Platform Cooperative Research Sprint – Successful Grant
In late 2020, DERC PhD researchers Kelsie Nabben and Megan Kelleher participated in a competitive selection research sprint, supported by Janet Roitman, with The New School and Harvard Berkman Klein Centre on cooperative approaches to data ownership and governance.
As a result, they were able to draw on their respective areas of PhD research in decentralised digital technologies and governance to co-write a working paper with peers from Indonesia and India on “Grounding Decentralised Technologies in Cooperative Principles: What Can ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’ (DAOs) and Platform Cooperatives Learn from Each Other?”.
This paper then won a grant from “MetagovDAO” , a funding initiative under the Metagov community of online governance researchers to engage the research community and further develop this research. As part of the grant, they will deliver a workshop to the Metagov community on the topic of our joint research paper.
“We were awarded funding for our research on “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations” (DAOs) by a DAO!” states Kelsie. “Metagov is an open network of researchers, specifically interested in online governance across various domains and disciplines that I’ve been involved with for a number of years, and so is Ellie Rennie.
Through Metagov, I helped raise funding from the “Gitcoin” open-source blockchain community, which was put towards founding “MetaGov DAO”, a decentralised fund to support qualitative governance-related research.”
MetaGovDAO just completed its first round of funding for qualitiative research on governance.
People can learn more or apply at : https://metagov.org/metagovdao-call-for-proposals-research-community/.
More initial findings from other groups in the research sprint on cooperative data governance can be seen here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2022-02/what-we-learned-research-sprint-cooperative-data-governance.