DAO Harvard

Conference Overview

The DAO Harvard conference will bring together an interdisciplinary set of stakeholders across academia, government, and industry to explore the various implications of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) in society. Below is an outline of the conference focus:

• Day 1: Research. Day 1 will gather experts across multiple institutions to discuss ongoing academic research efforts regarding decentralized social technologies. Researchers will have the opportunity to present their recent work, as well as align on future research priorities.
• Day 2: Law. Day 2 will gather lawyers, academics, and practitioners to identify the current pain points that DAOs encounter when trying to interface with the legal system, understand the current legal approaches being experimented with, and reflect on how legal frameworks could evolve to accommodate their needs. Topics include how various jurisdictions are currently handling incorporation (e.g. Wyoming DAO LLC), liability, taxation, and more.
• Day 3: Policy. Day 3 will be an intimate gathering of leaders across policy, business, and academia to discuss the role organizations such as cooperatives, open-source communities, and DAOs are playing in enabling equitable ownership and presenting antidotes to some of the harms caused by Big Tech. We will also discuss the hurdles these organizations are facing in realizing their potential, and how novel entities like DAOs may improve outcomes in the US.

Day 1: DAO Harvard Research Summit

An Agenda for DAO Research

Like DAOs themselves, the field of DAO research is very new. As such, the emphasis in this small, interdisciplinary workshop will be on bootstrapping the field: 

• refining research questions, 
• determining research priorities,
• identifying key obstacles to current research,
• identifying (or requesting) foundational texts and data sets,
• and fostering collaborations between researchers, especially across disciplinary divides.

The day will be structured as a series of panel discussions, with brief lightning talks from a set of invited panelists, followed by a longer seminar-style discussion open to all attendees.

While there are no proceedings for the workshop, attendees are encouraged to submit a link to a piece of research on DAOs or a related subject relevant to the forthcoming discussion, which we will then disseminate to the other participants. Please submit your research here.
 

Location

Harvard University - Exact location will be sent to confirmed attendees.

Agenda

Please see below for the current agenda (subject to change).

Speakers

Alex “Sandy” Pentland 

MIT Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland sponsors the MIT Computational Law Report and directs MIT Connection Science. He is Board member of the UN Foundations' Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to GDPR, and has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for his work in privacy.   He has previously been advisory board member for the American Bar Association, the Recording Academy, Google, AT&T, Telefonica, and Nissan.

Jake Hartnell

Jake Hartnell is a Co-Founder of Juno and Stargaze. Juno is the “Interchain Launchpad,” which allows dApps to launch and build an audience quickly and Stargaze is a public protocol for NFTs in the Cosmos ecosystem for NFTs. He also co-founded DAO DAO and Public Awesome, a team of developers that contribute to Stargaze.

Primavera De Filippi

Primavera De Filippi is a Research Director at the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris, and Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. She is the author of “Blockchain and the Law” published by Harvard University Press. Founding member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, she is the founder and coordinator of the U.N. Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA).  

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, he taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He holds an honorary degree from the University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada, UCLouvain, Belgium, Lund Univeristy, Sweden, Athabasca University, Athabasca, Canada, Amsterdam University, Amsterdam. Lessig is the founder of Equal Citizens and a founding board member of Creative Commons.

He serves on the Scientific Board of AXA Research Fund, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has received numerous awards including a Webby, the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award, Scientific American 50 Award, and Fastcase 50 Award. 

Lessig’s early work focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. His current work addresses the failure of democracy, and innovations to reform democracy.

He is the author of hundreds of articles and essays, and a dozen books, including: They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy (2019), Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (2019), America, Compromised (2018), Republic, Lost v2 (2015), The USA is Lesterland (2014), One Way Forward (2012), Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (2011), Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008), Code v2 (2006), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001), and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999).

Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge University, and a JD from Yale.

Eric Alston

Eric Alston is a Scholar in Residence in the Finance Division at University of Colorado Boulder. Eric’s research is grounded in the fields of institutional and organizational analysis & law and economics, and explores constitutions, economic rights on frontiers, and digital governance specifically. Eric is also currently engaged in governance design for several distributed network projects.

