On the zeen front, we’re exploring UI/UX patterns to innovate on group social tooling for the playful, invitational co-creation of these artifacts. This is where we’re focusing most of our squad’s energy currently - getting a concept site up for what we’re calling Our Zeen. Our Zeen, a cousin to OurLog, Relational’s primordial collective intelligence tool.

An Interview with the Relational Crew

by Z

Z: So, you’ve been experimenting with a type of group publishing? Relational crew: Yup! A blockchain-native hypermedia form called a Zeen (like a zine but more fuuuuuture).

Z: A blockchain-native hypermedia sounds cool, what does it mean though? Crew: Yeah, what we’re pointing to is a hyperobject (the zeen) created by a hyperagent (a friendly working group), that lives on the blockchain (a hypermedia). So yeah, zeens are a blockchain-native hypermedia.

Z: What's with all of the hyper - hypermedia, hyperobject, hyperagent? Crew: Hyper in this context is a fancy way of saying multiple perspectives, or multiperspectival. Which, actually, is just a fancy way of saying many.

The hyperobject is an object, in this case a piece of media, the zeen, which has multiple, many, viewpoints. These many viewpoints are an extension of the hyperagent, aka a group with many people. Blockchain hypermedia is media composed with many component parts, many blocks.

Z: Alright, makes as much sense as anything - what's so great about many viewpoints? Crew: Great question - many viewpoints bring out a depth of information. A higher dimensionality of understanding of something. Ask one person what they think of the web3 you'll get one perspective or viewpoint; ask ten people you'll get ten. When we're making sense of complex topics, it's nice to get multiple perspectives so we can understand the topic from multiple angles. Just like stereoscopic vision, the overlaps of these perspectives give the understanding depth.

Z: Okay, yeah, but at some point you reach an upper limit, yeah? Like too many people, too many perspectives? Crew: Yup, totally. We think Dunbar numbers (5, 15, 35, 150) are a helpful design constraint for groups making sense of complex information. In groups larger than 150 the complexity of the collective sense-making reaches an inflection point, and the exercise outputs more noise than sense.

So, our goal is to build playful sense-making tooling for small working groups. We’re starting with a collaborative zeen making system called Our Zeen.

Z: Maybe I’m just old-school, this sounds sci-fi and kinda intimidating, why would people want to do this? Is it easy? Crew: Yeah, complex work in a group can be really frustrating. Much of our research has been wading into this frustration and playtesting ways to create simplified games of sense-making. We’re packaging our findings into Our Zeen.

With Our Zeen, making sense together is not only easy, it's fun.

So, that's a big part of why people want to do this - groups get together to explore a topic by playing sense-making games to create a zeen, which can be shared with the world.

Z: Rad! Play games to sensemake and work with information - this reminds me of that information scaling threshold that Gordon Brander wrote about. Is that related somehow? Crew: Totally! We agree with Gordon and the Subconscious crew (and many others) that as a result of the internet, the amount of information available in our global society is... staggering. Overwhelming really. We call this mess of digital information the Latent Sea, but more on that later…

Z: We’ll pick up the Latent Sea some other time then. This is probably a good opportunity to close out this interview, thanks for your time, Relational! 🙏 Crew: Thanks for your questions Z, this has been fun! 💗

A Social Network for Groups

Like most of us, our relationship with Twitter and the other global social networks are… complicated. Frankly, it’s starting to feel like wearing an outfit that just doesn’t fit anymore. We’re growing, and we want our social networks to grow with us. Is that too much to ask for?

We don’t think so, and that’s why we’re exploring the Latent Sea possibilities of crafting common ground in smaller groups. Zeens as a bridge from the current web2 social networks, to a more relational, contextual web3 social sphere.

Zeen Product Explorations and Sketches

We’re in the Our Zeen prototype phase, when visions of what the product might look like start emerging. It’s an exciting time in the product lifespan - we’re throwing out ideas and seeing what sticks.

Often we imagine as a kind of Mario Party mashup with a blog club - a type of crew-play for knowledge gamers. In this spirit, Jon envisioned the Our Zeen interface and how a crew could design knowledge expeditions.

An integral component to Our Zeen is the event structure. Making zeens is not an always-on experience, so Jordan noodled on zeen creation as a type of event:

1. job to be done is cohesion and distillation of large amounts of group generated content

2. (via Prompty or really any communication) agreement to all explore a subject, problem, project

3. Create logs with tags relating them to the event - generate ingredients

4. introduce AI co-reflection at undetermined intervals

   4a) train model on understanding your rlog’s relationship and narrative as you go 4i) hopefully combine into some kind useful model based on the entire group's generated rlogs?

