Every month, RadicalxChange Foundation hosts panel discussions between inspiring personalities from all walks of life, discussing concepts and narratives about next-generation political economies. The conversations are live-streamed allowing for real-time interaction between the audience and panelists. This page is a collection of the events recorded in 2021.
Jennifer Morone, Matt Prewitt, Nick Vincent, Kaliya Young
Digital networks have centralized power over identities and information, creating problems for both markets and democracy. Does the solution require more shared agency over data? What might that look like? This panel discussion is structured around thought experiments to find solutions to this issue.
SPEAKERS
Matt Prewitt is RadicalxChange Foundation’s president, a writer and blockchain industry advisor, and a former plaintiff’s side antitrust and consumer class action litigator and federal law clerk.
Nick Vincent is a Ph.D. student in Northwestern University's Technology and Social Behavior program and is part of the People, Space, and Algorithms Research Group. His broad research interests include human-computer interaction, human-centered machine learning, and social computing. His research focuses on studying the relationships between human-generated data and computing technologies to mitigate the negative impacts of these technologies. His work relates to concepts such as "data dignity", "data as labor", "data leverage", and "data dividends".
Kaliya Young also known as the "Identity Woman" has spent the last 15 years working to bring about the creation of a new layer of the internet for people based on open standards. She co-founding the Internet Identity Workshop, which was recently profiled in the Wired UK. In 2017 she graduated in the very first cohort from UT Austin's iSchool with a Master of Science in Identity Management and Security. Her master's thesis The Domains of Identity: A framework for understanding identity systems in contemporary society is being published this month by Anthem Press. In 2019, she traveled to India for two months as a New America India-US Public Interest Technology fellow to study Aadhaar their national ID system. She co-founded HumanFirst.Tech with Shireen Mitchel, a project focused on creating space for diverse voices and building a more inclusive industry. In 2012 she was recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and Fast Company named her as one of the most influential women in tech in 2009. She consults with governments, NGO’s, startups, and enterprises on decentralized identity technologies.
MODERATOR
Jennifer Morone is the CEO of RadicalxChange Foundation and a multidisciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience in relation to technology, economics, politics, and identity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby. Her work has been presented at institutions, festivals, museums, and galleries around the world including ZKM, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ars Electronica, HEK, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Science Gallery, Transmediale, SMBA, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, panke.gallery, Aksioma, Drugo more, and featured extensively on international media outlets such as The Economist, WIRED, WMMNA, Vice, the Guardian, BBC World News, Tagesspiegel, Netzpolitik, the Observer.
Crystal Good, Enoch Liang, Tracey Bowen
Many people in the RadicalxChange community and data science arena agree that we need collective bargaining power to make digital networks genuinely democratic and transparent. In this spirit, the speakers of this panel are on the mission of uniting the world's data producers. They are true leaders in this space and share their experiences from their everyday work for data dignity.
SPEAKERS
Enoch Liang is a California-based lawyer and entrepreneur, first founding a law firm (LTL Attorneys) and then helping start an artificial intelligence software company (LegalMation). Enoch helped start The Data Dividend Project to help consumers collectively exercise their data rights and to collectively bargain with tech companies.
Tracey Bowen is the Founder of CONTROLR - an inclusive, decentralized Data Union - a Data Researcher at the South West Creative Technology Network, Mozilla Creative Media Award Recipient, and Post Grad Law student – oh yeah, and Mercury Music Prize Winner (a very, very long time ago)!
MODERATOR
Crystal Good (she/her/hers) is hard to put in just one box. She prefers Affrilachian artist, digital media entrepreneur, and Social Media Senator For The Digital District Of West Virginia, a completely made-up but totally real Office. She is a West Virginia University Newstart Fellow and the author of “Valley Girl.” Follow her on Twitter, @cgoodwoman.
Kaliya Young, Heidi Nobantu Saul, Tom Atlee, Jennifer Morone
Exploring social technologies & their role in fostering democracy with Kaliya Young, Heidi Nobantu Saul & Tom Atlee, moderated by Jennifer Morone.
