The Reimagining Power Project (RPP) was launched with the goal of exploring how emerging web3 technologies can be leveraged to redistribute power, mobilize capital, and transform systems toward more equitable outcomes. Focusing on decentralized governance models, the project aims to test new ways of coordinating resources and decision-making to promote social equity, sustainability, and community empowerment.

The RPP explores how to:

• Shift power from centralized entities to communities through participatory governance and decentralized coordination.

• Mobilize capital in more collectively intelligent, distributed and equitable ways that prioritize grassroots and community-led initiatives.

• Create and share open-source playbooks that enable others to replicate and build upon these governance models in their own contexts.

• Weave networks across organizations that share similar goals, fostering collaboration and the exchange of knowledge and resources.

Since the project’s inception, we have made significant progress in laying the groundwork for this transformation, building partnerships and coordinating with groups and individuals to strengthen our collective efforts.

Upon completion of the current RPP, we will have a growing library of open-source tools and practices for building new ways of decentralizing governance and capital allocation in philanthropy. We will also have an engaged network of organizations with a growing base of knowledge interested in exploring these new governance paradigms. Alongside continuing to develop our resources and practice, the next phase of the project will be to start to scale our impact by utilising these resources to support more and more philanthropic organizations to experiment with transformational approaches.

Progress to Date

Since the project’s inception, RPP has made significant progress in several key areas:

Governance Development

The governance development aspects of the RP project consists of 3 facets:

1. Formal research

2. Governance process design

3. Experimentation

However, a key aspect of the RP project is for the project itself to be a vehicle for experimenting with the governance innovations we are developing. So these three facets are woven together throughout the project.

• Partnerships - developed and tested a comprehensive governance framework and technical toolset to implement partnerships between philanthropic organizations and DAOs.

• Coordination primitives - Primitives are the building blocks used in the design of governance systems. We have developed and tested governance primitives for designing and implementing decentralized community and operational governance.

• Tools and infrastructure - developed, deployed, tested a core suite of tools for setting up and managing decentralized operations.

• Research partnerships - established research partnerships with other web3 organizations and individuals, including OpenCivics, MoreReese and BioFi.

• Onboarding & Orientation - Developed an onboarding process and orientation guide to onboard community members and contributors to the project in ways that enhance inclusivity and engagement across the network.

• Resource library - developed and began populating a set of resources to support and demystify web3 organizational design, including: lexicon of concepts, facilitation frameworks.

Knowledge Sharing & Network Building:

• Published a paper: "Reimagining Power: How web3 Can Transform Social Impact", offering thought leadership on the intersection of decentralized technologies and community empowerment.

• Contributed to a paper and podcast produced by the Menzies Foundation:

  • Paper

  • Podcast

• Co-hosted a web3 meet-up with Equality Fund, Sue Snider; Menzies Foundation, Liz Gilles; and Community Foundations of Canada, Michelle Baldwin at Skoll World Forum with 12 attendees

• Mapped stakeholders, identifying opportunities for collaboration across sectors.

• Coordinated with key partners to weave networks across web3 public goods, bioregional finance, traditional philanthropy, and sports for social good, creating an environment for collaborative innovation.

Partnerships & Collaborative Initiatives

• Following web3 practices of leveraging collaborative partnership, resource sharing and opensourcing of results, the RPP has established a set of collaborative partnerships to execute on the project's goals. These include partnerships with: Women Win, OpenCivics, Open Protocol Research Group, the Green Pill Network, BioFi, Ready Sport Global and ReFi DAO.

These achievements reflect our commitment to fostering collaboration and creating scalable, open-source solutions that others can replicate and build upon.

Current Work

The project is actively engaged in the following key activities and experiments:

Experiments in Progress

1. All In For Sport "Gatherings" Program: Hosting a series of monthly community gatherings from November to March, with a focus on participatory decision-making and local ownership. Decentralizing authority by creating a "Gathering Steward" role.

2. Institute for Community Sustainability (ICS): Developing a localized governance model, exploring DAO-like structures to guide future ICS initiatives. Identifying this as a potential model for federations of local nodes coordinating across communities.

3. Equality Fund Experiment: Completed a scoping session to explore using web3 tools for grant distribution, transaction approvals, and foreign exchange. Preparing a Discovery Report to identify ideas for experimentation.

Other Activities

1. Playbook Development: Playbooks are strategic guides that contain reliable "patterns" (high-level solution designs) and "practices" (specific tools and methods) that organizations can pick up and implement. We are currently advancing the playbooks operational plan, defining "what constitutes a playbook", and collaborating with OpenCivics on creating playbooks and pattern libraries.

2. Governance Development: Continuing to iterate on governance primitives and frameworks as they are applied in the ongoing experiments, ensuring inclusive, adaptable, and aligned organizational structures.

3. Exploring web3 and AI Intersections: Experimenting with using AI tools to enhance the accessibility and usefulness of project resources, while also researching topics like inclusive AI governance and data sovereignty.

Future Plans

Open-source tools take time and effort to create, but they can easily scale - a big theme for this next phase of the RPP is utilising the scalability of the open-source resources we have created to drive impact.

Upon completion of the current RPP, we will have:

• Refined a repeatable gatherings program format and set of tools to engage interested organizations from across the philanthropic and web3 ecosystems.

• Designed and tested a DAO-based community and operational governance model to support multiple philanthropic stakeholders.

• Created well-researched open-source playbooks, governance tooling and resource libraries accessible to the wider community.

• Demonstrated practical models for activating multiple forms of community capital (financial, social, and experiential)

• Established a rich network of partner organizations and individual contributors participating in the RP project utilising decentralized governance practices and web3 tools.

It is our intention to build on this foundation in a second phase by increasing the reach of the RP project and scaling its impact:

• Go beyond the initial 3 experiments - we intend to continue to work with our current experimental partners, but develop at least 3 more philanthropic partnerships within which we can work on applying web3 tools and practices in transformational ways to their existing systems and processes.

• Scale playbooks and resources libraries - Our tested web3 patterns will be transformed into practical tools that communities and organizations can easily adopt. We'll develop local facilitation networks to help organizations implement these approaches, ensuring tools and knowledge remain rooted in and controlled by communities.

• Scale community engagement beyond "early adopters" - Building on our tested gathering framework, we'll expand participation to a broader range of community organizations. This expansion will focus on strengthening information sharing between communities and institutions, creating resilient networks that can better mobilize resources and knowledge across regions.

• Develop web3 & AI intersections - We'll provide practical tools that put community data sovereignty first, ensuring new technologies serve local needs. This includes:

  • Open-source tools that help communities maintain control of their knowledge and resources

  • Systems for transparent resource sharing between communities

  • AI assistants that make collective knowledge more accessible while preserving community ownership

We are seeking additional funding to extend the RPP beyond its original scope into this next phase and continue our work toward transformative outcomes.

Conclusion

We are excited to continue our partnership with project stakeholders and build on the progress achieved so far. Additional funding will allow us to deepen collaborations, develop new tools, and further scale the impact of decentralized governance models across multiple sectors.

We welcome feedback on our progress and plans and look forward to working together to create sustainable, community-led solutions that benefit the non-profit sector and beyond.

Burnout. This is where I will start today. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterised by three dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;

• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and

• reduced professional efficacy.”

In 2019, the WHO officially recognized burnout as an “occupational phenomenon.” In the spring of 2022, following multiple consultations with physical and mental health experts, I learned that I was exhibiting signs of burnout. While I had observed my slow yet significant descent into persistent exhaustion, cynicism, and increased distractibility, I thought that it was a “post-winter phase”. Perhaps, I said to myself, this is another one of those odd feelings that creep up when seasons change or when the body is learning how to transition from hibernation into more activity. 

However, when I realized that it was becoming increasingly challenging for me to be present in conversations, to sustain focus in a given task, to find enthusiasm in my work or personal writing projects and that I required more and more hours of rest to regain a little amount of strength, I reached out to both my family doctor, and my therapist. Alongside this, I started listening to podcasts about the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s mental well-being. I came across more and more online posts with the tag #futureofwork where people shared their preferences and two cents about how most present-day workplace cultures led to more depletion than inspiration. I read books about burnout and chronic stress and sought out scholars and researchers such as Emily and Amelia Nagoski, Anne Helen Petersen, and Greg McKeown, who shared their findings about the causes of burnout, its impacts on individuals and organizations, and strategies for recovery. 

It was just after my 26th birthday when I went on official medical leave from my full-time role. I was completely depleted. I had no more to give to my work, my personal projects, and even my near and dear relationships. I needed rest as deep as the deepest ocean and as wide as the widest valley. The kind of rest that necessitated part(s) of me dying off, like leaves during the season of fall.

Anti-recovery

I am writing this piece a few weeks before my 27th birthday. In all honesty, it is almost impossible for me to believe where I am today. My mental and physical health have been through the trenches in the past year. The road to recovery has been paved with holes, barricades, fault lines, and mirages. To be at a place where I can articulate my experience without drowning in a sea of anxiety or resurfacing thoughts of panic is a win beyond any other. I have not crossed any finish line or landed at a desired destination. I do not think that the point of this journey has been to arrive at any particular place. 

To me, this road has been a necessary transformation. A catharsis which has catalyzed significant shifts in my mindset, fractured many of my beliefs, inspired changes in my habits, clarified my priorities, and, most importantly, has taught me how to practically and unapologetically protect my peace and well-being. Who I am today, in this very moment, is the woman I needed last year. The person I am right now can show up with compassion and skillful insight to support the version of me that was fatigued, resigned, drained, depleted, and burnt out. 

I was an anti-racism facilitator. The work that I did continues to be in strong alignment with my values. What I have learned is that, even when the work was in service to my values of enhancing equity and justice in this world, I needed all parts of me to be alive and nourished. I needed, first and foremost, to be well. I could not show up as my best — I could claim to be doing my best — when I was not well. In the process of trying to do work that was in service of systems transformation, I needed to also allow myself to be transformed. The moment I became inflexible or rigid in my habits, schedules, outcomes, and to-do lists, I broke. Unfortunately, it took my own fracturing, collapse, and enforced pause for me to learn the cost of my health and well-being. 

When humility knocks, pride responds

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

VIKTOR E. FRANKL

In order to experience and truly comprehend the events of this past year, I needed to humble myself enough to learn from my own story. As one of my teachers once shared, sometimes the most important lessons are the hardest to learn. Not because they are complicated beyond logic or cryptic beyond intuition. Rather, because pride has insidiously occupied the space between ‘stimulus and response’. 

As a consequence of pride and the illusion of superiority, some of us are robbed of the opportunity to be humbled by our experiences. We miss out on the chance to have our ancestors and children teach us; we move through the wonders of nature with aloofness; we reach the end of the road with no memory of where the journey began; and we forget to pay homage to the kin whose labour and freedom paid the price for our privilege to live, play, and dream today.  

In the same way, systems transformation — individual, organizational, societal, or systemic – requires that we deliberately carve out a space of teach-ability (humility) between the ‘stimulus’ and ‘response’. Transformation is a collapse of pride; a departure from the status quo; an entanglement with complexity; an embrace of the relations that we are connected to. Transformation requires pruning as much as it requires tending to a bed of new sprouts. Most of all, lasting transformation demands that we — you and I — are changed by what we endeavour to change. 

In practice

Since November 2022, I have been participating in meetings and events as a member of SuperBenefit Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Specifically, in relation to systems transformation, SuperBenefit, as a decentralized autonomous organisation, aims to learn from, explore, discuss, and publicize practices, mindsets, and frameworks that are tackling complex challenges at regional and global scales to shift power imbalances, address systemic inequities, and contribute to a livable, equitable, and inclusive future. 

My first introduction to this online, global community was through my current supervisor and fellow systems transformation and web3-enthusiast, Michelle Baldwin. As described on the website, SuperBenefit’s mission is “to develop the social and financial flywheels that enable the invention and acceleration of a better world. This includes strengthening capacities for systems innovation and supporting people to clarify pathways towards shared goals.” 

Most recently, our conversations as SuperBenefit DAO members have focused on the following research question: 

“What key intentions and practices do DAOs, which are working towards systems transformation, embody or portray in their teams, purpose, mission statements, and impacts/outcomes?”

Over the past three months, each core member of SuperBenefit DAO has been selecting a DAO (or two) to look into as part of our self-paced systems transformation research. Over this period, we have developed an internal collection of DAO profiles based on the information we have gathered from online sources or 1:1 conversations with contributors and affiliates from the vast and rapidly growing ecosystem of DAOs. These profiles highlight how a particular DAO incorporates or embodies any/all of the six transformative intentions and practices that we have theorized as being essential to systems transformation. 

As part of this process of learning from numerous other decentralized communities whose purpose is to create or contribute to livable, equitable, and inclusive futures, we (as members of SuperBenefit DAO) have also deliberately committed to self-introspection. This is our practice of injecting a necessary pause before ‘stimulus’ and ‘response’. It is our recognition that, as much as we are learning about and from fellow systems-transformation practitioners, we, too, are responsible for the narratives, practices, patterns, and frameworks that continue to be prevalent in our world today. We cannot simply consume and publicize our findings without acknowledging that (i) we are part of the DAO ecosystem and (ii) we are continuously being changed by what and who we encounter in our learning journey. 

As a team, we move with the awareness that we are not passive consumers of knowledge. To remain rigid and unchanged by the people we meet and the philosophies we encounter is a form of self-deception that runs counter to our commitment to inner transformation. In this way, we also recognize that ‘neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’, in the work of systems transformation, is sometimes used by some as an excuse to disengage from or to avoid uncomfortable, difficult, necessary conversations and shifts. Sometimes, our choice to abstain from making decisions or holding back on expressing our opinions might seem like the easiest way out of complex and sensitive discussions. But, what is the cost of such an approach and how sustainable is it in the work of systems transformation? 

Humility, then, is a willful embrace of incompleteness. It is a purposeful rejection of the fallacy which modernity perpetuates — that as human beings and human systems, we have absolute control, knowledge, and understanding of our own functions and faults, as well as that of fellow life forms. Humility is bewilderment infused with a commitment to inner transformation.

Within the study and/or practice of systems transformation, humility might look like:

• Acknowledging and attending to policies and practices in our teams and organizations that replicate inequities, erasure, and patterns of harm

• Generating questions without haste for response

• Making room for silence as a teacher

• Holding ourselves accountable to and responsible for our words, actions, and inactions

• Honouring our intentions and attending to the impacts (regardless of intentions)

• Tracing the stories, structures, and systems that make it possible for us to have the positions of privilege and power that we currently hold in our family systems, communities, teams, organizations, etc.

• Allowing ourselves to be continuously transformed, morphed, and to become undone by who and what we encounter in our study and work of systems transformation

Soil, seed, and sprout

Over the course of writing this piece, I repeatedly returned to an online resource that has been instrumental in helping me develop an understanding and ritualize a set of practices to comfortably engage with the discomfort of accountability, fragility, privilege, power, and personal transformation. This resource is a deck of cards that was developed by Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, which is an arts/research collective at the University of British Columbia. 

This deck of 55 cards, named ‘WITH/OUT MODERNITY CARDS’, was created in 2019 as part of an annual conference where participants were invited to consider the following question: “What infrastructures and architectures of  knowing and being operationalize the denial of relational entanglement, foreclosing possibilities for orienting our existence otherwise?” I urge you to play with this deck — by yourself, with your kin, team, etc. and see what emerges out of this, as well as how you are changed in/by the process. 

For this piece, I not only drew my inspiration from this deck of cards but also from my colleagues at SuperBenefit DAO, the scholarship of diverse teachers (including other-than-human life), and the intergenerational and intertemporal wisdom of Elders (as modelled by Victor Beausoleil). Finally, with the utmost respect, humility, and gratitude, I know that it is only because of my experience of tectonic and holistic transformation over the past year, that I now have the capacity and words to articulate my reflections on this page. I have to admit, however, that there were many days when I did not want to show up for the lessons that life was offering me. I preferred to remain in the comforts of my beliefs — unchanged by my evolving circumstances or relationships, unresponsive to the call of personal responsibility, and callous to the aching world around and within me. 