   4b) as ritual to help crystalize own thoughts mid stream

What We’re Thinking About

A broader look at what’s relevant for Relational on the Latent Sea.

https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1595882942508564480?s=20&t=XeFQqMHiKvi7EI7Fqc2Qaw

https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1597806976250961920?s=20&t=z7sjLu__kqhB0JsZkme68g

https://twitter.com/cryptohun3y/status/1602313580019269632?s=46&t=18_2V6IY9x74b3uPhhonqQ

https://twitter.com/jessmartin/status/1602635906678226944?s=46&t=18_2V6IY9x74b3uPhhonqQ

Credit, where credit is due

@kpaxle @jonbo @gorum for zeen wrangling; Kristen on art and design direction, and copy; Jon on information pipelining, content layout, and editorial; Dave on the last pass for editorial look-and-feel 📰 ✨

all content created by @dood, @computerlitch, @gorum, @jonbo, @kpaxle through playing a Relational game of creation and curation over an extended period of time

thank you to starline for the wavvveessss background image, sometimes you just don’t want to create everything by hand 🌊 🙏

“…cyberspace is characterised [in the 1984 novel Necromancer by William Gibson] by its placelessness and a sharp division between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ when users jack into the matrix, the ‘meat’ of the body in the physical world falls away and they enter an alternative, virtual realm where they float free from their bodies and their physical locations amongst a sea of geometric digital representations of global data flows.”

- Huw Halstead: Cyberplace: From fantasies of placelessness to connective emplacement

In this issue, Relational explores digital placeness. Our work is primarily focused on blockchain technology as a ripe social computing environment. One of the stickier challenges of making social connections online, however, is creating a felt sense of place. Sure, we can figure out a way to get people in the same digital space, at the same time. Yet somehow this digital co-location doesn’t necessarily scratch the human itch for connection.

As Relational continues to build a tool for collective cognition, OurLog, we’re co-creating a sense of place for the Relational squad, and also forming a better understanding of OurLog as a place. For us this means diving into an esoteric mix of concepts:

• digital physics with Ethereum as a substrate: co-presence and the metaverse

• social rituals

• the role and utility of AI

Here’s what we know for sure: place is contextual, and context is created by people. To that end, we’ll keep asking ourselves, how can tools help communities create shared spaces for connection and creation?

We also snuck in a bit about our build approach towards the end of the newsletter. Hint—it’s all about games and emergence!

Thanks for reading, XO!

Ethereum: Digital Physics and Placeness

In Relational’s OurLog, CJ linked up a talk from ludens, one of the builders behind Lattice, from DEFCON 2022. The talk focused on Ethereum, the shift from personal computing to societal computing, and how to emerge autonomous worlds in the Ethereum ecosystem. In other words: how to create places in the Ethereum social computer.

The key, as ludens explains, is the digital physics of a place: rules of play premised on autonomy and permissionless creation. CJ looped it back to OurLog: “I think the infra we choose to use is the digital physics itself. ETH has physics in it.”

At this point, we’ve got more questions than answers: how do we explore and better understand Ethereum’s digital physics? What does the digital physics afford in terms of developing a co-presence, a place that feels like we’re somewhere, together?

For now, we’re getting a better understanding of our priorities, and the qualities of placeness we want to see on the Ethereum social computer. For CJ, this is a reminder that co-presence may be the single most important aspect of a digital place:

I think the “metaverse” thing is a meme, yet in the age of COVID and remote work, co-presence is extremely important. Enabling co-presence and “place” while being physically distributed across a substrate that is public infra seems very important

I have some small feeling that yes, co-presence may be the killer thing enabled. Yet this co-presence is going to take many forms, just as it does in reality. It probably does not require VR or AR, or anything. But creating a placeness in a place without physical representation is key

Ethereum is a substrate on which this is possible. There’s a desire for digital placeness, even if the reality of this is somewhat unknown. There will likely be even more massive innovations once something like this can be achieved. There is something major lost when not being physically co-present. We have noticed this while being together in Austin and then being away. We are actively trying to schedule more co-presence with each other.

