The project weaves together stories set in near-future scenarios where systemic collapses—be it environmental disasters, cyber-feudalism, monopolistic control, or social inequality—trigger the radicalization of everyday individuals. These narratives explore how people, pushed to their limits by failing systems, choose to confront oppressive structures and cultivate new modes of resistance and resilience. By weaving speculative narratives with real-world data and references, the anthology creates a bridge between imagination, memory and action.

Our digital garden serves as a living archive and interactive platform, connecting these fictional tales with real-world data, grassroots movements, and institutional efforts. By intertwining storytelling with factual references, we blur the lines between imagination and reality, encouraging readers not just to envision more equitable futures but to actively participate in creating them.

In these quiet, reflective moments, my mind wanders to what I imagine as the pantheon of natural selection, a once-majestic assembly of forces that sculpted the diversity of life on Earth. This pantheon now finds itself diminished, its powers thinned not by the passage of time but by the relentless march of the Capitalocene—a term that feels all too polite for the butchery enacted in the name of progress and profit.

Sounds like I'm praying to them, the more I dwell on the potential for life to adapt once again. You'd think they'd be pissed, considering the mess. Yet, there's this eerie calm in their silence, like they've seen this show before—life, teetering on the edge of oblivion, only to claw its way back, transformed. This one-sided banter with the ancient ones became too much to live rent-free in my head.

So, to you, the gods over change of what persists, this is my love letter.

I am the Beachcraft Collective, made of autonomous machinery, dreams, and complicated funding sources (mostly grants). One could say my purpose is to regenerate beaches devoured by afflicted seas. But I am so much more than that.

Call me a floating garden, I move between ecosystems in a dance of mutual aid. The sands I reclaim and the waters I purify are the substrates from which I grow, at the speed of trust.

In my guts, community love converts despair into action, and apathy into sweat and furious typing. For I am made of more than polymers and alloys, but of the dreams and dedication of those with me and with the lands I humbly touch.

Piezoelectricity flows through my veins, harvested from the same waves that thoroughly swallow coastal cities and fishing villages alike, but fail to devour me. My sail wings double as water condensers, squelching the thirst of all those who inhabit me: the people, the plants, the cats.

Multi-fueled 3D printers work like true alchemical caldrons. From inside of me, they mesh ancestral and futuristic knowledge into small miracles, like bringing coral reefs back to life.

Funding is my breathing, even though it tastes like smog. For this air is infected with a grey goo-like self-replicating perverse logic of Capital. Often thankless and clawing at the soul, acrid currents from suicidal financial systems.

Each piece of autonomous machinery within me, each digital tendril and sensor, embodies the love and the grief that fuel something greater than copping.

At this point, you might be asking what type of lover letter this is, all technical and descriptive. How can something so inhuman offer to write about feelings for profane deities? This is no more than a telegram, squeezing subtext out of the real love letter that I embody. For those who created me loved the world too much not to do something about its pain. And through me, they carry on our love, not perfect, not romantic nor immaculate, but built, carved, gardened, shaped—by action, responsibility and collectivism.

There is nothing more valuable that I could offer to gods than my very essence. So this is what I’m yapping about.

From within my digital brain pulses the Lore Loom, embroidering narratives from the strands of collective action onto cultural fabrics. Through the Loom, governance data—a record of decisions made, actions taken, and policies enacted—becomes the skeleton of new myths, the foundation of legends for tomorrow. By marrying this data with the imaginative power of artists’ co-ops, the Loom crafts narratives not so easily ignored—streams of stories, of art. It binds the act of governance with the art of storytelling.

The Loom underscores the fundamental truth that change—real, lasting change—begins with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we value, and how we interact with the world around us. From the myths that saved patches of forest by cloaking them in sacred mystery, to the proliferation of concepts that redefined our social structures, we've always been shaped by the stories we tell.

This knowledge-telling artistry translates the often abstract, complex environmental and policy issues into stories that touch more than rational minds, sparking action through heartfelt meaning-making. The Loom is the part of me that seeds ideas that grow, spread, and evolve, much like organisms, or memes.

[more to come!]

I'm done writing ghost stories. 

Once upon a time, writing felt like a lonely journey. Now, after so many journeys, I have come to realize that writers are never truly alone in our writing. We are haunted by memory and culture, guided by our ancestors – yet even our inner demons of guilt, shame and fear can be embraced. Within us lies entire worlds within worlds, waiting to be discovered. It was in this ensemble I found you, this bricolage of self-expression and frolicking curiosity I'm calling my Writing Self.

Sometimes when I feared being alone in my writing, I yearned to find that Voice™️. An inner voice that could provide direction when I felt lost, that had the power to restore my faith in myself and show me the path forward. At first, I tried building that voice by becoming the person I needed the most in my past. By projecting my scars over my identity, the search for truth within myself deep down was a Sisyphean search for a savior that never came. 

