Agenda:

• Confirm timeline, scope, and approach, or revise in specific
• Assign action items for report next steps

Attending: Scott S, Thomas, Jeff S, Ann V, Mattisse, Scott D, Thorsten, Jim H, Luk V, Marc, Kathleen, John M, Eve

Congrats to Thomas (and his students) and Adrian on their awards!

In Italy, law has a general structure and then specific cases separately. Ethereum's recent fork required recalculating to a point before the hack (this was in July). Is this a problem for us? Jim comments: DAO demonstrates a number of things - that you need legal framing and that even decentralized protocols depend on communities. Eve notes that many of today's technologies and techniques seem to undermine DLTs and similar in that they centralize to protect them: TTPs, trust frameworks, permissioning, etc. Scott D thinks undermining isn't necessary: e.g., a dairy coop or a partnership could overcome the need for the "poison of centralization" (Eve phrase). Since any realistic IAM system injects this poison today, and any sufficiently "wide-ecosystem" (cross-domain) distributed use case will likely need some element of IAM and/or governance to achieve its goals, can the circle be squared?

What are the techniques that temper the need for centralization-style governance? Can Matisse and Scott D discuss this on the list? We can add them to the report.

Do we need to write several reports? There are several themes here. One is about specific technologies being missing, e.g. (as Jeff S notes) a query language and specific techniques missing (as noted above), and one is about the central tension here. Alternatively, Eve suggests our six-month goal is to write the first broad report about the central tension given the many use cases that want to achieve empowerment.

Thomas, Eric, and Scott D have already been writing a paper called Computational Sovereignty. They can distribute it – there's definitely interest!

There's some support for one report with recommendations for the breakdown of several reports/maybe specs in future. Jim suggests adding analysis to break down "smart contracts" vs. generic blockchain. And there's support for putting a stake in terminology generally.

AI: Eve: Ensure Ann's list contributions get into the minutes more properly.