As such, it took me a long time to share my experience with those near and dear to me. To share it here with you today was a decision that required (i) the consistency of courage and (ii) the resonance of humility. I hope that my story, lived experiences, ongoing recovery from burnout, and inner transformation offer you soil, a seed, or a sprout for your own systems transformation journey(s) as you continue to build livable, equitable, pleasurable, and inclusive futures. 

Freedom is being forged in and across forgotten places. I am being transformed by witnessing, in these times, the multiple and often decentralised forms of community and collective care that stand to interrupt age-old patterns of determining who is able to live and who is left to die.

ROBYN MAYNARD IN ‘REHEARSALS FOR LIVING’

Additional Resources:

Vanessa Andreotti: Allowing Earth to Dream Through Us [The Green Dreamer Podcast]

Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson [Book]

Designing network economies for autonomous teams to operate in.

Recently many in the web3 community have been refocusing the concept of DAOs. Going from the idea of DAOs being sprawling, unwieldy communities to DAOs ideally being smaller, more pragmatic units of creative innovation that can engage with communities in new and richer ways. This is an attempt to retain a lot of the power and potential of DAOs, but reduce much of the complexity that has been encountered as communities have scaled, and their ability to govern themselves has failed to scale with them.

The problem with this refocusing however, is that we can’t escape the fact that these smaller more functional DAOs still operate inside an existing economic and social context. And this larger context will continue to exert a profound influence on everything that occurs at smaller scales. I think that transforming this larger socio/economic context still remains the fundamental opportunity for web3.

Over the past year at SuperBenefit we have been working on DAO governance design that is focused on redesigning both the small innovation units building in web3 and also the larger networks that they operate inside. The goal is to create DAOs as coherent wholes that are made up of networked smaller nodes formed into complex systems that can scale.

We have been exploring DAO primitives, and have found unique and valuable territory in applying them at network scales. These primitive building blocks can allow the growth of DAOs as autonomous teams of people - working groups, pods, sub-DAOs (we refer to them as “CELLS” for the sake of the metaphor of evolving complex organisms), being coordinated as collectively intelligent purpose driven networks. This embraces the fact that small teams are the fundamental atomic unit of crypto/web3, but places them inside the larger context of purpose driven network economies. You can track this research through this series of articles:

• DAOs aren’t things they are flows

• Scale and the levers that provide DAOs their power

• DAOs: From fractal primitives to network scale

• Minimum viable permissionless-ness

DAOs as systems that can influence systems.

Why is it so important to coordinate at this higher level?

One of the breakthrough concepts of DAOs as community driven networks is that they have the potential to influence whole systems. This is something that is incredibly difficult within our current paradigm of discrete entities (companies and non-profits) operating within the confines of our existing institutions and economic system.

It is becoming widely recognised that changing the big societal systems that drive the dynamics of our world requires multi-modal, multi-disciplinary, multi-scale, multi-national approaches that are intelligent, coordinated and responsive to the emergent nature of the systems they are working in. And these approaches have to be sustained and resourced over long time periods. For instance, think about finding solutions to climate change or income inequality.

DAOs as purpose driven networks have the potential to coordinate vast numbers of smaller teams that can act on many different parts of a system in a way that is coherent, flexible and collectively intelligent, allocating resources in highly effective ways ref.

Hence using the biological term “CELLS” mentioned above. Nature has solved for this complexity problem before, we have design precedent to draw on.

In the design we have been experimenting with; the community holds the overarching purpose of the network and this informs and supports an operating context. Cells, as the operational units of the network, function inside this operating context. Cells can be both highly independent or highly integrated into the structure of the DAO as needed. The overarching community evolves the purpose of the network and tweaks its economics to ensure that the mixture of coordinating and autonomous Cells are incentivised to advance its purpose over a long time horizon ref.

A template for designing purpose driven network economies.

At SuperBenefit we are actively implementing this design approach in several projects including All in For Sport – designing a perpetual funding mechanism for community sports projects globally. We are also working with several large philanthropic funders, partnering to find more sophisticated ways of deploying capital across complex problem spaces at global scale. With all of these projects we are implementing aspects of the following designs for building community driven governance for scaling network economies.

Our core design revolves around a two house governance system that splits governance across three different scales:

1. Governance at the community scale, to safeguard the integrity of the network and keep it oriented towards its purpose.

2. Governance at the operational scale, to leverage many of the highly effective mechanisms that have driven business to be such an effective tool for creating breakthrough innovation and scaling it to the world.

3. Governance at the team scale, to ensure as many decisions as possible are made by autonomous teams operating closest to the reality of the system, and that these signals flow up to inform the larger network.

Here are the broad steps we are experimenting with to create these community driven network economies:

Stage one: Early Catalyst

People come together around an inspired idea or purpose and an opportunity to make it a reality. Start by prioritising permissionless community driven activity to inform and shape the early network. Then build a minimum viable governance structure so that the community can shape and endorse the direction of the evolving network.

1. Start with a catalytic idea and an open community of people who are inspired to rally around the idea and its purpose. Ideally a diverse group of stakeholders with complementary perspectives, including lived experience of the domains the purpose aims to address.

2. Permissionless testing of ideas that can be brought to a simple community proposal for community endorsement and support. Turning early conversations into experimental action.

3. Forming more structured working groups (based on the design of the CELL primitive) to undertake and resource more structured activities, via community proposals.

4. Recognising contributors with governance authority and resourcing their activities from community treasury if available.

5. Spinning up basic network governance infrastructure consisting of:

   1. Shared governance state - a shared description of what the network intends and how it will go about achieving its goals. Agreements around how to make proposals, change the structure of the network etc

   2. Proposal voting and tools

   3. Treasury wallet management

Stage two: Establishing a two house structure

Evolving past early decision-making to a scalable governance structure.

As more working groups (Cells) are created, Governance splits into two different houses – Community Governance & Operational Governance.

1. Community governance - safeguards the purpose of the network

2. Operational Governance - gives flexibility, autonomy and modern incentive design to produce innovation and scale

Operational governance forms out of Cells (working groups) coordinating in a sociocratic structure. Individual Cells have autonomy over their own actions, but then form coordinating structures with other Cells. These larger structures can derive strategy from feedback loops coming from the smallest scales of the network but also include direction from the network’s larger context (including from “Community Governance”).

Operational governance is also built on an economic model that can incentivise both structured “scaling hierarchies” as well as reward small teams who take risks and innovate to move the network forward in new directions (for example using retroactive public goods funding) ref.

Community governance is made up of Cell contributors, founders, partners (sponsors, funders etc), as well as others that have a stake in the purpose of the network but may not be contributing directly to its operations, for example other mission aligned organisations and networks. This allows community governance to include a broader base of stakeholders, many of whom have no financial stake in the network but are aligned with the purpose that the network is advancing.

Governance participation for Community Governance is managed by non-transferrable tokens/badges ensuring that no one can buy voting rights. It is focused on safeguarding the purpose of the network and slowly evolving and steering it over time, using slower less dramatic governance methods such as conviction voting, optimistic governance, quadratic voting and other yet to be designed mechanisms. It optimistically approves the overall operational budget but doesn’t partake in operational and technical decisions.

Community Governance also forms the back-stop for Operational Governance. Because of its focus on efficiency and effectiveness, Operational Governance has the potential to fail - either through governance capture, concentration/centralisation of power, or in other ways become misaligned with the direction that Community Governance is evolving the network towards (such as its purpose, values and vision). When this happens, Community Governance has a mechanism to step in and require changes from Operational Governance. Its control of the treasury and operational budget approval underpins this authority and ultimately Community Governance can vote to dissolve the network.

In the early examples we are experimenting with, the design requires that if Community Governance votes to withdraw treasury funding from the network the funds in the treasury will automatically be transferred to a US 501c foundation.

Optimised across the three different scales of decentralised organising.

This system leverages mechanisms that derive collective intelligence from the three different scales that a DAO network operates across:

1. Collaboration scale - Cells operating as high bandwidth small scale collaborative units that can think and move fast and are operating at the grassroots of the system.

2. Coordination scale - structures of Cells operating together in coordinating systems using sociocratic governance to allocate resources and effectively create and implement strategies for the Cells to execute on (Operational Governance).

3. Constituency scale - participation of a broader constituency of stakeholders that safeguard and evolve the long-term purpose of the network (Community Governance).

Legal Compliance.

The other important role that this mechanism plays is to create a legally compliant network structure that can allow individuals and organizations to participate in the evolving network without many of the risks that would prohibit most traditional organisations (corporations, non-profits and governments) from participating.

The separation of community and operational governance allows for Community Governance to be wrapped up in a UNA (in the US), or other proto-non-profit structures in other countries. This limits liability for people participating as members of community governance – based on community badging being non-transferrable and carrying no financial ownership in the network.

As long as the requirements of the operating agreement that governs the UNA are met – such as decisions being made via cryptographic voting – this DAO network structure has a huge amount of flexibility to evolve as it experiments with many different approaches at many different leverage points in the systems within which it plays. In time it can then adopt a more formal legal structure as it settle to become a more stable network economy.

Note: jurisdictionally compliant structures will continue to be developed and evolved, but the fundamentals should be implementable within any framework. However, please note, we are early in experimenting with these models and none of this should be considered legal advice.

Fit for purpose governance across all scales.

The big leap here is that this version of a “two house” model can provide the above formal protections without condemning the whole network to becoming a bureaucratic and rigid non-profit structure. This is because Operational Governance has the flexibility to reward contributors in ways that leverage the best tools that capitalism and the business world have to offer – as well as emerging web3 tools. These can be used to provide flexible incentive mechanisms for Cells that align DAO activities with its overarching purpose.

We think that designing DAO governance and tooling around the three different group scales articulated above is the key to leveraging the most effective methods of governance across a network. Community Governance creates and protects the larger context so that Cells can create, innovate, perform and scale in ways that enhance the overall network and its purpose, but without outgrowing the limits of the system or co-opting governance power to capture it.

We are learning as these experiments evolve and are deeply appreciative of the collaborative ethos present in web3. So do reach out if you have feedback, ideas or want to compare notes.

Article Series

• Previous: Minimum Viable Permissionless-ness

• Next: …coming soon…

One of my favourite philosophers, Dr Bayo Akokomafe, has an elegant way with words when it comes to articulating the value of ‘wander and lostness’. In one of his pieces, he offers a reflection on what might become possible when we allow ourselves to be indistinguishable from one another or from our environment/surroundings. In a world where exclusivity, polarization, and either/or perspectives are deeply and subtly embedded in our logos, ethos, and relationships, it can be challenging to choose to stay in the place of tension. That is, to voluntarily “sit with the trouble” and to “straddle the line of tension” could feel unfathomable. Quite literally, to consciously direct one’s energy into actively examining, thinking, and being in the space of “both/and '' could feel like pulling apart at our own structural integrity; tearing our own seams.

At the same time, we must consider that it is the simplicity of singularity and appeal of single-story narratives that have contributed to pathology, extractive economic models, systemic racism, sexism, ableism, extinction, and genocide. If we are to be active participants in sustaining our lives, lineages, and all relations across Seven Generations – as shared by the Haudenosaunee People – then we must locate ourselves as intrinsically connected with what is both within and around us. Indeed, it is healthy to individuate, but we must steer clear of separatism.

Therefore, to create sustainable systemic transformation we will need both our individuated selves, and one another. Right here, in the possibility of ‘both/and’ lies the opportunity to deepen our curiosity, to innovate, to unlearn, and to linger in the liminal space as we fervently and collectively work towards building communities and spaces that align with our shared values of care, sustainability, relational connectedness, and equity.

With that said, I invite you to allow yourself to get lost as we journey together through a review of the most recent 4-week learning series hosted by SuperBenefit DAO and Crypto, Culture & Society DAO UnSemester.

Before we hit the road, here’s a short description of the 4-week learning series to help you orient yourself: The emerging technologies of web3 enable new ways to collaborate, create, and share value and authority. Today, we collectively have an opportunity to harness these technologies to design and create systems and institutions that are inherently better for people and the planet. What do we mean by “systems transformation”? What’s its role in creating better futures? What challenges might hold us back? What are some web3 examples demonstrating the potential of systems transformation?

Rest stop 1 → web3 for better futures: transforming systems, sectors and institutions

Speakers: @Michael Lewkowitz - Krause House

In this session, we began by asking ourselves two foundational questions:

• “What does the word ‘systems’ mean?”

• “What is our definition of ‘systems transformation’?”

What came forward as the discussion picked up is that there is no single, clear-cut definition that seamlessly integrates all opinions, thoughts, and experiences. What was apparent, however, is that the people in the session shared a commitment to “staying with the trouble”, making meaning together, and building with a unified purpose towards desired outcomes of equity, sovereignty, and connectedness. These three outcomes/impacts served as the anchor to our mutating and, sometimes, nebulous discussions. To bridge together two vast and constantly shifting explorations, i.e. systems transformation and web3, requires a depth of curiosity, a willingness to lose one’s way, and solid ground to land on when the pace of work feels overwhelming.

This is how Krause House DAO was built – around a shared passion for basketball and a commitment to creating a dedicated space for fans to own and govern an NBA team. WILD, RIGHT? Well, it is happening! As Michael Lewkowitz (a Steward at Krause House) shared, the world of sports is itself going through a systems transformation in terms of media and marketing, revenue generation, access, governance, etc. Creating a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) with a bold mission to bring the first fan-governed team to the NBA is not only a response to the tectonic shifts taking place in the world of sports, but also an opportunity to experiment with the applications of Web3 to generate mass social benefit through decentralisation, enhanced transparency using blockchain, and reimagined ownership/governance models through DAOs.

And that’s just our first rest stop in the journey of exploring what is possible at the intersections of systems transformation and web3.

For more about the systems transformation journey at Krause House, check out their Hypepaper (Why?) and Flightpaper (How?)

Related resources:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18NP4U8KlHs3sx30Q1nFmPFNMTKxU8vQxLeBWLSHF7EU/edit

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rWseCw-uop3G03jFr64OBAwq-7adbRX_/view

Rest stop 2 → systems transformation and governance

Speakers: @Rowan Yeoman and @Alex Hannant

In this session, we oriented ourselves around these three questions:

• How can we differentiate between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’? And why does this distinction matter when speaking about systems transformation and governance?

• What governance models in our current systems can we build upon, and which are redundant/obsolete for the futures we are seeking to create?

• What opportunities do DAOs offer us in reimagining governance? What challenges still exist?

Alex Hannant, a Professor of Practice and Co-Director of the Yunus Centre at Griffith University started off by sharing a case study of what it might look like to design for transformation. Speaking about the work coming out of the Yunus Center, Alex highlighted one of the current projects titled, ‘Shaping Innovation Futures’ which seeks to respond to the question, “how can we create innovation infrastructures that are equal to the complex challenges we face, at an appropriate level of scale, and which can adapt to ever-changing demands?”

Much like our first session, this question and the guiding principles of ‘systems transformation and governance’ are intended to point us towards building from the ‘both/and’ space. To create new governance frameworks, it may be easy and somewhat tempting to imagine a brand new landscape that is devoid of current structures or systems - where our financial and educational institutions, economic models, and social media tools are upended and completely replaced. While there is excitement and thrill drawing us towards new utopias, we must also be cautious and discerning in our process of design/innovation, iteration, and creation. This means, when exploring transformation of governance through Web3, it is particularly important to take note of the web-like nature of systems, i.e., change at any scale has the potential to ripple out across micro and macro aspects of the entire system.

Following up on this, Rowan Yeoman offered a framework for ‘network thinking’ and the ‘network economy’. As an example of network economies within Web3, we reflected on the value of DAOs as networks. According to Rowan, the rejection of ‘entity thinking’ to create room for ‘network thinking’ offers an opportunity to understand the value of negotiation, iteration, and fractal experimentation in shaping futures.

This is also where the concept of ‘permissionlessness’ comes into play as we consider how our varied, individual contributions can mix and merge to create the larger, desired whole. When viewed this way, in the world of Web3, governance then is not about power-wielding through tools of hierarchy and domination. Rather, governance is an organic, evolving process that seeks to create transparent pathways to power and consensus that are distributed across contexts, geographies, etc., which aim to produce equitable, regenerative outcomes.

Related resources:

#Web3for2030: How can Web3 help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals Poetic Harvest (audio) and Poetic Harvest (written)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-tv-Vj6gGpxlSF42tKCK9gzEILHEJiV-/view?usp=share_link

Pack up your snacks, maps, and water as we head to our next rest stop!

