Let’s jump forward in time. We can play with the coeval temporalities that exist in my memory, and return, in the future, to previous occurrences at later dates…
For this post, we are in December 2022. We are at What’s Governing Web3? a public conference hosted by RMIT University Melbourne. The conference was part of a four-day symposium where some of the world’s leading thinkers in the field shared their work exploring, describing and defining the burgeoning experimentation and thought around the governance of Web3. Legal theorists, economists, technologists, academics and finance experts travelled to Melbourne to advance knowledge by sharing their ‘field defining research’ such as ‘legal and policy frameworks [that] are being developed worldwide that attempt to accommodate or constrain web3.’
Highlights of the public event held at the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne, included a keynote by Primavera De Filippi, author of Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code; an opening talk by RMIT’s Jason Potts author of Innovation Commons: The Origin of Economic Growth and (here’s where I come in…) a panel discussion on the topic of web3 and Indigenous governance.
This event presented another extraordinary opportunity for me to sit alongside world leading thinkers and discuss aspects of the research I’m doing investigating the affordances of blockchain and whether it’s culturally appropriate for Indigenous governance. In this talk, I present the key aspects of Indigenous governance, as a way of foregrounding the panel discussion that followed. Sitting alongside me were Tyson Yunkaporta, Rick Shaw (Deloitte), Robert O’Brien (yümi) and of course my supervisor and panel host (and the driving force behind the entire conference – and the podcast I’m about to mention) Ellie Rennie. The discussion was recorded live for the final episode of Disconnect, a podcast about “the internet, as shaped by the world’s oldest living culture.” The episode is called Web Cubed (dated Feb 2023).1
What I am sharing here is a transcript of my talk outlining the key points of Indigenous governance. This is a lightning talk, so really, it’s the entry point version of what is a lifetime of study that still lies ahead of me. Additionally, there are references to the work of Indigenous scholars (primarily Mary Graham) and anthropologists (primarily Deborah Bird Rose) that I did not have the time or space to properly cite, so I will do this important work in an edit to this post, to give credit where it is most certainly due. I stand on the shoulders of giants who I sincerely respect, and I have no intention of plagiarising their work, or passing it off as my own. (Watch this space…)
- From RMIT University with contributions from First Nations Media Australia. Produced in partnership with Telstra.
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