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tags: Governance
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# ReGovern.earth

ReGovern.earth is a legal-tech incubator designed specifically to incubate a new class of startups specialising in smart legal contracts. This new class of “law firm” is fully digitally native, administered and run on the blockchain and incorporated as a Wyoming based LLC (or similar jurisdiction). We are seeking investment in this startup, which we would like launch as one of the first portals on the DEIP platform.

ReGovern.earth will launch an open access peer reviewed journal - the Governance Journal, and launch a legal-tech incubator that will enable legal entrepreneurs to easily form, and secure investment in their own legal-tech startup (or “firm”). Each firm can specialise in an area of legal smart contract expertise, and generate fully digital revenue from smart legal contract commissioning, use, education and certification (brand reputation).

This is an emerging field and we anticipate young law firms being created on this portal, and seeking investment in order to disrupt the legal market.

## Asset Class

ReGovern.org will offer fractional-NFT based IP in the legal-tech “firms” that are incubated by the ReGovern.org legal-tech incubation service. There are a number of ways we can do this, and we will use the DEIP platform to experiment with:

- Tokenised licenses in smart legal contracts
- Tokenised ISA’s in legal tech education
- Tokenised revenue share agreements from legal firm services

The project will launch with the publication of the Governance Journal in conjunction with the support of a number of university departments, blockchain companies, and law firms. We will use the DEIP collective intelligence protocol to craft a multidimensional reputation model for this journal seeded by the existing reputation of the academics and coders publishing in the journal.

## Governance Journal

The Governance Journal is the name we give to an open access peer reviewed publication that we will develop on DEIP in order to build the community of experts that are needed for the see reputation graph required by the collective intelligence protocol, which in turn is the basis of the quality assessment of the legal-tech incubator and the valuation of the asset class(es) at the heart of the business model. The Governance Journal provides a relatively easy and low cost-to-market strategy on top of which we can build the legal-tech courses and legal-tech incubator. The journal is the basis of our brand and PR strategy that we will use to open up an otherwise highly conservative and traditional industry.

The Governance Journal would launch with content from the following sources and networks:

- Smart contract related articles from projects interested in Governance
- Legal articles related to smart contracts, regulation and governance
- Invited speakers in the area of democracy, currency design and technology
- Liquid Democracy, self-sovereign identity and Citizen Assemblies
- Anthropology relating to governance
- Legal Philosophy (VSM and Moral Modalities)
- Global, ecological and space law
- Meritocracy, science and expert opinion
- Software projects such as Democracy Earth

In order to build a community of authors for the journal, the editorial team will innovate around the integration of podcasting and interdisciplinary group work in the article creation workflow.

## Podcasts

Podcasting is a relatively new medium in the legal and academic space, however many journals and thought leaders are experimenting in this space. We aim to professionalise this space by fully integrating podcasting and workshops into the publishing process.

Panel discusssions provide a bridge to podcasting, and post-COVID are of interest to conference organisers in the legal-tech space. The Governance Journal incorporates panel discussions, recorded and published as podcasts into the publishing workflow, incentivising authors and reviewers to turn the discussion into one or more peer reviewed articles on the platform.

In this way panel discussions are an easy onboarding vehicle for new contributors to the journal. Authors interested in exploring a new topic, particularly an interdisciplinary topic, can invite speakers to a panel discussion, and reGovern.earth makes it easy to do this - scheduling the time, and providing the context, recording and podcasting workflow required. Finally the editorial team, have the inhouse expertise required to produce professional audio mixes and a strong identity to the podcast.

There are a number of legal podcasts with authors that we are in conversation with. Podcasts can be quoted within publications and the legal commons alongside other material.

- http://www.ejil.org/podcast.php
- Another Way - Larry Lessig
- Against the Law

The Governance Journal will work with this community of podcasts to help organise and increase the audio and academic quality of the material. We will curate podcasts in the legal-tech sector, incubate new podcasts that authors may wish to start, provide our own RSS feeds, and enable the audience to explore legal-tech subjects by mapping and organising episodes of podcasts for a range of sources.

Podcast would be enhanced with elements like references, transcripts and DOI’s. The aim will be to grow a community of experts and to sign them up to the project with an account that enables them to develop and leverage their reputation in order to begin an organised process of peer review. In turn we will be able to cite podcast episodes, or even specific audio segments of an episode within an article, or entry in the legal commons.