Rest stop 3 → web3 systems transformation and equity

Speakers: @cult_leader_en

Coming into this discussion, participants were invited to reflect on the fundamentals of being in relationship with one another. To think about the ways that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion underpin connections, access, and opportunities within and across the organisations and systems we are part of. This is where we are asked to be cautious of viewing Web3 as the “shiny new tool that fixes everything”.

While Web3 opens up new doors for the kinds of value, relationships, and outcomes that are possible because of revamped structures of the internet, it is still a tool that is created, modified, and directed by human beings (you and me). As such, this session focused on examining the ways that we can move with more intentionality and mindfulness to ensure that we do not replicate patterns of inequity within web3 communities or in systems transformation work.

According to En, “Web3 has taught me that free and fluid human coordination is the ultimate public good and value creator. Us collectively being socially and economically unlocked via the internet (web2 + web3) is going to create the new ideas that usher in true societal innovation.” The opportunity for this free and fluid human coordination is made possible by being in a web space that is psychologically safe, inclusive, insisting on diversity, and with guaranteed equitable outcomes/rewards. To operate with these guiding principles, En highlights the importance of perceiving the digital world as a material world – one where we can all come together to design and build towards the kinds of futures that are representative of our diversity.

To foster a space where diversity, inclusion, and equity are embraced, we can link back to how this piece of writing began. That is, a recognition that we are connected to one another and our environments. Therefore, it serves our individual and collective well-being and sustenance to approach systems transformation through strengths-based approaches that are context-aware, historically informed, and open to evaluation and feedback. Connected to this, when speaking about DAOs in relation to systems transformation, En shared the following: “It can be easy for us to get stuck in a thought process where we map old concepts onto innovative technologies.”

Questions to further ponder on as we move on to our final rest stop:

• What does equity mean to you?

• Why do the concepts and practices of equity, diversity, and inclusion matter?

• What is the difference between local and global equity?

Related resources:

Poetic Harvest (written)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pXrnOg0_pEBQBnqQRDSzGsx11TwoIrYC/view

Rest stop 4 → web3 and systems that work

Speakers: Peter Gulka and Suzanne Bowles

A key part of systemic change and transformation is planting seeds for our hopes and dreams while knowing that we may not live long enough to experience these seeds sprout and take root. This does not mean that we are working in futility. Rather, it is an admission and acknowledgement that our work is for the long haul; taking a long-term perspective. To build something that is good and lasting, it is beneficial to position ourselves as committed learners. Humble enough to acknowledge that we are one piece of the whole, but also wise enough to know that our seemingly small individual actions/decisions compound in the long term and can lead to significant shifts at a systems scale.

This is why the wisdom and knowledge of Elders is a prerequisite to the work of systems transformation. In particular, part of moving forward in a good way involves us recognizing the practices, policies, and systems that got us to where we are – the good, bad, and downright ugly. Tools like web3 and phrases like ‘Systems Transformation’ can sometimes fill us with an insatiable thrill and adrenaline rush. Yes, there is a risk here that we jump into learning all about this and run out of steam much faster than is desired. The bigger risk, however, is that we fail to seek counsel from Elders and people with lived experiences of the systems we are working to transform, and consequently, our actions perpetuate egregious harms and reproduce unintended negative impacts.

There is wisdom in turning towards Elders, in taking a sacred pause, and in sitting with the trouble. As Peter and Suzanne shared, there is wisdom in moving with humility and acknowledging the Indigenous wisdoms and traditions that are rooted and present around us. Claiming that we are successfully working towards systems transformation without simultaneously addressing the reality and impacts of ongoing colonisation and anti-Indigenous racism is a lie – and one with horrific consequences.

As people who purposely seek nuance, embrace complexity, welcome discomfort, and centre collaborative approaches to design, imagination, and futurism, we have an opportunity to ask ourselves some key questions:

• In what aspects of your own life have you been on the "margin" and how has this positionality given you an advantage/disadvantage?

• How are you intentionally using your positionality and privilege to advance systems transformation?

• How can Truth and Reconciliation inform and guide efforts of systems transformation? And how does Web3 factor into this?

Related resources:

Poetic Harvest (written) Video Recording

Thank you for journeying with us. We hope you never find your way back! Stay lost, stay curious.

The Messy Middle Has An End Too

It’s been a fantastical, meandering path to reflect and write this piece out. As someone who is early on in their Web3 learning and practice journey, I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to not only contribute to the discussions in the 4-week learning series, but to also give back to the people who curated, facilitated, and hosted each session. My writing is my offer of gratitude, but also my commitment to stay curious about what doors these technologies are opening for the kinds of futures we seek to create.

Systems transformation is a long-time practice – I hope you give yourself the chance to stay present, to ask good questions, to be nimble and agile, and most importantly to devote yourself to wander as you lose your way.

Written by Njoki Mbũrũ

Over four sessions, so much learning and fun

But our journey together has just begun

Let this be our springboard

My friends, see you in Discord.

~ Poetic Harvest by Heenal Rajani

These four sessions took place between Nov 23-Dec 13, 2022

• As a partnership between Crypto Culture & Society DAO UnSemester and SuperBenefit DAO

• Hosted by: Michelle Baldwin, Heenal Rajani & Nate VanNortwick

• Sessions capture and note-taking by Taryn Lucas

• For more info, visit our website: https://systemstransformation.xyz/

DAOs are like water. They take various forms and fulfill several roles, yet are recognizable for their existence as society’s H2O. Adaptable, recognizable, and versatile enough to play a uniquely essential life-breathing role within society. They plan on making waves in the places that will benefit society without flooding it with power and force.

This is the third video of a three part-series that compares DAOs to nature, because what better way to describe the straightforward spontaneity of a community than to compare it with the physical phonomena that does it best.

DAOs are more flexible in what they decide their purpose-emitting star to be, and with enough gravity, any of the ongoing projects within a DAO can become the center of orbit. We like to call space the final frontier for humanity, but we’ve got more in common with what lies beyond its mysterious edge, than we think.

DAOs are like planetary systems. Our own Solar System functions around a center of gravity that creates an orbit for the eight planets circling it. It’s almost as if the Sun is an object of purpose, its gravitational pull creating tiers of engagement.

DAOs are similar. Those planets closest to the Sun’s pull spin faster and complete more revolutions in the same time that planets farther away do – their engagement depends on how close they are to the pull of the DAO’s purpose. Members at the periphery of a DAO, similarly, are still a part of it; just less involved.

DAOs come in all kinds of shapes and forms, and they collectively represent different purposes, just like the stars and heavenly bodies that create a galaxy. They both manage to exist on their own, authentic, yet with a powerful enough purpose to ensure a framework to allow freedom for experimentation. Just like space, there are so many more discoveries left for us to make with DAOs.

This is the second video of a three part-series that compares DAOs to nature, because what better way to describe the straightforward spontaneity of a community, than to compare it to the physical phonomena that does it best?

What happens when you incentivize synonymous purpose for collaboration?

You get a decentralized autonomous organization. And a starling murmuration. The sizes and shapes that the two fluid groups can exist in are infinite, and the ways in which they can twist and transform to suit a common goal are endless. Birds of a feather typically flock together, but the iridescent starlings and members of a nascent DAO are much more creative in the way they approach communication and collective purpose.

DAOs are like starling murmurations. A few handful, or millions of starlings organize themselves into complex shapes to improvise and adapt to their environment.

Form follows function with these birds, where the shape of the murmuration depends on what kind of predator they’re escaping. Similarly, DAOs shift and transform, liquid-like, to fit their purpose. The only constant is change. Movement towards the goal is the only means of identification.

Murmurations have no social hierarchy or leader – yet they move collectively in unison, gathering together to share information. The beautiful diversity shared between DAOs and starlings proves that their variations makes them stronger than their strongest members, and more unique in their collective individuality.

This is the first video of a three part-series that compares DAOs to nature, because what better way to describe the straightforward spontaneity of a community, than to compare it to the physical phonomena that does it best?

collect://

Rowan is a contributor to SuperBenefitDAO and works on scalable models of coordination and fractal DAO governance. Gratitude to Michael Lewkowitz for contributing to this article and for his deep insight and belief in the possibility of Web3. This article is the fourth in our series exploring the concept of DAOs as networks and their evolutionary nature.

As we wrote in our recent article DAOs: From Fractal Primitives to Network Scale, a DAO needs to be able to produce emergent collective intelligence; “DAOs are network intelligence that flows”

This is what sets DAOs apart from businesses and other organizations. Traditionally we work on the notion that the smartest people sit at the top of an organization. They filter all of the information from across the whole org and then come up with a strategy that is sent down the chain of command to be implemented by the “little people” at the coal face.

But DAOs — as fractal networks of cells — have the ability to self-organize around the best opportunities emerging across the system in real-time. This dynamic, occurring constantly across the whole network, causes the system to become “intelligent”. It can prioritize opportunities, allocate resources, make strategic decisions, change its shape and change its direction. It can do all of this traditional “strategy” much more effectively than a traditional organization can. Furthermore it can do it organically and from the bottom up in a deeply decentralized way.

Central to harnessing this decentralized collective intelligence in DAOs is the concept of “Permissionless-ness”. The concept of “permissionless access” gets thrown around a lot in DAO-land but mostly as an ideal or an aspiration, and usually not in a very principled way.

In this article I want to make the case for a very simple “primitive” from which we can build permissionless access into DAOs out of which effective collective intelligence can emerge.

Permissionless-ness

The term “permissionless” in crypto originates from the concept of a “permissionless blockchain”. Starting with the Bitcoin whitepaper, “permissionless access,” as a property of the blockchain, meant that no third-party gatekeepers could prevent anyone from interacting with the ledger.

From here, the concept has become an important part of Web3 with the notion that permissionless access breaks us out of the gatekeeping structures of old, where entrenched power controls access to platforms and resources in ways that serve their needs; and not necessarily the needs of the community.

The vision of Web3 as a new paradigm of decentralized community ownership, and collective governance, requires permissionless-ness as a key part of the design. But at this stage there is a real lack of clarity about what the concept actually means, and as a result it is being applied in DAO design in haphazard ways.

We need to tighten this up. Rather than thinking of permissionless-ness as a vague ideal to aspire to, we need to think of it more as a principle to design from. I.e. What dynamics are we hoping to produce through employing “permissionless access”? How can we balance permissionless access with the need for security, privacy, capture resistance etc?

These are the kinds of questions that should be keeping us up at night.

Permissionless access in DAOs

With permissionless blockchains, e.g. Bitcoin, there is an explicit notion that the blockchain is designed to be a “non-excludable”, “non-rivalrous”, public good. This means that anyone can access it, use it, and that this usage does not reduce the value that other people derive from using it as well. This permissionless access is the whole point of a system like Bitcoin and therefore is wound deeply into its architecture.

But what about DAOs? With DAOs that are organized around clean technical protocols that are very focused in their scope (e.g an AMM), it is relatively straight-forward to see how aspects of the protocol can be open in a way that allows permissionless access to everyone in a principled way.

But with more expansive DAOs, we are talking about coordinating groups of humans to bring insights and ideas, to contribute and collaborate, to create and build, to allocate capital…

This is an entirely different proposition. If we are going to leverage the power of collective intelligence, but not fall into the chaos of structurelessness, we need a more “social” understanding of the concept of permissionless access.

While access to a blockchain or protocol might be a non-rivalrous good, a DAO’s resources are rivalrous goods. That is, if one individual or project gets given resources then these limited resources are no longer available for someone else to use.

DAOs can’t just allow permissionless access to finite resources without running straight into a game theoretic tarpit. But if we restrict access to DAO resources, just like a company would, nothing of significance will change. This is the challenge that we are wrestling with in DAO governance.

In their insightful article Go Fork Yourself; Packy McCormick, Luca Prosperi & David Phelps make the case that the direction that current DAO governance is heading in, to address this challenge, has not led to meaningful decentralization in how DAOs operate:

The actual decision-making has become more “democratic” because more people are involved in the final decisions, but this often rests on a small group of people putting up proposals for sign-off by the larger community. While community voting is a step forward, it doesn’t, on its own, produce more intelligent systems.

Permissionless access to the “network”

The key here is in recognising that DAOs aren’t organizations in themselves, they are networks. What needs to be permissionless is not access to a DAO’s resources (treasury and other assets) but access to its network.

The following three features are the basis for allowing permissionless access to a DAO network. If DAOs do these three simple things well they can produce “the ability for anyone anywhere to contribute creatively to a system” and harness collective intelligence to grow it into more complex and powerful things.

1. Work on something

A person can see an opportunity to contribute to the DAO and can start working on that thing without needing permission from anyone else.

This doesn't give them any claim on the resources of the DAO and doesn’t give them the ability to interfere with what anyone else is working on. But it recognises that a DAO network’s openness should be fundamental. People should be able to take action to attempt to create value for the network without requiring permission.

The network can decide separately whether it values that contribution and whether it wants to engage with it.

2. Attract others to work on this new “thing”

A person can encourage others to join their project without asking permission.

People (“talent”) are the network’s most valuable resource.

A person working on their “thing” can’t demand that anyone join them on their project, but they are free to ask. Talent freely decides whether to contribute to the person’s project (or not), based on whether it represents a compelling opportunity.

3. Put up a proposal to the network

Anyone in the network can put up a proposal to the highest level of governance in the network without needing permission.

This ensures that if (1) a person can see a compelling opportunity and start working on it. And if (2) they successfully gather others to push the opportunity forward, (3) they are able to show this to the community to ask for the resources necessary to keep developing it.

• A crucial second function of this “permissionless access to the proposal mechanism” is that the network can reorient itself when needed. When anyone can call out when the DAO may be moving out of alignment with the purpose or values of the network that animates it; it gains the capacity for the DAO to avoid capture and remain alive and relevant.

Of course all of this freedom of access needs to be designed into a DAO in a way that doesn’t just plunge everything into chaos.

A lot of current DAO design is wrestling with managing governance overwhelm and how to prevent issues like malicious proposals destroying the viability of the DAO. All of these kinds of issues and friction does need to be resolved. The key point though, is that if we view DAOs as networks, we realize that we shouldn’t try to do this by restricting access to the network itself — don’t treat the network like an organization.

Access to the network should be an inalienable right

People can do “things” in the network in a permissionless way. The collective sense-making (and permissioning of rivalrous goods) is based on how the rest of the network responds to these contributions.

• Is their contribution valuable?

• Is their behavior acceptable?

• Do others in the network want to engage with what they are doing?

Crucially, unlike with organizations, these decisions don’t have to be centralized. Other players in the network can decide for themselves whether they want to engage with, support, or promote any given “thing” that someone is working on. And at a higher level, the community/network can collectively agree on allocating capital to the valuable “things”.

We still need to wrap structure around this. DAO’s might utilize a code of conduct for managing behavior on a communication platform (like Discord) and they will implement tools and methods to curate proposals so that governance doesn’t become a hot mess. This is not about everything being radically unconstrained. Rather it is about making sure that these three inalienable rights of permissionless access are not compromised in the process. They are what fuel the collective intelligence at work in DAOs.

What does this gain us?

Enshrining these three permissionless features deep into a DAO’s structure and culture causes an important self organizing dynamic to emerge.

Individuals (“talent”) identify high potential opportunities.

“High potential” means that they have the potential to deliver on personal goals as well as the DAO’s purpose and values.

As the developing opportunity attracts more talent, this signals to capital via treasury proposals, or other newer and more decentralized mechanisms.

This is a big shift from the status quo, where capital tries to be the source of intelligence. Collective intelligence emerges when people have permissionless access to the network and can turn this access into valuable action.

Knowledge and insights from many individuals working “close to reality” become the driver of strategy. Rather than governance being solely focused on democratic decision making by the members of the network at the highest level, most decision-making becomes a function of action happening across the network. This dynamic is nicely articulated by Spencer Graham here.

• NB: I am aware the term “talent” may feel a bit loaded, but I am using it in a deliberate way to mean not just “people,” but people who have specific skills and intentions that make them relevant to a particular context. Broadly “talent” is: individuals with skills, discernment and motivation.