We see democracy as ideally a process of co-creating the conditions of our shared lives, solving our collective problems, and learning about life from and with each other. The less force and the more creativity, aliveness, and intelligence we can bring to this process, the better. This requires a lot of communication and conversation to share information, ideas, experiences, needs, values, energy and so much more - in ways that actually work.
Many different approaches to doing this sharing and talking have been created. When such ways are formalized as methods that can be applied and taught, we call them “technologies”. Most of the social technologies for democracy we work with are grounded in conversation - discussion, dialogue, deliberation, choice-creating, negotiation, collective visioning, and various forms of council, assembly, conference, and so on. There are different dynamics and nuances among them, and there are experts trained to facilitate the theory and/or practice.
Democratic technologies, thought of and used in this way, can be applied in creative new ways that enable people to become more engaged with each other, with better results and less wasted, counter-productive energy, thus moving towards more successful, enjoyable self-governance. They operate at a variety of scales from small groups, organizations, and networks to whole societies.
SPEAKERS:
Kaliya Young (@identitywoman) - Founder of Unconference.net, an event design and facilitation for professional communities. Co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop in 2005. It still meets twice a year and is the world’s leading interactive, industry shaping event that brings together the largest concentration of talent dedicated to designing and building online identity systems that empower individuals.
She is an expert and leader in the fields of user-centric digital identity, self-sovereign identity and personal data and has appeared in this capacity in three different RxC events. She blogs, and tweets under her community handle – “Identity Woman“.
Heidi Nobantu Saul, MAM (@nobantu) - International facilitator and process design professional. Specializing in planning and facilitating large and small Open Space Technology (OST) meetings for organizations, agencies, educational institutions, retreats, strategic planning, and open events such as unConferences. Much of her facilitation practice involves working with people who are working on the leading edge of change.
Along with facilitation she enjoys working with others co-developing events, training courses and tools (process design) for self-exploration, expanding self and collective awareness and working sustainably together.
Tom Atlee (@tomatlee) - Co-founder of the nonprofit Co-Intelligence Institute in Eugene, Oregon. Author of The Tao of Democracy, Empowering Public Wisdom, Participatory Sustainability, and Reflections on Evolutionary Activism. His Wise Democracy Pattern Language offers an encyclopedia of democratic innovations and of approaches to generating collective wisdom.
His blog - Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge - explores a wide range of topics in provocative ways, and has spent 32 years researching and writing about co-intelligence with no formal institutional support beyond his small nonprofit. He is supported by the people on his mailing list which you can join by emailing him at cii@igc.org (subject: SUBSCRIBE).
MODERATOR:
Jennifer Morone (@jlmorone) - Artist and CEO of RadicalxChange Foundation. As an artist, she makes work that seeks to disrupt the narratives that humans create – such as corporations and nation states, and has been dealing with the problematic position of the individual in the contemporary world of work for many years. In 2014, she registered herself as a corporation – Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc, of which she is the director, the shareholder, and the basic product, in order to try to provoke the ruling economic and legal system from within. Since 2019 she has been working on The Scheme of Things, a co-creative process that brings to life imaginations of what a desirable post-work world might look like through various media.
Bryan Ford, Shireen Mitchell, Kaliya Young, Glen Weyl
Most digital identity systems are centralized (e.g., in big government or technology organizations) or individualistic (e.g., in most blockchain projects). However, being in the world is fundamentally social and intersectional — we are all part of networks. So how might we formalize digital identity in a way that better reflects this complex reality? This panel with leading social technology and computer researchers explores more robust digital identity approaches and potential application areas in political economies.
SPEAKERS
Bryan Ford leads the Decentralized/Distributed Systems (DEDIS) research laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Ford's research focuses on decentralized systems, security and privacy, digital democracy, and blockchain technology. Since earning his Ph.D. at MIT, Ford has held faculty positions at Yale University and EPFL. His awards include the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award, the NSF CAREER award, and the AXA Research Chair. Inventions he is known for include parsing expression grammars, delegative or liquid democracy, and scalable sharded blockchains. He has advised numerous companies and governments, including serving on the US DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group and on the Swiss Federal E-voting Experts Dialog.
