Hi Ann, Josh,
First of all, I find your work very interesting and I think that the ecosystem really needs such tools. Your Medium article does a good job of making sense of data that may seem complex at first glance on Airtable. As you mentioned, a front-end would clearly be helpful for ease of use. Your approach to study online communities in general (and not specifically blockchains/DAOs) also brings a lot.
Regarding your open questions, the SCRF forum contains some posts that might be of interest to you:
- A state of the art on blockchains’ decentralization metrics (+ discussions in comments):
Notable Works in Decentralization metrics -
‘A list of vulnerabilities in DAOs, presented as both opportunities and challenges’:
DAO Vulnerabilities: limits, threats, and opportunities to DAOs , by @kelsienabben
SCRF plans to publish more posts as part of a long term project to study decentralization in the context of blockchains. Govbase could certainly be used as a data source in this research.
To give my opinion on what data and metrics to use for decentralization, I think it is necessary to maximize their number to capture all aspects of the network. Using only a few metrics can obscure important concepts and lead to misinterpretations of the results (e.g. Blockchain A can be more decentralized than Blockchain B according to metric X but not metric Y).
The use of different data samples can allow to study specific granularity, as the time periods over which the metrics are involved can influence the results (e.g. Bitcoin mining is less centralized today than in 2009). Different granularity can also allow to monitor/study the evolution of a metric through time.
I didn’t know about the “are we decentralized yet” website, thanks for the reference. I think it’s a good base but it lacks metrics regarding project governance and they only focus on smart contracts platforms/Layer 1, leaving out some DAOs that you might be interested in.
P.-S. : I also find your “Agreement Engine” idea really cool!