Reports & Papers

Estonia, after a series of severe cyberattacks in 2007, integrated blockchain technology into its e-governance system, bolstering its cybersecurity infrastructure and becoming a global model of digital society innovation. Today, Estonia is one of the world's most digitally integrated countries, with 99% of its public services digitized, reportedly saving over 1,400 years of working time and about 2% of its GDP annually. This case study provides a comprehensive analysis of Estonia's digital transformation, evaluating the endeavor from multiple perspectives, encompassing technology, governance, regulatory frameworks, stakeholder involvement, and the underlying values driving the transformation. It aims to derive lessons for other countries considering their own digital transformations.

Direct air capture (DAC) is a type of technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air. As the negative impacts of climate change become ever more apparent, governments and private industries have funneled increasing support toward DAC as a critical pathway toward achieving a net-zero future. Although a promising technology, wide-scale deployment of DAC faces several significant challenges.

This paper, authored by Connor Spelliscy, Sarah Hubbard, Nathan Schneider, and Samuel Vance-Law, explores how newly developed DAO tooling could help co-ops compete in the online economy.

Smart wearables are quickly becoming the next wave of ubiquitous technologies due to their vast market penetration and broad utility. In the healthcare setting, smart wearables may be used to advance preventative health measures, emergency medicine, and primary care. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that healthcare is done, but major technical and nontechnical limitations exist and the regulation of these technologies is still underdeveloped.

Neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) represent a global health emergency, affecting millions of individuals and imposing significant economic burdens. Despite increased funding and government initiatives, effective therapies remain elusive, and NDD research lags behind other fields. This report argues for a simplified, accelerated, and transparent unified approach to NDD research, building on lessons from other fields and industries.

Decentralized Web3 technologies such as blockchain emerged as instruments for creating an alternative “trustless” system that uses cryptography and decentralized consensus mechanisms to obviate the need for third party human intermediaries, but suffered significant setbacks due to massive frauds and speculations throughout the past decade of their evolution. This report investigates a variety of case studies that showcase emerging efforts to employ decentralized trust-building technologies (DTTs), especially those central to web3, in the physical realities and the built environment of our social institutions.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), typically accessed through smartphones and headset devices, allow users to access a shared virtual environment, often referred to as a metaverse. While major companies make multibillion dollar bets on the metaverse, regulation and governance structures are still underdeveloped. In this technology primer, we dive into the technology, use cases, governance, and public purpose considerations of AR and VR for the Metaverse.

The current strategy for digital platform governance is fragmented, ad hoc, and politicized; the United States has barely moved the needle on an organized governance strategy to improve consumer welfare and communal wellbeing online. Industry-wide voluntary standard setting offers a path forward to ensure we have expert-led processes, measurements, and best practices to elevate safety and quality on digital platforms, while paving the way for comprehensive U.S. federal rules and enforcement. 

Artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically machine learning (ML), is becoming increasingly prominent in the day-to-day lives of most people through commercial ready products, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. In this technology primer, we dive into the technology, use cases, governance, and public purpose considerations of AI and ML. 

The use of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok is increasingly widespread, currently amounting to billions of users worldwide. Social media companies deploy proprietary recommendation algorithms to automate the selection, ranking, and presentation of content on the platform’s “feed” or recommended content section, every time a user opens or refreshes the site or app. However, social media recommendation algorithms have a range of privacy, security, information quality, and psychological concerns for users. 

A successful approach to the regulation of social media recommendation algorithms will require a combination of government regulation, self governance, and external oversight to facilitate value alignment across these diverse actors and tackle the various challenges associated with this technology. This publication explores the technical components of social media recommendation systems, as well as their public purpose considerations.