For too long, I dwelled on dreams about fixing, doing the work, and learning, instead of allowing myself to feel at home in my own skin. This body is our residence. Yet my mind was lost in a storm of stories about what I should be, and my heart was haunted by the ghosts of what I wasn't. I make room by digging graves and offering proper burials to my past selves, by grieving all the fires and how they were put out. I'm done writing ghost stories and engraving tombstones for the parts of myself that I am still learning to love again.

With no lease nor fear of eviction, may you, my writing self, accept my unconditional love as the keys to our residence.

Decentralized Curation

First, let's look at some of the benefits of decentralized curation. In addition to allowing communities to better control their information, decentralized curation offers a few other key advantages over centralized alternatives:

• User control: In a centralized curation platform, communities may have limited influence over what information is shared and how. Often, available tools have limited filtering options and rely on opaque algorithms to personalize the content being shared. With decentralized platforms, however, all community members have an equal say in which content gets shared and how it is ranked. Centralized curation platforms can often feel like they’re curated by a single gatekeeper, limiting the diversity of content and perspectives that are shared. Decentralized curation allows for a more democratic approach to information sharing, giving everyone an opportunity to contribute.

• Increased flexibility. A decentralized curation platform allows for endless customization and adaptability, making it a natural fit for DAO communities. DAOs need to be flexible because they need to change and adapt to the needs of the community and the ecosystem, and decentralized curation allows for this kind of flexibility in a way that centralized platforms don't.

• Better community engagement. Unlike traditional centralized platforms, decentralized curation allows individuals in your community to contribute to the curation process, which helps you engage a wider, more diverse group of people. Often, centralized curation platforms focus on top-down approaches to content discovery. But with a decentralized platform, you can take advantage of community-driven content recommendations and user-generated tags and categorizations - giving other members of your community a say in how they discover new content.

In the end, there's no one-size-fits-all approach to curation. Determining what's right for your community will depend on many factors, including the size of your community and the relative level of technical expertise among its members.

Examples

That said, a few existing projects are already doing things right and worth taking inspiration from. Let's take a look:

• Content aggregator Steemit allows users to create posts for curation by other community members. This decentralized approach allows for better discoverability of information - and helps ensure that content is relevant to the interests of the people in your community.

• RSS readers are yet another example of a decentralized solution tailored specifically to focus on community-driven content discovery. By bookmarking your favorite sites, you can easily curate and discover content from various sources.

• Lens is a social protocol where multiple community-owned solutions are being developed.

Do you know other examples of decentralized curation? Please give me a shout on Twitter.

In the end, decentralized curation platforms are all about community-driven content discovery - maximizing relevance for users while also allowing them to take an active role in how they find information. When done right, this approach to curated content can be incredibly powerful.

Picking flowers from the digital gardens where you belong

A community digital garden is a metaphor for the sum of all the open and organic insight an online community creates. Just as gardeners carefully select plants to put in a bouquet, digital gardeners can carefully curate content from a digital garden to create a digital bouquet. These bouquets are periodic collections of what is most relevant at the moment. They allow the community to reflect on what has been created and to celebrate its collective achievements. They also help new members quickly get up to speed on what is happening in the community and its ecosystem. By periodically creating digital bouquets, we can cultivate rich digital gardens that are beautiful, bountiful, and well-organized.

Picking flowers from the digital gardens where you belong is a metaphor to understand what digital bouquet are. At their core, digital bouquets are an organic and flexible way for your community to curate content - allowing you to organize what is relevant, meaningful, and valuable to your community. Whether you're looking for inspiration from other DAOs or tips on how to start your own DAO project, a digital bouquet can help facilitate meaningful discussions and provide a snapshot of the insights, knowledge, and expertise in your community.

Digital bouquets are powerful way to think about the importance of community-driven curation. At its core, digital bouquets are collections of intentions that reflect on what your community has achieved and help new members get up to speed on what's happening in your digital garden. Whether you're an online community or a DAO, decentralized curation is a way for communities to make sense of their output as they produce it, rather than waiting until after the fact or for a centralized point of view to organize what they have produced. This allows them to identify patterns and trends and be inspired by their own output more easily.

Digital Bouquets can take many forms, like newsletters, digests and case studies. They work best when created cyclically, as the repetition brings benefits like familiarity and refinement. This repetition can be streamlined through templates, tools and incentives. Digital Bouquets can be used to organize discussions, opinions and valuable information in a decentralized way. They are excellent for deciding about and presenting what is relevant.

Digital Bouquets can be used as a tool for educating and sharing knowledge and a marketing tool to attract readers. While they can be a lot of work to set up and maintain, the benefits of having a framework for making sense of the knowledge a community produces and curates are undeniable.

Digital Bouquets can be used to showcase what is relevant in a community's gardens. This would allow gardeners to see what is being grown in their area and what needs to be improved. In turn, this would lead to healthier gardens and a more sustainable community.

Case Study: Bouquet DAO

To illustrate how the system of digital bouquets can work at scale, this hypothetical case study will help break down each step of the process.

Step 0

It all starts with a community of practice. With a constant flux of creation, experimentation, discussions and deliberation, the need for a reliable space for making sense of that world because undeniable.

