DWeb Camp 2026

Seth Frey

Dr. Seth Frey is a computational social scientist and cognitive scientist who studies commons governance, collective action, and other complex social phenomena. He specializes in using online communities as model systems for emergent institutional and organizational phenomena. His expertise is in computational approaches to self-governance and the cognitive science of collective behavior.

He is an associate professor in Communication at the University of California Davis, an affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and a Research Director at Metagov. He was a behavioral economist at Disney Research in Walt Disney Imagineering, and a complex systems scholar at NECSI. Seth holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Informatics (complex systems) from Indiana University and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.

Seth’s research has appeared in PNAS, Nature Scientific Reports, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. It has been covered in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and TEDx. It has been funded by the NSF, NASA, and the Ford Foundation.

https://enfascination.com/research


Sessions

07-09
16:00
60min
From Hackerspaces to Coops-- We all need Community!
Mitch Altman, Seth Frey

Mitch Altman is sometimes called the "Johnny Appleseed of Hackerspaces." He's devoted his life to starting them. Seth Frey has launched or led Co-ops throughout his life. As a professor at the University of California at Davis, he's made a science of self-governance, community, and other collective behaviors.

In this fireside chat, Mitch and Seth will draw from their lifelong personal experiences as a community organizers to show why community is so important to all of us and our future -- individually and collectively. They will share some of what they have learned, the very real challenges, and how we can all live better lives when we teach and learn and share within communities of our choosing.

Intergenerational Growth: Seedlings, Saplings, and Old Growth
Linden Theater
07-11
10:30
60min
Decentralization is not a type of structure. It's a type of person.--TEEN VERSION
Seth Frey

What if we've been building the wrong thing? What if the decentralization project is not a project of technological development but one of human development. I will show just how much of successful decentralization depends on people with tremendous training in collaborative and autonomous work.

Intergenerational Growth: Seedlings, Saplings, and Old Growth
Teen Base Camp
07-11
17:00
60min
Decentralization is not a type of structure. It's a type of person.
Seth Frey

What if we've been building the wrong thing? What if the decentralization project is not a project of technological development but one of human development. I will show just how much of successful decentralization depends on people with tremendous training in collaborative and autonomous work.

Sustaining Infrastructure
Birch Salon