Ann's research background is in decentralized governance, particularly Web3 and DAOs. She has always been interested in alternative forms of governance and in understanding what happens when people try to build institutions outside of conventional structures. Her work on DAOs grew out of her involvement in the early Ethereum ecosystem while also studying it — she was researching these new forms of governance while also participating in them and helping build them, which gave her an inside perspective on the ecosystem and made her especially interested in the relationship between what blockchain technology makes possible and the role that culture and the "social layer" ultimately play in these experiments. This experience became the empirical foundation for her doctoral dissertation, an ethnography of non-profit DAO culture examining both the opportunities and limits that blockchain technologies present for collective organization and governance.
At ZIBR, she will be working on two connected strands of research:
Digital Identity and the Swiss E-ID
Ann's work at ZIBR extends this line of inquiry into the relationship between infrastructure, identity, and sovereignty. She is interested in digital identity as a site where assumptions about citizenship, privacy, trust, and sovereignty become embedded in technical infrastructure, shaping how individuals are recognized by, and relate to, the institutions that govern them. Her empirical focus will be Switzerland's digital identity infrastructure, particularly the development and governance of the Swiss E-ID. She seeks to conduct interviews with the actors involved in developing, implementing, and governing the Swiss E-ID, as well as with people whose work and perspectives offer insight into how digital identity is understood and negotiated across the Swiss institutional landscape.
Network States and Intentional Communities
Alongside this empirical work, Ann is interested in exploring how these developments intersect with emerging "network state" projects and intentional communities, which increasingly imagine digital identity as foundational infrastructure for new forms of collective organization and political membership.