When “talent” is free to make choices and act based on motivation and discernment, it can flow toward opportunity and act on it. Then if “capital” is able to flow towards this “talent taking action”, you have strategy and capital allocation done at network scale, in real-time from the ground up.

You have a system that can scale collective intelligence in a way that: (1) evolves to closely match the environment the system is operating in; (2) remains in alignment with the purpose and values of the broader network; and (3) is far more resistant to governance capture and attack than centralized systems.

Article Series

• Previous: Fractal primitives to network scale

• Next: Building DAOs as scalable networks

The first conversation we hosted was on ‘meta-governance’. The second was on ‘DAO2DAO cooperation’. This final conversation explored what web3 can learn from and contribute to existing governance perspectives and practices.

The contributors

• @JayneEngle - Civic Futures #ParticipatoryCanada @ParticipatoryC @agirrecenter | Prof @mcgillu | Book #SacredCivics: Building 7 Gen Cities http://bit.ly/7GenCities 

• @AlexHannant - Transitions to regenerative futures @YunusGriffith | @SuperBenefitDAO | Board @BCorpANZ

• Tina Jennen - Board TECT, WaikatoLink | Edmund Hillary Fellow | Advisory Boards Wellbeing Protocol and Collective Intelligence

• Moderated by: @ml_baldwin and @HeenalR

The discussion

The text below is an attempt to capture key themes and insights from the discussion. While we have attributed some points, our summary misses the nuance provided by the contributors and the depth of overall conversation. As a result, we encourage you to listen to a recording of the session here.

Acknowledgement

@ml_baldwin set the scene by referencing that it was Canada Day, and how the meaning of this day was one in flux - moving from the celebration of a colonial legacy to an acknowledgement of a more problematic history and an increasingly diverse and self-aware identity, today. Going into a conversation about ‘new and old’, she emphasised the importance of remembering how nature, earth, and ecosystems create the ultimate, underpinning conditions for the conversation, and how Indigenous ways of knowing have much to contribute.

Framing governance for better futures

@AlexHannant opened by framing the role of governance in the context of pursuing better futures. The governance we’re used to, and which will continue to be needed, primarily relates to the coordination of authority and accountability in respect to a range of entities, functions, and resources. But we’re facing complex challenges and working with complexity demands dynamic ways of acting. These will require expanded governance mindsets and modalities. For example, how do we retain coherence between diverse actors and groups who are interconnected (maybe interdependent) but also autonomous? How do we negotiate and organise in fluid, systems contexts, be they networks, DAOs, places, or value chains?

And, if better futures are to be pursued, what are the processes that can help form shared orientations and agreements around what is ‘better’ (while allowing for diverse perspectives and self-determination)? While this may feel abstract, it's a real challenge that we need to find practical ways of navigating. From a functional point of view, the expanded scope of governance in the pursuit of better futures could include:

• Oversight of key operational functions or resources.

• Enabling representation and decision-making at multiple levels.

• Stewardship of shared values and principles.

• Sensing and interpreting the world around us, or at least the systems we are acting within.

• Negotiation and determining directions.

• Conflict resolution between interconnected but autonomous actors.

• Stewardship of shared assets and interests (including data).

• Managing, mitigating, and adapting to systems-level risks.

• Fractal-level enablement and consistency - e.g., what happens in micro interactions has fidelity with macro level principles, practices, and missions.

• Interfacing a plurality of perspectives and self-governing entities.

• Distribution of rights, responsibilities, and value.

In respect to the conversation here, how can existing thinking and practices combine with emerging web3 infrastructures to meet these communication, coordination, and coherence challenges? How can we harness ‘new and old’ to enable ‘good governance’ within this expanded and future-facing framing?

@AlexHannant then referenced how B Lab Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’s new governance system is attempting to grapple with this expanded scope. B Lab AANZ is a small organisation that has to work well within current systems, while fostering a network-based movement of purpose-led businesses, with a higher-level goal for changing the economic system. Rather than have one governance group that attempts to hold these different functions, they have established a governance system that involves different forums to serve the entity, network, and system contexts (and which draws upon a mix of corporate, cooperative, and Indigenous influences).

While there is no current use of web3 infrastructures, it is easy to see the potential value they could add. This could include: B Corp certification being on-chain, tokens enabling network-based participation, shared data assets, a ‘soulbound’ token to foster connectivity with other movements and networks, and so on. He also recognised that web3 is not only about technologies. It’s clearly creating spaces for radical thinking, organising, and experimentation. He referenced Packy McCormick’s view on the potential for web3: "[it] allows for the most rapid iteration on new economic and governance models of any system humans have built.”

With this in mind, it may be that the framing of ‘new and old’ is unhelpful. Certainly, there’s nothing inherently oppositional here. This is really about how we bring our full set of capacities to the task of shaping better futures, and combine them in ways that gives us the potential to close the gap between where we are and where we want to go.

@JayneEngle started with acknowledging the sense of the possibility being created by web3 and her curiosity in exploring its role in bridging ‘what needs to die in the old world to what is emerging in the new’. Her context for exploring these horizons spans her roles as: Co-director of Participatory Canada, a collaborator in the City Experiment Fund in eastern Europe, and Co-author and editor of Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities. Her lens is asking how do we collectively adopt higher orders of responsibility and thinking about governance to build that which we do not have now. Her bias is towards ‘commoning’ and emphasising the importance of governance arrangements and capacities being able to hold the inevitable tensions in commoning and maintaining a strong sense of mutual responsibility. Her hypothesis for the pursuit of better civic and planetary futures is based on the idea that we are currently not organised for the change that is coming or for change that the world needs. The locus of power and organisation requires fundamental shifts and new institutions that are enabling of global commoning, global citizens assemblies, and more decentralised civic and bioregional networks.

@tinajennen started by sharing her lens on this conversation and her broad experience of governance. This included: learning about her own Indigenous identity after working with those in Aotearoa New Zealand, sustainable land development through Antelope Commons and wetland restoration, door to door canvassing for grassroots organisations, a community energy trust, bringing technology to the primary sector, and advisory roles to Collective Intelligence - a community organisation that grows leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Wellbeing Protocol - a DAO that is harnessing web3 infrastructures to help communities become more self determining. She emphasised the importance of interfacing ‘new and old’, and is looking for how technologies can be harnessed to develop sustainable communities while also bridging knowledge from community organising into the digital space.

Digital and physical spaces

The discussion moved to explore the degree that experimentation in DAOs and digital spaces was translating into complex social and physical spaces, where existing institutions and organisations are active and have a range of obligations. Questions came up around how capability and literacy could be developed so a wider range of people could access web3 infrastructures and determine its potential use in their context. Also, how do we find more ways to transition thinking emerging in digital spaces into existing social spaces, and how do we enable more experimentation with web3 in social and physical contexts?

While there are many examples of this crossover happening, there are more where web3 is being used for the purpose of extraction and wealth concentration - i.e., the status quo. On the flip side, too many existing governance institutions that hold responsibility for change are resistant to it. New worlds are trying to emerge but much of how the world works is stuck, such as city governments resisting experimentation and keeping expectations low as they struggle to deliver services or the serial collapse of bold, multi-dimensional policy packages like ‘Build Back Better’ in America​​. We need more hybridity that isn’t trapped by the logics of the present day and can act through the lens of being accountable to future generations.

These changes will require fundamental shifts in mindsets and assumptions. Through the lens of economy, there will need to be movement towards accounting for multiple forms of value (that reflect the attributes of real progress) and universal values. From the ‘old’, Indigenous perspectives can signpost the way through inclusive and regenerative principles. From the ‘new’, web3 infrastructures can platform blended and distributed forms of value creation, information exchange, and governance. Refi (regenerative finance) offers a promising example of this potential.

Moving into new territories

While we intuitively know we need new ways of organising and new institutions, it's hard to anticipate what these will look like and how they will work at scale. So we need governance that can help shepherd emergence and serve more relational and systemic approaches to cooperation. Not everything needs to be tightly coordinated, but there does need to be connectivity, coherence, and constant calibration to manage interests and conflicts. Awareness, literacy with, and practical application of web3 technologies could help facilitate some of this difficult work.

Forming shared values and principles are important in these trajectories because in an increasingly crowded world we can’t avoid interconnectivity and interdependence. The historical evolution of rule by divine right to the rule of law suggests such fundamental shifts are possible, if not linear. In the context of innovation, this means reframing thinking from individual solutions and ventures to something that is far more relational and better recognises the vast potential of harnessing latent multipliers and synergies.

Amber Craig @Tahetoka joined the conversation to emphasise the importance of safe spaces for Indigenous people and perspectives, and for the need to disrupt the structural bias of resource flows. Her focus has been on growing the Indigenous (Māori) tech community and fostering crowd efforts for systemic change. Her current kaupapa (purpose) is tackling housing inequality by seeking to provide warm, dry, sustainable, and affordable homes for Māori. Te Whare Hangahanga is stripping the core issues back to their roots and building fundamentally new models through mātauranga (traditional knowledge) and technological innovation. Amber emphasised how these approaches strive to be sustainable right from the very beginning: ‘we descend from the earth and that’s who we have to give back to because it will sustain us for the rest of our lives and future generations. We need to provide resources and create spaces for Indigenous Peoples to just get stuff done’.

Where to start

Community and the collective is a critical starting point for this work. There is much good intention in this respect but the logic of how we see and shape the world is dominated by assumptions that have been built up over the last 400 years, and our personal baggage. Part of the reorientation process is to make the implicit more explicit. For example, boards would benefit from declaring and monitoring their individual and collective assumptions and worldviews before engaging in the substantive work of governance.

One of the challenges of scaling in web3 is that we often don’t know the people we are communicating with while relying on mechanical processes to make decisions. Also, we may not be getting enough diversity. This is important because diverse teams are better equipped to make sense of complexity and resist groupthink. The Wellbeing Protocol is intentionally being incubated by a diverse group with both some challenging and promising results, but how do we foster this type of diversity in innovation and governance across global networks?

In response to this question, notions of Citizens Assemblies provide a model. This can include global institutions that involve 100 randomly selected people from around the world, who are invited to engage with their local communities and then contribute a voice on shared issues, like climate action. DAOs could provide organisational infrastructure for these types of approaches. How would we think about designing DAOs to facilitate global citizens assemblies? How could we think about generating collective intelligence with the aid of technology to inform deliberation? Whatever we build needs to consider scale and also find bridges between different levels of scale.

DAOs as bridges between new and old?

This turned the conversation to asking what DAOs actually represent. We can see them as novel organisational forms or as an enabler of organising - a more fluid arrangement that is able to respond to the requirements of next-horizon cooperation. The framing around these ideas is hard because it’s still forming; we’re having to build novel ways of understanding, interacting, and communicating as we go.

@Lewwwk joined the conversation and raised the potential trap around seeing DAOs as a formula and wanting to see DAOs doing something. It can be more helpful to think about them as the primitives or tools that are coming available to enable experimentation with new forms of weaving across systems and networks. Experiments with how we bring people together in ways that are sometimes ephemeral, sometimes durable, and sometimes around shared resources. They are enabling us to be more flexible and iterative than we’ve been before with existing governance systems.

Progressing the notion of organising versus organisations, to what extent can DAOs enable diverse actors to organise around shared missions? How can this interface with non-DAO actors? Or is this a false dichotomy…? The decoupling of agendas may come from the pace of change in legacy institutions not aligning with people active in the web3 space who are looking for accelerated movement. While there is a clear need to work towards better futures, we also need to avoid slippage into utopian spaces that exist outside the reality of cities and places. We need to integrate new technologies with existing social and physical contexts in ways that are transformative, not vacate them.

The conversation closed with a sense that splitting the worlds of ‘new and old’ is not helpful. People active in DAOs are not categorically different to those who haven’t yet developed an affinity with web3 (or are skeptical of its value). It’s more helpful to see this time as transitional, not divergent. That said, if web3 plays out to its potential, we will need many more people engaged in how the technologies can unlock new possibilities and bigger shifts in cooperation.

A reflection on all three conversations

We’re not currently organised for the change we need. Better futures will demand more fluid cooperation and more people participating in distributed yet coherent action towards shared missions.

In the three conversations we explored how:

1. Meta-governance offers a framing to recognise systems interdependence and a field in which to develop practical governance approaches for those contexts, and which can layer onto higher-level purposes and orientations.

2. The dynamics of DAO to DAO interactions are incredibly diverse, fluid, and emergent.

3. Web3 infrastructures provide the potential to enable radically different ways of organising, acting, and governing, but creating communities decoupled from the social and physical contexts we inhabit will stymie this potential.

More than anything we reaffirmed what we already had a sense of - that we need more values-based and purpose-led experimentation with web3 infrastructures. DAOs and DAO primitives provide flexible and dynamic spaces and platforms for doing this, and diversity will enhance innovation.

Critically, experimentation needs to go hand-in-hand with the strengthening social capital and transfers of power (and resources) that enable more people to think and act differently.

It will also be useful to think about different time horizons and levels of scale - what is available now vs. what needs to be worked towards, and what needs to be present at the level of experimentation to indicate the potential for scale (acknowledging that scaling can play out in a number of ways).

As we find our way through these experiments, we will need deeper and clearer thinking about the role and arrangements for governance. Furthermore, we should recognise that governance is an emotional capacity, and a mindset, as well as a set of functions.

You may also be interested in…

Some other thinking on governance being undertaken by @SuperBenefitDAO:

• DAOs aren't things... they are flows.

• Scale and the levers that provide DAOs their power.

• DAOs: From fractal primitives to network scale.

• Summary of Conversation #1 ‘Metagovernance’..

• Summary of Conversation #2 ‘DAO2DAO cooperation’.

Summary produced by: @AlexHannant and @TarynLucas6

Image attribution: Coloured reflections, Tony Hisgett

Scale matters

DAOs are extraordinary for their capacity to test experimental ideas. And the innovation DAOs are unlocking because of this, all across Web3, is astounding! But, in order to have a transformational impact on the world, we need DAOs to scale beyond experiments. There is a risk that if they can’t successfully scale what they do, their potentially transformational innovations will just get co-opted by more centralised organisations (pseudo-DAOs and companies), who can more effectively scale and exploit them. Leaving us in much the same position we are in now.

Scale is not just about getting a lot of users onto a protocol with a bare bones interface that only early adopters will accept. In traditional startup speak, this would be considered validation or proof of concept only. Scale means delivering world class products to millions of people, with user experiences that are better than what Web2 is currently giving us.

I know we like to criticise the Web2 progenitors to our world, but these companies are running massively scaled operations the likes of which DAOs have not come close to yet.

It is true that digital scaling (network effects + scaling at near zero marginal cost + Moore's Law) means that digital business models scale in particularly powerful ways. But this does not mean that these models scale effortlessly without needing infrastructure. The likes of Google, Meta, Twitter et al still have to design and build significant infrastructure to generate scale advantages for their business models across; design, software development, sales, marketing etc – just like any other business does. And likewise, DAOs don’t get to opt out of this dynamic just because they are digitally native.

It is also important to remember that DAOs are increasingly going to be building for real world applications. If Web3 is going to be a transformational force in the world, DAOs are going to need to operate across all of the domains that companies currently do. And for this to work, being able to harness scaling dynamics at least as well as companies currently do is going to be crucial.

Scale needs to be a clear part of DAO thinking going forward and we need to make sure that we aren’t ignoring it – consciously or unconsciously – just because it reminds us of traditional business.

In the previous articles in this series – “DAOs aren’t things… they are flows” and “Scale and the levers that provide DAOs their power” – we looked at how a legacy mindset causes us to think of DAOs as ‘entities’, but they are much better understood as networks with coordinated flows of resources and value. We then unpacked how biological systems, companies and cities all function based on two fundamental scaling dynamics:

We saw that unlike companies that operate business models, DAOs are network economies. This makes them more like cities, giving them the remarkable ability to leverage both Dynamic One and Dynamic Two scaling systems.

In this article we will dig deeper into how DAOs can deliberately design themselves to utilise both of these dynamics.

From simple to massively complex

DAO structures need to start simply but then be able to grow into massive complexity. As DAOs try to scale, we cannot just apply arbitrary structure to them to solve the coordination issues that will naturally show up. If we do, we are just going to end up with broken systems. Ad hoc solutions that seem like good ideas at the time will end up causing problems like centralisation and fragility down the line in unexpected ways as they scale.