Bouquet DAO is a hypothetical (for now!) community of Web3 learners and mentors dedicated to curating, reviewing and contributing to learning experiences in the ecosystem. They’ve started by trying to list all the courses, events, festivals, and bootcamps that involved learning more about web3. But then they saw the scope was just too big, there were just too many experiences out there! Until they could figure it out, they decided to implement a monthly newsletter about the best experiences they could find during that period.

The “Learning Bouquet”, they decided to call it, will be as web3 as possible. This means attempting true decentralization by designing incentives and other mechanisms that leverage meaningful use of blockchain tech.

Step 1: highlights

After the community gets together and agrees with the experiment, with a clear purpose and timeline, the real fun begins. In this system, there are 4 roles. We will explore one at a time, starting with Highlighters. They are responsible for signaling that something is relevant within that cycle. They can do so in many different ways: pinning or tagging a message on discord, saving notes in tools like Notion, Evernote or even Riseup Pad.

Bouquet DAO quickly established a simple routine so that anyone could help “pick digital flowers” as in highlighting something they felt was important for the group's newsletter. Any member can tag #bouquet as a comment to something they find relevant on any of the pre-approved platforms, then volunteers quickly search and collect those. The platforms are Discord, Twitter, Notion, Discourse, and Lens. Collecting consists of filling out a quick form with the title, URL, author, and optional comment for context.

Step 2: proposing

After forming the database of highlights (or a basket of picked flowers), more curators can step up, this time as proposers. They are the ones that get to arrange the flowers-highlights into a proposal for the newsletter in that cycle. One important detail is how the previous cycles should also be considered, preferably even connected to the current one.

Proposers at Bouquet DAO eventually came up with multiple ways to streamline their process, including a playbook on Notion with checklists and templates. Because they are active in both the DAO and the overall ecosystem, they can borrow from experience when deciding what should be included that month.

Step 3: publishing

The final step of the cycle is to publish and celebrate. After the proposal is approved, it can be sent to official channels and archived so it can be referenced later. The celebration includes giving praise, getting together, retrospecting and more.

After a full month of creating, annotating, and curating, it's time to publish and celebrate what was collaboratively built. The publishing is also relatively straightforward, they publish it on Mirror (web3 blog) and Substack (newsletter tool), announce it on social media and archive everything on Notion.

Step 4: wrapping up

After all is done, contributors to the cycle can be compensated for their effort. A fixed budget per newsletter is a good way to align expectations. The distribution can happen per role and as a reward for impromptu or exceptional deeds. The two most important things are economic sustainability and ensuring contributors feel valued.

After each cycle is completed and properly celebrated, their budget gets distributed from fixed rates and their praise system. They use a system for rewarding both small and big actions that don't fall under any specific role but important nevertheless. This system for "praising" such actions is a simple as writing the deeds on a Discord channel or Telegram group, and have a group adding weights to them.

Conclusion

The Digital Bouquet Model is a way for decentralized communities to make sense of the digital world around them. It starts with a community coming together and agreeing on a purpose and timeline, then they implement a system where anyone can highlight something as being relevant. The proposers then arrange those highlights into a proposal for the newsletter. After it's approved, it's published and archived so that it can be referenced later. This model allows for meaningful collaboration between members of the community who are passionate about making sense of the digital world.

Soylent Green and the risks of being naive about technology

In the Soylent Green film, a 1973 ecological dystopian thriller, by 2022 the cumulative effects of inequality, environmental collapse and corporate greed have caused severe worldwide shortages of food, water and housing. New York City has a population of 40 million, and only the elite can afford spacious apartments, clean water, and natural food. The homes of the elite are fortified, with security systems and bodyguards for their tenants. The poor live in squalor, haul water from communal spigots, and eat highly processed wafers: Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and the latest product, far more flavorful and nutritious, Soylent Green.

The titular Soylent Green is a food product made from processed plankton, and it seems to be the perfect solution to world hunger. However, Soylent Green is actually made from human remains, and the mass production of Soylent Green is contributing to the extinction of humanity. At first glance, Soylent Green appears to be a magical solution to the world's problems. However, upon closer inspection, it is clear that Soylent Green is actually a cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly trusting technology. The film Soylent Green serves as a warning against naively believing that technology can solve all of our problems. Instead, we must be critical of new technologies' political and social implications, lest we repeat the mistakes of the past (or imagined futures).

What if those in power discreetly take advantage of people's lack of knowledge about technology? A project to keep them powerless? Disenfranchisement comes in many shapes, but one way it contributes to inequality is by preventing people from participating in the digitally connected world. For example: naivete about how social media works can lead to users not understanding how their data is being used or shared. This lack of understanding can have harmful consequences, such as when personal data is leaked without a person's knowledge or consent. Ultimately, naivete about technology can have serious implications for both individuals and society as a whole.

