[Talk] Applications of MP-FHE for Vulnerable Communities

Coming out of a week in Bangkok, Thailand, getting deep in the weeds on emerging cryptographic techniques at Devcon 2024, thanks to the support of 0xPARC sponsoring me as a Research Fellow.

Some highlights to note for me include:

• learning more and nerding out about verifiable networks, selective disclosure, and indistinguishable obfuscation — topics I expect to be major areas of exploration in this space moving forward

  • I’m curious how indistinguishable obfuscation and fully homomorphic encryption can be combined to create systems where encrypted data is run on encrypted programs, and what the downstream implications of this will be.

• exploring ideas of cryptographic consent mechanisms (perhaps another framing for selective disclosure?)

• having a space to really be able to share my work and research to a receptive audience, especially around community applications for zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), multi-party computation (MPC), and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)

I also gave a talk on Applications of MP-FHE for Vulnerable Communities, as a part of the “Multi-Party Fully Homomorphic Encryption (MP-FHE) in Practice” block: (link to slides here if you’d like to see my notes, recording to come!)

I’ve also been talking with some friends about putting together a residency around community privacy, hopefully for early next year, where we can bring together privacy and cryptography builders with community workers into collaborating in shared space — very excited about this!

Other highlights on this trip: visiting my friend’s mom in Chiang Mai, riding around on the back of scooters, eating delicious seafood and fruit, getting massages, and tapping into the local queer scene and music scene.

Special thanks to my friends Ying Tong, Janabel, Aayush, Vivek, Micah, Rithikha, Seb, Raymond, Naia, Grjte, and Jay for all the inspiring and though-provoking conversations this week. I’ve learned so much and feel so grateful to be in community with others who are also kind, curious, and excited about building out new infrastructure with these emerging tools.

[Resource] Community Models for Music Venues and Platforms

Published a short piece in Rave Cafe Zine v.003: Resistance on Community Models for Music Venues and Platforms <3

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“What are possible models for community-supported and community-governed spaces for music, art, and culture? DIY music venues are constantly under threat of raised rents and shuttering down. Most musicians are not able to make a living wage, especially from current streaming and royalty models.

Emerging models for community venues and platforms may provide alternative cooperative frameworks for supporting music, culture, and creative workers. Through experimentation and collective organizing, building sustainable infrastructure and creating systemic change may be possible.”

[Resource] Interfaces for Data Consent

Was supposed to give a talk and workshop on Interfaces for Data Consent at the Re-Imagining Cryptography and Privacy (ReCAP) Workshop last month! Sadly came down with a virus and was unable to attend. I did compile some resources into a short guide that I’d like to share.

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“How can clear, effective, and fluid interfaces for consent be built into digital public infrastructure and data governance?

Some examples of cultural frameworks and interfaces for consent include: Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent; informed consent in medicine; University Title IX Policies of Affirmative Consent; Sociocracy’s “Consent Decision-Making”; consensus decision making; opt-in vs. opt-out; consent profiles; GDPR cookie consent interfaces; Creative Commons licensing; open-source licensing, GPL3, and copyleft; and more!

As we translate cultural frameworks for consent into interactable consent interfaces, how can we implement privacy and cryptography tools to provide backend consent guarantees?”

Cooperative Leaders and Scholars, Community Venues and Cultural Land Trusts

As an alum of the Cooperative Development Foundation’s Cooperative Leaders and Scholars program, I returned this year for their Denver coop tours trip and co-facilitated a personal asset mapping workshop for the new cohort. I had a lot of fun! We chatted with local coop leaders from the Rocky Mountain Farmer’s Union, Center for Community Wealth Building, CoBank, visited the Southwest Food Coalition, ate lunch from worker coop Mujeres Emprendedoras, and visited Montevista Mobile Home Park and the Queen City Coop.

I also met up afterwards with my coop collaborator Nathan to work on our Governance Archaeology project together (site to be live soon!) at CU Boulder.

Community Venues and Cultural Land Trusts

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about community venues and community spaces, leading me to think more about community real estate options. In NYC, so many DIY art, music, and community spaces closed over the pandemic. The ones around today are still constantly at threat of raised rents, insurance, etc. The main example I’ve seen on community-owned music venues is based in the UK, through the Music Venue Trust, where, using a Community Benefit Society—a not-for-profit legal structure that I believe is specific to the UK—local community members can buy community shares to raise capital to buy venue buildings. (Am hoping to publish some writing soon on community music models, including venues as well as platforms.) I’ve also heard of a DIY art space in DC, Rhizome, attempting to buy their. building using a community financing model based on Land in Common, a nonprofit community land trust in Maine.

