Elizabeth "Liz" Barry is the Executive Director of Metagov, a research-and-infrastructure nonprofit dedicated to creating governance primitives for the digital era. Metagov builds modular, composable systems and communities that help shape how institutions emerge, adapt, and self-govern in sociotechnical settings. Previously, she served as global Head of Partnerships at The Computational Democracy Project, the 501(c)3 organization she co-founded with the creators of the Polis technology to steward its open source code and methods. Elizabeth works with facilitators, social movements, civil society organizations, journalists, indigenous nations, democratic governments both young and old, and peacebuilders to implement "listening at scale." The collaboration began when the founders of g0v invited her to Taiwan during 2014's Sunflower Revolution, which led to her introducing vTaiwan and Audrey Tang to the international community in the 2016 piece for Civicist titled "vTaiwan: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberpunk Frontier of Democracy," now republished by Taiwan's government. She is a nobody.
Her large-scale facilitation skills were developed and honed through listening to ~100,000 strangers on the sidewalks of New York City and across the United States with a sign that said "Talk To Me" and a couple of lawn chairs, and by throwing parties in which 1000 strangers met each other. Her large-scale coordination skills were developed and honed in participatory science projects. In response to urban tree death rates, she co-founded TreeKIT, an accessible method used by thousands of people to scientifically hug every tree on every sidewalk in New York City. TreeKIT was used to generate the City's most accurate spatial inventory of biological assets, which now powers the official NYC Tree Stewardship Map. In response to the information blackout imposed on journalists and scientists during the BP oil spill, she co-founded the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. With Public Lab's open research community, she guided the interplay between place-based organizing and distributed peer production for >10,000 active members in over 100 countries. In recognition of this experience, she was elected to the first Community Council of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware--a global community of hackers dedicated to making open science hardware ubiquitous--to design their networked governance system.
Trained as a landscape architect and urban designer, she tunes human-environment-technology relationships by applying design to community organizing, science to environmental justice, and math to democracy. Her work is carried out in service to community self-determination and has been characterized by others as collective intelligence for collective action. She refers to her initiatives as "methods for the madness."
Socials, profiles, and blogs
Authored and co-authored articles about Polis and vTaiwan
Assorted content about Data Rescue NYC, Five Borough Farm garden metrics, the Aerocene, and large scale interactions with strangers
PDFs