2025-06-24: MetaG0v, Comms, The Dumbest of Phones
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Working on:
Metametagov
Call with Liz Barry 🄽, intro’d by @Kaitlin Donovan who recognized that she peppers conversations with the same buckshot I do — interop, standards, tools for deliberation ; Liz worked with Audrey Tang 🄽 in Taiwan, ran the cluster of orgs around Polis 🄽 (which we now use, somewhat, at Filecoin governance) and is currently Exec Directing Metagov 🄽. Also Elianna DeSota 🄽, ex of Desci Labs 🄽!
I’ve never been able to track all the wonderful things Metagov does (I’d always get the latest hot news from Kaitlin Beegle 🄽), so I hope to peek in on their interoperable deliberative tools workstream tomorrow and get a feel for what’s happening there these days.
Putting them both in a back pocket to spring out as a potential resource for the new head of governance when he arrives. One more month of infinite tyrannical power to go.
Comms Tooling
Trying to get back in the mindset I was pursuing at FDS 6 🄽 , which is to see if there’s some work we can do to track decisions and summarize communications and propagate good practices and chill the noise and up the signal and oh god it’s probably AI isn’t it, either that or a fight to the death in the officially sponsored Filecoin Thunderdome. Some of my notes from back then make more sense now I read them back; some seem incredibly foolish: will grab time with Meredith Pallante 🄽 this week to see if the remains make enough sense to pull in some people to work on it. (Reminder that if you too need comms, design, or event help and you’re Filecoinic, Meredith’s team is a click away). You can probably talk to an AI version of me about this via Maple 🄽 (it hallucinates somewhat, check the transcripts for accuracy).
STFIL
Holy holy cow: someone finally reports getting their FIL back without the backing of a lawyer — They had to travel in person to a police station in mainland China to complete the process. Progress of a kind, though a ridiculous level of bureaucracy. Maybe a thread that we can help someone tug on though.
Thinking about:
Readers write: I got mail — well, a Slack DM — from a reader concerned that yesterday I’d implied that IPNI 🄽 wasn’t (at least potentially) decentralized. I hadn’t meant to step on that particular rake, and I’ll put the links here that they sent to show a lot of thinking into how IPNI 🄽 federation would work. I was more thinking about how FF might approach unavoidably centralized services (which I hope CID location would not be, whether it’s a DHT or dedicated indexing services), and if any decentralizable services began to lean toward SPOF 🄽 dom, then we could help ensure that they did move toward more resilient infrastructure.
Also, time to tap the sign at the bottom of this that says I’m not speaking for FF here: you’re usually getting my initial takes on how to do better, not what’s wrong, and so should prefix every paragraph with an image of me overexcitedly saying “You know what we should do that would be awesome”, and end every paragraph with someone far smarter — possibly you — muttering “whoa there cowboy” or suchlike. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy getting those smarter people messaging and updating me. Seriously, DM away — I’d rather you give me your corrections than let my bad ideas ferment here alone.
Link du jour:
A 4G dumb phone that works — A real review from someone who has been using the basic TCL onetouch 4041 as a day-to-day tool, rather than just idly dreaming about throwing away the smartphone and moving into a hut in the woods like the rest of us. Spurn the temptation! Fly into the sun!