Michael Zargham

Zargham is a Systems Engineer working at the intersection of mechanism design and organization design. His research on algorithms as policy is focused on the role of estimation and decision making protocols in digital public infrastructures. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, is a Board Member & Research Director at Metagov, and is an affiliated researcher with the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Dennison Bertram 

Dennison Bertram is the founder of WithTally.com, which provides tools for decentralized decision making and governance in distributed ledger ecosystems, and DappHero, which offers low code Ethereum website building tools. He also founded BuyBTC.cz, the first Bitcoin exchange in the Czech Republic in 2012. Prior to his work in blockchain, he was a photographer, creative technologist, artist, and filmmaker. 

Camille Canon

Camille Canon is a leading expert in governance, organizational design, and new institutional models.  In 2022, she founded Apiary to build systems and solutions that make collective decision-making in distributed organizations and communities possible. Canon previously co-founded Purpose, a social enterprise on the forefront of new institutional models of ownership and governance. She is based in Los Angeles. 

Philipp Zahn

Philipp is the co-founder of 20squares and the Directior at Institute for Categorical Cybernetics. He has led research into the economic consequences of interacting computations and the design of new institutions, and is best known for his work on compositional game theory, a new mathematical foundation for game theory that blends game theory and computations. 

Before, Philipp was an assistant professor at the University of St. Gallen and a post-doc at the University of Mannheim. He also worked as an economic advisor for several startups and companies.

Philipp has obtained his PhD (2013) in economics from the University of Mannheim. During his PhD he was a visitor at the Toulouse School of Economics and a Chazen Visitor at Columbia Business School New York.

Rolf Hoefer, Ph.D.

Rolf started in blockchain with his PhD at INSEAD in 2011, where he completed his dissertation on tokens and organizations. Today, Rolf is a core contributor to MetaCartel Ventures DAO, invests with VC firms Cultur3 Capital and Metarial VC, and leads Numomo, a creative Web3 agency. Rolf has experience across NFT, DeFi, and other DAOs. Rolf is currently writing The DAO Book, following up on his previous book called NFT Revolution that sold over 100,000 copies.

Quinn DuPont

Quinn DuPont is an Adjunct Professor at the UBC School of Information and Research Associate in Schulich School of Business at York University. Previously he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Business at University College Dublin. He has a PhD in Information Science from the University of Toronto.

He is the author of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains (Polity 2019); Associate Editor, Frontiers in Blockchains; Education Chair at IEEE Blockchain Initiative and IEEE TEMS; Research Fellow at University College London, Center for Blockchain Technologies; and Affiliate at The Future of Money Research Collaborative.

Tara Merk

Tara Merk is an ethnography and political science PhD student at CNRS and Panthéon-Assas University Paris II, working for the ERC BlockchainGov project and Metagov. Her current research, conducted mainly through participatory action research and other modes of digital ethnography, focuses on blockchain governance, DAOs, exit to community and NFTs. She previously held various roles in the blockchain industry after studying in Maastricht, Hong Kong, and Dublin where she completed her MSc in the field of information systems management focusing on institutional entrepreneurship in Bitcoin.

Danielle Allen

Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond &  Lily Safra Center for Ethics. She is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy. She is also a seasoned nonprofit leader, democracy advocate, national voice on pandemic response, distinguished author, and mom. 

Nathan Schneider

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the MA program in Media and Public Engagement. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press. He edited Vitalik Buterin’s book Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains and co-edited Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Recent scholarship has been published in New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, the Georgetown Law Technology Review, and Media, Culture & Society, among other journals. He has also reported for publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America, a national Catholic magazine. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website, nathanschneider.info.

Silke Noa Elrifai

Silke is a crypto lawyer, legal engineer, and governance researcher with a passion for privacy tech. Silke has advised blockchain projects since 2014, when her law firm was retained to advise on Mt. Gox’s insolvency. Between 2018-2022, she was the CLO of Gnosis, where she oversaw, among other things, the initialisation of DXDAO, Gnosis’ transformation into one of the largest DAOs to date, the spin-off of CoW DAO and SAFE DAO, as well as the on-chain merger with xDAI resulting in Gnosis Chain. She is one of the initiators and co-authors of the COALA DAO Model Law. Since resigning from Gnosis’ management, she has been focusing on researching DAO’s emergent justice systems and their interaction with legacy legal systems as well as supporting privacy activists and impact DAOs. As a lawyer, Silke is admitted to practice law in England & Wales, New York and Germany and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. She is a board member of the Decentralized Cooperation Foundation. 

