you know that kind of evolution is is I think really exciting and really really promising and so I yeah I don't know that's that was the end of my thought. That's so cool. Okay, I'm going to talk again now. So what was something that that just called to mind when you start talking about tolls. When I started my career career career like for work. With all due respect as opposed to research. I was a lawyer in a government. And, and we would do a lot of infrastructure and I got pulled into a lot of the infrastructure work. And there's this interesting model that's sort of similar to the flow that Natalie and shows if we're starting to tease out on these sort of the less traditional, but, but, but, but still well pretty well defined context of And it's the quasi public entity or different ways to structure public private partnerships for like a big infrastructure thing like a port authority, or a, you know, or like a big bridge or even a certain arenas and other kind of big, big things where it's not exactly a jurisdiction but it's, if you blur your eyes, it's not that different where it's got kind of like funding that goes, you know, 2030 years operating budgets it's got, you know, its own ability to sort of make rules that transcend, you know, the multiple jurisdictions usually that it's within it's got governance for sure it's got stakeholders decision making, you know, a whole bunch of interesting stuff usually there's some statutes around them. But when all said and done, and other stuff so I just wonder if there isn't another canvas to paint on for composable governance that would be some kind of quasi public big capital budget infrastructure project of the of the future the stuff that's kind of where people starting to propose it now, but it hasn't come together yet. Let's throw that out there. And so, you know, we're not done, because we've said everything, we're only done because we've reached time and and I hope that this idea forum, this initial one has served its purpose which is to begin, and to start to put some ideas out that that we can learn and that we can continue to pull these threads and start to weave together the fabric of what composable governance could be. And so I want to thank everybody for showing up today and and for sharing what you did. And we hope that you'll stay with us, and that you will submit some of these thoughts in the form of a contribution that we can publish in our special release on composable governance. So until then, thanks again, and we'll see you at the next idea forum. Thank you so much for inviting us. Yes, yeah, thank you for organizing doesn't love me to meet you all. Thank you, does it. Thank you everyone.