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”. INTRODUCTION This paper…

(First published via Mirror.xyz) What follows in an excerpt from a forthcoming special collection initiative called “Defining Web3: An Off-Chain Collective Research Project”. Thank you to the editors for the invitation. I had such a ball writing this piece (and a good few years researching it). The secret of change…

First published via Mirror. The following post offers an excerpt of a methodology has been developed in the course of my research to conduct ethnography in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). These questions, first identified in this post on ‘DAO Design Patterns’, have becoming a seminal starting point for engagement with…

Components that constitute “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” — Kelsie Nabben May 2022 “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs) are everywhere, yet it is unclear what a DAO is (or isn’t), and what design elements constitute a DAO. Already, DAOs are diverse. DAOs have helped to shift early blockchain community debates from “one blockchain to rule them all” to a “pluriverse”…

Towards a Policy Position Kelsie Nabben 9 May, 2022 This piece presents the concept of “Metaverse Cities”, as an exploration of how “crypto cities” and “crypto states” are melding with the physical infrastructure of cities to offer new potentialities in how people organise, work, rest, and play. …

Kelsie Nabben & Michael Zargham April 19, 2022 Introduction This post highlights an excerpt from Zargham, M. & Nabben, K. (2022). “Aligning ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’ to Precedents in Cybernetics”. Stafford Beer articulated the “Viable System Model” (VSM) in his 1972 book ‘Brain of the Firm’ as a management tool to…

A research paper… Kelsie Nabben, providing a brief introduction to: Zargham, Michael and Nabben, Kelsie, Aligning ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’ to Precedents in Cybernetics (April 4, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4077358 April, 2022. When I first came across the fact that the term “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” had existed at least since 1997 in my…

Problematizing and positioning the concept for decentralised infrastructure research Kelsie Nabben, March 2022 This piece explores the concept of resilience. Digital technologies are infrastructures that support human activity. The concept of resilience has applicability in the disciplines of software engineering, civil engineering, and community development. It has also garnered interest in relation to organisational resilience in “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations”…

Decentralised data storage as a resilience problem Kelsie Nabben 31 January, 2022 This piece explores the issue of persistent storage of content as part of resilience in distributed networks. I focus on Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) as a general use case for content addressing and data storage. …