I believe in the premise that most digital nomads do not want to contribute to the rise of these challenges, do good and create a more positive impact, but I also believe that they lack the information on how to do so.

One of the information gaps I would like to tackle is information about what places and communities to visit besides the well-known tourist and digital nomad hotspots. Everyone should have clear access to information on how to create more positive and less negative impacts.

For this reason, I started working on a tiny product during my creator residency at Cabin - a directory of rural and peripheral coliving communities. You can find it here.

🎯 The goal of this directory is to disperse digital nomads away from the current hotspots and to promote a more balanced distribution of people and economic activity across different regions and communities.

Why colivings?

Since digital nomads primarily travel between communities, I have started to present only community or coliving projects and not cities as we see them on Nomadlist. 

Colivings are also important because they provide a sense of community, foster social connections, and promote a more sustainable way of living.

To borrow words from my friend Jackson, ‘’In a world where loneliness is a growing epidemic, coliving offers a solution by connecting people in spaces designed for community and personal growth.’’ Loneliness is indeed one of the main reasons why nomads stop their travels and return back home.

Why rural?

By encouraging digital nomads to explore and settle in less popular or less developed locations, the hope is to:

• Promote economic development in underutilized or underserved areas by bringing in new businesses and investments, creating job opportunities, and supporting local entrepreneurship

• Encourage sustainable tourism and development by diverting traffic away from overburdened tourist destinations and promoting responsible travel and lifestyle choices

• Foster greater cultural exchange and understanding by exposing digital nomads to different cultures, languages, and ways of life, and facilitating greater interaction and collaboration with local communities

• Provide greater visibility for these communities and the people who live and work in them

• Help attract more people and resources to these areas, which could in turn help these communities thrive

• Support the growth of peripheral digital nomad communities located outside of the current hotspots

In this directory, I included communities:

• NOT located in cities suffering from overcrowding, gentrification, high housing costs, loss of authenticity and strain on local resources and infrastructure

• Suffering from brain drain

• Located in rural areas

• Not being intensively promoted

• Building on intentionality and inclusiveness

Will this directory solve the problems cities and communities are facing today? Probably not. It is a complex social problem and complex problems cannot be solved with one product, one start-up, or one person. They require a global network of people and organizations.

Therefore, my main goal would be to initiate a discourse and create an open and decentralized community consisting of different people with one goal: creating a more positive impact while traveling and building regenerative communities.

This community could potentially work on these things:

• Add more listings (preferably also outside of Europe)

• Design a functional website with a system to filter listings

• Enable others to add listings themselves

• Develop a unified booking system for regenerative accommodation options

• Develop a blockchain-based reward system (impact certificates) for doing good 

• Start providing educational resources on how to design regenerative communities and create a more positive impact while traveling 

• Your idea?

These are just some of my ideas of what the next steps might be. I would be happy if others who are interested in this topic would join me and contribute to this open project.

For this reason, I am setting up a private Telegram group where people can join in and discuss pragmatically how we might address some of these issues.

If you feel motivated to solve some of these issues with me, join the TG group here.  

If you know a coliving community that would fit in, you can enter it here.

We tell our travel stories in different ways. We meet our friends for a beer and tell them all about our trip. We may give a talk in the local community and share our experiences. We write a blog about it or we record travel vlogs.

And this is nothing new. People have been doing this for centuries. They told the masses about their travel experiences and the unknown places of the world. They brought back souvenirs from foreign lands. They even bought paintings and put them up in their homes to show them to their visitors and tell them about their travels.

So we can not say that talking about our travels is something new or even negative. However, with technology and social media, the opportunities to show or tell stories about our travel have escalated. Some travel just to create a perfect Instagram feed of their travels (or a perfect physical photo album, if you will). We travel more for extrinsic values than intrinsic ones. Who wants to travel to a place where they can not take stunning photos? Even if we use a physical photo album, do we really keep it just for ourselves?

Besides, hundreds of years ago, there were not that many people traveling, and if you traveled yourself, everyone was eager to hear the stories you had to tell when you got back. Each story was special because the chance of someone else being in the same place as you was slim.