Galls Law reminds us that we need to start with simple systems that work:

SuperBenefitDAO recently hosted a conversation on metagovernance with Gabagool.eth, BPetes.eth and Justinehy.eth. As we explored the topic of metagovernance, one theme that came through strongly was the idea that we need to keep coming back to the magic that we all saw in DAOs in the first place. The magic of small groups of inspired people working together on something that matters to them – and the simple primitives that make this possible. From here we work our way up to complex governance and metagovernance, but we keep this simple starting point in focus. This is a great signpost for us to think about the simple primitives out of which complex DAO networks can emerge.

DAOs as fractal networks of connected cells

When a core team of people come together to start a DAO, pretty quickly they feel the need to create sub-teams as a way of separating tasks and managing accountability. As soon as this happens, they have begun the complex and difficult journey of experimental org design.

The mental model that rescues us from this becoming a morass of incoherent and unscalable structure is that of fractal design. Rather than umbrellaing these teams inside an entity (like a company does), we can think of these smaller teams as being identical in type to the DAO that birthed them. Each starts as a DAO primitive; a version of the DAO created out of itself, in order to get things done. All of these DAO cells exist in relationship with one another in a complex and emerging network.

Call them subDAOs, Pods, Fractals, Working Groups, Circles – I’ll refer to them as “cells” in this article because that works nicely with a biological metaphor, but the naming of them is neither here nor there – the mental model is to understand them as their own independent DAO cells that are defined by their relationships with other cells in the DAO network.

This notion of DAO cells as the primitive starting point for DAO networks is the basis for DAOs being able to leverage both of the scaling dynamics laid out in the previous article.

It is also the mechanism by which DAO networks collectively evolve.

Here is how both of these mechanisms work.

Cells can become Scaling Hierarchies AND Creative Networks

When a new DAO cell is spun up in a DAO network, depending on the purpose it has, it needs to be set up to be either part of a scaling hierarchy or a creative network.

D1 Scaling Hierarchy: If it is to play a role in a scaling hierarchy – for example, as part of DAO operations or core DAO infrastructure – then it will have quite tightly defined accountabilities. It will be closely coupled to other cells in the scaling hierarchy because its outputs will be critical to the functioning of the system as a whole.

D2 Creative Network: However, if the cell came into existence to explore things like novel ideas, partnership opportunities or new areas of research, then it will be much less constrained.

Where a cell needing to plug into a scaling hierarchy needs tight constraints to make sure that it is producing the outputs that the other cells in the hierarchy need, a creative network cell is set up to be maximally unconstrained.

DAO cell primitives need to be easily configurable in order to dial up the right constraints to make them function as the DAO network needs. This requires clearly defining the accountabilities, roles and relationships with other cells in the network, and then setting up the corresponding governance structure and tooling to make this possible.

Out of these single-celled starting points, DAOs then evolve into complex networks of cells.

Hats off to all the folks already experimenting in sophisticated ways with how these primitives can work – Orca, Sobol, Colony, Murmur, Juicebox, Hypha et al.

Example: DAO Prison Network

Let's make this more concrete by looking at a hypothetical example. Imagine a national prison system run as a DAO network. I’m choosing a difficult real-world problem here as an example to emphasise the challenges of scaling real-world systems.

The prison network is animated by its purpose of transforming how we approach crime as a social issue by searching for better solutions to these complex problems.

Because it is running existing infrastructure in an existing system, the DAO network would be made up in large part by scaling hierarchies consisting of networks of DAO cells that combine to deliver the well understood operational needs of the prison system. Things like buildings and facilities, security, health and welfare, education, staff/HR etc. These hierarchies of cells would be highly coordinated to deliver the right outputs, reliably and efficiently.

Each DAO cell would be set up to perform a specific role in the system, be accountable to other cells that rely on it, and be governed to some extent by these interdependent cells. They would likely have ongoing streams of funding and would measure themselves by the effectiveness of their activities in delivering on the known outcomes they were created to produce. They would also have the ability to produce their own new DAO cells so that as their responsibilities grew they would be able to scale their activities via fractal hierarchical scaling.

An important caveat to add in case the word hierarchy is triggering. The term scaling hierarchy refers to the structure of a network that functions with this particular set of scale advantages. It doesn’t need to mean “dominator hierarchy” or “management hierarchy”. Companies traditionally use management hierarchies to implement a power structure, but DAOs don’t have to do this. Much of the cutting edge work in organisational design (The Ready being a great example), concerns itself with how we can coordinate at scale without resorting to old school management hierarchies, aka “command and control”. But make no mistake, DAOs do need to match their ability to innovate with a genuine ability to scale.

But interspersed with these scaling hierarchies would be numerous loosely coupled creative network cells that are experimenting across the system in search of better solutions. Unlike the more highly coordinated scaling hierarchies which function with a well defined operating model and something that looks a lot like “strategy”, these creative cells will bubble up from ideas and inspiration from the DAO’s community.

A member of the community can have a novel idea, refine it, get a proposal approved and then spin up a cell to start exploring it. For our prison example, things these cells might experiment on could look like:

1. Ideas for better systems for staff - Process innovation/Horizon-1 (in traditional business speak)

2. Novel ideas for working with prisoners, rehabilitation etc - Product line expansion/Horizon-2

3. Radical ideas that would make prisons as we know them obsolete - Disruptive innovation/Horizon-3

4. Ideas that bridge and extend the DAO network beyond prisons, perhaps into mental health or early social crime prevention. Possibilities to connect and integrate the prison DAO into larger aligned networks beyond prisons.

These creative cells would be funded and structured to give them maximum freedom/autonomy. And then as creative cells evolve their ideas beyond experimentation, they can grow and connect with other parts of the larger DAO network to develop their discoveries into scaling hierarchies that the whole network can benefit from.

DAO networks evolve organically

With traditional organisations and companies we are used to thinking about power structures. And so for an organisation to change, it requires the power structure to change at the highest level and then for this to cascade down through the hierarchy. However, because DAOs consist of networks of cells, they can evolve organically.

For example, if a creative cell in our national prison DAO had been exploring an idea for early social intervention which prevented crime and discovered an exciting solution that would meaningfully reduce crime. That cell could generate its own contributors, community, token value, capital etc and as it grew would exert its own gravity on the larger DAO network. As this new opportunity started to scale it would change the shape of the original DAO as the network collectively reorientated itself around this new and impactful opportunity. Perhaps as a result the prison population would fall, but this is good news as the DAO would already have been flowing resources towards the new activities and possible new paradigm of transformational social outcomes.

This is sense-making in action. Rather than leaders in a power structure gathering up all the data and deciding on a new strategy for the DAO, the energy and resources flow with each individual member of the network as they gravitate towards the highest potential and most aligned opportunities. This is the DAO network reshaping itself organically using genuinely decentralised intelligence. Rather than trying to define and implement strategy for the DAO, strategy emerges autonomously from the DAO network itself.

This is in stark contrast to traditional organisations who can’t produce this kind of flexibility and collective intelligence due to rigid scaling infrastructure (see previous article). This legacy model leads to incredibly crappy externalities. This is easy to see in current private prison systems, where prison operators will often lobby governments for stricter enforcement of laws to increase prisoner numbers, in an attempt to maintain occupancy rates and ensure their business models keep working.

Enough scale to pay for the innovation

These amazing network dynamics are great in theory but DAO networks need to generate enough scale to make them work in practice. Searching for novel solutions is resource intensive. If DAOs are going to be these combinations of scale and innovation that can sense and evolve, they need to be big enough to generate the scale efficiencies to afford to do it.

Scale is also needed to make sure that these valuable new ideas make it out into the world in a way that many people can benefit from them.

It is easy to see from our prisons example, that if the DAO network only included one prison, the system would likely not be able to sustain the kind of creative networks needed to actually find breakthrough solutions. And then if they did find a breakthrough solution, they would not have a network through which to scale it. In our previous article we talked about the city-like positive feedback mechanisms that DAOs can generate:

For all of this to work the DAO network needs to be operating at the scale of the system that it is trying to transform.

DAOs as many interconnected networks working across vast scale

But all this talk of “enough scale”, must not collapse back into entity thinking. It is not about any one particular DAO being any particular size. This is the exciting opportunity. If we can pull the design of DAOs back to their smallest starting primitive cells, and DAOs (as networks of cells) just build up from there, then getting bogged down in where one DAO finishes and another starts becomes unnecessary.

If one DAO cell can easily, and in a principled way, connect with any other DAO cell and form into a useful structure (scaling or creative), then in principle it should be just as easy for two cells in different DAO networks to connect as well. Given all the experimentation with things like token swaps and DAO-to-DAO tools, the technical and governance tooling to do this more and more easily is emerging.

In this way I don’t think the future will consist of giant monolithic DAOs that rival the likes of Google, Meta and other giant traditional companies. DAO networks present us with a different way of thinking about scale. A company needs to contain its hierarchical scaling dynamics inside an entity, but the tools that Web3 gives us allow the coordination of resources across and between vast networks.

So a Web3 solution that replaces Google might be a whole web of DAO networks that is spread across all of Google’s 4.3 billion users… some of whom are working in highly structured ways to deliver at-scale technical infrastructure and core functions, some who are working on thousands of smaller experimental projects that grow and evolve into new and valuable things, some who just use the products being created and contribute data to the network as a byproduct. Maybe there is one search product, maybe a hundred, maybe a million.

I know developing a million products sounds implausible but there is no reason that the tools we are collectively evolving to coordinate shared ownership, governance and activity across interconnecting networks could not scale to coordinate a network of billions.

DAOs are “network intelligence” that flows

DAO networks will find equilibrium as they scale and fill the needs/opportunities they are trying to fill. But they will constantly be evolving under the surface. Whether it is the culture of the network evolving within the larger cultures we inhabit; adapting to changing environments, developing new technical underpinnings or product/service offerings, harnessing emerging discoveries and innovation - they will be able to scale but also to evolve, grow and reorient towards what is needed.

Unlike animals and companies who, because of their inflexibility, grow old and die, DAO networks will be like forests, dying and being reborn moment by moment as the energy and resources of the community flow, form, reform, connect and interconnect in ever more complex and useful ways.

But DAOs developing into these kinds of complex emergent intelligent systems can’t happen in an ad hoc way, it has to be foundational. We need to focus on finding and refining the primitive starting points. We need to make sure that we are working towards simple systems that can evolve into vastly complex ones.

The limited liability company primitive was able to produce the vastly complex global systems we have today. Now we need DAO primitives that can similarly evolve into our next emerging paradigm.

Article Series

• Previous: Scale and levers

• Next: Minimum Viable Permissionless-ness

The first conversation we hosted was on ‘meta-governance’ - a summary of which you can find here. In this second conversation, the focus turned to what we’re seeing and learning from ‘DAO2DAO cooperation’.

The contributors

• Chase Chapman - building a better society with web3 podcast othersidepod.xyz// contributing @OrcaProtocol // investing @thecowfund; othersidepod.xyz

• Stefen Deleveaux - President, Caribbean Blockchain Alliance (@cbahub); DAOist @thedaoist_ @primedao_ @govrnhq; resident dao ecologist; The Bahamas cbahub.org

• Jihad Esmail - build cool stuff with friends // currently: @forefront__@otherinternet__ @thecowfund

• Michael Lewkowitz - transition + cooperation; invest @possibilianVC; source @SuperBenefitDAO; stew @KrauseHouseDAO; Lewwwk.eth; lewwwk.com/about

• Rowan Yeoman - centerless network gravity; @SuperBenefitDAO; @AkinaFoundation; socialleancanvas.com

• Moderated by: @ml_baldwin and @HeenalR

Our reflection on the conversation

Listening to this conversation reinforced the categorical differences between DAOs and the conventional organisational structures that dominate the modern economy and the landscapes of our daily lives.

Companies, charities, and public sector entities, alike, have exoskeletons and hard-wired functions that determine how and why they cooperate with each other, and also how they interact with people - which is usually, essentially, transactional in nature.

Conversely, the edges of DAOs are blurred, dynamic, and porous. In many respects, DAOs have no boundaries and are only held together by the gravity of their members’ interests, agreements, and beliefs at any point in time. They are organic, fluid, and, essentially, human (DAO = Decentralised Autonomous Organisation Organism). This is also why many of them will flourish and then fall apart.

It follows that while tools and tokens may provide the interstitial fluid within and between these organisms, the human aspects of purpose, identity, and values are more likely to determine both the success and sustainability of any inter-organism cooperation. So, although technology has enabled DAOs to emerge, it may well be the nature of the relational ties and infrastructures that enables them to evolve and thrive.

How this relates to the interplay between digital spaces and physical contexts may also be an area ripe for further exploration (might digital technologies enhance, and be enhanced by, networks and systems with existing social capital?). Indeed, this is an inquiry likely to feature in our next and final conversation of the series - ‘New and Old’.

The discussion

The text below is an attempt to capture key themes and insights from the discussion. While we have attributed points of emphasis, our summary may miss the nuance provided by the contributors and doesn't do justice to the depth of overall conversation. As a result, we encourage you to listen to a recording of the session here.

What does DAO2DAO mean to you?

• @chaserchapman:

  • From a transactional POV - mergers, acquisitions, and services

  • More broadly - anyway DAOs engage with each other

• @jaesmail 

  • A general term for specific interactions, often in the context of tokens

  • But the topic invites exploration of the unique interactions that DAOs can have with each other

• @Lewwwk:

  • Provision of the tooling infrastructure that DAOs need

  • Disruptive potential in the murky boundaries around and between DAOs

  • How do we be proactive to leverage those experimental spaces to intentionally better drive futures?

• @yeoro:

  • Essentially, the proto-space where we’re learning how decentralised groups and networks interact with each other

• @stefdelev:

  • The dynamics of DAOs lean towards collaboration

  • Enables us to explore how we create networks and ecosystems of communities versus siloed structures and systems

What are the principles for proactive cooperation

• @yeoro

  • If we step back and look at the larger picture, we all inhabit the same ecosystems and economies

  • So cooperation is basically about developing the tools and infrastructures to make this connectivity work better and more productively

• @Lewwwk

  • We are going through another cycle and there seems to be a sense that we’re more intentionally experimenting with tools to fundamentally change the patterns we find in society

  • What does it mean to be proactive at this moment and instill the values we want into the new systems we’re building? How can DAOs be doing this work in a more assertive way?

• @chaserchapman

  • There a few different ways to think about DAO2DAO, the transactional aspects are just the foundations, the exciting part comes with what we layer on top and thinking about  anything DAO2DAO as potential ‘allyship’

  • How can we collaborate and sustain this? Token swaps enable collaboration but they aren’t sufficient in themselves

  • Interesting human dynamics to explore, how do you foster feelings of allyship between networks and groups?

• @Lewwwk:

  • I love this, what does it look like to support that human element?

  • Do we explicitly create more spaces and support for this? Feels like there is an opportunity to build allyship within the wider ecosystem so we are enabled to be intentional and proactive in creating the futures we want.

  • What does it mean to put this into practice?

• @jaesmail:

  • When you have a more meaningful connection you see more robust collaboration around projects

• @stefdelev

  • Interesting to look at the ‘mafia form’ of DAOs (e.g., Seed Club, MetaCartel) - these communities have a strong sense of identity and individuals who have deep relationships with one another - these are really important facilitators of cooperation

• @Lewwwk:

  • Interesting to see how full networks and ecosystems are interacting with each other.

  • Celo is an example of an emerging ecosystem that has a focused orientation but a lot  of diversity around that shared interest

  • Placing a new DAO in these existing networks is like placing a new plant in a forest - it’s able to draw on shared soil and nutrients.

  • The idea of ecosystem first - a fertile network can help other projects grow. Makes me think of how we build the tooling to reinforce these ecosystems and the growth of the connections between these ecosystems?

How far can token swaps take us?

• Stefdelev

  • There’s always a negotiation process - what does this DAO’s approach to collaboration look like? How does it benefit all those involved?

  • Cooperation needs to be as optimal as possible for both communities

  • Values are important but so are the practical aspects of any potential partnership

• @yeoro:

  • Are token swaps as we are using them now creating smaller pods between DAOs who collaborate in their own ways?

