Introduction to the Bywire News and Publishing DAO


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A decentralised autonomous organisation, or DAO, is an emerging mechanism for collective decision-making with no central authority. A DAO provides an opportunity for a wide range of individuals around the world to be empowered and collaborate with other like-minded individuals with similar objectives. Which is why I’ve decided to turn Bywire News into a DAO.

Members of a DAO will share a common purpose, acting to further the best interests of the entity through their participation, which often takes the form of creating and voting on proposals. Members of a DAO may often vote upon decisions that impact the DAO’s treasury, future project scope and technical upgrades. Alternatively, members may vote for DAO delegates, who once elected, take decisions on behalf of members.

DAOs come in many different shapes and sizes, and there is debate around how much decentralisation and independence constitute both an effective and/or authentic DAO. Personally, I think Vitalik Buterin’s recent blog posting “DAOs are not corporations,” makes some interesting distinctions on what the important elements of decentralisation are, and how they can outperform the centralised status quo:

   1. Decision-making

   2. Censorship resistance

   3. Credible Fairness

It was after reading Buterin’s post that I was certain my decision to turn Bywire News into a DAO was correct. A news organisation can uniquely benefit from the three distinctions of decentralisation identified.

Decision-Making

Centralised newsrooms and editorial departments have been the guardians of news from the beginning. They are responsible, both legally and morally, for what news is published and what news is not. They are both brave heroes, and cowardly villains, simultaneously, and at different times, but their decision-making has always remained opaque.

Many criticise editors and newsrooms for being overly determined to please their proprietors, or pander to the lowest common denominator for clicks and likes. Some are deserving of the criticism, but most at least started with a sincere determination to hold power to account and to inform truthfully. They certainly didn’t choose to become journalists for the money and power, because you get neither. You get the cons without any pros nor poems.

Journalists are now the second least-trusted professionals in society, marginally more trusted than members of the government (not even politicians in general). I believe this to be, at least in part, due to the assumptions of why decisions in newsrooms are made.

Critical news will often be met with the “Oh, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” response from those who disagree. This assumes the news story is biased in its origin, as it must have originated from a non-objective source. Perhaps if there was more transparency, critics may identify circumstances which contextualise decisions, leading to better informed opinions.

Journalists who do the best work, may suffer the worst fate. Many are persecuted by the people they investigate, their supporters, their own government, the police, the secret police, organised criminals, conspiracy theorists, crackpots, and even their own readers.

Then you have the pressures from competition which translates into journalists regularly being told that: “We need an exclusive,” or “Be the first one to publish,” or “Find some dirt,” maybe  “Get something that no other news organisation has,” or even worse; “If you have nothing, just make it up!” 

You also have the inverse; isn’t this government incredible (gets special treatment, government grants etc), isn’t this stock/asset/crypto the best value ever (receives rewards or renumeration, incentivises bias). And I can attest that if you write something about a corporation or powerful person, even if true, even if it ultimately serves their interests in the long-term, they will blacklist you at best, and actively seek to harm you at worst.

Ultimately, the decision process for news editors is complex, and the weight of this complexity is driven by market competition. Sometimes in search of profits and growth, but more often in defence against a shrinking market share, audience, and revenue model.

News does offer something more valuable than money of course - it provides influence, credibility, and soft power. All of which are vital ingredients in the transition from rich, to rich and powerful. Which is why so many wealthy individuals choose to own news publishers, and perhaps why decision-making remains hidden.

But more than just transparency, the efficacy and accuracy of decision-making within a news network will be made better by pluralism and compromise. Decentralised wisdom is most useful when decision-making is based upon large amounts of diverse inputs, just like complex news stories and busy newsrooms.

Finally, taking decisions upon how the DAO finances are distributed and reinvested will be far better suited to community and reputation decision-making. Compromise will foster more innovation, less monopolistic practices, and encourage a more diverse and intelligent pool of decision-makers.

The thriving independent media sector is made up of many former journalists who left their jobs and built successful, profitable, and scalable news start-ups. They have proven they know how to manage budgets and build repeatable business models. Providing an effective and fair framework for talent to collaborate, is an exciting endeavour that will likely lead to greater collective success and security than would be possible siloed.

Censorship resistance

The Bywire network has long been built to withstand censorship. Each news article is automatically turned into a unique cryptographic equation and stored on the EOS Network, the content itself is copied to the IPFS and LBRY peer-2-peer blockchains, which each replicate copies across their nodes. LBRY is itself a PoW protocol, ensuring Bywire is not even dependent on the Http protocol itself, or even any specific domain name to deliver our content and our publisher’s content anywhere in the world.

Decentralising the network access and decision-making will be the last step in ensuring the network’s total resistance to censorship, with no single points of failure.

Credible Fairness

Finally, Buterin describes credible fairness as valuing traits like predictability, robustness, and neutrality, above speed and efficiency. This is particularly pertinent to a news network because people will trust an organisation seen to make decisions impartially, fairly, and transparently, above one which does not.

Bywire operates a trust or not AI powered platform which warns readers if it judges a news article to be untrustworthy, i.e., created to mislead rather than inform. According to IBM: to trust a decision made by an algorithm, we need to know that it is fair, that it’s reliable and can be accounted for, and that it will cause no harm. We need assurances that AI cannot be tampered with and that the system itself is secure. Given this important need for AI oversight, a DAO seems uniquely placed to provide human-oversight, while also ensuring it maintains the same values it was formed to protect: fairness, accuracy, and reliability.

In a similar way to political discourse, those who disagree with the AI assessment assume, or at least allege, that it is biased. Therefore, Buterin is correct in his assertion that a transparent, balanced, and fair decision-making and oversight process is far more valuable to trust, than the centralised private decision making we have today.

The Bywire DAO beta platform is available for testing at BywireDao.com

By Michael O’Sullivan

 

 

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