Jordan reminded us that we’re still a ways off on creating digital places that are fun enough to take over from the primacy of IRL place - especially in regard to VR. Instead, we should focus on digital placeness as a complement to — not a replacement of — IRL socialization.

there are a few material conditions wrt to social media that are worth re-examining. feeds and always fresh content aren’t more important or more valuable than real world experiences with humans, but it is are FAR more accessible than coordinating real world activities. As capital locks every physical part of life behind rent and fees, we have less and less places to casually convene, so connecting through media seems a cheaper & easier alternative. But even at its most insidious and pervasive extremes, the phone can be set down and pocketed quickly enough to remain engaged in the default world.

this feels like a set-up for thinking VR is still a logical continuation of these material factors; more & more systems moving fully online, increasing alienation and loneliness, lack of 3rd spaces etc. but there's still an acknowledged & very obvious barrier, it’s [VR] just not fun enough yet. Social media never had to directly compete with the things people truly enjoy, you can still rock climb or go to concerts and use it. It's able to compliment versus having to replace.

In terms of OurLog as a place, Jon explores OurLog as a community hub through the skeuomorphic of a bulletin board.

OurLog is for supporting a distributed group of people as they learn, build, and explore together. This means helping people coordinate their online and offline thinking time with each other. It is about signaling the intent to gather, inviting friends you know well and those friends you haven't met yet.

What does the central bulletin board of an online, distributed community look like?

• a list of events, some of which are open to the public in various capacities

• a list of goals and open questions the community is looking to answer / facilitate / build for

• resources the community has found, vetted, or produced

• information about how to get more involved and active, about the community's practices and thinking behind those practices

• information about its story, how the community came to be, where it hopes to go

OurLog is about augmenting the interactions that would've already happened, had the group been perfectly situated within walking distance of each other, with shared rooms with whiteboards, wifi, and coffee mugs. It is about virtualizing a place before that place can exist. Making room for both predictability and serendipity with digital hallways.

Social Rituals Help Make the Place

Kristen has been pondering how the squad can emerge social rituals in an attempt to intentionally enter and exit the Relational field; or in Dave’s words, “logging in and out of the group mind.” These might occur at smaller time scales, like a specific design session as well as in longer time scale contexts, like at the beginning of a multi-week project.

this is for the purposes of having a shared experience, explicitly. it serves to prime folks upon entry and to help folks transition out upon exit.

the thing of it is this - when we convene, there's a LOT of energetic transfer. what we do with it in session is a sacred practice... how do we prepare ourselves for the task at hand? to intentionally focus our energies into a space... and then release that energy afterwards.

One area we’ve been exploring is enabling constraints for the "work week" at a team-level; some kind of a weekly ritual. There's certainly some forms here that would be fun and useful to frame the week—we work idiosyncratically, so there isn’t an obvious shape here. We’re investigating both sync and async approaches to this kind of weekly ritual:

• entering into and exiting "the field" of the Relational working group

• intentional open and close to the week, as a minimum enabling constraint for group cohesion

• purpose is to increase our bandwidth as a group, not explicitly to create efficiencies in production though this may be a byproduct

• in practice: checking-in and seeing what emerges when we connect, figuring out exactly what we want to do with this time

• in practice: maybe a short sync sesh (30 mins) and/or async sharing of a small media artifact to encapsulate

-Kristen

We’re also figuring out the best way to collaborate across build sessions. There’s a definite need to share information at the end of each build sesh not only for other collaborators to pick up where we left off, but also to help ourselves remember what we’ve previously covered:

introducing....Time Capsules! ~2 minute long video recaps at the end of build seshes to share with whoever you want to invite to collaborate on the next phase of building

hypothesis: Time Capsules are best shared before or during a sync session, where you can talk with new collaborators and “hand-off” the work. Should work through an async hand-off as well. Bonus: useful for new collaborators, or just to remind yourself where you left-off.

-Kristen + Jon

Integrating AI with a Social Blockchain

Relational has, officially, fallen down the AI rabbit hole. In the Information Age, especially in social blockchain ecosystems, we can’t imagine how else we’ll be able to work with the absolutely immense amounts of data and information we’ve already amassed and we’ll continue to generate over time.

Dave shared a video of John Ash exploring collaborative sensemaking through a tool he calls Iris. One of the most salient aspects of Ash’s work has direct applicability to the R&D nature of Relational’s work, as Jon noted, "effectively using GPT-3 as a summarization + translation tool simultaneously.”

Dave and Jon explored this human-computer relationship, and ways in which GPT-3 can be used in our work. Much of this exploration is philosophical in nature—we’re realizing the depths of the implications of AI in social computing. It seems our squad has become so interested in AI, in particular GPT-3, because it affords a type of collaborative writing, or writing augmentation.

Essentially, we’re exploring using AI as an interface for working with a group’s thinking. For example, we can imagine how GPT3 could help with curation of the Relational newsletter based on our OurLog. This cross of social blockchain x AI technologies allows for a type of distributed collective cognition.

