---
description: bestape reflections on waving the LexDAO flag (though name is still missing) on West Coast in April 2024

---
###### tags: `event` `reflections` `roadtrip`

# Futurelaw and Earth Commons, 2024

###### at South Whidbey Commons on *April 21 2024* by Kyle | bestape

Over the past week, I attended:

* the Computable Contracts conference at Stanford
* the Institutional Ecologies conference at Stanford
* the Earth Commons (and Funding the Commons) conference at Berkeley

This week, I'm off to Roatán for the [Safe Harbor](https://safe_harbor) conference.

## The Computable Contracts Conference

The first conference was Computable Contracts starting on Tuesday at Stanford, specifically insurance contracts. The conference lasted two days, but I decided to spend the second day at the Institutional Ecologies conference that LexDAO sponsored, held next door.

It was very good LexDAO represented the "law is a public good" perspective at the Computable Contracts conference, and in the future I hope enough of our members attend events like these that we have a persistent presence and help define standards with adequate OSS priorities.

I learned a lot at the conference, including actually reviewing code as shown below. I also saw an opportunity for LexDAO to teach web3 ontologies to the Futurelaw community sometime in the future, such as: A) discretionary <> deterministic (adequate latency), B) client <> wallet interdata (compare client <> server <> database dynamic), C) persistent data memory <> persistent program memory (Von Neumann reminder), D) text is the universal interface (Unix philosophy reminder); E) the document object model "DOM" is the networked user interface "NUI" leaf node (World Wide Web reminder). I wrote notes about this during the conference, and these notes might eventually become part of [Ix](https://ixian.tech) design principles; I'm very grateful that I was able to attend the conference and clearly see a juxtaposition of two thoughtfully crafted ontology trees.


At the conference, I reminded everyone how important of a legal engineering tech the DOM is. Not only does the DOM offer a declarative and imperative scripting-&-database medium designed to express documents, the DOM is grandchild tech of arguably the first legal engineering inventor [Charles Goldfarb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Goldfarb)'s SGML. All else equal, the DOM is likely by far the best declarative <> imperative composite solution, at least for interdata human interfaces aka NUI leaves. More on my DOM thoughts [here](https://ape.mirror.xyz/FjUVEcUrDmQISEmcVarGEDHt6mLK9VOjLbxXgFy4edE).

The big ontological complaint I had as a legal engineer was that defining traditional alphabetic languages 'natural languages' misses that modern computer languages are also natural languages. Modern programming languages are more mathematical than traditional alphabetic languages, but math is also a natural language. Indeed, in some traditional alphabetic languages such as Hebrew, math isn't considered separate from the rest of the language.

I was staying at [The Embassy](https://embassynetwork.com/locations/embassy-sf/)'s Ada Lovelace room during the event, so perhaps my inner voice reminding me that Lovelace's dad was Lord Byron during the conference added emphasis to the absurdity of illiterate readers, unable to learnedly appreciate programming language, nonetheless declaring programming language isn't a natural language despite the historical nicety that it is the natural language marriage of poetry & math through Lovelace's invention. I now suspect a key difference between legal engineers and other lawyering might pan out to be whether the inability to read and write modern programming languages is considered a literacy problem or not. If the wider legal community does recognize programming languages are recently invented natural languages, our sense of what is or is not unlicensed practice of law "UPL" might change. At this stage in the evolution of law being dragged into the information age, it's as if our only English speaking jurisprudence tradition would consider the practice of law in Japanese is not the practice of law because it isn't conducted in English and looks like gibberish to the Japanese illiterate so it mustn't be legal practice since that's only done in English. All the more uneducated of a position, in my spicy opinion, because these modern programming languages -- a graceful marriage of poetry & math -- have been invented because they are the only languages that can automate the law, which is an incredibly powerful <> fiduciary practice area of law, if not already the most, when you stop and think about it. Yet, we don't distinguish UPL from other developer work and end up with tragedies like the Tornado Cash *habeas corpus* fiasco [MetaCartel has sacrificed all its ETH](https://twitter.com/DekanBro/status/1773003984061534221) to the lawyers in order for us to react to via criminal trial defense rather than anticipate. Let's start anticipating rather than reacting, and that requires us admitting that like other natural language wordsmithing, some (of the most important) developer work is also the practice of law in a recently invented natural language taxonomy based on logical philosophy, poetry and mechanical automata engineering.