Shireen Mitchell is an award-winning technological woman of color, founder, author, speaker, social entrepreneur, nonprofit leader, advocate, diversity analyst, and a political, digital & social strategist. She is a native New Yorker playing video games, designing BBS boards and gopher sites prior to the Web going worldwide. As an early adopter and one of the few women of color web designers in the early '90s, she's been involved with tech and social networks for over 30 years. She founded Digital Sisters/Sistas Inc.--the first organization to focus on women and girls of color in tech and online access. She created the first women of color web multimedia management firm (MHG). Her recent projects are Tech Media Swirl, Stopping Online Violence Against Women (SOVAW) & Human First Tech. As an author, she's written “Gaining Daily Access to Science and Technology” in the book “50 Ways to Improve Women’s Lives” and “Access to Technology: Race, Gender, and Class Bias,” The Scholar and Feminist Online.
Kaliya Young is an expert in self-sovereign identity and identity on the blockchain. She is the co-author of a Comprehensive guide to Self-Sovereign Identity and is widely known as Identity Woman (it's also the name of her blog and her twitter handle). She is committed her life to the development of an open standards based layer of the internet that empowers people. In 2005, Young co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop with Doc Searls and Phil Windley. Five years later she founded the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium to catalyze a network of companies working to give individuals the tools to collect, manage and gain value from their own personal data generated actively and passively as they interact with all kinds of digital systems. In 2016 she began the Identity Ecosystem Map project and collaborating in leading its development. She consults with and advises companies seeking to develop products in this ecosystem. She is the co-founder with Shireen Mitchel of HumanFirst.Tech a project focused the needs of diverse communities and building an inclusive industry. Currently she is the Chair of the Interoperability Working Group for Good Health Pass at the Trust over IP Foundation, Co-Chair of the Interoperability Working Group at the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) and Co-Chair of the Secure Data Store Working Group jointly charted by the Credentials Community Group at the W3C and DIF.
E. Glen Weyl (@glenweyl) works to collaboratively envision, design, experiment with and organize around next generation political economic institutions. He serves at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist (OCTOPEST), where he helps design and implement technology ambitious corporate social commitments. He is Founder and Chair of the RadicalxChange Foundation, a non-profit that coordinates a global social movement for social technology. Previously he was 2007 Valedictorian of Princeton University, received his PhD in economics from there in 2008, was Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Assistant Professor of Economics and Law at University of Chicago, co-author with Eric Posner of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society and co-author and technical lead of the Edmund J. Safra Center Rapid Response Task Force on Covid-19 that was a foundation of the Biden administration’s covid-19 response plan. In 2018, he was one of Bloomberg Businessweek’s 50 most influential people, WIRED’s 25 people shaping the next 25 years of technology and Coindesk’s 10 most influential people in blockchain.
Charlotte Cavaille, Chris Hansen, Sachin Mittal, Jake Interrante
Quadratic Voting offers hope to revitalize collective decision-making in a wide range of domains in society and the economy, e.g., corporations, governments, unions, games, ratings, research, et cetera. An increasing number of examples support that hope in this radical voting method. In this panel discussion, you hear from current practices by policy-makers in the Colorado government and academic researchers and their insights from working with Quadratic Voting in preference polling.
SPEAKERS
Charlotte Cavaille is an Assistant Professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Before moving to Michigan, she was an Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She was also a fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. She received a Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University in November 2014. Some of her work appeared in The Journal of Politics and the American Political Science Review. Her research examines the dynamics of popular attitudes towards redistributive social policies at a time of rising inequality, high fiscal stress, and high levels of immigration.
