Nena Jain and Austin Wade Smith
Nena and Austin are building the next generation of coordination interfaces for social, technical, and environmental resilience. For the past five years, they served as executive leadership at Regen Foundation, designing and implementing governance systems, token models, and public infrastructure for collective ownership and environmental decision-making across distributed stakeholders. In parallel, they developed a rigorous research program in this field, distilled in the recent book Ecological Institutions: Law, Economics, and Technology in a More-Than-Human World. They are currently building River Computer, direct evolution of this practice — a studio operating at the frontier of digital sovereignty, partnering with grassroots, Indigenous, and local groups to deploy technical stacks that integrate identity, claims, and governance into operational civic infrastructure.
Session
Our social operating system is due for an upgrade. So how do we build new institutional lifeforms in response to the "meta-crisis" — the compounding failure of markets and states to manage biospheric collapse and the erosion of democratic life?
