Metagov
a laboratory for digital governance
Our mission
We cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age.
Our vision
We are working toward a governance layer for the internet that is empowering, creative, interconnected, and accountable.
Our structure
Metagov’s activities occur through three mutually supporting pillars:
- Community: The dynamic interplay among all participants, who develop vibrant and evolving collaborations through our shared spaces. At the base of this pillar is the Metagov Membership.
- Research: The cutting-edge research that advances knowledge in support of our shared goals. At the base of this pillar are the Research Directors and their grant-funded projects.
- Operations: A participatory approach to organizational infrastructure. At the base of this pillar is a commitment to transparency, accessibility, and to honoring the care work that goes into making the organization function.
Our values
Metagov’s core values include:
- Openness: Our work is a commons. We seek to produce public goods that are widely available and accessible, and to operate in a way that is transparent to our stakeholders.
- Inclusivity: Community is at the heart of Metagov’s work. We seek to cultivate a diverse and mutually supportive community of practice, which people can be part of at various levels of engagement and commitment.
- Rigor: Metagov supports research that excels at the highest standards of scholarly and creative work. We prioritize accountability and ethics in relationship to the people and communities we study.
- Experimentation: Online self-governance requires experimentation, and we seek to embody this spirit in everything we do, drawing on scientific, technical, artistic, and social forms of discovery.
Our history
Metagov was founded in 2019, out of a seminar at Harvard Law School called “Governing Virtual Worlds”. Joshua Tan (who TAed the class) and Louis Kang (one of the guest lecturers) got together and presented the original idea for Metagov to Lawrence Lessig (who taught the class), Primavera De Filippi (one of the other guest lecturers), and Joi Ito (Louis' mentor). Originally intended as a collaboration between Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the MIT Media Lab, we officially spun out as an independent nonprofit in January 2020, with Josh, Louis, Prima, and Larry serving as the initial board and Josh as the founding executive director.
In 2023, Eugene Leventhal stepped up from operations director to serve as interim (and eventually permanent) executive director. In 2024, Liz Barry joined us from the Computational Democracy Project as our third executive director.
Here's our original "about":
Online governance is evolving. Competition, ideology, and technological advances have created the conditions for a new generation of games (e.g. Minecraft, Seed), social networks (e.g. Mastodon), and collaborative platforms (e.g. Ethereum, Aragon). This new generation of online communities is changing the rules of online governance. In these worlds, users have the right to self-governance—the right to come together and organize their own social and political institutions. Our goal is to describe, support, and expand that right.
But on the internet, the right to self-governance is not a natural right; it is enabled and circumscribed by the architecture of the platform on which people interact. That same architecture also governs the interaction between separate user-generated institutions. Metagovernance describes these two related roles: (1) enabling and constraining users’ ability to create their own institutions, and (2) governing the interaction between separate institutions, whether they be small informal chat groups on Telegram, open-source communities on GitHub, billion-dollar protocols on a blockchain, or traditional institutions like courts and contracts that have been transposed to a new digital realm.
Get in touch
Connect with us by sending an email, signing up for our newsletter, or joining our community.
Learn more about our current and archival projects, events, and seminars.
Metagov is a 501(c)3 nonprofit in the US. Consider supporting us.
Thank you
Our work is generously supported by One Project, the Optimism Collective, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Mina Foundation, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Grant for the Web, the Internet Archive, the Digital Infrastructure Fund, Project Liberty, NSF, Gitcoin through past grants, several Gitcoin Grant Stack rounds, and direct support, the Filecoin Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, the EPSRC / University of Oxford, the Future of Life Institute, GnosisDAO, Aragon, Arbitrum, Radicle, ENS, Metacartel Ventures, NEAR, Commonwealth, the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab, RMIT University, and many Metagovernors through our membership program. Our finances are hosted publicly on Open Collective.