Ellie Rennie

Ellie is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, working across RMIT University's Blockchain Innovation Hub, the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. She is currently undertaking ethnographic research on various elements of the web3 system including contributions/rewards tools, validators and identity. She is also examining how these technologies are being used in relation to the creative industries, social innovation, and climate change. Prior to commencing her Future Fellowship, Ellie's research was focused on the topic of digital inclusion. She has written or co-authored five books.

Joshua Tan

Joshua is a mathematician and computer scientist at Oxford whose research focuses on applications of higher mathematics to the design of intelligent systems. He is co-founder and executive director of Metagov and lead at DAOstar, the standards body for the DAO ecosystem.

Reuben Youngblom

Reuben Youngblom is Managing Editor of the Cryptoeconomic Systems Journal and Conference Series, an interdisciplinary effort between the DCI and MIT Press. He is a Fellow at Stanford Law School’s CodeX Center for Legal Informatics, where he runs the Blockchain Education Initiative, serves as a Coordinator for the RegTrax Blockchain Regulatory Tracking Initiative, and co-hosts the Our Data podcast. He also releases an annual ranking of universities for CoinDesk, evaluating the institutions’ impact in the blockchain space. 

Reuben holds bachelor’s degrees in computer science, philosophy, and psychology; a master’s degree in philosophy; and a JD with an emphasis in intellectual property law. He regularly consults for blockchain startups, advising on technical and legal issues; contributes to the Ethereum ecosystem; and spends most of his free time in the ocean.

Day 2: DAO Harvard Law Summit

Legal Challenges with DAOs

The blockchain space has seen the emergence of many new Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) in recent years. These organizations have grown in popularity and manage large amounts of cryptocurrency funds. They are also increasingly eager to create contractual relationships with their contributors, such as contractors, or even claim legal ownership of digital or physical assets. However, the lack of legal recognition of these blockchain-based organizations makes it difficult for legally unregistered DAOs to interact with existing legal entities or physical persons from a legal standpoint. Moreover, the lack of legal personality creates significant liability risks for all the DAO members, who cannot benefit from the corporate veil that traditional companies enjoy. Some national and subnational jurisdictions recognize DAOs through different legal entities, and some DAOs have attempted to become incorporated. However, legally incorporating DAOs necessarily imposes constraints on their usual functioning and undermines some of their distinctive features as a novel organizational form. Ultimately, no one legal framework works for every kind of DAO.

This conference will bring together representatives from a variety of DAOs, as well as regulators and policymakers from multiple jurisdictions, to identify the current pain points that DAOs are encountering when trying to interface with the legal system and to reflect together on how the legal framework could evolve to accommodate their needs,  and what these means for the use of DAOs in society. The day will be structured as a number of parallel workshops on five high-level topics: (1) Benefits and drawbacks of incorporation, (2) Liability regime for DAOs, (3) DAO Taxation, (4) DAO Legal Gateways, and (5) Technical standards for compliance via regulatory equivalence. Each workshop round will be seeded with practical exercises and pressing questions. The day’s goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the most pressing regulatory issues related to each topic and devise possible legal and technical frameworks to address them. Our hope is that the outcome will spur future collaboration and solution design beyond the conference. 
 

Location

Harvard University - Exact location will be sent to confirmed attendees.
 

Agenda

Please see below for the current agenda (subject to change).

Suggested Readings

• COALA DAO Model Law

Day 3: Equitable Ownership & Governance

An Antidote to Big Tech’s Harms: Equitable Ownership and Governance in the Online Economy

Despite our awareness of the critical issues stemming from Big Tech’s approach to personal data use, privacy, governance, and anti-competitive practices, we have yet to establish rules, or support realistic alternatives that mitigate the harms of these platforms.

On April 4th, we will bring together a group of 70 leading policymakers, scholars, and industry leaders to explore alternatives to Big Tech platforms. Plenary sessions will draw from the experiences of platform cooperatives, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and other open-source communities. Attendees will discuss the regulatory hurdles these organizations face, and how we might support them in realizing their full potential as competitors to Big Tech platforms. Interdisciplinary breakout sessions will discuss strategies for enabling greater ownership and governance in our online economy.

Attendees will leave with an understanding of the current landscape of case studies across industry and academia on the subject matter, potential strategies which present an antidote to the harms of Big Tech, and a strong network among those who can make a difference. 
 

Location

Harvard University - Exact location will be sent to confirmed attendees.
 