Senator Chris Hansen represents Senate District 31 in the Colorado State Senate. He specializes in energy sector economics and data analytics, with 20+ years of experience in the global energy industry and five years in the Colorado General Assembly. He currently serves on the Joint Budget Committee, as well as Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Before his work as an elected official, he was Senior Director at IHS Markit, where he led a global portfolio of energy products, events, and partnerships. Dr. Hansen holds a BSc in Nuclear Engineering from Kansas State University; a Graduate Diploma of Civil Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; a Master of Science in Engineering Systems from MIT; and a Ph.D. in Economic Geography from Oxford University. In addition to his current role in the state senate, Hansen serves as Chairman of the Board of Western Freedom, a non-profit dedicated to integrating the power system and RTO in the West. He is also the Co-Founder and Director at the Colorado Energy & Water Institute and as Founder of the Colorado Science and Engineering Policy Fellowship.
Sachin Mittal is stewarding KERNEL at Gitcoin.
MODERATOR
Jake Interrante is Editor in Chief of the Chicago Policy Review and an MPP candidate ’21 at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Previously, Jake worked as a policy professional in the community development finance field. During his time working with Massachusetts Housing Partnership’s ONE Mortgage Program, he helped working-class families buy homes in otherwise unaffordable parts of the State. Before that, he helped finance amenities in economically disadvantaged communities as Development Coordinator for Partners for the Common Good, a DC-based CDFI Loan Fund. His published work on comparative borrower outcomes in the ONE Mortgage program and FHA Mortgage Program appeared in the March 2020 edition of Cityscape. Jake also holds a B.A.s in Public Policy and Political Science from the University of Chicago.
Jennifer Lyn Morone, Matt Prewitt, Alex Randaccio
RadicalxChange Voice is a new governance tool and experiment to bring in the RxC community to guide RxC Foundation's work. Hopefully, if the experiment turns out well, we can help other communities adopt it to enable a broader range of democratic participation. It also features some new thinking about QF, Pol.is, and QV. As we get ready to try it out, the Foundation's team introduces you to RxC Voice's end-to-end democratic process and explains the thinking behind it. Most importantly, it is your opportunity to ask us anything about it.
SPEAKERS
Jennifer Lyn Morone is RadicalxChange Foundation’s CEO and a multidisciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience with technology, economics, politics, and identity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby. Her work has been presented at institutions, festivals, museums, and galleries around the world, including ZKM, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ars Electronica, HEK, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Science Gallery, Transmediale, SMBA, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, panke.gallery, Aksioma, Drugo more, and featured extensively on international media outlets such as The Economist, WIRED, WMMNA, Vice, the Guardian, BBC World News, Tagesspiegel, Netzpolitik, the Observer.
Matt Prewitt is RadicalxChange Foundation’s president, a writer and blockchain industry advisor, and a former plaintiff’s side antitrust and consumer class action litigator and federal law clerk.
Alex Randaccio is a Project Developer for RadicalxChange. He leverages an interdisciplinary background in software development, design, research, and writing to build out and advance RadicalxChange projects. He studied computer science and political science at Brown University. Alex proudly hails from Buffalo, New York.
Jennifer Morone, Matt Prewitt, Alex Randaccio
In keeping with our goal and promise to make the RadicalxChange Foundation democratically governed and accountable, the RxC team built a new participatory governance application called RxC Voice, combining liquid democracy, online deliberation, and quadratic voting. Having just concluded the first instance of this large-scale collective decision pilot, here are the results for the question posed: ‘What activities should the RadicalxChange Foundation prioritize in 2021-2022?’
The experiment ran from May 17th to June 8th, 2021 and was structured in three foundational stages: (1) Delegation, (2) Deliberation, and (3) Election. Prior to the event, the RxC Foundation team put out an open call inviting members of the community to take part in the pilot. Out of around 150 who requested to take part or were invited, 68 signed up and participated in the process by delegating voice credits to fellow representatives, engaging in a democratic conversation via Polis, ratifying the resulting ballot curated by RxC Foundation, and prioritizing the ballot’s 54 proposals in a quadratic vote. In the end the democratic process ran smoothly and resulted in actionable and valuable takeaways.
Read more at https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/announcements/rxc-voice-pilot-results/