Since its origins, travel has been about learning and exploring the unknown. We are born explorers. However, in the 1950s, travel was heavily influenced by the Industrial Revolution and became highly commercialized. Before that, not everyone could afford to travel, and only elites had that opportunity. After the commercialization of travel (rise of the middle class and commercial flights), the masses began to travel as well. After that, travel was not so much about learning and experiencing new things. It became an industry.

What follows?

As travel has become accessible to everyone, there's a good chance that someone in your social circle has already been to the same place as you. How can we stand out now? We

• look for the next hidden, exotic place where not many people go (which is already quite difficult),

• present our travel experiences through new means (better photos, videos, etc.), or

• do stuff on our travels that others have not done (eating bugs, doing extreme sports, taking a photo with a rare tiger, etc.) that position us as superiors in our circles or just earn us a few more likes.

None of this is necessarily negative. Except the former one can be IF for the purpose of creating a better photo, crafting a better story from our travels, or satisfying our hedonistic needs, we indulge in activities that are creating a negative impact on the places we visit. I’m talking about negative ecological, economic or social impact. Especially the latter seems to be neglected lots of times.

Beautiful on the outside, ugly on the inside

I’ve been thinking a lot about the reasons why we travel but watching the documentary film The Last Tourist got me to the point that we need to talk about how and why we travel more. The film is scary, to say the least in the sense of how we are exploiting local (especially underdeveloped) communities to play status games and satisfy our hedonistic needs. It talks about some of the negative aspects of the commercialization of travel. Things like exploiting the local workforce, exploiting animals, gentrification, destroying cultural sights and more.

My summary of the movie in a few words: Tourism is a beautiful industry on the outside but ugly on the inside.

I am pessimistic that many of the problems shown in the film will be solved by the choices we, the travelers, make, or it is naive to think that this will happen anytime soon. In my opinion, it has to happen from the top down.

However, I would like to lay out some potential solutions and my thoughts on how we can manage or at least reduce the negative impacts we are causing. Most of them are long-term and probably even obvious. But they are still not successful.

1) Education and awareness-raising

• Implement the subject of (responsible) travel in primary and secondary schools.

• Tourism schools and faculties should be the leaders in producing staff who think about these problems and propose solutions, rather than educating new tourism workers who mindlessly follow tourism trends. At the moment, most of these schools bring little value to the world.

• We need more travel influencers promoting socially responsible travel.

• Better travelers = better citizens. Countries should prioritize educating about responsible travel.

2) Creating new sustainable destination business models

where local communities get more value - decentralization of power or centralization to the local community and more transparency. I would like to say that blockchain and the DAO model of organization will solve this, but I think it starts not with the technology but with the mindset. This is one topic we were discussing at our latest retreat.

3) Westworld-like world

Let's create a world like in the TV show Westworld where you can satisfy all your hedonistic needs without harming anyone (except the AI). I don't think we (or at least another generation) are going to give up this type of tourism. Most people don’t care about responsible tourism. Shouldn’t be that hard to implement, right?

4) We need to separate the words travel and tourism

Tourism is an industry, traveling is a lifestyle.

In my podcast interview (in Slovenian) with Tina, she said that traveling just for the sake of traveling is classic consumerism and not what traveling could really be about. Traveling should be an experience. The best experiences you have on your travels (or in life) were usually not paid for. They are the moments that come spontaneously. Out of the blue.

The reason for traveling is, of course, very different for each individual and always will be. Traveling for food, history, work, sports, partying ... you name it. Everyone has their own reason and we will continue to travel. Let us just try to play a positive-sum game where we return from our travels with meaningful experiences and local communities benefit. Merely traveling and experiencing more won’t solve our problems. Seneca (stoic philosopher) talks about this in his letters to Lucilius:

“Are you amazed to find that even with such extensive travel, to so many varied locales, you have not managed to shake off gloom and heaviness from your mind? As if that were a new experience! You must change the mind, not the venue.” (XXVIII.1)

Aside from the Web2 projects I’m currently working on, I’ve been exploring something new for the last couple of months. You can say I went into the Web3 rabbit hole. Before I went deeper, I had a basic idea about what is Web3 and how it could change how we work but when I started reading and contributing to DAOs, I felt like they can be the core driver behind this change. This piece will be about what a DAO actually is and my journey so far in this exciting space.