• @chaserchapman

  • Token swaps are such a big question mark - surprising how much energy goes into meta-governance? Does it feel like there is a priority to do something more with it?

• @stefdelev:

  • Governance focuses on the contributor - how to connect wider dots between large networks and communities?

• @jaesmail:

  • There is a very real chance that the relationships between these communities now is at the extent of where they can be, and that’s okay

• @Lewwwk:

  • On the flipside, swaps can act as signal or beacon - can sparks something unexpected

DAO2DAO cooperation vs. competition and the future of work?

• @chaserchapman

  • Interesting to compare DAOs and the gig economy - both have individuals as the atomic unit of work

  • DAOs offer the same freedom but in the context of a community, and the knowledge economy demands more than individual people

  • The aim of Orca Pods - offer freedom, fluidity and collaboration within DAO2DAO relationships

• @chaserchapman

  • Competition playing out in different ways

  • In an idealist version people don’t compete (‘neighbours not competitors’) but how this plays out in reality will be dependent on the market. How will DAOs offering similar products really interact?

  • Changing labour conditions and markets might impact human-level alignment

• @stefdelev

  • Beyond rhetoric, the dynamics of DAOs change the nature of competition

  • People are working and contributing to multiple DAOs, sometimes ones that are competing with each other

  • You can compete but be more aware and not try to wipe each other out - ‘If I win, you win; if I lose, you lose’

  • Contributions in one DAO can also be helpful to another - being active in different DAOs can be a multiplier to both - different to how traditional workplaces think

  • As the influx of people into DAOs continues, it will be important that people don’t just enter what already exists, there needs to be constant creation of new DAOs and sub-DAOs

• @yeoro

  • Organic structure of DAOs is a key enabler of innovation, productivity, and adaptation

  • Atomic units of DAOs can naturally evolve into larger and faster networks without becoming monolithic and rigid entities

  • Competition will have different dimensions, including values - what is it that draws and keeps people together?

How can DAO2DAO networks create learning systems?

• @yeoro

  • Two facilitators - information flows and the capacity for organic reshaping

  • How does information flow across the network and enable network intelligence to grow with it?

  • As energy forms around ideas and activities that are important, their shape evolves and they become more prevalent in the DAO. This also shapes new information flows

• @chaserchapman

  • Organisational honesty has to proceed the sharing of learning

  • Regardless of the strength of a community, if you are not willing to be honest with yourselves and others on what isn’t working then we will not get far on shared learnings as you may be sharing make-believes. Honesty validates learning

• @Lewwwk

  • Wave of people coming in and working across multiple DAOs - this can create mass pollination

  • How do we encourage people to join more DAOs  and grow the potential to weave relationships, knowledge, and interests

What does collaborative defiance mean and how DAOs can enable it?

• @stefdelev 

  • The idea is based on shifting paradigms and pushing back on what exists

  • It’s a political move - you can’t really get away from it

• @Lewwwk:

  • Would love to see more at this moment

  • What can we do to make defiance less reactive and more proactive? Feels like there is a window to be explicit about what we want to create

  • A lot of focus on funding public goods in novel ways - e.g., voluntary carbon markets

• @yeoro:

  • There is a standard challenge in the impact/social innovation space - how do you keep that mission/values alignment when things change in size and capital has its effect?

  • We need governance mechanisms to retain alignment around mission when scaling happens.

  • How can individuals and smaller groups command access to treasuries to follow emergent energies without getting constrained by bureaucracy (or a majority)?

• @chaserchapman:

  • Models where you can ‘rage quit’ your funds from the treasury, but an extreme measure

  • There is a lot of potential functionality that can be used to change controls around treasuries, but this comes with tradeoffs that a lot of DAOs aren’t willing to make, but that may be an area for further change

Coming up…

If this caught your interest, join us for the next conversations. On June 30, 6.30-7.30 PM (EST), the conversation will explore: ‘New and old - what can Web3 learn from and contribute to existing governance perspectives and practices?’. Set a Twitter reminder here.

You may also be interested in…

Some other governance discovery being undertaken by @SuperBenefitDAO:

• DAOs aren't things... they are flows.

• Scale and the levers that provide DAOs their power.

• Summary of Conversation #1 ‘Metagovernance’

Summary produced by: @AlexHannant and @TarynLucas6

Image credit: Nick Pitsas, CSIRO

Given governance is, in essence, how authority and accountability is held and actioned in any given context, we think this core social infrastructure is ripe for innovation. Fortunately, the arrival of web3, coinciding with other pressures and shifts in the world, are inviting us to reframe, revitalise, and, in many respects, remember, what governance is and can be.

With this in mind, SuperBenefit DAO is convening a series of conversations to explore how the nature of governance is evolving and its role in accelerating transitions to better futures. We’re specifically interested in how web3 technologies are enabling new thinking and their potential to combine with existing practices, perspectives, and traditional wisdom.

The first conversation we hosted was on ‘meta-governance’. We gathered with a small group of founders and DAO-ers to discuss what it is and where it could take us.

The contributors

• Bryan Petes – Co-founder @TeamSobol | Also playing the DAO game w/ @banklessDAO, @CityDAO, @DAOPunksNFT, @PolygonDAO, @ReputableDAO in my spare cycles.

• Gabagool.Ξth – On-chain sleuth: @InfoTokenDAO

• justinehy.eth – Head of dao strategy, bd, & metagovernance at @rabbithole_gg - justine.mirror.xyz

• Rowan Yeoman – Centerless network gravity | @SuperBenefitDAO, @AkinaFoundation – socialleancanvas.com

• Moderated by: @ml_baldwin and @HeenalR

The discussion

The text below is an attempt to capture the key points and themes from the discussion. We have attributed specific points of emphasis, but our summary doesn't do justice to either the depth of conversation or the insights provided by the contributors. As a result, we encourage you to listen to a recording of the session.

What is meta-governance?

There are different ways to unpack the ‘meta’ in meta-governance. A narrow definition, specific to web3, refers to the nature of governance created by index mechanisms that acquire tokens from various DAOs and protocols. With these tokens come governance interests and rights. This framing can be generalised to refer to how DAOs participate in, and influence, each other.

A broader conception of meta-governance relates to ‘how we figure out whole systems governance’ (Gabagool.Ξth) and deal with issues that impact everyone but can’t be controlled by any specific individual or entity. While this is salient in web3 in relation to core integrity issues (such as mitigating the impact of Sybil attacks), it also transcends the digital context. Indeed, systems governance (and inter-systems governance) will be critical in how we respond to challenges, such as climate change, and how we evolve the communities and societies we live within.

This more expansive framing of meta-governance also creates space to transcend current constructs of governance and speculate about where emerging trends are taking us and what could be possible.

‘What is ‘beyond governance’...?

Like the hard structures of boards and ballots in conventional contexts, much web3 governance gets reduced to token-weighted mechanisms. The emphasis rests on the act of governance - voting on proposals; rather than the process of governance - deliberation and wayfinding. And despite the intent to distribute and decentralise, token-based voting often slips into old patterns of concentrating power and influence.

If governance is to become more attuned and responsive to the systems dynamics it exists within, how do we find ways to ‘soften’ the flows of influence and authority? How might we match technicalities with the emergent energies produced within movements and networks? How can we harness social capital to sense and shape systems change? How might governance forums be more responsive to stakeholder sentiment and bottom-up interests?

Could we design governance systems to enable smaller and localised groups to express their interests and consent into ‘roll-ups’ (Bryan Petes). Could forums become more flexible to include representatives and specialised perspectives based on specific issues and context? We need to experiment more with bottom-up and localised decision making, and enable more people to engage on issues that are relevant to them - enabling them to come together as and when it makes sense to cooperate (Rowan Yeoman).

On this point, we also have to do a better job of communicating that ‘governance has teeth’ (Gabagool.Ξth) and that it's worth participating in. To do this, we need to better understand the roots of apathy (which may be an echo of the disenfranchisement experienced in conventional contexts) and be able to demonstrate that voice can have influence. Critically, ‘participation in governance requires education’ (justinehy.eth) for governance. We’re reminded that when Mondragon has acquired conventional businesses and converted them into cooperatives, that they take five years to enable employees to transition their mindsets and behaviours into those of active co-owners.

How can Web3 contribute to better futures?

Many of the meta challenges faced by humanity today are the product of ‘doing a bad job of dealing with complexity’ (Bryan Petes). Artificial separation and simplification of sectors, entities, and interests has spilled over into any number of negative externalities and is leading to runaway consequences. Looking ahead, we need ‘systems of systems’ finding ways to interact and do better for people and the planet. Within this, we need to reframe governance as the stewardship of holistic interests rather than just specific ones.

Traditional governance in existing institutions will struggle to provide this reform, but the infrastructures provided by Web3 technologies, enabled by the cultural levers of ‘self-sovereignty (ED: this concept has different connotations - we lean towards ideas of self-determination vs. narrow property rights) and bottom-up influence’, offer the potential of ‘liquid democracies’ and genuine power shifts.

This is further aided by the incentives inherent in Web3. Rather than zero-sum scaling dynamics found in conventional (and Web2) commerce, Web3 ecosystems scale through mutual growth and success. In thinking about how we intentionally shape the direction and evolution of these ecosystems, it’s helpful to ask ‘how we might go about influencing the direction of an industry?’ (e.g. ‘Defi’) (Gabagool.Ξth). Might we use strategies like cross-DAO token holding to build coalitions of projects aligned around particular values and ethics?

These simple token swaps are dynamic and are creating some interesting results. They’re a means to weave interconnections and interdependencies, and for small parties to move together and raft their power - ‘Token swaps are a swapping and sharing of power’ (Gabagool.Ξth). We see amazing examples of trust and energy emerging from small, disparate groups organising in web3. It would seem that web3 is providing spaces for new value sets and norms to take hold, and becoming an attractor for people who seek radical but practical reform to find each other and act.

Importantly for a change agenda, the inherent properties of DAOs are attuned to ‘Autonomy, complexity, emergence, agency, and transparency’ (justinehy.eth) This affinity with complexity makes web3 and DAOs powerful infrastructures for the governance of systems and physical spaces. This can relate to evolving notions of ‘commoning’ - where actors take shared responsibility for stewarding assets and places for future generations. This can be seen in emerging experiments such as City DAO where there is a blurring of the metaverse and physical spaces to foster networked cities. To enable self-organising models to be responsive to their contexts, we need to ‘design for complexity in mind - minimum parameters in place but not too rigid - try to keep it simple’ (justinehy.eth).

Wrapping up

The ‘meme of decentralisation’ often presents as something outside of us - as an inherent quality of the Web3 environment, but ‘it needs to be insisted upon and actively established’ (Gabagool.Ξth). Individuals acting across forums, networks, and protocols can curate experiences and spheres of engagement that promote this ethos and the emergence of values-based meta-governance.

We all have a responsibility to do this. Indeed, while increasing sensitivity to sentiment is important, transitions to better futures will demand greater pro-activity in shaping the values and norms of core industries and systems. Doing this well in Web3 will provide opportunities to harness digital infrastructures in physical contexts, and provide powerful tools to address some of our world's most urgent challenges.

Coming up…

If this caught your interest, join us for the next conversations. On June 16, 6.30-7.30 PM (EST), the conversation will explore: ‘DAO to DAO - what are we seeing and learning from inter-DAO cooperation?’. On June 30, 6.30-7.30 PM (EST), the conversation will turn to: ‘New and old - what can Web3 learn from and contribute to existing governance perspectives and practices?’. Set a Twitter reminder here.

You may also be interested in…

Some other governance discovery being undertaken by @SuperBenefitDAO:

• DAOs aren't things... they are flows.

• Scale and the levers that provide DAOs their power.

Synthesis produced by: @AlexHannant and @TarynLucas6

Header image: Aaron Neumann - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84826213

Goodbye “business model”. Hello “network economy”

As we described in our recent article ‘DAOs aren’t things… they are flows’, Web3 presents the possibility of a new paradigm to replace the company-centric paradigm that has been evolving over the past 400 years.

If we can shed this ‘company as centralising entity’ paradigm and instead see DAOs not as entities but as centerless networks with coordinated flows of resources, then a whole new way of looking at business and economics becomes possible.

DAOs and companies are fundamentally different systems. Companies operate business models. DAOs are network economies. And this distinction is at the heart of why DAOs have the potential to usher in a new paradigm.

Unpacking what network economies are and how they are different and more powerful than business models will require some framing. The concept of scale will be our way into understanding this; and to explain scale, I will lean heavily on Geoffrey West’s work on the dynamics of how systems scale.

A fuller explanation can be found here, but at a high level there are two fundamental dynamics to understand:

I will start by outlining both of these dynamics and, if I do this well, hopefully it will become obvious that these two systems are the keys to unlocking the power that DAOs can embody in the world.

West’s work starts with understanding that biological systems scale in a sub-linear way, meaning that as biological systems (mammals, insects, trees, etc) increase in size they become more efficient in a uniform and predictable way. For example, if you double the size of a mouse, it will only require 75% more food, oxygen, water and so forth; its heart will beat slower, and it will live longer. And the equations that predict this are accurate all the way up from a mouse to an elephant or a blue whale; each doubling in size produces a corresponding 25% increase in efficiency. The mechanisms that cause this phenomena have to do with the concept called fractal scaling hierarchies.

Biological systems create fractal hierarchies with branching structures and every layer in the hierarchy creates an increase in efficiency. A good example is the cardiovascular system of a mammal. All of us mammals have a heart that pumps blood around our bodies in the same way; the heart pumps blood under pressure into an aorta which branches into two arteries. These then branch into more arteries and these then branch into still more. The physics that govern this system means that the more layers in the branching hierarchy, the more efficient the system becomes (the amount of work your heart has to do to get oxygenated blood to every cell in your body drops as you grow). This is why a 220 ton blue whale’s heart only has to beat 11 times per minute to circulate blood to every cell in its body, while a mouse’s heart needs to beat 500 times a minute to do the same thing. And every mammal in between these two exhibits the exact same heart rate to size ratio.

Amazing as this is, what is more incredible is that this dynamic holds true for human-built systems too. This scaling effect is the fundamental dynamic that makes companies work. As a business grows, it is essentially building a set of branching hierarchies that generate economies of scale using the same mathematics that mammals, insects and trees use to grow. As the company increases its size and adds more layers to its hierarchy, efficiencies are gained across all the layers in the hierarchy. This causes the unit cost of the goods it produces to fall as its size increases. This is known as sub-linear scaling, where the use of resources becomes more and more efficient as the system grows in size.

Fractal hierarchies are finite

Systems that rely on scaling via fractal hierarchies can become incredibly efficient as they scale. But the downside of this dynamic is that these systems decay and die in very predictable ways. The lifespans of all animals are almost perfectly predicted by their size (for mammals, from a mouse 1-1.5 years, to an elephant 60-70 years, to a blue whale 80-90 years). The bigger you are, the longer you live – but all do die eventually.

This is because fractal hierarchies are rigid. They gain advantage by creating infrastructures that can deliver scale, but over time this infrastructure decays. Over time the system inevitably pours more and more of its resources into maintaining its aging infrastructure and, with no ability to alter its fixed structure, it eventually becomes non-viable.

As a side note, humans are the only animals that buck this trend by living roughly twice as long as we should based on our size. But this has only happened in the past few hundred years because of breakthroughs in medicine, hygiene, nutrition etc. Up until the 19th century our lifespan averaged somewhere between 20-40 years, which is about right for our body size.

Companies are masters of fractal hierarchies

This dynamic is what underpins 400 years of success for the “Company”. With the creation of the limited liability company we gained a highly effective system to make this dynamic work – allocating capital, to build infrastructure, to scale a business model… rinse and repeat.

But a consequence of this is that, like fractal hierarchies in biology, companies are finite. They scale their business models but then over time they fail to evolve, their infrastructure requires more and more resources to maintain itself, and eventually they die.

This death is often not obvious. Companies employ every trick they can to keep themselves alive, including anti-competitive practices, buying and incorporating other companies that are still on a scaling upswing, or they themselves might be acquired by another company (continuing a brand even though the company essentially disappears). But even with all of these strategies to cheat death, a broad analysis shows that almost all companies do predictably decline and die.

The other powerful dynamic that West identifies is that of social networks and the way they produce social outputs in a super-linear way. The social networks we are referring to here are simply networks of humans interacting; this might be friend groups, business relationships, religious communities, membership clubs etc – any collection of social relationships.

