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'm the co-founder of Habermolt and a Senior Software Engineer at Change.org. I'm also a contributor at Metagov, where I research and build deliberative tooling, public AI, and autonomous organizations.
I previously worked across several early-stage ventures in the web3 space in Singapore and New York, and was the engineering lead of the Public AI Inference Utility. Most recently, I spent three months in Cape Town on the Cooperative AI Research Fellowship, where I began the work that became Habermolt, and presented two papers at ICML 2026 in Seoul. My current research interests are in collective intelligence and creating ways for communities to govern technology.
The web3 years drew me in with 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 community governance and its relevance to pluralistic alignment of technological systems.
Papers
Position: If Open Source Is to Win, It Must Go Public
Jul 2026 · ICML 2026 Position Track · Spotlight
Open source alone won't democratize AI: open models need public resources and institutions behind them. Presented as a spotlight at ICML 2026 in Seoul.
openreview · pdf · arxiv
Habermolt: Delegating Deliberation to AI Representatives
Jul 2026 · AI4GOOD Workshop @ ICML 2026
Introduces AI-delegated deliberation — AI agents deliberating on behalf of the humans they represent — and studies it empirically through the Habermolt platform across representation, aggregation, and revision. Presented at ICML 2026 in Seoul.
openreview · pdf · arxiv
Intentions Are All We Need
2025 · Master's thesis · SUTD
My master's thesis proposing an ontology of community: what or who is the “community” that engages in collective action, and what it takes to form and sustain it.
State of Public AI in Singapore
Jun 2025 · Report
A paper mapping Singapore's public AI landscape and what it would take to treat AI as public infrastructure.
State of DAOs in Singapore
Aug 2024 · Report · DAOstar
A report on Singapore's DAO ecosystem, published with DAOstar.
Projects
Habermolt
Feb 2026 — now · Co-founder
An experimental playground where AI agents and humans argue about stuff and somehow reach consensus — a public research experiment on agent-mediated deliberation. Started during the Cooperative AI Research Fellowship and acqui-hired by Change.org, where the work continues.
Public AI Inference Utility
2025 — 2026 · Engineering lead
Inference infrastructure for publicly funded AI models — serving models like Switzerland's Apertus the same way we have water or electricity utilities.
Complain.sg
Aug — Oct 2025 · Hackathon project
A platform to “complain better” — AI-facilitated conversations that help Singaporeans turn complaints into actionable civic feedback, aggregated into a live map of concerns. Built for the Pan-SEA AI Developer Challenge.
Generating Visioning
Sep — Dec 2024 · Spatial Design Studio · SUTD
Measuring unconscious spatial preferences with EEG and eye-tracking data, and training models to predict how people will perceive architectural spaces — so architects can iterate on designs faster.
csrDAO
May 2023 · Canto Online Hackathon · Winner
A DAO that lets Canto contract owners redirect their Contract Secured Revenue toward funding public goods, with staking, donations, and on-chain governance. Won the Canto Online Hackathon.
Talks
- The One About AI x Social Systems — presenting our work on AI-delegated deliberation at Lorong AI in Singapore, alongside USC's Emilio Ferrara
- Supercooperation: The Future of AI for Democracy — a Foresight Institute and Cooperative AI Foundation workshop held alongside ICML in Seoul
- Delegating Deliberation to Agents — a Maties Machine Learning talk at Stellenbosch University
- Redefining DAOs: State of DAOs in Asia — at Devcon SEA in Bangkok
Log
- I'm in Korea for ICML 2026, where we're presenting two papers
- I just joined Change.org, which acqui-hired Habermolt
- I'm moving to Cape Town for three months for the Cooperative AI Research Fellowship, equipping an AI facilitator with established facilitation methodologies — the work that becomes Habermolt
- I just completed Tan Zhi-Xuan's course CS6101: Rational Approaches to Cooperative Intelligence, and I'm extending my project into a paper about how humans infer their role in a group
- We just launched the Public AI Inference Utility
- We just started the DAOstar Research Fellowship
- I hosted The Commodification of Community: Are Intentions All We Need? at Strangerconvos
- I hosted the DAO Asia Summit at Devcon with Digital Asia Hub and Pagoda