What’s a DAO?

So, what the heck is a DAO? It stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. That probably still doesn’t mean anything to you. I know, it didn’t to me either.

The shortest and simplest definition of it is: ‘’An online community with a shared crypto wallet.’’ Or, to use a more Web2 expression: ‘’A subreddit with a bank account.’’

A DAO operates without hierarchical management and has no central leadership — the decisions are governed by the community. They are internet-native and run on smart contracts on the blockchain (usually Ethereum).

Any changes to the DAO are made by community proposals voted on by all members. The proposals must find a majority to be accepted. Voting is done online using software such as Snapshot. To have full access and vote, you usually need to hold their token. How many tokens you need to own depends on the DAO itself.

DAOs are very similar to cooperatives in their distribution of power among members. However, there are some differences between them. For example, a co-op has a “one member — one vote” system, while DAOs usually choose the “one token — one vote” system. In my experience with co-ops and DAOs, the latter offers more flexibility and is faster in decision-making.

DAOs today mostly operate on Discord. Most of them are very open and you can just jump in and see what it’s all about. It’s kind of like entering Google’s HQ and walking through the office space. While that’s almost impossible with normal companies, it’s common practice with DAOs. It’s really a plug & play system.

A great example of the potential of DAOs and community activation is ConstitutionDAO, which set out to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Although they failed in their endeavor, they provided a glimpse of what can be achieved with an engaged community. Some numbers behind it:

• $48 million was raised by more than 17,000 unique people

• There were 21,000 members in ConstitutionDAO’s Discord channel

• 71,000 followers on Twitter

I won’t go into more details, as there are many good articles written about DAOs. Check out this DAO canon for more insight.

A Cabin in the woods

I started reading about DAOs in December 2021. Then I decided I wanted to learn about it first hand and join one. I was looking for a DAO, which is in some way related to travel, as that is the industry I’m most active in. It didn’t take long before I stumbled across CabinDAO, a community of cabins for Web3 workers. Their vision is to build a decentralized city for creators. They organize retreats for Web3 workers and DAO operators, giving them the possibility to connect and unwind IRL.

Since this was my first DAO, getting into Discord was a bit of a shock. Although Cabin provides a really good onboarding experience, it can feel overwhelming for Web3 newcomers. It also takes a while to understand all the Web3 terms like WGMI (we’re going to make it), etc.

To become a full member of Cabin and have the ability to vote, you have two options: You can buy the Cabin token or earn one by working for the DAO. I chose the second option because I knew it was the best way to get to know Cabin in detail and especially to get in touch with other members. Ok, one of the reasons was also the high gas fees.

Cabin has different guilds (i.e. departments) where you can participate and earn your first token: Product, Placemaker’s, Media, and the Community Builders guild. I joined the Media guild and started by writing a few newsletters. Next, I wrote Twitter threads, which is also a great way to build a reputation on Twitter and an easy way to earn your first token. After that, I have already teamed up with a friend to write my first article.

Besides completing bounties (tasks), Cabin also offers many social activities, such as a book club, playing Dungeons and Dragons, etc. We also recently had our first guild games! Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see the Media guild win …

My experience has been nothing but positive so far. The only thing I struggle with is the time zone, as most people are from the US. That usually means having late-night meetings. But that’s changing too because more and more people are coming from Europe, which means we are already excited for Cabin IRL meetups and hopefully, the first Europe Cabin Node!

Looking forward

While Cabin is the DAO where I am currently most active, I also lurk around different, mostly tourism and digital nomad-related ones. Since I see DAOs in the long term as the **future of work for freelancers and creators, **offering us a better way to organize people together towards the same goal, I’m actively learning about this topic.

DAOs are a new way of organizing people and teams around the world. When you contribute to a DAO, you are not just a contributor, you’re also an owner, and that’s a big mindset shift. Anyone can hop into the discord, introduce themselves, and offer their skills to the DAO. It depends on the DAO and its purpose, but you can help in many ways (coding, writing, design, onboarding, etc.). It’s also important to choose communities that you feel connected to.

The best DAOs, in my opinion, have a healthy core community and not a purely financially motivated culture. The community shares the same interests and feels connected to the vision. As they say, vibes matter.