Wake up regen, anon, thetan, digital nomad, whatever meme you choose- the Ethereal Forest website is now live! To accompany it, we’ve decided to launch this periodic newsletter. Subscribe - we will only update when we have something to say. 

First up, let us reintroduce ourselves. Ethereal Forest is a Portland, Oregon based workgroup promoting localist applications of the decentralized web. Our team is made up of a large portion of the group formally known as PDX DAO. In the wake of our General Forum on Ethereum Localism, we decided to temporarily dissolve PDX DAO under the belief that a city DAO should emerge under more participatory conditions than were currently available.

Ethereal Forest emerged in order to help generate those conditions - to catalyze the landscape of organizational self-sufficiency, the taste for economic democracy and the enthusiasm for technological means to those ends that will be needed for a Portland city DAO to emerge in the plural image.

Fun DAO

As one of our projects is seeding community DAOs of all stripes, we have set the initial spark of Fun DAO, a local onboarding project where community members can join their first DAO, meet some friends, and plan a monthly event using a revolving set of web3 tools for high-fidelity, direct democracy. 

Season one of Fun DAO was a success, with multiple community members onboarded to self-custody wallets and nearly all of us using jokerace for the first time. We’ll be using General Magic's pairwise voting mechanism for season two. Read more about Fun DAO here … and please, steal/alter/duplicate the onboarding concept to your own cosmolocal ends!

Onboarding Hours

As a corollary to Fun DAO, and at the request of some of our community members, we have also initiated Open Onboarding Hours at our associate community space, Bridgespace Commons. Hours will be between 3:00-5:00pm every second Tuesday of the month (that is, the Tuesday after our monthly EthPDX meetup). We will be hanging out in the space to help with things like generating a self-custody wallet, basic opsec, onboarding and bridging to L2s, and interfacing with DAOs. 

If you are a nonprofit initiative, affinity group, or even an SME that would like to become a DAO or build an exit to community roadmap, don’t hesitate to reach out to us to schedule an appointment outside of these hours.. We will make time. If we don’t the exact answers, we can connect you to the people who do. This is what we are here for!

Impact Tracking

Impact tracking is a key question in the public goods ecosystem right now, and while some of our members have been behind the scenes cooking up some hyperactive witchcraft to contribute to the solution space, Ethereal Forest is in the process of implementing Hypercerts into our impact tracking process. We are on the lookout for a validation layer, with an eye toward Spark.eco’s ImpactScribe Protocol [DeReSy v2 just released!].

One of our key concerns is forging a path for future locally-oriented projects to find sustainable means of contributing to the urban commons while avoiding traditional traps along the revenue-evil curve, and impact tracking is crucial to that end. Once we have an established impact tracking flow, we will be sharing a detailed document of our process over at our blog. 

Ethereal Forest Ministry of Propaganda

As one of our goals is to be an interlocutor and resource for the Portland community on the web3 thesis, we have started producing visual media around topics or tool sets in the web3 ecosystem that deserve to be highlighted, with an eye toward non-crypto native audiences. HQ versions of the posters in color and b&w will be available on the M.o.P. page, and they are free to be used, repurposed, détourned, etc by anyone. Check out our first two posters, Democracy is Eating Finance at Web3 & DAOs Have the Power to Turn the City Upside Down.

ETH Denver & GFEL II

If you are going to ETH Denver, keep an eye out for us! We will be floating among the localist, public goods oriented contingent (and avoiding corporate crypto like the plague). On the occasion of ETH Denver, we will be releasing a collaboration with other DAOs of the localist flavor - but we’ll keep that hush hush for now. Suffice to say, if you’re in Denver later this month, be on the lookout for a drop that will turn your idea of a city upside down.

Finally, we would like to offer a save the date for the second iteration of the General Forum on Ethereum Localism (before it sets sails to other cities, other times in following years). The tentative date for this event will be Friday the 13th-15th of September, same location in SE Portland with pre-conference side tours on the Wednesday and Thursday prior. (If you want to get psyched up in the meantime, you can go revisit the recordings from GFEL 2023.)

That's it for now! Thanks for subscribing...more updates to come. ⛧🌱⛧