Agenda

Please see below for the current agenda (subject to change).

Suggested Readings

• Exit to Community: Strategies for Multi-Stakeholder Ownership in the Platform Economy
• Enabling Community-Owned Platforms: A Proposal for a Tech New Deal 
• Fostering Worker Cooperatives with Blockchain Technology: Lessons from the Colony Project
• Decentralized Autonomous Organization Toolkit
• When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance
• DAO Governance

Speakers

Rep. Jake Auchincloss

Congressman Jake Auchincloss is serving his second term representing the Massachusetts Fourth. In addition to his work on the committees for Transportation & Infrastructure and the Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and China, his areas of focus include healthcare, clean energy, and gun violence.

Jake was born and raised in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of a surgeon and a scientist. They showed him the value of curiosity and hard work. From the moment he could read, Jake loved American history.

After graduating from Harvard College, Jake joined the Marines. He commanded infantry in Afghanistan and special operations in Panama.

Upon returning home, Jake continued his service as a three-term city councilor in Newton. While working at City Hall on nights and weekends, Jake built a career in business, running product development at both a Fortune 100 insurance company and a cybersecurity startup. He has degrees in Economics and Finance from Harvard University and MIT Sloan.

Today, Jake lives in Newton with his wife, Michelle, and their children, Teddy and Grace (along with their Labrador Retriever, Donut).

Danielle Allen

Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond &  Lily Safra Center for Ethics. She is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy. She is also a seasoned nonprofit leader, democracy advocate, national voice on pandemic response, distinguished author, and mom.

Karan Aswani

Karan is a lawyer specializing in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for the past 7 years. He is CLO at Gnosis, a blockchain infrastructure development group that builds tools for the Ethereum and DAO ecosystems. Karan also consults for Isolas LLP, a Gibraltar law firm, through which he has been supporting the growth of the local DLT industry. He has worked closely with the Gibraltar Government on developing and implementing its DLT Regulatory Framework, and is ranked by Chambers & Partners as a leading Fintech lawyer in the jurisdiction. 

Karan participates in various education and training initiatives, for example through the University of Gibraltar, where he is a guest lecturer for their introductory course on Blockchain & Smart Contracts. 

Marta Belcher

Marta Belcher is president and chair of Filecoin Foundation as well as the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, and general counsel and head of policy at Protocol Labs. She is also special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Marta serves on the Boards of the Zcash Foundation and the Blockchain Association and is a member of Paradigm’s Crypto Policy Council. Marta is a pioneer in cryptocurrency law and policy and has testified in U.S. Congress and state legislatures as well as speaking in European Parliament. Marta has been recognized by the Financial Times Innovative Lawyer awards, by Law360’s list of Top Attorneys Under 40, by CryptoWeekly’s list of Most Influential Women in Crypto, and as Business Intelligence Group’s Woman of the Year. 

Camille Canon

Camille Canon is a leading expert in governance, organizational design, and new institutional models.  In 2022, she founded Apiary to build systems and solutions that make collective decision-making in distributed organizations and communities possible. Canon previously co-founded Purpose, a social enterprise on the forefront of new institutional models of ownership and governance. She is based in Los Angeles. 

Jake Chervinsky

Jake is Blockchain Association’s Chief Policy Officer, leading policy efforts in Washington on behalf of the crypto industry. Jake is an industry veteran, joining the Association from Compound Labs, the developer of a leading DeFi protocol, where he served as General Counsel. Prior to this role, he represented individual and corporate clients in cryptocurrency-related securities and commodities litigation at Kobre & Kim LLP. Jake earned his B.A. from the George Washington University, and his J.D. from the George Washington University Law School.

Dorothy Dewitt

Dorothy D. DeWitt serves in the U.S. Senate as Chief Finance Counsel to Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York. Prior to that, she served as the Director of the Division of Market Oversight (DMO) at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the first woman appointed to serve in the role since the agency was founded in 1974. At the CFTC, Dorothy was responsible for the licensing, regulation and examination of derivatives trading platforms and exchanges. She also oversaw the $400 trillion (notional) commodity derivative markets, including market structure and emerging risks and trends. During her tenure, Dorothy led the team that proposed and finalized the CFTC’s Dodd-Frank rulemaking.