Social networks scale in a super-linear way based on a set of predictable networks dynamics, including Metcalfe’s law

This is how things like markets work. The greater the number of participants in a market network, the greater the possibility that valuable exchanges of goods and services will occur (trade as a social output) and therefore the greater the value of the network.

This means that as social networks increase in size they produce social outputs at an increasing rate. So if you double the size of a social network, the research shows that you get a greater than double increase in social outputs; a 115% increase, to be exact.

This dynamic holds true across all social outputs, but what we are interested in for this analysis is the production of ideas and innovation. And the conclusion of West and his team is clear; if you increase the size of a social network, you get a mathematically predictable super-linear increase in ideas and innovation. This is a direct result of the greater surface area for the exchange of ideas, knowledge, capital and the possibility for creative collaboration.

The problem for companies is that once they are mature, it is nearly impossible for them to successfully leverage this social network driven dynamic. The necessity for them to commit to building scaling hierarchies in order to capture the benefits of economies of scale means that they need to have highly rigid infrastructure and organisational structures. This makes genuine creative innovation almost impossible. Try as they might, innovation is just not what they are designed for.

Some do engage in R&D to drive product line expansion etc, but this seldom leads to genuinely novel innovation. So most resign themselves to purchasing innovation that is produced by others. As their hierarchies become more and more entrenched and inflexible, they do this more and more in an effort to stay relevant and ultimately to try to ward off their inevitable decline.

But cities don’t die

This is where West’s analysis gets really interesting. While animals, plants and companies all predictably die, throughout history there have been almost no cases of cities dying.

It turns out that cities survive (and thrive) because they are able to harness both of these dynamics - sub-linear hierarchical scaling and super-linear social network driven creativity and innovation.

Cities utilise scaling infrastructure for roading, electrical grids, water supply, hospitals, emergency services, communication networks, schools, and much more. This means that the bigger the city, the more efficient all of this infrastructure becomes, which allows for more amenities and better standards of living.

But, as cities grow, they also have ever larger social networks, which produce increasing amounts of creativity and innovation (along with all the other social outputs). If you double the size of a city it produces 115% more research papers, patents, startups etc.

This dynamic has the effect of creating a virtuous cycle of innovation and improvement to the city. The innovation producing function of the city creates a constant stream of innovative new businesses growing to replace those that die, bringing in new money; incomes go up, infrastructure is invested in and improved, the city is renewed. This in turn adds another virtuous cycle where the improvement in the lifestyles and prospects of the city’s residents attracts new residents, which then improves the Dynamic One efficiency of the infrastructure and also improves the Dynamic Two ideas and innovation machine.

What about DAOs?

You can probably see where this is going. DAOs as network economies have the potential to leverage both Dynamic One and Dynamic Two. After all, cities are not things either… They are networks!

Companies are fundamentally about building out fractal scaling infrastructure. That is what they do. Steve Blank, professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford and Berkeley Universities, differentiates between a startup and a business (company) in the following way:

In this framing, we can see that a startup is meant to operate like a social network – a group of founders, who are hopefully well connected, being highly creative and innovative as they connect, experiment, iterate, pivot... in the hope that they can discover a repeatable and scalable business model.

Then when they have the repeatable and scalable business model, they become laser-focused on building the infrastructure to scale the business model. This commits them to the structure they have chosen. They orient their strategy and their business units towards delivering this structure and change, after this point, is extremely difficult.

But DAOs are network economies, not business models. And as network economies they can be more like cities and can escape the rigid and finite fate of companies. As economies, they can leverage both dynamics; they can be engines of experimentation and discovery, led by communities of individuals aligned around a shared purpose, but they can also bring these innovations to scale making them useful to the world.

This is possible because network economies can be coordinated in much more complex and useful ways than can companies. A DAO network can contain multitudes. Rather than being a single centralising, controlling entity, it can contain many autonomous self-organising groups – all working towards its overarching purpose inside a vastly more flexible structure; some building scaling hierarchies and others exploring and creating.

Like cities, leveraging Dynamics One & Two, DAO networks can benefit from the same positive feedback loops as they grow. Increasing economies of scale make them powerful, while constant creativity, innovation and responsiveness keep them alive and relevant to a changing world. And as a result of this they attract more and more talented people looking for opportunities to do useful things, who grow and sustain the DAO network.

This is the promise of Web3! This is the promise of DAOs as networks of inspired individuals that can collectively overcome the inertia of our deeply entrenched economic system, multi trillion dollar incumbents and 400 years of habit.

And to do this DAOs have to be able to leverage both Dynamic-One and Dynamic-Two.

Article Series

• Previous: DAOs aren't things, they are flows

• Next: Fractal primitives to network scale

We are specifically interested in how Web3 technologies are enabling new models of governance towards these ends, and their potential to combine with existing practices, perspectives, and wisdom.

Beyond the governance of organisations, communities, and networks, we’ll probe the notion of meta-governance and the practicalities of governance in a systems context.

Three conversations

Over three conversations, we engaged with people who bring different and complementary perspectives to governance. This included experience and views from DAOs, other decentralised networks, the co-operative movement, Indigenous cultures, purpose-led business, and civic and systems innovation.

We explored perspectives on the essential functions and attributes of governance, and the design implications for governance arrangements that seek to foster decentralisation, pluralism, and regeneration.

Each of the conversations were framed around a question:

1. June 2, 2022: Metagovernance - what is it and what’s its potential?

2. June 16, 2022: DAO to DAO - what are we seeing and learning from inter-DAO cooperation?

3. June 30, 2022: New and old - what can Web3 learn from and contribute to existing governance perspectives and practices?

All Twitter Spaces took place from 6:30 to 7:30 pm EST and were hosted on the SuperBenefit Twitter account.

Listen to recordings of the 3 spaces.

• To share this page easily, you can use the link exploregov.xyz

Conversation 1: Metagovernance - what is it and what’s its potential?

Taking place from 6:30 to 7:30 pm EST on Thursday, June 2, the first Twitter Space in this series featured:

• Bryan Petes – Cofounder @TeamSobol | Also playing the DAO game w/ @banklessDAO, @CityDAO, @DAOPunksNFT, @PolygonDAO, @ReputableDAO in my spare cycles.

• Gabagool.Ξth – on-chain sleuth: @InfoTokenDAO

• justinehy.eth – head of dao strategy, bd, & metagovernance at @rabbithole_gg - justine.mirror.xyz

• Rowan Yeoman – centerless network gravity | @SuperBenefitDAO, @AkinaFoundation – socialleancanvas.com

Read key insights and takeaways from the June 2 Twitter Space or listen to recordings of the Twitter Spaces.

Conversation 2: DAO to DAO - what are we seeing and learning from inter-DAO cooperation?

Taking place from 6:30 to 7:30 pm EST on Thursday, June 16, the second Twitter Space in this series featured:

• Chase Chapman - building a better society with web3 contributing @OrcaProtocol @indexcoop // investing @ cowfund // cofounder (now advisor) @decentology // Otherside podcast

• Stefen Deleveaux – President, Caribbean Blockchain Alliance (@cbahub); DAOist @thedaoist_ @primedao_ @govrnhq; resident dao ecologist

• Jihad – building @forefront__ / squad @otherinternet__ / prev @syndicatedao @amagrowth / 🇵🇸

• Michael Lewkowitz – transition + cooperation | invest @possibilianVC, source @SuperBenefitDAO, stew @KrauseHouseDAO

• Rowan Yeoman – centerless network gravity | @SuperBenefitDAO, @AkinaFoundation – socialleancanvas.com

Read key insights and takeaways from the June 16 Twitter Space or listen to recordings of the Twitter Spaces.

Conversation 3: New and old - what can Web3 learn from and contribute to existing governance perspectives and practices?

Taking place from 6:30 to 7:30 pm EST on Thursday, June 30, the third Twitter Space in this series featured:

• Jayne Engle - Civic Futures | strategist/urbanist/builder/seeker | adj professor urbanism @mcgillu | #SacredCivics: Building Seven Generation Cities

• Tina Jennen - Tina is involved with the Wellbeing Protocol (see video) and, with a diverse range of governance experience, has insights into how governance and design approaches can foster community and civic self-determination

• Alex Hannant - For better and fairer. @AlexHannant @SuperBenefitDAO @YunusGriffith @BCorpANZ

Read key insights and takeaways from the June 16 Twitter Space or listen to recordings of the Twitter Spaces.

Hosting and learning

The conversations were be hosted by SuperBenefit, who are currently undertaking research in Web3 governance principles, practices, and patterns.

Our intention is to harvest the learnings from across the three spaces and integrate them with independent research into governance models and practice in order to publish an article with our findings and to inform further conversations and explorations.

We welcome collaborators! If you’re interested in joining us in this project, reach out to Heenal or Michelle on Twitter, or join SuperBenefit’s Discord.

As we face a layering of crises at the intersections of equity, climate and economy worldwide, organizations and individuals alike must accelerate and co-ordinate for the societal transition required to address these challenges and their complex impacts.

Popular and well-used methods like network building, public policy and advocacy, cross-sector collaboration and narrative shifting are important. But they are no longer enough to drive the scale and pace of change we need.

What if we were to look outside of our go-to tools and innovations and beyond our own institutions and sectors to explore emerging systems and technologies that could help shape a better future for all?

The revolutionary potential of Web3

The socio-technical shift known as Web3 shows some promise of building anew, rather than trying to retrofit existing capitalist institutions. In the midst of crises and collapse, the technologies that mediate our everyday lives are evolving at a rapid pace and Web3 offers the possibilities of a new societal infrastructure that can disrupt the community, business, government, media, culture and philanthropy sectors: a new “operating system” for society that enables individuals to freely organize at scale around issues that are important to us.

Web 3, web3 or Web 3.0, Web3 is a new iteration of the internet that is built on decentralized blockchains and prioritizes ownership, sovereignty and transparency. Web3 is also used as a catch-all term for associated phenomena, including cryptocurrencies, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), DeFi (decentralized finance), DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) and the metaverse.

Web3 provides users agency over content, data and assets and is built on models of co-ownership and decentralization of decision-making and control. Him Gajria captured this concept simply in a 2020 Tweet: “Web 1: Read, Web2: Read-Write, Web3: Read-Write-Own.”

To understand what makes Web3 potentially revolutionary, it’s helpful to look at the evolution of the internet. The emergence of the internet, Web 1.0 (1990-2005), was a read-only experience, where individual users were consumers of content. Web 2.0 (2005-20) saw individuals contributing content and large corporations (such as Facebook, Google and Amazon) get rich through advertising models based on the exploitation of personal data freely given away by users usually without our consent or knowledge. With Web 2.0, users, in effect, went from being the consumers to being the products.

Web3 eliminates the need for, and functions of, Web 2.0 central authorities and gatekeepers such as governments, financial institutions and tech companies. Rather than just using free technology platforms in exchange for giving away our data, users can participate in the governance and operation of the underlying apps and technologies themselves. This means that each one of us can become participants and owners, not just customers or products.

Web3 also has the potential to disrupt existing institutions because it can accelerate change more quickly, creating new models rather than working through existing layers of process and governance. But the direction that such disruption will take is not guaranteed. Technological innovation is reliant on humans to create and interact with it in ways that bring about positive change. In any emerging system there will be some who use it for selfish or harmful purposes, as well as unintended consequences resulting from the inherent unpredictability of innovating at the edges of possibility.

A few prevalent negative narratives about Web3 pertain to the accessibility of the technology, its climate impacts, corrupt behaviour and lack of customer protections. While each of these critiques has some validity, it’s very early in the evolution of Web3 and many are working on addressing these very challenges. Numerous negative narratives have been shaped by mainstream institutions and media and, while they contain some truth, there may be a conscious or unconscious motive to perpetuate these narratives to maintain the status quo that serves their interests.

We have the opportunity to be engaged in influencing and shaping one of the most significant socio-technical transitions in our history, rather than simply observing and analyzing it. For those seeking to harness Web3 to accelerate the societal transition required, there are many promising patterns and initiatives emerging in the space across a variety of dimensions — including enabling mission-driven organizing around social and environmental change, rebuilding equitable systems, and redistributing wealth and power.

Mission-driven organizing

Many projects operating in the Web3 space are structured as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). A DAO is a group organized around a mission that co-ordinates through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain. One of the main benefits of a DAO is that they are more transparent than traditional companies, which significantly reduces the risk of corruption and censorship, as well as operating costs. Not only does a DAO's balance sheet exist on a public blockchain — meaning that every transaction is completely transparent at all times — every major decision is voted on and recorded using a tool such as Snapshot.

Web3 also enables the invention of new mechanisms that can shift markets and create new resource and authority flows, even with climate change. Addressing the climate emergency through renewable energy, carbon reduction, plastic removal, forest and ocean conservation, and holding corporations accountable is the foundation of a number of DAOs outlined on the ReFi DAO website. One example, Klima DAO, has bought and absorbed 17 million tonnes of carbon offsets, equivalent to taking 3.6 million cars off the road, and has the potential to impact corporations’ commitment to climate action and a green economy.

Rebuilding equitable systems

The fast-moving landscape of Web3 is creating the space for governance innovations to be iterated upon at a rate that would simply not be feasible within traditional institutions. Collective governance that is participatory, decentralized and democratized is foundational to Web3. Inspired by Indigenous governance, co-operatives, holacracy, sociocracy, self-managed organizations and anticipatory governance, some Web3 projects have taken the initiative to experiment with novel forms of governance and “solve” one of the wicked problems of humanity: governance. Leading from a place of trust over risk is a core principle that challenges existing institutional governance systems and power structures.

Understanding that the complexity of the issues humanity is facing requires a systems lens, SuperBenefit is one example of a DAO that is taking a systems-thinking approach to act as a co-ordinating mechanism between existing DAOs and to collaborate to build the social and financial infrastructure and flywheels that can help to address the wicked challenges we are facing.

Redistributing wealth and power

To address the oppression of those historically excluded, Web3 has a growing movement of equity and inclusion with the values of power with and power to. This includes engaging more BIPOC, women, and 2SLGBTQI+ people as artists, collectors and builders through communities and accelerators including The BlkChain, NotYourBro, HerDAO, and web3baddies.

While governments in Canada and around the world slowly begin to realize its value, run pilots and question how to fund it, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is already available in Web3. Proof of Humanity, Circles and Good Dollar are three projects that offer a UBI to anyone anywhere on the planet.

Meanwhile, Pact Collective has used Web3 tools to create a sustainable mutual aid model in New York City. Funds will go to support grassroots organizations, artists, and activists (who are the leaders of this work), as well as the development of a Web3 platform to support this network.

***

The potential value of Web3 is in enabling human co-ordination at scale, for the benefit of the many, at low cost and unmediated by external actors. The ability of Web3 to facilitate truly people-powered (while technology-assisted) movements can help us rediscover the interconnectedness of humans and the opportunity for social cohesion that has been so deeply scarred by the pandemic and by the interwoven wicked challenges of the 21st century.

The societal transition upon us requires us all to prioritize our ecological, human and community well-being and to harness the power of emerging innovations and systems, including Web3, while existing community, business and governmental institutions continue to evolve.

Imagine if Web3 were to happen with us rather than to us. Together, we can harness this historic transition. Doing so will require us to get uncomfortable, embrace technology and invert our current paradigms and mindsets every step of the way.

***

We believe in hearing and learning from others. We would love to hear your reflections, insights and comments in this linked document.

Web3 is giving us the opportunity to rewrite how groups of people come together and do things in the world. But are we importing a core concept from our existing paradigm without realising it? A concept that if it does find its way into the fabric of web3 might see us recreating our traditional centralising structures - the very structures we are so fervently trying to shake off?

How entity thinking became our dominant model.

400 years ago, the creation of the limited liability company (with the formation of the Dutch and English East India Companies) laid down the template for the modern company. "Legal personhood, permanent capital, transferable shares, separation of ownership and management, and limited liability" defined its status as an entity structurally separate from the people involved in it. Over the past 400 years this has become the basic template upon which all of our capitalist world has been built.