There are styles of human-computer-relationship. As I interact with the AI, I treat it as a crowd intelligence. Giving a text-speech to the “audience” represented in the model and asking for feedback. The way the crowd interprets my position can tell me how obscure my thinking is. The different lenses offered in the prompt can scope the feedback (feedback from a second grader, feedback from a philosopher). It’s an imperfect art but very useful. The different AI models can be used in cross-cultural conversation. As a type of interpreter.

Curious what kinds of controls could be exposed in a conversational thinking interface powered by a Large Language Model (LLM).

-Dave

wow. did not think about GPT-3 being used in this way, at all. I think the distinction here is many projects try and use GPT-3 to find an answer to a posed question, from its massive dataset. instead, John Ash (in my understanding) leverages the language-parsing capabilities of the model to deconstruct and reconstruct the information. so effectively using GPT-3 as a summarization + translation tool simultaneously. John calls it a mirror and that is true in several senses: the model is already trained on a giant corpus of human writing, and also it is receiving raw, live information from the audience

During the demo, someone asked "what role does that leave all of us", which was interesting, voicing (broader) fears of AI changing the relationship between humans and work. John’s response was basically, "go out and build things and use this to get un-stuck"

-Jon

Dave played around with Open AI, having the tool translate a software design concept into a mycelium and forest metaphor:

Prompt— Reframe and expand the following philosophy in a metaphor of mycelium and a forest:

Protocols are the substrate for experiences. Compelling experience emerges protocol. A diversity of compelling experience creates a robust protocol. A healthy protocol is a collaboration of experiences.

OpenAI— A protocol is like the mycelium of a mushroom. It is the hidden but essential foundation that supports the mushroom and allows it to grow. A compelling experience is like a mushroom. It emerges from the protocol and is something that can be enjoyed and appreciated. A diversity of compelling experiences is like a forest. It is a robust and healthy ecosystem that is supported by the protocol.

The Relational Approach to Building

Relational has agreed on a strategic approach to building: play games to emerge the OurLog app to emerge the Relational protocol. Much of our work has been premised around designing simple games with a goal to emerge a piece of the puzzle that is OurLog.

While we have a directional sense of what OurLog will become, because blockchain technology is so new, we’re not sure exactly what is feasible. So, we play games to discover the boundaries on the tech, within the context of OurLog as a group cognition tool. Tony summarized our build approach nicely:

Shared Universe Mini Games

Make disjointed mini games at a regular cadence.

Game pieces are composable.

Some new games will use old game pieces.

In a nutshell, we’ll focus on building OurLog (an app) through games, and in the process we’ll emerge the Relational protocol. We’re calling this a vertical integration (as opposed to focusing on a horizontal protocol-focused build).

Our goal here is to prioritize the relationship with users and therefore an understanding of the market. We don’t want to be building in a vacuum—we want to build so that people can use our product and have the experience of enhanced group cognition. Eventually, as the protocol emerges, we’ll open things up horizontally so more developers can build using the Relational digital physics engine.

We’re in the thick of fall in the Northern hemisphere—so here’s a healthy dose of foliage and mushrooms. Lest we forget about the networked nature of mycelium connecting all plants and trees across our globe.

Mushrooms are the fruiting and reproductive body of mycelium, and how beautiful they are. As far as we’re concerned, nature as a reminder of collective intelligence will never steer us wrong!

Until next time! 🙏 💗 ✨

Cover photo: A vibrant growth of chrysanthemum flowers in Chicago, IL, Oct 2021. 📸  by Kristen.

We’re feeling a bit like we’ve summited a hill on Relational—we presented the latest OurLog prototype and vision at a recent DEF Demo Day where we received a wave of positive and helpful responses. The OurLog Gitcoin grant closed out with over 275 contributors (!!). And we discovered a number of aligned projects in our neighborhood of networked comms, including Common Sense[makers].

As we coast down the backside of our recently summited hill, we’re looking out onto the horizon and seeing a sea of other hills (and mountains) to climb, crest, and coast down. Such is life, and Relational is flowing with the ups and downs.

In this issue of Relational Highlights, we’ve captured some snapshots of our meandering journey, including:

• our continued exploration of Vision and Principles

• the importance of ownership experience (OX) in community comms and media production

• emergent design thinking for OurLog

• investigations into collective intelligence and hyperobjects

We hope you enjoy issue #3 of Relational Highlights!

