Kelsie Nabben and Primavera De Filippi 25 October, 2023 SEAL DRILL TIME A message appeared in the Telegram chat application group chat: “Welcome to the SEAL Chaos Team’s Simulation War Room. You’re now part of a real-time exercise set in the Yearn ecosystem. Your mission involves diagnosing and responding to…

Kelsie Nabben, September, 2023 Hello! This post shares a recent working paper… The paper explores an ethnographic study on an experiment conducted at an engineering services company called ‘BlockScience’. It focuses on the development and implications of ‘constituting an AI’ for accountability. The experiment integrated a pre-trained Large-Language Model (LLM)…

Kelsie Nabben August, 2023 Yesterday marked the launch of the Decentralised Data Governance Pattern Library. The library attends to the social arrangements surrounding data management to improve resilience. Resilience, here, refers to adaptability and transformability in response to external threats, internal vulnerabilities, and opportunities. The social science approach I take…

Kelsie Nabben. May, 2023. It’s May 2023, which marks 3 years since I formally embarked on a PhD research journey to investigate ‘resilience in decentralised technologies’. As one journey (hopefully) comes to an end (see findings here, here, here, and forthcoming), I am hereby holding myself accountable to set out…

February, 2023 The following is the beginning of a recent journal article, published in Big Data & Society. The full article is available at: Nabben, K. (2023). Web3 as ‘self-infrastructuring’: The challenge is how. Big Data & Society, 10(1). https://doi-org.10.1177/20539517231159002 Abstract: The term ‘Web3’ refers to the practices of participating…

Ethnography Using Computational Methods in the Field of Web3 — By Kelsie Nabben (RMIT / BlockScience), Michael Zargham (BlockScience), & Ellie Rennie (RMIT University) February, 2023 This post discusses a concept that builds on existing ethnographic approaches, that we call ‘Computer-Aided Ethnography’ (CAE). Our ethnographic research on Web3 uses some of the same software tools that define ‘Web3’ (referring to…

Kelsie Nabben December, 2022 Originally published via Mirror. Suggested citation: Nabben, K. 2022. “Decentralised Technologies as “Self infrastructuring”. Mirror.xyz. Available online: https://kelsiemvn.mirror.xyz/Obs11rquCCp20XB1nUiMTBU7bKWslThbfpF4Hf7n7Rg. TLDR: Decentralised technologies are resilient when a phenomenon that I term ‘self-infrastructuring’ occurs. ‘Self-infrastructuring’ is when people are able to participate in designing, owning, operating, governing, and/or maintaining…

As Friends With Benefits DAO continues to scale, how will it incorporate decentralized governance principles and processes into its next phase of growth? If I was part of any DAO, I would want it to be “Friends With Benefits.” It is just so darn cool. As a vortex of creative…

De-mystifying algorithmic systems BY KELSIE NABBEN & MICHAEL ZARGHAM. The purpose of this post is share an outline of a forthcoming piece on “The Ethnography of a DAO”. This piece is being shared as a paper for the industry ethnographer conference “EPIC”, as part of the 2022 conference theme “Resilience”. The link the…