Carin Ism

Director of Future of Governance Expedition at Bitnation

My experience and deep interests:

• Governance

I am based in: Amsterdam

I am the Director of the Bitnation Future of Governance Expedition – a research institute and alliance-builder that develops applications of new technologies to the field of governance. The scope encompasses a wide range of governance issues, from blockchain arbitration, algorithmic regulation, and global citizenship authentication, to robot rights and automation.

Before this, as Executive Director, I built up the Global Challenges Foundation and led it through the multimillion-dollar New Shape Prize aimed at finding governance models to tackle the global catastrophic risks that threaten more than a billion individuals.

I serve as Chair of Effective Altruism’s Swedish branch and work to make philanthropy and do-good-efforts more evidence-based and rational.

I am also active as an artist, dedicated to the same process as in the work on governance innovation – to take reality as we perceive it, deconstruct it, and reconstruct the pieces into constructions fully aligned with our goals and ideals. In my art, the process is literal and I break down pictures of oppressive structures and reassembles them into hypnotic large-scale pieces.

My background is rooted in the LGBTQI+ community where I was an activist and community organizer for over a decade. I identify as trans and see the binary construct of gender as one that technology will enable us to permanently overcome in a not too distant future.