I was in Cayman a couple of weeks back and went to a presentation by Tom Jenkins and Maj Gen David Fraser, about their book The Anticipant Organization, at the George Town Yacht Club, hosted by Cayman Enterprise City (CEC), where the authors explained their thoughts on anticipating (proactive, elastic, adaptive) rather than reacting to negative events. It's been helpful analyzing phenomena lately, asking if the actors are anticipating or reacting to negative events, especially as a self-reflection exercise.


## the institutional ecologies conference


LexDAO sponsored Institutional Ecologies.


I was lucky enough to have a private conversation with Tony Lai during our first workshop breakaway. One thing we recognized as musicians was that society's civic relationship with legal practice could be better served if we legal professionals, when appropriate, thought of our role with creative clients (which is common in web3 lawyering these days) as much more that of a producer helping an artist record a hit song and get it distributed in the right places. The producer doesn't write the song. In other words, clients and lawyers always expect the lawyer to know more about the law but often, for that particular branch of jurisprudence, sometimes the client should be the person creating the law and maybe stewarding the law as well. That law might be the client's song to sing, and we professionals are there to help them shine, as soil for their harvest. This makes quite a bit of sense in polycentric legal systems, and could, among other harmonizations, ease integration of legal principles between cultures. Tony and I also chatted about modern insurance contracts and the 'institutional' possibilities of mutual risk funds, including arbitration for customer v. insurance provider 'client-server' disputes.


When we reconvened after the workshops, Tony brought me onstage to share a bit with the audience about the ecologies of how law could be more humane like music as well as the prosocial and self-help possibilities of DeFi insurance in polycentric jurisdictions.


The next day was the main Futurelaw at Stanford CodeX conference. I decided to be strategic and not attend the event. Next year, hopefully, more LexDAO members will be in the Bay Area during these events and our guild can be present everywhere. Instead of going to Futurelaw, on Thursday and Friday I caught up on work, prepared for Earth Commons and caught up with my Ethereum Localism community with whom I co-authored the first Inverted City zine for ETHDenver 2024 a couple of months ago (mint [here](https://app.manifold.xyz/c/invertedcity), zine [here](https://v2.akord.com/public/vaults/active/7Bqji4Mz0QBoAm1bRtoCxcVdVPp0xrZ0yW7yWfccnuM/gallery#1a6444ce-d8ed-4382-bd5d-d3d2cad1913a), retrogrant [here](https://app.daohaus.club/dao/0x64/0xb152b115c94275b54a3f0b08c1aa1d21f32a659a/proposals/320)).

[](https://twitter.com/bbeats1/status/1766218695771099604)

## the earth commons conference

The Earth Commons conference at Berkeley starting on Saturday was two days over the weekend and was effectively the same conference as Funding the Commons. The Earth Commons and Funding the Commons agendas are [here](https://fundingthecommons.io/san-francisco-bay-area-2024). For simplicity, going forward I'll call both events Earth Commons.

[Here](https://youtu.be/D5fs_4et9z4)'s an interview with Tony and friends recorded during Earth Commons that explores the ecological institutions of the commons. The video will give you a good sense about topics discussed at the conference.

The Linux Foundation made the keynote address, shown below.


Our friends at [OpenCivics](https://opencivics.co/) were well-received, shown below.


During the Earth Commons conference, I was invited to the Hypercerts workshop the next day, on Monday. I decided to go as it's important I learn about this tech as LexDAO's grants lead given its stickiness with many of the organizations represented at Earth Commons. I learned a lot about Hypercerts on Monday, and would like to include them in future LexDAO grant and impact measurement initiatives. I'm thinking about Hats Protocol integration and how Hypercerts enable, potentially, something somewhat related to dividends. The Hypercerts workshop switched to a FundPG presentation, and I enjoyed a bit of that, ran into Tony & Manu who were representing Blockravers at the Wikipedia and AI conference a few doors down, then returned to the Embassy for more salon conversations.

## conclusion

On Tuesday, I started my drive back to Seattle. I stopped by the PDX DAO house that evening and crashed on their couch. The next day, I jammed a bit with the other Inverted City co-authors, where Exeunt explained to me that metaphysics and physics are chiral mirrors of each other. Then I drove to Seattle. As such, the trip ended.

Thank you LexDAO for sponsoring my attendance to all these conferences and events! I enjoyed representing our community and advocating for our incredibly important mission of upholding **law is a public good**.

At the time of writing this, I'm soon off to Honduras to co-host the [safe harbor](https://lu.ma/safe_harbor) summit on behalf of LexDAO. A picture of the dome we'll host the summit in is shown below. More about the jurisdiction [here](https://niklasanzinger.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-biomedical).