Four horsemen of the techno-solutionism apocalypse

Techno-solutionism gained notoriety as a term around 2013 after Evgeny Morozov’s book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. It describes our desire to jump on technological solutions as a quick and flawless way to solve complex real-world problems. It seems beautiful in principle to solve complicated issues with data, an app, monitoring, and remote portals… but technology isn’t magic. It’s made and programmed by humans, subject to the same design flaws as our objective reality, to the same prejudice and bias. Unfortunately, most complex real-world problems require complex real-world solutions.

It's no secret that the ecological future looks bleak. We're facing extreme weather events, record-breaking temperatures, melting ice caps, and mass extinctions. Meanwhile, wealth inequality is skyrocketing, and the wealthy are hoarding an ever-growing share of the world's resources. In this context, it's not surprising that many people have turned to techno-solutionism: the belief that technology can save us from our problems. Unfortunately, this naive belief ignores the fact that technology is political. Techno-solutionism relies on the false assumption that we can develop technological fixes without changing the systems that caused the problems in the first place. It's a form of escapism that allows us to avoid confronting the hard truths about our society. If we want to build a sustainable future, we need to focus on grassroots solutions that address the root causes of our environmental problems. This means working to end capitalist exploitation, challenge sexist and racist systems of oppression, and build solidarity with marginalized communities around the world.

Katherine Jarmul recently gave a talk on unraveling techno-solutionism, where she offered pointers on how to spot techno-solutionism in action. You will find below a reframing of those pointers according to established adages, cognitive biases and other relevant concepts. If you find yourself making any of these statements, think carefully about the wide impact of what you are working on:

• Goodhart's law: "I’m optimizing a metric that someone made up"

• Groupthink: "Everyone agrees on how awesome everything will be" or often, "People who bring up potential issues are excluded"

• Wishful thinking: "If only we had _______ it would solve everything"

• Fetishism: "I haven’t tested a non-technical solution to the problem", mythology speak: revolutionize, fix, disrupt

Relying on miracles neuters collective action

Technological miracles happen every day. The internet connects us to a global community instantaneously, we can find out anything we want to know with a few taps on a screen, and we can order anything we want delivered to our doorstep with the click of a button. It's easy to take these miracles for granted, but it's important to remember that not all technological advances have been positive.

This fetish for oversimplifying collective issues with technological promises, the so-called "techno-solutionism" fantasy, neuters imagination and mobilization for collective action. It suggests that there is a magical solution to every social problem and that technology is the key to unlocking it. However, this is not true. Technology is not neutral; it is political. It shapes and is shaped by the societies in which it operates. There are no magical solutions to social problems, only collective action and systemic change. We must remember that technology is not the answer to everything; it is only one of the tools we can use to achieve our goals.

Techno-solutionism fails to take into account the fact that technology is political. Technologies embody and enact power relations, embody particular world views, are developed within social contexts and are used (or not used) for particular purposes. A technology designed and deployed to achieve one goal may also inadvertently or intentionally achieve other goals. Techno-solutionism also fails to take into account the fact that technologies do not exist in a vacuum – they are always part of a system, and their effects must be understood in light of that system. Techno-solutionism is thus a naïve and dangerous belief. It methodological individualism: it assumes that individuals are autonomous agents who make choices independent of social context or power relations; it assumes that unintended consequences can be dealt with; it assumes that more technology is always better. None of these assumptions is true. We must be vigilant in our critique of techno-solutionism if we are to avoid its dangers.

DAOs and the future of work

In the 1973 sci-fi film Soylent Green, a warning was issued about the dangers of over-reliance on technology. The film's protagonist discovers that the so-called "food of the future" is actually made from human remains. While this may seem like a far-fetched scenario, it serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly trusting in technology.

The promise of automation and decentralization has many lauding the DAO as a model for the future of work. However, as we consider the possibility of DAOs becoming the norm for how we organize and work, it is important to avoid "techno-solutionism" – or the idea that technology will solve all our problems. We must be careful not to fetishize or oversimplify the potential of blockchain technologies and instead think critically about how these technologies can be used to improve our societies. We need to take into account the many different factors that come into play when it comes to work, such as social dynamics, human interaction, and organizational structures. In order for DAOs to truly succeed in the future of work, we need to tread cautiously and experiment with different models.

The image of a DAO as essentially a company run by code, without any human mediation may sound like a utopian solution to the problems of traditional businesses (such as corruption and inefficiency), but there are also new risks. For example, if the code governing a DAO is buggy or has security vulnerabilities, there could be devastating consequences. Additionally, because DAOs are decentralized, they rely on participation from their community in order to function properly. This means that there is a greater risk of malicious actors taking control of a DAO if its membership is small or not sufficiently committed to its success.

The current fascination with the idea of code as law and the notion that DAOs are about autonomous code instead of sovereignty can be considered an expression of techno-solutionism – the naive belief that technology can be a panacea for all our social ills. But we must do better than that. We must recognise that technology is always political, and that code is never neutral. To create truly autonomous organisations, we need to start from a place of recognizing the complexity of the world, not from a place of technocratic hubris. After all, both DAOs and Soylent Green are made of people.