A Continuous Unfolding of Relational’s Vision and Principles

In Relational Highlights Issue #2, Kristen wrote:

encountering challenges, issues, as they arise and figuring out the best way to address at that point in time (not prior) is an emergent strategy tool

In this Issue, Jon rediscovers a related emergent strategy tool: priming for future play. This is made evident as the team boots up design and development for Exquisite Land’s Canvas 2, a year wiser, and with Tony and Jordan now in the fray.

now that we're spinning up exquisite land it really does feel like our past selves primed our present selves to pick up and continue the game. leaving enough open to allow in new ideas, perspectives, and people but giving us a solid foundation to pick up on and the existing social context of people that know and are excited about the project

we are now in chapter 2 and i’m reminded to be comfortable to leaving things for chapter 3, for our future selves to figure out, which is forwards-facing trust -Jon

Meanwhile, the Relational Discord continues to hum along. As an OurLog prototype, our Discord personal channels offer an asynchronous view into everyone’s thinking and research, and a space for conversation. Additionally, Kristen and Jon are experimenting with several new channels and integrations for easier publishing to Twitter and piping to Notion. Discord is also where we coordinate the variety of different social, technical, and design sessions throughout the week.

relational discord is feeling like a place. multiple projects running in parallel, no clear central point of communication, everything takes the space it needs

information routing through the place - like at a train station. some goes into notion, some turns into emails to be sent, some turns into a mirror publication -Jon

Kristen’s response: placeness, and info running through a place: communications tooling is this - it's piping things from one place to another, as appropriate. giving people the tools, the agency, to decide what goes where - patterns of engagement emerge, social norms

What do all of these media activities have in common? - all involve media associated by URL - they can all spawn each other- we are comfortable altering the communication form and cadence as necessary - all involve different people; are embedded in a social graph

What media artifacts do these activities produce? - text - audio - recorded and live video -Jon

Relational’s Ownership Experience (OX)

During the course of Relational’s day-to-day work and research, we consume and produce a variety of different media formats - both synchronously and asynchronously. Being able to create new pipes (integrations) and re-arrange them is proving increasingly valuable as our constraints, projects, and goals continue to evolve.

After reading Jesse Walden’s Tokens are Products, Kristen notes:

The main problem we solve for our users of OurLog/rLog (users being communities as a unit) is ownership of their media production process/pipeline. This is interesting - ownership of a process. As opposed to ownership of a media output (like Mirror: own your blog post). And as opposed to an external platform owning the process (like Discord and Notion where we produce and edit this newsletter)

Ownership of a media production process in web3 means providing composable tools to afford customization of the process to meet your unique needs, as a community, the ability to design the experience of media production for your community.

OurLog/rlog is a tool to create your community culture around media production - this is very powerful, very empowering. -Kristen

In addition to the principle of movement, CJ points to the importance of decomposition and recomposition as well:

Relational is a decomposition engine in some sense. Decomposing information into its primitive bits. Decomposition is essential in the ecosystem for life to emerge. To provide the nutrients for the rest of the system. We are fungus.

From decomposition you can recompose. -CJ

Kristen’s response: yes - mycelium networks transport resources through the network; we are creating comms network infra in the likeness of mycelium networks, our resources = information; information composed into media formats for publication and distribution

Internet media is produced and tightly packaged in embedded contexts. For example, a podcast might contain a transcript derived from the audio track, the audio joined to the video, and a text description on the platform it’s uploaded to with still more context.

Decomposition means being able to digest and process this media as a community by extracting and referencing specific snippets and portions from a podcast, combining them with snippets and ideas from other sources and producing altogether new outputs. To tie it back to the Ownership Experience frame, this evolutionary process and the tooling that enables it is precisely what the community gets to retain control and ownership of in the Relational model.

OurLog - A Peek into Relational’s Design Thinking

Although Discord, Notion, and this newsletter are particularly text-centric, we aren’t forgetting the importance of representing other formats. Capturing and sharing the full breadth of a group’s thinking will involve audio, video, and many more formats.

using "thoughts" to temporarily describe the objects being generated with/for OurLog, since "notes" feels too text focused...i don't think it's necessarily the best term but its what I’ve come up with for now -Jordan

Once captured, these thoughts will support a variety of different interactions and workflows, personal and collaborative. Here is some of Jordan’s emerging design thinking on OurLog:

OurLog, Hyperobjects, and Collective Intelligence

If individual thoughts are the material, what are we making with it? Tony and Kristen explore the role of abstraction and emergence in the creation of hyperobjects and how OurLog might afford groups the power to create, manipulate, and share these multi-dimensional structures.

Hyperobjects are relational stacks of abstractions -Tony and Kristen

Tony: abstractions are levels in a stack of information. each higher level has increased leverage over the level below it. you take a concept and use it as a building block with other concepts to form a higher level abstraction.