On this trip, Jenna, one of the current CLS cohort members, told me about cultural land trusts, a community model for art and culture organizations to collectively steward land and buildings. There are actually a few examples of this, based in British Columbia; London; Austin; Seattle; and more.

I also learned on this trip about the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative (NYC REIC), which I was so excited to find and then, after looking around, seems now sadly inactive. I’m really curious how these efforts went and how we can learn from them.

Very excited to explore these topics more! I think this concept of community real estate is feeling salient to me as music spaces near and dear to me in NYC have been closing or at risk of closing. While more are forming as well, and I know that the nature of New York can often be ephemeral, I’m also thinking about ways for communities to be able to share homes together. I know at least three friend groups ready to pool in on a coop home together, and I’m wondering, what financial and legal infrastructures do we have, either on the state or federal level, to support these kinds of efforts of community and collective wealth building?

[Talk] Governable Spaces | Collective Governance: Governance Archaeology

Had a lovely time sharing a talk and panel earlier this month at the Brooklyn Public Library on Governable Spaces: Tech for Democratic Communities alongside colleagues and collaborators Nathan Schneider (Governable Spaces), Hazel Devjani (Metagov), and Rudy Fraser (Papertree).

Topics we collectively covered include:

• governable spaces and implicit feudalism

• financial infrastructure for mutual aid

• toolkits for governance

For my portion, I also cover:

• collective governance and commoning

  • examples: participatory budgeting, cooperative models, digital governance

• governance archaeology — a collaborative project between myself, Federica Carugati, Nathan Schneider, and Júlia Rodrigues, investigating collective governance practices across history, geography, and culture (more to come soon!)

• Indigenous data sovereignty

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Watch the recording on the Internet Archive here:
>> Governable Spaces: Tech for Democratic Communities

[Essay] Privacy-Preserving Data Governance, Ash Center Occasional Papers Series

Read the full essay here:

>> Ash Center Occasional Papers Series: Privacy-Preserving Data Governance

Published an essay with the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation on some recent research and ideas on privacy-preserving data governance, covering:

• how emerging privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) can serve vulnerable communities such as sex workers;

• how privacy-preserving data collectives can enable community power;

• how interfaces for data consent can create infrastructure for community agency;

• models of access, usability, and responsibility over “ownership;” stewardship, consent, and agency over “control;”

• community research and co-design.

[Talk] Privacy-Preserving Data Governance, Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy, Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center

Last month I was invited to talk at the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023) at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. 

I’m trying to think of how to describe this gathering… I had fun and met many lovely people with interesting ideas around governance, representation, voice, power. I shared some new work and research around privacy-preserving data governance, covering:

• emerging privacy and cryptography tools and frameworks

• models for data collectives, e.g. data trusts, data coops, data commons 

• interfaces for data consent and collective consent

• models beyond “ownership” and “control”  

• community research and co-design 

A summary and detailed notes of the workshop can be found on Bruce Schneier’s blog as well. 

My personal highlights include meeting and befriending more sci-fi and speculative fiction writers, learning about community efforts to amend the constitution (which I didn’t consider as a possibility!), chatting with a privacy lawyer, discussing possible models for collective consent, thinking about new frameworks for data governance, and, as always, being in community with others excited to build and collaborate together.

I’ve also been thinking about: 

• the Creative Commons as a model for the digital commons

• open source as digital public infrastructure 

• cryptography enabling data sharing in a way that can be both open and private 

• governance archaeology and ethnographic approaches to collective governance 

• consent as relational, networked consent

• “What do we collectively want, and how do we build this shared future?” 

Below are the slides from my talk, and here’s a link to them as well if you’d like to see my notes.

Thinking a lot these days about data privacy and digital consent models, especially for vulnerable populations. More specifically, currently working with my friend and collaborator Val Elefante from Lips.social on cryptography-enabled privacy protections, data coops, and collective consent interfaces, by and for sex workers, and excited to share more soon. 

Also continuing research on governance archaeology in collaboration with Federica Caraguti and Nathan Schneider, investigating collective governance across culture, history, and geography, and my hope is to bring in a stronger decolonial and international lens to our work.

Wishing to publish more research and writing in this year, stay tuned :-)