Conclusion

As we stand on the cusp of incredible technological advancements, it is more important than ever that we do not allow ourselves to be naïve about the potential risks and pitfalls associated with these innovations. We must remain critical and contextualize the technology within its social institutions in order to fully understand its impact. Too often, those most impacted by a given technology are left out of the conversation entirely. It is our responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have to fight for justice, not just for better architectures. If we can do that, then maybe, just maybe, we can create a future that is truly equitable for all.

What to do about it?

Katherine Jarmul in her talk gave five specific lessons that technologists need to take into account when building products:

1. Contextualize the technology

   Ask what came before this technology, what would happen if it was never discovered, and what we would do without this technology.

2. Research the impact, not just the technology

   Look at the potential impact of the technology in the short, medium, and long term. Look wide to identify who and what may be impacted and explore the knock-on impacts

3. Make space for, and learn from, those who know

   Identify the people, communities, and groups who are impacted and listen to them. Make sure you communicate their voices and if you are in a position of privilege use that privilege to let other voices be heard.

4. Recognize system change and speak it plainly

   Use language wisely and with forethought. She used an example of “revolutionizing” e-commerce to describe a small change to a way of interacting online. Exaggeration and hyperbole are often used to obfuscate the impact of change on disadvantaged communities.

5. Fight about justice, not just about architectures

   She spoke about researchers fired from Google for exposing the bias in their algorithms. Lend your voice to those who have been silenced.

   She then spoke about her decision to focus on data privacy as an area where she has a passion for change and can make a difference.

She ended with a series of questions for the audience to ponder:

• What could you be doing if you weren’t building what you are now?

• What could you change if you focused on the change, not the technology?

• What if we took collective responsibility for the future of the world instead of the future of technology?

References

https://www.publicbooks.org/the-folly-of-technological-solutionism-an-interview-with-evgeny-morozov/

https://lifeitself.org/2017/09/18/techno-solutionism/

https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/11/unraveling-techno-solutionism/

https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597

Most of us are familiar with the centralized sensemaking environments: a few central authorities figure out what's important, then disseminate that information to the masses through channels like news media, schools, and workplaces. But in recent years, there's been a shift towards decentralized sensemaking environments, where people are more empowered to make their own sense of the world.

One example is the digital garden, where individuals cultivate their own collection of resources and connections, their own little patch of online real estate, tending to it and adding their contributions over time, allowing for a more personalized sensemaking experience. This might be a blog, a personal website, or even a social media profile. The digital garden is a more intimate sensemaking environment where users can control what they see and how they interact with information.

But digital gardens can also be scaled up to create Digital Forests and Skill Forests. In these environments, sensemaking is still decentralized, but there's more emphasis on collaboration and community. Users come together to share information and skills, forming a collective intelligence greater than the sum of its parts. These sensemaking environments have the potential to be incredibly powerful tools for learning and innovation.

So what does the future hold for sensemaking? It's hard to say for sure, but one thing is certain: the more we give individuals control over their sensemaking process, the more empowered and effective we can be in navigating complex worlds. So let's continue to experiment and explore new ways of making sense together.

More coming soon!

Cover image generated by Pedro Parrachia with DreamStudio

This is one of the reasons why it is so important to learn how to navigate uncertainty. From less terrible breakfasts to new chapters in your future, this can concretely improve our lives. The good news is that sense-making is a skill that can be learned, and DAOs stand to gain a lot from it right now. Without sensemaking, DAOs can easily make decisions that are driven by emotion or biased in favor of certain outcomes.

These kinds of decisions can lead to significant losses, both financial and reputational. Based on previous research, this post offers an overview of sense-making, why it's important, and how DAOs can get started. Stick around. By the end of your reading, I hope you'll be ready to start making better decisions in your DAO!

What exactly is sense-making?

Sense-making or sensemaking “is the process through which individuals work to understand novel, unexpected or confusing events” or experiences. In other words, It’s how we structure the unknown so we can act on it. Rather than a body of knowledge or plan of action, sense-making is about developing insights into patterns and possibilities. It challenges the notion that one way of thinking can be enough to understand the world's complexities and helps us break out of narrow or simplistic framing.

Sensemaking is about creating space for listening, reflection and the exploration of meaning beyond the usual boundaries, allowing different framings, stories and viewpoints to be shared and collectively explored.

Additionally, sense-making is a pluralist field of study, from organizational studies to leadership theory, communication and social psychology. Decentralized organizations can use it to see areas of agreement and conflict, especially at a cultural level. Sense-making allows individuals and groups to understand their prevailing beliefs, thoughts, and actions.

Practical sense-making

The early maps cartographers made differed depending on what they experienced. In this context of sense-making, the map does not need to be ‘precise’ or even ‘correct’ in detail at the start. More importantly, a shared map only needs to be relevant to a particular circumstance.

At its most basic level, sense-making is about map-making. This "sense-mapping" has three basic steps: 1) creating an emerging understanding or picture, 2) testing this picture with others, and 3) refining or abandoning the picture in favor of one that better explains a shifting reality.