Kristen: there are similarities between abstraction and emergence… abstraction being the technical to emergence’s poiesis (the process of evolution, of transcend and include).

Which explains why, if humans are entering into a time when/where we have the ability to understand hyperobjects, we need collective intelligence tools with abstractions to encompass, to understand hyperobjects

“seeing” hyper object is the most human quality, yet many digital tools shard hyperobjects and package these shards into products for an end user. Practically every social coordination app: basecamp (company org & projects), slack (groups), discord (informal groups), jira (projects), tiktok (memes)

These packaged shards are great in their simplicity to grok for the end user. “We are talking about work here,” “we are creating memes for a product here,” etc. However they are an incomplete picture of what the end user is doing, an arbitrary level of abstraction for a given hyperobject. There is no shared understanding of what is actually being coordinated around.

groups have the ability to consciously coordinate around hyperobjects. OurLog is the first tool that is focused on hyperobject coordination, creation, and exploration. -Tony

And since OurLog would be capturing high-fidelity interactions of an entire community instead of narrow individual perspectives, it opens up interesting possibilities for machine learning:

i'm still thinking a LOT about Tony’s ideas on ML being trained on collaborative team behavior instead of just individual jobs...feels like its somehow relevant to group-based composable games, providing translation or interconnection of diverse ideas. -Jordan

Related Miscellany

A few more highlights where Dave explores the relational aspects of money and Tony covers the past evolution and possible future directions of gaming as enabled by web3 primitives.

Just finished David Graeber’s “Debt” book. He’s writing the history and mechanics of money from an anthropological perspective; which affords a view across time and culture into the various ways people have oriented to the subject of exchange. He mentions that the typical purely Economic perspective on the how and what of money tends toward understanding human behavior in terms of mathematics and describes these understandings with equations

The anthropological perspective takes into account the relational aspect of money. How cash and credit are different representations of human relationship and how when the money begins to stand in for those relationships the society can begin to go quite wonky. -Dave

A very abridged, and out of order, history on composable gaming: 1. Users have tools to create low-fi worlds. Little flexibility on personas, interaction, and reusability (e.g. Minecraft) 2. A hi-fi game world that lets users embody a persona they identify with. Interaction set is predefined by game. Personas are widely varied and focus on strong IP, but not customizable. World is fully defined by game creator. (e.g. Fortnite) 3. Users have tools to create low-fi worlds. Interaction set is open and composable. Personas are fully customizable. Sub-worlds are disconnected. (e.g. Roblox)

Where’s gaming go to next? - Highly customizable worlds with variable fidelity- Flexible personas. Create your own. Be your favorite IP. or both- High variance on things you can do across the gaming worlds. Puzzle-solve, fight, technical problems, and a combination of all these things- Shared narratives and ideas across the game worlds. (insert HyperXP here) -Tony

Thanks for reading this issue of Relational Highlights, we love you! 💗✨

We’ve continued using Discord as a prototype for processing and publishing our collective intelligence. Capturing and sharing our research, reflections, resources, and insights with the local Relational community. The patterns of practice we’re developing are the basis for a software toolkit we’re calling Ourlog.

This publication is an early example of the type of thinking Ourlog can output—currently we’re: pipelining original content from Ourlog to Notion for formatting, editorial, and review; and finally to Mirror for publication. The successful bits of these experiments are to be encoded in a blockchain-compatible, public goods protocol we’re calling rlog.

Most of our work since the last edition has focused on rlog/Ourlog, though we did get into other projects as well. Here’s some highlights:

• built and deployed iOS and MacOS apps of Ourlog - no bells and whistles, but functional

• launched a Gitcoin grant for Ourlog—if you’d like to support us, donate to the project through our grant! Every little bit counts as donations are matched by additional funds in the Gitcoin ecosystem

• pulled together an Ourlog website

• hosted a handful of Exquisite Land dev sessions—getting close to launching the 2nd canvas soon! Slime is coming…

Thanks for reading, let’s dive into this issue of Relational Highlights!

Ourlog: Emerging a Decentralized Communications Tool

As the Relational squad focused on creating a Gitcoin grant for Ourlog, and building out the iOS and MacOS apps, we began to see more clearly what Ourlog is, and what role it plays in a decentralized comms network. This is the joy (and challenge!) of working emergently—there’s a leap of faith required to jump in and experiment, and when we do, we’re rewarded with an experiential understanding of what we’re building.

We’re gaining clarity on what our next steps can be, and we’re feeling energized about what’s possible. Lastly, we’re beginning to contextualize Ourlog in the broader Ethereum and blockchain ecosystem; it’s starting to click and it feels good.

