Hi, I'm Joseph 👋

I'm a community governance researcher exploring the promises and perils of using technology to build community and organize collective action.

I work as a Research Engineer at Metagov, where I conduct research and build products involving deliberative tooling, Public AI and DAOs.

I came to this work through being an engineer in the web3 space, drawn to the idealism of building community for positive change. But I also encountered an uncomfortable truth: these efforts often reproduced the very problems they aimed to solve. I call this the “commodification of community”. This tension drove me to pursue a master's thesis questioning the fundamental nature of community. My research proposed an ontology for understanding what or who is the “community” that engages in collective action, and what does it take to form and sustain it.

Outside of work, I'm an avid trail runner and a recovering coffee snob. Observing the politics of road running versus trail running, or how major races pull all the demand while independent race organizers struggle, has shaped how I think about community boundaries and power. I used to give coffee workshops to about 50 students a month, but have since started questioning the prescriptive notions of “good taste” I once embodied. This shift motivates my interest in pluralistic alignment. Turns out community governance shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.