Ms. DeWitt joined the CFTC from Coinbase, where she served as General Counsel for Business Lines and Markets. She previously served in senior legal and compliance roles for Citadel Securities, a broker-dealer and swaps dealer provisionally-registered with the CFTC, S&P Global, and as an attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell. Ms. DeWitt spent nearly a decade in an investment capacity as a portfolio manager of alternative investment funds that relied heavily on derivatives and swaps. At Cadogan Management, Ms. DeWitt served as a partner and portfolio manager who co-led the investment group. Prior to that, she served at GAM in London, a global fund of hedge funds, as the portfolio manager for the GAM Multi-Arbitrage Fund, managing arbitrage, credit, event-driven, and fixed income investments. Before that, she served as a research analyst at a merger arbitrage and event-driven hedge fund at ING Furman Selz.

Ed Felten

Ed’s research interests include computer security and privacy, and public policy issues relating to information technology. Specific topics include software security, Internet security, electronic voting, cybersecurity policy, technology for government transparency, network neutrality and Internet policy.

Ed is the Director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), a cross-disciplinary effort studying digital technologies in public life. CITP has seventeen affiliated faculty members and maintains a diverse research program and a busy events schedule.

Primavera De Filippi

Primavera De Filippi is a Director of Research at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.

Her research focuses on the legal challenges and opportunities of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, with specific focus on governance and trust. She was a founding member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). 

Lizzy Fallon 

Lizzy Fallon serves as Financial Services Policy Director to Majority Whip Tom Emmer, leading his financial services portfolio on the Whip Policy team and his work as a member of the Financial Services Committee. Lizzy specializes in policy related to fintech and blockchain/crypto. Additionally, Lizzy manages Whip Emmer’s co-chair responsibilities on the Blockchain Caucus.

Joe Greenspan

Joe Greenspan is Head of Partnerships at Toku (previously known as WorkDAO), where he leads Toku’s relationships with leading organizations such as Gnosis, Hedera and Protocol Labs to simplify token compensation. Toku is the first comprehensive solution that allows its partners to employ and compliantly compensate global teams in both fiat and tokens.

Prior to joining Toku, Joe led business affairs and legal operations at Skillz, a platform company for mobile games, and helped take them through their IPO on the NYSE (Ticker: SKLZ). Joe also focused on compliance and policy advocacy in the private sector to ensure equal access to the largest app stores and distribution channels.

Joe holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Philosophy from Georgetown University.

Chris Grieco

Chris Grieco is the General Counsel of Rain, a fintech startup dedicated to empowering DAOs with fiat spending capabilities for their on-chain assets.  Previously, Grieco served as General Counsel at Fei Labs, a decentralized stablecoin project.

Before his work in DeFi, Grieco held several high-level positions within the Federal Government, including Associate White House Counsel in the White House Counsel's Office and as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia.  He also served on Capitol Hill, where he led multiple high-profile investigations as part of the Judiciary Committee.  His most recent public service culminated with a senior position at the Department of Justice, where he served as Associate Deputy Attorney General, advising the Deputy Attorney General and the Department on various technological issues.  His work at the Department included helping draft the 2020 Google Antitrust complaint and leading the Department's review of  Section 230, among other tech issues.  Grieco has clerked for Judge Edith Clement on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and graduated from Stanford Law School.

Sara Horowitz

Sara Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union and the Freelancers Insurance Company. Formerly chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Horowitz is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and has been featured on NPR and in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, among other publications. In her recently released book Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up, Sara takes a profound look at the crisis of work and the collapse of the safety net, and gives a vision for a better way forward, rooted in America’s cooperative spirit. In 2021 She Founded the Mutualist Society to begin to gather mutualists across the union, cooperative, faith, social enterprise, mutual aid and alternative currency communities together as a sectoral strategy.

Sarah Hubbard

Sarah Hubbard is currently a Technology and Public Purpose Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Justice, Health & Democracy Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics where she is focused on researching DAOs and public policy. She is a product leader and strategist with a focus on building emerging technologies at scale. As a Senior Product Manager, Sarah has led various cross-functional teams building products in artificial intelligence and machine learning, mixed reality, Azure IoT, and new intelligent devices at both Apple and Microsoft. She has a passion for human-centered design, building communities, and guiding the ethical and equitable use of technology in society.