What makes creation extra powerful in Ourlog is when you create under a context — are you creating something just for yourself, a hyper object, with a team, for a project, or a group of friends? Capturing context through tags, metadata, and shared creation sessions are what make interacting with Ourlog invaluable.

Interaction with Ourlog can take a couple different forms: - The first is simply viewing a feed of creations from contexts you care about. - The second way to interact is to apply contexts to Ourlog. Filter by time, media types, hyper objects, groups, and more to get the information you need to understand the world -Tony

Kristen’s response: I’m excited about creating a context in Ourlog through relationships. weaving your own web of relationships to view the world through different lenses; experience the world in new ways

While in Ireland, I saw the book of Kells and Trinity’s old library—physical books and places stored and preserved over time. An expensive task, which also has time fragility. Deterioration or an unfortunate event could destroy them. A blockchain on the other hand feels like an anti-fragile library, and rlog is the media. -Tony

Ourlog as a media ecosystem for community. to be in better relationship with a community of people, to share and read what other people are experiencing at some level of depth.

fundamentally, blockchain as a medium facilitates this kind of comms/media ecosystem - the term, or principle, we're playing with is subsidiarity- the idea that in social systems, local decision making, local interactions are key. we can interpret this as "community-level" interface. -Kristen

Community Publishing → Local Media

CJ and Jon drove through Marfa, Texas after leaving Austin, and stumbled upon a local newspaper: The Big Bend Sentinel. They were struck by the rich detail of the writing, the specificity of the content to a local geographic environment—it was by and for the people who live in and around Marfa. They found it nice to be able to share the newspaper, pull out pieces to pass along, write in the margins, or tear pieces of it to read later.

As we explore local media in a networked information age, how do we create community spaces to produce something as lovely as The Big Bend Sentinel? Relational is exploring group publishing in the blockchain ecosystem, a new form of self-organized journalism.

There is perhaps something to a new generation of journalism. A model premised on small-group coherence practices and communal publishing. The tools and individual practices which emerged in the early web era of blogging brought into an intentional communal format. Tightly coordinated groups, working to make sense of the world. Now plausible due to new styles of validation protocols afforded by blockchains. Transparent, peer reputation systems fueled by tokenized economies.

We have the pieces to form network-validating, interdependently self-supporting, and well-tooled group journalism labs; oriented toward exploring new forms of self-organizing journalism. Localities (digital and geographic) must have coherent self-governed means of communicating with and about themselves. A democracy is only as healthy as its local media. -Dave

Kristen’s response: at its root, Ourlog affords the ability to surface what's important to your community, and this varies by community

Jon’s response: "group journaling" vs "group journalism" is a really interesting frame. to me the connotations/implications are: - group journaling = ephemeral, capturing of personal or within-group information, relating self to past/future self or the group, spontaneous - group journalism = permanent, more focused/directed, writing about period of time or about things beyond the group, relating the group to other groups

Being able to share a physical copy of a book with notes is powerful. Exactly what I hope for digitally as well. Seems odd that we don’t have a similar kind of native surface. I would love to be able to see friends “notes in the margins” when reading an article online if they happened to also read it - CJ

What is Relational? Reflections on Vision, Principles, and Org Design

Jon and Kristen have been feeling into the emerging structure of Relational, where we’re headed, and how we’re getting there. It’s still fresh, but we’re envisioning Relational as an organization which supports member organizations (or projects) in a network. Relational creates a space for member organizations to grow through social supports and other shared resources so people and their projects in the ecosystem can thrive.

Relational lives in the Ethereum ecosystem, and in many ways is a fractal of Ethereum itself. As an entity, we are similar to the Ethereum Foundation in that our main purpose is to support and nurture the growth of our members orgs.

Most often, this looks like supporting member orgs in the design, development, implementation, and stewardship of their projects. Much of our efforts are in creating and nurturing a community space which affords our member orgs a place to grow as individuals, teams, and as a place to develop comms infrastructure for the broader world.

These efforts are more “social” in nature, as opposed to building tooling (which is more technical in nature). For example, we’re currently focusing on applying for a Gitcoin grant for the Ourlog tool. This group effort feels like a social resource, and one that can be shared in in the future across other Relational projects/member organizations.-Kristen

Relational is: - an exchange of practice and learning - a high-trust, good-faith communication exchange - a support network for resources and practicing for building interoperable communication and governance tooling - predicated on invitational, peer-based, practice-oriented participation -Jon

encountering challenges, issues, as they arise and figuring out the best way to address at that point in time (not prior) is an emergent strategy tool

i believe this is one of Relational's principles/practices—this feels like it underpins an aspect of our work -Kristen

noticing a bit of meta-coordination consistency around each technical session.

there’s a replicability to the process, which means it can be documented and repeated by others in the future; this is important for the Relational network, for the propagation of rituals and practices—it allows for experimentation in other localities/communities -Jon + Kristen

Cover photo featuring Jon and Dave hiking in Forest Park, Portland OR, August 2021. 📸 by Kristen.

