Metagov is a nonprofit laboratory for digital governance. Our mission is to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age. We do this by building standards, APIs, governance data sets, research, and seminars to improve the governance of online communities.

Some of our recent work include:

Grants Innovation Lab (GIL)

GIL helps improve the understanding and tooling related to grant issuance to make it as easy as possible for those applying for grants while maximizing the impact of the work done. The project focuses on:

• research on grant tooling, grantee assessment frameworks, Grant Maturity Index, and best practices;
• technical development of Grant Management standards, shared databases of approved grants, common app for grants, and infrastructure for impact measurement;
• Community, including spaces for grant program operators, technical working groups, and a mix of virtual and in-person events.

We recently hosted our second quarterly call for grant operators and are currently running a Twitter space series on the Future of Public Goods Funding featuring projects such as OS Observer, Karma GAP, Hats Protocol, Hypercerts, Drips, Metrics Garden, and EAS. At ETHDenver, we hosted the first Web3 Grant Summit, you can read more about the takeaways from the workshop here.

Public AI

Public AI ensures that AI capacity:

• delivering benefits to all,
• reflects society’s values, and
• is not limited to Big Tech.

Public AI has been hosting a weekly seminar series throughout the year and is in conversations with multiple governments around the world. We also recently hosted a 4 week seminar series with RAI on AI governance in January.

Other projects

• Attestation Standard for DAOs: The Attestation Standard for DAOs (aka DAOIP-3) defines a basic indexing architecture on top of the verifiable credentials specification, in order to bootstrap a permissionless attestation system for DAOs. The standard has been utilized to deploy a public registry of DAO-related EAS schemas (DAOIP-7, upcoming) and will greatly improve the discoverability and interoperability of all kinds of DAO-related attestations.

• PolicyKit (https://policykit.org/): an engine for building governance in online communities. PolicyKit is being developed between the University of Washington and Metagov, and is being utilized in multiple communities, including Metagov as the mechanism through which the community proposes and votes on new seminars.

• DAO Science (https://daoscience.org/): DAO Science is a nonprofit project to catalyze impactful work on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and other digitally-constituted organizations. In our paper, “Open Problems in DAOs”, we describe how researchers can contribute to the emerging science of DAOs and other digitally-constituted organizations. From granular privacy primitives to mechanism designs to model laws, we identify high-impact problems in the DAO ecosystem where existing gaps might be tackled.

• Interoperable Deliberative Tools: With support from a grant from the Mina Foundation, Metagov is launching a new RFP focused on supporting more interoperability for deliberative decision making tools. Applications for this RFP are currently open through early May. Feel free to join our Slack and ask questions in the #interoperability channel. You can learn more about the RFP, including the full RFP and scope for the interoparbility here.

• Governance Research Round: As part of GG19, we hosted the first Governance Research Round where we were able to support 34 researchers with a matching pool of $25k thanks to support from the MetagovDAO and Arbitrum.

For a full list of our contributions, please visit this link.