Previously, Sarah worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where she collaborated on launching the Climate Education and Literacy Initiative, a variety of White House Women in STEM projects, and multiple computer science education initiatives such as having President Obama write a line of code. She is also one of the authors of the research paper "Toys That Listen: A Study of Parents, Children, and Internet-Connected Toys", through her work at the Tech Policy Lab, which focused on the security and privacy implications of internet-connected devices featured at CHI 2017 & FTC PrivacyCon 2018. These experiences in technology policy have influenced her career as a technologist in industry, sparking a life-long interest in understanding and guiding the impact of the emerging technologies she is building.

Amritha Jayanti

Amritha Jayanti is the Associate Director of the Technology and Public Purpose (TAPP) Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Before assuming this role, she served as a Research Associate, supporting both TAPP and the Belfer Center’s Director and former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter. Her work focuses on emerging technology, international security, and public purpose.

Prior to joining the Belfer Center, Amritha was a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk where she primarily researched the governance of artificial intelligence in Western military organizations. She has also worked at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation researching the application of artificial intelligence in various sectors, including defense and education. 

Prior to her policy-oriented focus, Amritha served as the lead product manager at Clara Labs, a San Francisco-based, Sequoia-back startup. She also served as the Executive Director of a San Francisco-based non profit, Interact, focused on supporting young technologists interested in social impact. Additionally, she founded a nonprofit, Technica, which encourages gender diversity in computer science and STEM more broadly; she remains a member of the board.

Amritha received her degree from the University of Maryland, where she studied computer engineering, economics, and public policy.

David Kerr

David is the principal of Cowrie LLC, where he assists clients in developing risk mitigation and business development strategies within web3. He has over 10 years of experience in tax strategy, financial accounting and risk advisory in gaming, telecom and software-based sales.

David is a member of FWBs treasury team, a contributor to the World Economic Forum / Wharton School’s DAO Project Series and is the Head of Research for the DAO Research Collective, which is dedicated to open-sourcing research foundational for effective DAO operations.

A prolific author on the subject of DAOs, David and Miles Jennings’ (Head of Decentralization & GC, a16z) definitive series on DAO Legal Frameworks was a significant contribution to the development of legal thinking on DAOs.

Dr. Morshed Mannan

Dr. Morshed Mannan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the BlockchainGov ERC Project at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute. He completed his PhD dissertation on the emergence of democratic firms in the platform economy at Leiden Law School, Leiden University. He is currently researching blockchain governance, platform cooperatives, and data cooperatives. He has also acted as an expert or consultant on matters regarding decentralized autonomous organizations, cooperative law and governance for the International Cooperative Alliance and NCBA Clusa International, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the OECD, the European Commission, as well as several local and national government bodies.

Jessica Mason

Jessica Mason is an entrepreneur, startup coach, educator, and angel investor whose work is focused on the power of cooperative entrepreneurship to lay the foundation for a more equitable and resilient economy. She is the Executive Director of Start.coop, a U.S. nonprofit whose mission is to cultivate the next generation of cooperative businesses with ambitions of scale. Jessica has deep experience leading innovation ventures in the social and public sectors -- from nonprofits to philanthropy to social enterprise. Her previous roles include founding a social impact consulting firm and directing a portfolio of social innovation labs in Latin America while working at Harvard University. In addition to her role at Start.coop, Jessica founded and leads the sustainability startup Island Eats MV, is an Omidyar Network Luminary, an elected member of the board at platform cooperative Ampled, is a 2023 Post Growth Fellow, and is an investor in 16 early-stage startups and 2 venture funds serving underestimated founders. 

Timothy Massad

Timothy Massad is currently a Research Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the Director of the Center’s new Digital Assets Policy Project.  He is also a nonresident scholar at the Brookings Institution and a consultant on financial regulatory and fintech issues.  

Mr. Massad served as Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2014-2017.  Under his leadership, the agency implemented the Dodd Frank reforms of the over-the-counter swaps market; harmonized many aspects of cross-border regulation, including reaching a landmark agreement with the European Union on clearinghouse oversight; declared bitcoin and virtual currencies to be commodities; and enhanced cybersecurity protections.  

Previously, Mr. Massad served as the Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In that capacity, he oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the principal U.S. governmental response to the 2008 financial crisis.   During his tenure, the Treasury recovered more on all the crisis investments than was disbursed.  Mr. Massad was with the Treasury from 2009 to 2014 and also served as a counselor to the Treasury Secretary.  

Mr. Massad received a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Harvard College.  

Nolan McCarty

Nolan McCarty is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and Vice Dean for Strategic Initiatives at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.   He served as the chair of Princeton Politics Department from 2011-2018.