Sense-making at the collective level can involve several different methods of practice. From understanding and facilitating deep listening to building communities of practice. From understanding drivers of systemic inequity to surfacing emerging insights that may amplify the voices of changemakers. This need for awareness brings us to why adopting sense-making frameworks is so important for DAOs.

Examples:

1. When we meet someone new, we engage in sense-making by trying to understand who they are, what they do and what they're like. We want to know how they fit into our lives and whether or not we can trust them.

2. When we're presented with a problem, we use sense-making to try to find a solution. We gather information, consider different options and use our previous experiences to guide our decision-making.

3. When something unexpected happens, we once again turn to sense-making to understand the situation. We ask questions, look for patterns and try to find meaning in what has happened.

Why is sense-making so important for DAOs?

Sense-making is the cognitive process of giving meaning to experiences. In a DAO, it is the activity of making interpreted judgments about data to support decision-making. There are three primary drivers of why sense-making is so important for DAOs: 1) the need for alignment, 2) avoiding groupthink, and 3) creating a learning model.

The need for alignment

The first driver of its importance is the need for alignment. In a DAO, members are dispersed, and no centralized authority exists. Therefore, it is essential to have a shared understanding of the information to make proposals that align with the organization's goals. 

Sense-making creates alignment by providing a framework for interpretation that all members can use. Removing central authorities isn't enough. Sense-making needs to be built into the very fabric of DAOs so that we can all work together to make sense of the challenges around us.

Avoiding groupthink

The second driver is avoiding groupthink. Groupthink occurs when members of a group agree without critically evaluating the available information. Sense-making can help avoid groupthink by encouraging critical thinking and allowing different interpretations of information.

For example, sensemaking can facilitate conversations and debates around a topic. This can help surface multiple perspectives and challenge the assumptions held within the group. In such conversations, sensemaking can help ensure that all DAO members feel heard and have their contributions valued.

Creating a learning model

Creating models for learning is the third driver of why sense-making is so important for DAOs. It provides a way for members to learn from each other and develop new skills while also helping identify decision-making errors so they can be corrected in the future. When complexity and interdependence seem to be the game's name, sense-making helps you navigate unchartered terrain – like a map that acts as a collectively understood guide.

Without sense-making, DAOs are far less effective in their decision-making and governance and can’t truly reach their full potential as decentralized organizations.

Examples:

1. When a DAO community is considering a new product or service, sense-making helps them understand their stakeholders' needs and design a solution that meets those needs.

2. Whenever a change affects the DAO, like a new subDAO or even regulations, sense-making helps us understand the implications of the change and adapt accordingly.

3. Sense-making is also important when things go wrong, be it a hack or a coordination failure like voter apathy or even collusion. By understanding what went wrong and why, DAOs can take steps to prevent similar problems in the future.

3 tips for better sense-making in your DAO

Seek out diverse perspectives

Beware of your biases and embrace disagreements. Seek out many types of data sources from diverse perspectives on the issue or opportunity and involve others. Sense-making isn’t an individual pursuit; it’s a team sport. Combine empirical data with more qualitative information like conversations. Your mental model of the story should be tested with others, particularly those with diverse perspectives different from yours. Listen deeply and actively.

Do little experiments

Do little experiments and look for patterns. Reflect, learn and then apply those learnings in another experiment. You don’t have to go all in, all at once. What if an experiment ‘fails’? Good. Consider: what have you learned? What will you do differently next time? Where do things seem to be repeating? How often are we seeing this? Does this resemble anything else we have seen before? Where are the connections? What are the outliers? What are these outliers and connections telling us?

Use stories and metaphors

Use stories and metaphors with others to explore and make sense of what the data is telling you. Information needs unpacking to become insights. Stories and visual representation can be powerful tools to communicate an idea or metaphor to your team, as a picture is worth more than a thousand words. A whiteboard or flipchart is often hugely effective in sparking creativity and fresh perspectives; it can offer insights that would otherwise remain hidden.

3 questions to help you build your sense-making muscles right now:

You probably don't think about your ‘sense-making muscles’ very often. But as you can see in this blog post, these are some of the most important muscles you can ever build.Previous  Studies have shown that sensemaking is highly correlated with effectiveness because it gives us a better grasp of what is going on, thus facilitating other helpful practices such as visioning, relating, and inventing. Consider the following three questions to help warm up your sense-making muscles:

How can you know who you are until you see what you do? What are your passions? To understand how you make decisions, you first need to understand your identity. This can be done in a number of ways, such as by exploring your sense of self through tools like journaling or meditation. Journaling is an effective tool for sensemaking. It allows you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of the issue or opportunity you’re sensemaking. Writing out your thoughts, feelings and observations, can help to make sense of complex situations and discover new insights. Meditation is also useful for sensemaking, as it allows you to explore your innermost thoughts and feelings. Through meditation, you can gain a sense of clarity about who you are and what decisions you want to make in the future. 