## Legal Commons

The legal commons is a knowledge commons, created for and by ReGovern.org for the Governance Journal. The content is drawn from free culture sources such as:

Open access journals and publications including:

- European Journal of International Law
- [*Duke Law Journal*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Law_Journal) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Law_Journal
- [*German Law Journal*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Law_Journal)
- [*Health and Human Rights*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_Human_Rights)
- [*Melbourne University Law Review*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_University_Law_Review)
- [*SCRIPT-ed*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT-ed)
- Articles published by opendemocracy.net

There are 637 open access law journals, of which 408 are in the English language - https://doaj.org/search/journals?ref=homepage-box&source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22filtered%22%3A%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22bool%22%3A%7B%22must%22%3A%5B%7B%22terms%22%3A%7B%22index.schema_codes_tree.exact%22%3A%5B%22LCC%3AK%22%5D%7D%7D%2C%7B%22terms%22%3A%7B%22index.language.exact%22%3A%5B%22English%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%7D%2C%22query%22%3A%7B%22query_string%22%3A%7B%22query%22%3A%22Law%22%2C%22default_operator%22%3A%22AND%22%2C%22default_field%22%3A%22index.classification%22%7D%7D%7D%7D%7D

Content and citations from this open access literature will be referenced and organised into dictionary style knowledge nodes, and hyperlinked to original articles authored for the journal.

In addition we start with other free culture licensed material from:

- Green Earth Vision (content from Mooc)
- Purpose driven organisations and OGM governance model
- Wikipedia (governance topics)
- TED talks

## Legal-tech Workshops

We will launch the project with a series of workshops with lawyers and blockchain experts around creating these new legal structures based on the new Wyoming LLC legislation. These workshops will be attractive to lawyers, entrepreneurs and smart contract coders alike. They are based on existing work done for OneClickOrgs based around company formation and governance of cooperatives, voluntary associations and companies limited by guarantee. The workshops will adapt these forms for the new Wyoming based legislation, together with parallel workshops in UK, Australia and Canada. We aim to extend these workshops to cover other language and legal jurisdictions starting June 2022.

The workshops would be organised and structured by the editorial team, while the teaching would be undertaken by myself (David Bovill) and experts from both Lexon and DEIP. We have access to an extensive list of legal-tech professionals through our contacts in Lexon, DEIP, Future Law Ltd and Legal Hackers (MIT). Combined with our ability to create content with a wide spread interest in governance, legal philosophy, anthropology and related disciplines within science and software development we would launch a “journal” together with the workshops serialised on the DEIP powered web portal.

## Team

It can be seen from the above minimal outline that the basic work that needs to be undertaken is akin to running a course, publishing an academic journal, or developing a MOOC. The effort needed to do this, and the expertise required is not inconsiderable.

The roles and skills involved with such an activity would include:

1. Project Lead (David) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbovill/
2. Editor (tbc)
3. Head of design (Wendy)
4. Chief of Technology (Pete)
5. Community development / workshop facilitator (tbc)

The team organisation should be structured along the lines of a creative agency or publishing department - that is the term should work together based on strong creative communication with the ability of team members to swap roles and discuss ideas in order to create strong coherent publishing propositions / brands together and to market / recruit writers / speakers and workshop participants.

## Partnerships and sponsors

The Governance journal would seek sponsorship deals and partnerships. We have secured funding from Lexon to run legal-tech workshops, with lawyers and coders based in Wyoming, Texas, UK, Canada and Australia. We have interest in running legal-tech workshops in many other non-English language jurisdictions, and aim to seek finance on the DEIP platform to translate the journal, workshops and the legal code into the relevant local context.

At the same time we would explore partnerships with organisations that have extensive experience in quality publications in the democratic or governance space - such as https://opendemocracy.net. We are currently in discussion with a number of academic institutions such as Stanford Centre for Legal Informatics, and the open access publishing house at London School of Economics with regard to forming a partnership around the Governance Journal.

## International launch event

We have been invited to launch the journral at the UN conference Stockholm+50 that will take place in Stockholm (June 2-3rd, 2022) to celebrate 50 years since the first even UN conference on the Environment. During this event we will launch the first issue of the journal, covering aspects of supply chain, carbon pricing, and environmental legislation from around the world. We will offer self-organised workshops that enable projects to create smart contracts and embed these into the environmental governance and stewardship of their organisation.

- https://www.unep.org/events/unep-event/stockholm50

## Academy Launch

These workshops will take place online in a customised video conferencing platform that we will embed into the academy. This platform enables the workshops to scale horizontally as groups of participants can self-organise and schedule times for their own workshops.

The second stage of the project would be to launch the academy and incubator program. This stage would happen when we have recruited and signed up a sufficient community of experts to the Governance Journal in order to establish the initial reputation graph, and tutors for the academy.

The second stage requires additional funding, that could be raised on the platform itself. The steps involved in organising this project would include:

1. Recruiting the right mix of workshop attendees.
2. Securing clear time commitments from domain experts.
3. Creating workshop materials.
4. Publishing the workshop results (workshop goal).
5. Securing initial sponsors and investment for legal tech IP in platform projects.
6. Attracting investors to the academy.