Introduction

d20 is a Discord bot that allows communities to play governance games in an LLM-mediated environment. Groups can come together to embark on a governance “quest” and experience a diversity of governance structures, decision-making processes, power distributions, cultural dynamics and more.

d20 aims to help lay the collective decision-making foundations necessary for communities to conduct governance experiments, education, future scenario planning, and real-life decision-making while bonding communities through play.

Background

d20 was built by a group of researchers from The Metagovernance Project, a nonprofit research collective aiming to empower online community self-governance. Whereas, currently, many of the most commonly used digital platforms limit communities to hierarchical admin-user models (“implicit feudalism”), Metagov aims to promote alternative governance structures (“modular politics”) through tools and resources such as PolicyKit, the Metagov Gateway, CommunityRule, and now d20 Governance.

Building on the work of our colleagues at Metagov, our team started out in 2022 by studying the challenges communities face when it comes to designing or evolving their governance structures and processes. With the growing trend towards self-governance on the internet, governance literature and tooling are abundant. However, there are few spaces for more hands-on learning about governance, experimentation, simulation, or even just play! This was how d20 was born.

Our goal with the d20 game is to create an environment where communities can learn not just basic governance vocabulary but also engage closely with these concepts through practice, gameplay, and interaction. We strive to give members of online communities hands-on experiences with alternative governance processes so that they can be more intentional about the way they design governance systems for their own context.

The d20 Experience

d20 currently has two game modes.

1. Agora: The agora empowers communities to asynchronously explore different decision-making methods, alter game settings, run one-off governance experiments, and engage with the features of the d20 bot.

2. Build a Community: The “Build a Community” game is a ~25-min narrative-led quest where players are prompted to come together to establish themselves as a new group within the community. Each stage of the game bring players into contact with different decision-making methods, cultural environments, and governance structures .

In both modes, d20 influences the group's communication norms with "culture modules” that use an LLM to modify the content of users' messages and temporarily place players in artificially constructed cultures.

There are currently six culture modules:

• Amplify: Intensify the sentiment of original messages
• Eloquence: Beautify messages to be persuasive and Shakespearean
• Obscurity: Obscure messages to make them harder to read
• Ritual: Harmonize messages with previous messages
• Values: Check how aligned messages are with community-defined values.
• Wildcard: Transform messages into the voice of the most recent group to complete the Build a Community quest.

Use of Grant Funds

User Research and Evaluation: User research is critical to our project's ongoing success and evolution. We aim to invite select communities to participate in the "Build a Community" game and conduct user interviews with players post-gameplay. This will allow us to collect valuable insights into user experiences, challenges, engagement levels, and changes in perspectives on decision-making. The result will be a report reviewing the bot's impact on users' understanding and approach to decentralized governance online and within their communities.

User research will be supported by Val Elefante who brings user research experience gained while in the context of the Metagov Gateway + PolicyKit project. Additionally, our advisor, Ellie Rennie, complements our research with her track record of ethnographic studies on online communities, particularly communities using Discord and web3 tooling/infrastructure.

Budget

We would like to work with 3-5 communities for this report. Here is our budget breakdown:

• $1000 to conduct outreach, a playtest, user research, and a report of our interaction with a single community.
• $500 to produce the final report
• Total Budget: $3500-5500

Timeline

Approximately 2-4 months, depending on the number of communities we conduct research with.

Team

d20 was incubated at Metagov by the following team:

• Janita Chalam (Developer)
• Val Elefante (Researcher)
• Hazel (Researcher)
• Cent Hosten (Developer)
• Ellie Rennie (Advisor)

Conclusion

By enabling communities to test elements of modular governance in a playful and interactive way, we believe d20 will significantly contribute to advancing both the experience and understanding of online self-governance. Your support will help us carry out this initiative and promote a fun, interactive environment to learn, educate, and experience alternative governance structures on the internet outside the prevailing paradigm of "implicit feudalism".

• Try d20: https://discord.gg/TRVbdrnuBD

More Links

• Website: https://metagov.github.io/d20-governance/
• Repo: https://github.com/metagov/d20-governance