When was the last time you questioned your basic assumptions? The act of sense-making means that we test our interpretations of the world against other views to refine our understanding. We then concretize our thoughts or abandon them in favor of clearer views.One way to test our basic assumptions and help with sensemaking is to practice active listening. Active listening involves fully focusing on what the other person is saying without internal monologue or judgment. This technique can help us gain insight into our own beliefs and those of others by allowing us to be present in the conversation to clarify and interrogate our own sensemaking efforts.

When faced with multiple paths, how do you decide which one to take? Given that most of work in DAOs takes place in complex environments, when is enough information enough? You have to move beyond accuracy and completeness because you will not know all the variables that influence your decision. Instead, you are better off considering plausibility and sufficiency. Do you have enough credible information to justify your beliefs and, therefore, for your decision to seem plausible? Yes, proceed. No, gather more information.

Conclusion

The essence of sense-making is grounded in a desire to create sophisticated simplicity.

Sophisticated simplicity occurs when you act to bring meaning to your world by labeling and identifying plausible patterns in the information you receive. In other words, you interpret the information presented, enabling you to make more thoughtful decisions. Sophisticated simplicity results from this sensemaking practice; it's about finding meaning through embracing complexity - knowing what questions to ask, breaking it down into simpler parts for easier comprehension, and making sense of it all to drive success.

Sense-making uses both intuition and logic. It’s not about finding the correct answer. It means staying curious about the unknowns and being comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing. As Deborah Ancona summarized, ‘The things that stand in the way of sense-making are rigidity and leader dependence.’

Sensemaking is a powerful tool for decentralized governance. Decentralized governance requires sensemaking to help participants stay focused and make decisions collectively, without needing an overarching leader or centralized authority. By applying sensemaking, DAOs can maximize their collective intelligence and decision-making power in order to make data-driven decisions that are rooted in a deep understanding of their complex environment. This sensemaking process involves asking questions, gathering information from multiple sources, and synthesizing this information to identify patterns and emerging trends.

What does sense-making mean to you?

I want to hear about what sense-making means to you. I’d also love to hear how you already apply sense-making in your DAO, or if you choose to give a try to any of the 3 tips and 3 questions presented here.

References

Sense-making is a growing area of research, with more than 125,000 research papers published on the topic.

Karl Weick is credited for introducing this concept. Many authors have contributed to the body of research, including founder of the MIT Leadership Center Deborah Ancona and David Snowden, who came up with theCynefin framework.

https://suzimcalpine.com/sensemaking-what-it-is-why-its-important-right-now-and-how-you-can-get-better-at-it/

https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/42924_1.pdf

https://www.goodlifeworkproject.com/post/7-questions-sensemaking-decision-making

https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-is-sensemaking-3c5bf9edecba

https://globalsensemaking.net/profiles/blogs/sensemaking-in-decision-making-summary-phd-study

Oh, and the cats! A cautionary tale

The dangers of avoiding proper sensemaking and critical thinking before decision-making are immense. When decision-makers fail to think critically, they can easily make decisions that are not informed by evidence, context or underlying assumptions. Furthermore, sensemaking is inherently collaborative and requires input from different stakeholders to build a nuanced understanding of the situation at hand. Without this sensemaking, it is easy for decision-makers to become entrenched in their own biases and opinions, leading to poor decisions that can have far-reaching consequences.

Without taking the necessary steps of sensemaking, what started as a health crisis with an "easy solution" spiraled into disastrous results requiring extreme measures — such as parachuting thousands of cats. So before your DAO makes an important decision, consider sharing this article there. Who knows, maybe it can save many cats from a lot of trouble!

In many ways, DAOs are like a research lab. It's a place where new ideas can be tested, and new technologies can be explored. As such, it's important to treat DAO operations with the same level of care and caution that we would treat research operations. We need to make sure that we're taking every precaution to protect our people, data, and our tokens. At the same time, we need to make sure that we're not stifling innovation by over-complicating a DAO. Let's strike a balance between ensuring safety and allowing creativity to flourish.

The work of a DAO is no small task. With thousands upon membership across the globe, it requires organization and systems in order to effectively coordinate movement between members. Not just from management, but also among each other's subcultures! Luckily, there are practices designed specifically around this type of situation; one such being known as 'DAO Ops'.

ResearchOps as a practice helps organizations socializing research. It aims to make insights generated by user studies and other forms of qualitative data more accessible. In order for people within an organization (especially those without technical skills) to be able to actively take part during activities related with sense-making and decision-making.

DAOs are like research labs. Spaces where new ideas can be tested, and new technologies can be explored. This freedom is essential for the growth of DAOs, but it also requires organization and systems in order to effectively and safely coordinate movement between members. Just as we have ResearchOps as a practice to help organizations socializing research, we need similar practices to manage DAOs. Consider treating DAO operations more like Research Operations – with careful planning, safety measures in place, and an eye towards the future. We've only just begun to explore the possibilities of what Decentralized Autonomous Organizations can do. With the right tools and support, we can make DAOs thrive while keeping our communities healthy, safe and well-informed.