He has written on a variety of topics related U.S. politics and political economy ranging from the causes and consequences of political polarization, economic and politic inequality, regulation, and the political role of business.  He has also engaged in the development of statistical methodologies and the application of game theoretic models to political questions. He earned his A.B. in Economics from the University of Chicago and his PhD in Political Economy from Carnegie Mellon University.

Scott Moore

Scott is a co-founder of Gitcoin, an internet-native organization for building and funding digital public goods. Using democratic and participatory tooling, Gitcoin's community has helped to allocate over $50m+ to a wide range of causes across open source, education, climate, and more. Scott also participates in a number of other DAOs building public infrastructure including ENS, Gnosis Safe, and Optimism. Previously, he helped kickstart related projects with the Digital Public Goods Alliance and Ethereum Foundation Grants.

Aaliyah Nedd

Aaliyah Nedd serves as Director of Government Relations for the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA CLUSA). In this role, she leads NCBA’s federal, state, and local outreach and advocacy work to develop, advance and promote cooperative enterprise. 

Prior to joining NCBA CLUSA, Aaliyah worked on a variety of policy issues at the National Association of Counties (NACo). Most recently she served as the Associate Legislative Director for Agriculture/Rural Affairs and Immigration. Aaliyah holds degrees in International Studies and Russian and is a graduate of the University of Florida.

Joni Pirovich

Joni is a passionate advocate for web3 innovation and DAO-first thinking, founding LawFi DAO in July 2022 to further her contribution to web3 education and responsible policy development. BADAS*L was opened in early 2021 to operate as a distributed law practice where Joni provides legal and non-legal services to a range of law firms in various web3 matters spanning tax, securities and financial services, IP, labour, litigation and AML/CTF compliance. The learnings from Joni’s distributed law practice filter through in the thousands of hours spent on policy contributions since 2018, available at https://badasl.com/policy. Joni was a contributor to the recently released World Economic Forum DAO Policy Toolkit and sits on the DAO Panel for the UK Law Commission.

Jacqueline R. Radebaugh., Esq.

Jacqueline assists mission-based, values-forward entrepreneurs and businesses in identifying and addressing their legal needs, from start-up phase through financing rounds, to conversion and exit strategies. Committed to advancing racial equity through social entrepreneurship, the sharing economy, and community & economic development strategies that promote local sustainability, Jacqueline aims to bring about social and economic change. For that, she collaborates with coop incubators, community-based organizations, and instigate conversations about community land trusts, cooperatives, DAOs and other shared equity models. She focuses on democratic governance and employee ownership models, and DAOs and their overlap with cooperative practices and principles. She’s a partner and shareholder attorney at Jason Wiener p.c., a public benefit corporation, and a Legal Fellow with the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

Sarah Roth-Gaudette

Over the past 25 years, Sarah has managed campaigns with some of the largest grassroots mobilizing groups in the country, including U.S. PIRG and MoveOn PAC, and understands how to stimulate grassroots engagement and convert it into effective political results using the best technology, communications, and alliance building.  She now heads the digital rights advocacy organization, Fight for the Future. The group developed the strategy and online tools that have shaped policies to protect net neutrality, stop online censorship and surveillance, and defend alternatives to Big Tech and Big Banks. Known for its massively viral effort at dontkillcrypto.com that drove 40,000+ calls to senators to oppose last minute additions to the infrastructure bill, Fight has emerged as a leading human rights advocate in the crypto space, opposing financial surveillance, defending the right to code, and ensuring that lawmakers and consumers alike understand the stakes of these complex technologies.

Nathan Schneider

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the MA program in Media and Public Engagement. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press. He edited Vitalik Buterin’s book Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains and co-edited Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Recent scholarship has been published in New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, the Georgetown Law Technology Review, and Media, Culture & Society, among other journals. He has also reported for publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America, a national Catholic magazine. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website, nathanschneider.info.

Aiden Slavin

Aiden Slavin is the project lead of the World Economic Forum’s Crypto Impact and Sustainability Accelerator. At the Forum he leads initiatives across the public and private sectors to advance the Web3 policy and impact agenda. Prior to the World Economic Forum, he led policy and partnerships programs at ID2020, an alliance focused on realizing the benefits of blockchain-based digital ID. He holds a BA from Columbia University and an MSc from the University of Oxford. 