From the shared stream, we bubbled up some highlights to publish as a way to capture our thinking at a point in time. In Dave’s words, “self-organized journalism as a practice.” This is our very first edition and we’re going for minimal editing, sharing our thinking in more-or-less the same form as it was posted to Discord.

We’re looking forward to evolving this practice over time, and excited to have you as part of our journey!

What is Relational?

Seems like as good a place as any to start. After spending almost two weeks together IRL, we’re the closest we’ve ever been to finding a way of describing the work we’re doing. While this might not be the “official” Relational vision, it feels pretty darn good to consolidate our collective work over the last couple of years into a handful of sentences.

Very amped about feeling into the core nugget of Relational values. "Community = verb" feels like it could be the thing everything stems from. - Tony

The long term vision of Relational is a decentralized human communication layer build on the architecture of blockchain compute environments. Taking advantage of the natively networked, naturally interconnected data environment to allow for communication to flow democratically. This vision is built piece by piece through the iterative enactment of communities of practice. These communities are only as strong as their ability to be self-sufficient. The Relational vision seeks to push agency down to the members of communities, allowing local design via componentized systems. - Dave

Publishing on blockchain: immutability x emerging social norms

The implications of publishing on blockchain are starting to settle in. What do we gain and what do we lose when publishing is more permanent?

… i'm starting to understand in a deeper way how the discomfort of publishing to a more permanent medium (albeit with low discoverability) it's a great lever for better interactions. The option of rescinding a public thought is also a permission slip to act like a dick. The missing half is how to enable good faith by the reader, going to keep my eye out for this.” - Jordan

“… some people are anti web3 because of the immutability, the lack of ability to delete - it feels like a feature not a bug to me... exactly because of what [Jordan is] saying!

if data is immutable, being more honest with yourself and posting in a "civil" way is a positive - and if you do step in it, there's room to show growth by responding to an original post and talking about how your thinking there was flawed

i suppose there's a line to walk here - which is the concentric circles of "publishing" becoming more and more public - so you're less self-conscious in the inner rings of publishing - what i'm trying to say is, if you're censoring yourself BECAUSE of immutability and not being honest, thats not great. - Kristen

The democratic medium of the EVM

The reason Ethereum is a great place to build decentralized communication protocols and tooling is the democratic nature of the ecosystem.

The blockchain as a media. The blockchain as a surface. The compute environment of Ethereum. Comms systems which build on the shared compute environment of EVMs. Everything is connected natively.

The EVM is a democratic computer. Democratic systems of communication are premised on two fundamentals: 1) Anyone can talk to anyone and 2) Anyone can say anything to anyone. The media of the blockchain has this as its basic architecture, making it an ideal environment to build democratic comms protocols and clients.

Add into this the concepts of permissionless participation, commonly held, self-sustaining architecture, and you have a media environment ripe for innovation. New means of publishing, coordination, and collaboration are on offer but are gatekept by complexity. - Dave

Capturing meta-experience

The team is reflecting on what it’s like to use the rlog prototype, and thinking about future iterations of the tool as we grow it. There will be growing pains, and we know it! Sharing these thoughts early and often is part of the practice. As is embracing the future potential of what the tool can become. All thoughts are fair game in rlog.

Quick thoughts on the bubbling experiment so far:

• I’m organically reallocating twitter time to team feed time, it’s absolutely engaging

• I’m actually having a hard time dealing with the amount of thought needed to process everyone’s feeds. I seem to take on only 1 or 2 per day and really need serious time to internalize it. I think this is what is practice is for, I’m still catching up and expect my capacity to increase

• Per Tony’s question about the lack of dodo’ing - I’m struggling with when to assign value as the impact of ideas change over time. Some things seemed dodo at first glance, and were, other things were vaguely interesting and as time went on became very dodo. I think that’s probably fine as a system but my current comfort level looks like at least a day or 2 to feel confident enough. This might be a tempo thing and practice should affect that intuition - Jordan

it'll be interesting to use rlog-ios app with inability to see other's writing in it, holding a space for only creating. - Jon

Good work, you made it to the end of our very first Relational highlight reel! 🏆

See ya next week!