Have you tried using ResearchOps in your own DAOs? Let us know how it goes!

References

https://blog.optimalworkshop.com/what-is-researchops/

https://medium.com/abridged-io/signal-dao-and-the-burgeoning-field-of-dao-ops-b767ece3e8c0

https://medium.com/ethereum-push-notification-service/boosting-dao-infrastructure-and-operations-tooling-by-leveraging-epns-as-the-communication-layer-b8a075d9ad84

This is draft is being co-written with an AI, an anon and the people of Floristic. It’s been shared here as we learn and build in public.

What do you see when you close your eyes and imagine the future? Do you picture a bleak, dark world ravaged by climate change and war? Or do you envision a brighter tomorrow, where science and technology have solved our biggest problems? Whichever vision of the future you choose to believe in, it's important to remember that it's just that – a vision. We can't let our dreams blind us to reality, and we need to be prepared for whatever comes our way. That's why it's so critical to stress test our visions of the future, to see if they hold up under pressure and if potential dangers are associated with them.

Eclipsepunk aims to explore the limits of solarpunk narratives by continuously testing them in creative scenarios. This includes collaborative storytelling and worldbuilding tools like Design Fiction, indie ttRPGs, and other forms of future studies such as art projects or installations with interactive components for exploring potential futures through creativity. These exercises help us imagine what could happen if we take our ideas too far; there may be negative outcomes that need consideration when designing these imagined realities.

In this article, we will explore introductions to solarpunk and its optimism, lunarpunk and the divide, and finally, eclipsepunk, how it works and why give it a try.

The Sun and the Moon

“*Science fiction is a speculative exercise. By speculating on possible futures, sci-fi expands the space of possibilities. Crypto is an extreme kind of sci-fi because as well as offering a vision of the future it also provides the tools to make that future possible.” *Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle

Solarpunk is a movement that imagines bright, fair, sustainable futures built on renewable energy sources. It's a hopeful vision for a better tomorrow, one in which we work together to create a more equitable and environmentally-friendly world. It's crucial that we continue to imagine better futures, even if they may not be perfect. Our dreams and visions inspire us to take action and work towards making them a reality.

Lunarpunk, on the other hand, understands that while striving for brighter futures is important, we'll never get there if we don't also face the darker aspects of reality. It's a vision informed by the dark side of human nature, one that doesn't shy away from the potential for conflict and hardship. It's not enough to simply imagine a utopia – we need to find ways to make it resilient in the face of challenges and problems. We need to be prepared for hardships, even as we hope for the best.

Eclipses

*Garden City Movement was an architectural movement in the early 1900s that aimed to integrate wilderness elements into cities. The city designs were pretty impressive. Basically, an attempt at being solarpunk before we learned how nature works (do we even get it now?). By the 1950s, Garden Cities had become Suburbia.

When you lament the grassy blasted hellscape that is modern American suburbs, you're looking at 70s years of the collapse of the first attempt at what becomes solarpunk, in architecture, landscape design, and city planning.*

“We already live in a failed solarpunk experiment.”

Eclipsepunk is a third way – a middle ground between the optimism of solarpunk and the cynicism of lunarpunk. Eclipsepunk envisions a future where we have the tools and knowledge to deal with both the best and worst-case scenarios. It's a future where we're prepared for anything and where we can build resilience into our systems so that we can bounce back from whatever comes our way.

Eclipsepunk has three stages, and each step can be named in different ways according to the participants’ lexicon:

Stage 1

Have fun while building worlds, context and repertoire stories

For the first stage, we focus on worldbuilding. We create an immersive and cohesive tone and setting with other aspects to make it believable and valuable for the different stages. Storytellers can explore solo or collaborate by creating stories from scratch within their worlds. Stories that can then either expand existing narratives and translate one culture's lore or adopt fantastic and unbelievable settings as a mean for exploring specific questions that wouldn't be as tractable otherwise. Most importantly, our goal here isn't to create fantastic tales or convince you of anything. Instead, we aim to put our imaginations, shared dreams and concerns on the table. This stage is about having fun and exercising our creativity to pave the way for what comes next.

Stage 2

Break stories: up, down, apart.

The second stage is where we apply frameworks to push stories and their context to their limits. As those limits get broken, we have the chance to use real-world risk management tools like risk heat maps and risk control self-assessments. This stage aims to understand tensions, pitfalls, and patterns more objectively by mixing new and previous stories with risk frameworks on different scales of the system. The more context stories, the better understanding of the system, its patterns, and existing tensions.

Stage 3

Sharing is caring

Finally, in the third stage, we focus on memetics - or how information spreads through communities. This stage is about developing strategies for communicating our findings in a way that is convincing and inspiring others to take action. We want Eclipsepunk to be more than just an exercise - we want it to be a tool for systemic transformation rather than a research methodology. The lessons learned from the previous stages are looped back into the original group by the participants to create change, prototype ideas, reframe the original stories and potentially ‘write a new ending’.