Connor Spelliscy

Connor is a decentralized internet researcher and advocate, primarily focused on DAOs. Connor is the Executive Director of the DAO Research Collective, which accelerates DAO functionality by procuring and open sourcing targeted research foundational to effective DAO operation.

Connor also advises DAO foundations and nonprofits on initiatives designed to improve the ecosystem with a particular focus on equitable access to legal information and improving policy. 

He co-founded the Blockchain Association and the Canadian Web3 Council, and previously worked as a Venture Partner at Hangar and a technology lawyer at Goodmans LLP.

Allison Stanger

Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College; Research Affiliate (Co-lead, Theory of AI Practice Initiative) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; and External Professor and Science Board member at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. Professor Stanger is also the co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics, co-editor and co-translator (with Michael Kraus) of Irreconcilable Differences? Explaining Czechoslovakia’s Dissolution (foreword by Václav Havel) and the author of numerous articles and essays. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Who Elected Big Tech?

Peter Van Valkenburgh

Peter is Director of Research at Coin Center, the leading non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. He’s a founding board member of the Zcash Foundation, a non-profit charity dedicated to building financial privacy infrastructure for the public good, and an advisor to StarkWare, a company on the forefront of developing trust-minimized scaling solutions for blockchains using zero-knowledge proof cryptography. He is a graduate of NYU Law, has a BS in economics from George Mason University, and is a self-taught web developer.

He drafts Coin Center’s public regulatory comments, and helps shape its research agenda. He has testified before the Senate Banking Committee, and the House Financial Services and Energy and Commerce Committees. He has briefed staff and members of the EU parliament, and educated policymakers and regulatory staff around the world on the subject of cryptocurrency regulation and decentralized computing systems. Previously, he was a Google Policy Fellow and collaborated with various digital rights organizations on projects related to privacy, surveillance, and digital copyright law. In a former life he was a working actor in New York City and Washington, DC theater.

Glen Weyl

E. (Eric) Glen Weyl is Founder and Research Lead of the Microsoft Research Special Project the Plural Technology Collaboratory,, Founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation, the leading thinktank in the Web3 space, and Founder and Chair of the Plurality Institute, which coordinates an academic research network developing technology for cooperation across difference.  He previously led Web3 technical strategy at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer,  was Co-Chair and Technical Lead of the Harvard Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Rapid Response Task Force on Covid-19, whose recommendations were endorsed by a dozen leading civil Society organizations and the Biden Campaign and taught economics at the University of Chicago, Yale, Princeton and Harvard.

He is co-author with Eric Posner of the 2018 Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, with Puja Ohlhaver and Vitalik Buterin of the 2022 paper “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul” (which reached the 25 most downloaded papers of all time on the Social Science Research Network during its first year) and is working on an open, Web3-based collaborative book project with Taiwan’s Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, Plurality: Technology for Cooperative Diversity and Democracy.  He is also the author of dozens of scholarly and popular articles in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Economic Review, the Harvard Law Review, the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation and the New York Times. He graduated as Valedictorian of his Princeton undergraduate class in 2007 and received his PhD in economics also from Princeton in 2008.

Katherine Wu

Katherine Wu is one of three Lead Stewards of the ENS DAO, where she oversees the working group responsible for providing governance oversight and supporting the management and operation of working groups through DAO tooling and governance initiatives as well as treasury management for the DAO.

Katherine is also a Venture Partner at Archetype, an early-stage venture firm focused on accelerating the decentralized future. Most recently, Katherine was the Senior Lead on the Coinbase Ventures team, where she led investments on behalf of Coinbase and scaled the investment team. During her tenure at Coinbase, Katherine oversaw a record-breaking year in deal-making, putting Coinbase Ventures among the most active corporate venture funds in operation.

Reuben Youngblom

Reuben Youngblom is a coordinator for the Stanford CodeX RegTrax Initiative, as well as the co-host of the Stanford Law School Our Data podcast. He has a law degree, a computer science degree, and a master’s in philosophy. His work focuses on the intersection between blockchain and the law, and has appeared in CoinDesk, the CodeX blog, and the MIT Computational Law Report, as well as other outlets. He works primarily with solidity, react, javascript, and python. He is an active blockchain developer, and advises startups on legal and engineering matters.

Community Application

Community Application for DAO Harvard Conference

The community application is now closed.

• Apply Here