Life Itself Labs: highlights and achievements of 2022
In June 2022 we officially launched Life Itself Labs, a subsidiary of Life Itself housing our research and consulting activities particularly on the themes of alternative economics and governance, and technology and society. We’re incredibly proud of what Life Itself Labs has accomplished in 2022. Here are some highlights:
We’ve established ourselves as a leader in the economic incentives of data sharing, and are making impactful contributions to EU policy in this area
Throughout the year we’ve worked to engage key stakeholders across the private and public sectors, including the European Commission, around the vital role of incentives to support environmental data sharing. Our work has fed into major discussions around approaches to environmental data sharing across the EU and beyond, and will have a tangible impact on how the EU Green Deal strategy unfolds.
What’s more, our reputation as thought leaders in this space has seen us receive further requests for high impact involvement in 2023, so watch this space!
We’re proud to be contributing to the growth of an exciting new social change ecosystem, and have secured funding to take expand our efforts
2022 saw us further expand and upgrade our Ecosystem Mapping Project with new visualizations, an expanded database and a new, wiki-like infrastructure to open the map up for community contribution. You can read more about these improvements in our recent blog.
Even more excitingly, we’ve just secured EU funding to take our mapping efforts even further. We’re part of an amazing consortium of partners who will be exploring how this new social change ecosystem is manifesting in Europe, and how its insights and approaches might support key decision makers across the continent.
We’re aware that lots of our focus thus far has been on Europe, and have been proactively engaging behind the scenes with actors focused on responses to the global polycrisis elsewhere in the world. We’ll have some news to share around this in the new year, but are thrilled to be able to help connect the dots between pieces of this emerging movement all across the globe.
We’ve become a recognised voice of reason in the volatile world of Web3, and have powerfully contributed to sensemaking in this area
2022 has been a wild year for the Web3 ecosystem as a whole, punctuated by huge crashes such as Terra and more recently FTX. For quite some time, Life Itself Labs has been advocating caution around the web3 ecosystem, drawing on our mix of social scientific and technical expertise to make meaningful contributions to the discourse and query some of the claims being made.
Since March, to date, we've had over 12,000 users of our Making Sense of Crypto & Web3 site, our web3 podcast series has had 3560 plays, and our web3 YouTube series has had 11,146 plays.
Our expertise in this area has begun to be recognised and called on externally. We’ve delivered a final report to the US Government Finance Officers’ Association offering guidance for municipal finance officials on engaging with Web3. We’re excited to share the published report early in 2023.
We have (just) launched one of the most comprehensive sensemaking guides to the web3 and crypto space available
We’re incredibly excited to share an exciting new announcement: we’re launching our newly revamped guide to Web3 and Crypto! As this is the culmination of all our research and sensemaking work over the last year, we’ll share a full bulletin in the new year offering a full breakdown. But for now, here's a brief introduction…
After nearly a year-long journey making sense of the world of web3 and crypto, the unclarity and uncertainty of the space doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. As we write this, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the defunct crypto exchange FTX, has just been arrested. At the same time, the value of bitcoin has once again miraculously begun to climb, and many of the more social change orientated web3 actors see the collapse of their more capitalist cousins as nothing but a positive. Throughout the turmoil, the narrative power of crypto manages to persist.
In other words, the need for proper sensemaking around this topic continues to be vital, even as the economic bubble seems to be popping. Particularly for those of us interested in transforming society, ensuring we’re directing our hope and resources in the right direction remains a vital goal.
Our guide provides the most comprehensive analyses we are aware of of the largest claims made about web3 and crypto, and particularly their potential for social change. We’re proud that all our analyses are fully referenced to an academic standard, and even the less extensive content contains an extensive bibliography of sources all of which we’ve made accessible to read via an open Zotero library. What’s more, the entire site is wiki-fied to enable the expertise of our readers to develop it even further.
If you’re interested in deepening your understanding of some of the key issues and debates in the sector, then we wholeheartedly recommend you take a look. We’d love to know what you think!
Explore our guide to crypto & web3
More from Life Itself Labs
https://lifeitself.org/2022/06/09/launch-announcement-life-itself-labs