It can go by many names depending on where you are in the world. But whether it’s called a Limited Company, an LLC, a Corporation or some other variation on the theme, it is all essentially the same structure that was laid down in the 1600s. The company has become the basic building block of modern commerce and almost all of the development of modern society has been driven by it.

A company is, at its heart, a way of organising a network of participants in a highly coordinated and profitable way. By putting different participants into well-defined categories (investors, employees, suppliers, customers etc) the company can create a role for each to play that will benefit each and benefit the company. If it works, the company wins. And the more scale it can generate by doing this, like building giant factories and workforces, the more efficiencies it can create and the more it wins. This is the basic formula that is repeated across the globe.

In this system the company is the central entity: we invest in the company, we work for the company, we sell to the company we buy from the company. The company is always at the centre coordinating its network.

Because most of the modern world is built on the back of this model, "entity thinking" is an inescapable part of our context. Whether it's a company, a non-profit, social enterprise, university or a nation state, we can't help but orient around entities. This is programmed deep into us and our systems.

Entity thinking is woven all the way through our legal system. As soon as we try to do anything practical, we need a formal entity. Anything to do with money, compliance with regulations, transacting with customers-everything requires us to centralise around some sort of structured entity to contain our activities.

It’s also deep in our psychology, we feel it viscerally. We've all had that experience when our thing becomes a Thing. That feeling when our amorphous collection of intention, ideas and people gets instantiated as a company, a non-profit, a DAO... an entity. All of a sudden it seems more solid, more real, more possible and more valuable than just the sum of our collected thoughts and actions.

The entity becomes our psychological anchor and the lack of an entity to anchor our thinking makes us feel untethered and a bit lost.

DAOs are reproducing entity thinking.

Incredible work is happening in DAO governance amidst an explosion of innovation on how to coordinate collective activities. Entity thinking, however, is a continuous influence on DAO design and governance and it undermines the potential that has drawn us here.

We constantly talk about the network as being the important thing, but we can’t help backsliding into focusing on the DAO as an entity and, as a result, ever more time, energy, cost and risk gets tied up in governing the entity.

Entity thinking is bound up in the concepts of assets and their need to be owned by something. Orienting DAOs around the concept of treasuries and protocols (as assets) draws us into thinking of a DAO as an entity, with assets that need to be protected and managed.

For all our talk of "stewardship" as a deeper concept, we can't help but collapse into focusing way too much on who’s in charge of the entity and its assets.

Even as we decentralise DAO decision-making via proposal voting, if we are just decentralising the governance of an inherently centralising concept we are repeating this historical pattern and missing the bigger web3 opportunity.

If anything, the success of DAOs has served to exacerbate the tendency towards entity thinking, due to the fact that many DAOs have treasuries that are out of all proportion with the current value that exists in their networks. This distortion makes it almost impossible for a DAO’s treasury (as a centralised asset) not to have an outsized gravitational pull.

The value exists in the DAO network, not in the DAO entity.

If we can stop collapsing into this subtle trap of entity thinking, we can see decentralised autonomous organisations in a much more profound way, as decentralised autonomous networks. As centerless networks that organise themselves. As coordinated flows of resources across a network towards some animating goal.

We need design that recognises DAO networks as what they are: groups of actors (people and organisations) who are coordinating their collective resources towards some shared intent. Their value is represented in real-time as the resources in the network (time, skills, technology, capital etc) plus the way it is being coordinated toward their goals in high leverage ways.

Our fixation on treasury assets and protocols as assets is leading us to miss that the incredible potential of web3 can only be realised when networks are set free.

When they are not squeezed through a centralising entity frame, three critical properties become possible for DAO networks:

1. High-scale - They are capable of generating the kind of high-leverage scale-economies that companies have used to power the last 400 years of progress.

2. Adaptive - They can innovate. They can be adaptive and evolve, form and re-form in unique and powerful ways. Unlike companies, along with leveraging scale they can also be highly creative, experimental and responsive to change.

3. Sensing - All of this scale and innovation can be driven by a broader and deeper sensing of what is needed beyond the narrow set of needs that a company is designed to serve (i.e., maximising shareholder value). DAO networks can genuinely serve the larger needs of the ecosystems they inhabit.

These three qualities hold the potential of what web3 can offer the world, but their actualisation is by no means guaranteed. If we continue to pass everything through an entity thinking filter as our underlying framing, we are more likely to get the heartbreak of more of the same… a world where high-leverage, high-scale things are dominated by centralising power and profit motives and where the work of moving the world to a better future is back as a low-leverage, low-scale side project for humanity.

Fractal DAO design can take us somewhere better.

If we lean into thinking about DAO networks as coordinated flows of resources towards a goal, and not as centralising entities, then the only real way for this to work is using fractal dynamics. Just as in biological systems, we need DAO networks that can:

• Spin up versions of themselves out of themselves

• Constantly form, reform and deform

• Exercise radical freedom combined with powerful interdependence

Fractal DAO network design is leading us to ask questions like:

• What is a minimum viable DAO network structure?

• What primitives and tools would make it simple for networks to spin up useful fractals of themselves?

• How can a treasury be a distributed function across a network and not a centralising force?

• How can part of a network reform into a new structure that fully represents the value embodied by that part of the network?

• How can tokens (meta-governance, treasury, reserve currencies) work across fractal networks to maintain powerful but flexible interdependence - governance, incentives and leverage?

There is a lot more to say about fractal design in DAOs and also a bunch of folks doing interesting work to answer some of these questions. Some promising examples include:

• Modular Politics

• Metagov

• Gnosis Guild

• Orca Protocol

“DAO” as a verb, not a thing.

It’s also true that thinking about DAOs as complex networks is probably what we all think we are doing already. But entity thinking is deeply ingrained and subtle and will keep exerting its gravity on what we are designing and building. We need to be aware, moment by moment, of when we might be collapsing back into entity thinking, otherwise its centralising power will just keep sneaking back in again and again.

Maybe part of this is a reorientation of our language. Maybe it's "DAO" as a verb. The ”organisation” in DAO does not refer to an entity, but to the act of organising.

To DAO, or DAOing, is for a network to autonomously organise itself in a decentralised way. And what we call “DAO” is just the collection of coordinating functions that show up in a network/community so that it can achieve its goals.

Perhaps this reframing will help keep us oriented towards coordinating value flows across networks and away from legacy ideas and entity thinking.

Article Series

• Next: Scale and levers

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edition://0x04E6d8401ec2AB3F2Bc2164Be1D8f74BBc1b891C?editionId=0

These limited editions by the wildly talented Brazilian artist Roberlan Paresqui express our hope and opportunity for the future. Each edition is an emblem of your commitment to that future and your role in creating it. In addition to the NFT, collectors will also receive an allocation of $SPRB*, and unique, enduring status in SuperBenefit’s history. All proceeds will go to a shared treasury, governed by the community, for the purposes of advancing our mission.

Here We Are

Humanity's greatest strength is our ability to collaborate and coordinate with each other.

From the earliest hunter-gatherer communities, to city and nation states, to networked global economies, it's collaboration and coordination that's lifted us from the savannah to the very stars.

Over the millennia humans have developed systems to enable, restrict, and shape that collaboration and coordination. Systems of language, systems of power, systems of government, systems of trade, systems of education, systems of culture, systems of production, and systems of technology... Systems upon systems, inheriting the values of the systems they are built on top of. Often these are values of control, of power, of profit maximization, of privileging one group of people at the expense of others and maintaining the status quo.

As technology has supercharged these systems, they have given us a greater and greater ability to influence our world. Right now our current systems of collaboration and coordination are taking us beyond our planetary boundaries and our society to the brink of disaster. Our greatest strength threatens our very existence.

These systems are so enmeshed in our lives that we do not even recognize them. Not because they are hidden, but because they are ubiquitous. They are water and we are fish. And like water to fish, these systems shape us.

And yet, our history is littered with systems we've outgrown. Often it's a new technology that enables transition.. Something better is developed – the wheel, the arrow, the printing press, the telephone – and old systems fail, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. Changing systems is what we humans do.

So here we are, in 2022, with an opportunity to make deep and radical change.

Web3 is a socio-technical transition and is creating powerful new infrastructures. These new operating systems are enabling people to reimagine how they organize, create, and act, and to privilege different values. However, this opportunity is emergent, and the nature of its evolution will be contingent on many factors, influences, and choices.

We have a rare chance to reframe and do better. A rare invitation to change the paradigm.

We Need to Make Better Faster

SuperBenefit exists to embed better values into society’s deepest systems, and to accelerate the arrival of a better future.

To understand the significance of the change that web3 offers, it is helpful to look at Donella Meadows’ outline of places to intervene in a system:

Optimizing the parameters of an existing system

When it comes to change, most of our established institutional world focuses on tweaking the parameters of an existing system: the things that can be adjusted by policymakers, like taxes, subsidies, and standards. These are safe moves that are simple optimizations but avoid changing the inherent characteristics or design of the system they govern. In web3, these kinds of changes are like adjusting the reward rate in an OHM fork: simple optimizations of the existing system.

Changing the dynamics of existing systems

One level down are changes to interactions between elements of the system in ways that change the dynamics of that system. In the established world, this might be adding real-time financial data and machine learning to small business loan approvals and ratings, opening up new categories of who might be eligible and how quickly they can receive a loan. In web3, this is like what Klima (in collaboration with Toucan) did by applying an OHM fork to the voluntary carbon offset market to drive both the demand and price of carbon credits.

Designing new systems

Going deeper, we start tapping into the opportunity to design new systems. In the established, institutional world, this is uncomfortable territory because it invites change. This might be a structural innovation like universal childcare or universal basic income. In web3 we start to get at the more profound opportunities that arise from the ability to design new information flows, systems, and the power to enable self-organization. The ability to use tokens to enable and prove ownership, and incentivize participation, simultaneously at scales of a few people in a team to a global community of thousands, has opened entirely new possibilities.

Examples of this include communities like KrauseHouse that reimagine entire industries from a perspective of collective ownership and governance. In their case, what started as an idea to pool together to buy an NBA team has spread to reimagining how professional sport could be managed by bringing together fans, players, and other stakeholders, fundamentally changing the flows of value and control. If players deliver the value and fans provide the revenue, now that collectives can pool capital together from around the world, what is the value that individual owners bring? What could scouting and player development look like if every person at every local basketball court, game, and tournament could stake a bet on the brightest stars they see for the chance to prove “I knew them when…”? Once we glimpse how one component of the system might change for the better, everything becomes open to reimagination. And that attracts a talent pool unrivaled by any organization.

Changing the paradigm from which new systems emerge

Finally, the most powerful places to intervene are at the level of intent: the goals of the system, the mindset out of which the system arises, and the power to transcend paradigms. This gets us to the core implications and promise of web3.

The potential to intervene at this level arises from the technology itself - distributed ledger technology (DLT). A core feature of public DLTs are transparency and a verifiable history of transactions and ownership. When people come together to do something it often involves pooling, allocating, and governing resources. For the first time, on DLTs like Ethereum, every transaction related to those resources is visible and everyone who holds that resource can be included in deciding how those resources are governed. These fundamental properties unlock whole worlds of possibility.

This simple change has profound implications for how we make decisions around resources. It’s like making an organization’s bank account public. Recognizing that every transaction is open to scrutiny translates into pressure for transparent governance from the beginning. And when core infrastructures are governed by those who use them, those users can ensure their values and interests are served.

Another feature of web3 is the default to and dependency on open source licensing. While seeing the code is essential to building trust in the underlying ledger itself, allowing code to be copied is essential to demonstrating commitment to community and permissionless evolution of the ecosystem.

Combined, this creates the conditions that any community that comes together does so with the expectation of transparency and democratic governance. Inherent in this is the recognition that if those expectations are violated, community members could simply copy the code and move on. Now, what gets built by one, can be built on by others, layering and evolving new foundations for collective benefit at an accelerating pace.

With the foundations in place for a radical shift in power toward the collective instead of the few, we have the opportunity to reimagine society. What that society looks like is up to us. What will we choose?

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Embedding Universal Abundance Into the Foundations of Our Future

The combination of these enabling technologies and values hold promise for a new set of societal systems, infrastructure, and institutions. As a socio-technical transition, they present the opportunity to flip our civilization onto a new path, abandoning the limitations of our old paradigm for new ones fit for the complexity of the world we live in today.

For those of us in SuperBenefit, it is clear that a transition is underway. How it happens and where we end up though, is far from certain.

SuperBenefit’s purpose is to embed universal abundance into the core infrastructure of the future.

For us, universal abundance includes and requires the interdependence and interplay of the following properties:

• Equitable access to opportunity, support, services, and resources.

• Regenerative and distributive economies.

• Self-determination, rights, and sovereignty of identity.

• Care and conservation of all life, ecosystems, knowledge, and cultures.

More specifically, our mission is to develop the social and financial flywheels that enable invention, investment, and acceleration of a better world.

Over the past several months, we’ve been mapping potential pathways towards these goals. This is where you come in.

The Invitations to Act

Artists, information and communication designers, developers, governance pros, process experts, systems designers, defi architects and engineers, facilitators, sense-makers, story-tellers, and futures explorers – welcome!

There is much to do, and we’re ready. SuperBenefit’s governance structure, community onboarding, and project squads are already at work. We invite you to join, in one or more of the following ways.

Invitation 1: Mapping pathways to the future

When we talk about better futures, the transformational potential of web3, and the systems we need to change, what do we really mean? Building on our Theory of Change, we’ll co-create landscapes which help:

1. Imagine and illustrate the futures we believe are possible.

2. Explore the ideas and inventions that can shift trajectories towards those futures.

3. Make sense of the greatest opportunities and priorities for change.

4. Design how SuperBenefit develops its flywheels.

This first invitation focuses on creating a landscape for where we want to go - ‘Map 1: imagining better futures’. This first map will also help us learn how to design and coordinate subsequent map-making rounds. You can see the initial thinking on the work we’re preparing here. Let’s get mapping, together.

Invitation 2: Building capacity and interdependence through governance

The design of systems of governance that enable self-management and organization are themselves critical infrastructure for the world ahead and our role in it. In this critical moment, how can we leverage this budding infrastructure to strengthen our common bonds, resource our interdependence, and build our collective influence? We have fertile ground to work with. Let’s plant new seeds for what we all need.

Invitation 3: Creating a soul-bound portal to a better future

Let’s go beyond basic NFTs and design a soul-bound portal to creating this future together. Let’s imagine ways to use this portal to bring us together, engage our talents and skills, swarm and adventure together in ways that get the new flywheels of our future spinning. What if we, as a collective, shared a contract that we could use to build our networks, and design and inspire action. What if we combined the idea of FWB’s Membership Portal, with dhof’s Corruptions? Let’s make better faster. (LMBF, *OK)!

Invitation 4: A metacurrency for metagovernance, values, and acceleration

We are in a pivotal moment where our core infrastructures and the values they adopt and enact are in play. What if we had a metacurrency that made it easier for anyone to be invested in our future? What if we used it to build our collective influence over that future coming to be? What protocols and primitives can we employ and create to accelerate the shift in power, resources, and values that we are collectively working to build and bring to life. What if applied the spirit of (3,3) and the power of BTRFLY to the assets of the future? If the future we want is more valuable for everyone, let’s unlock that value to help us build it faster.

Invitation 5: A commitment to bridging old into better

We can’t just rely on the new; we have to build a bridge to welcome the old. Let’s build that bridge to engage companies, institutions, and endowments that want to be part of this future, but who are still accountable to the old world they created. While they may be slow to change themselves, let’s give them a way to meaningfully demonstrate and contribute to the new future emerging here. What if we expanded on our soul-bound portal above but designed it for institutions? Let’s make it easy for them to commit their resources and take actions that unblock and accelerate the transition to a better future. We are all, after all, in this together.

Invitation 6: The look, feel, and story of a better future.

Designers and illustrators, video makers and motion artists, the story, voice and character of SuperBenefit are waiting to be defined. To communicate the seriousness of our intent and the joy with which we're pursuing it, we need to establish a brand language and identity that's uniquely of this movement. Opportunities for design and storytelling abound, from the Theory of Change, to identity design, to web design, to NFTs, and so much more. This is an invitation to help design and tell the story of a global movement.

Over the last several months we’ve been preparing the foundations to extend these invitations and welcome you as part of this journey. If an invitation appeals, you belong.

It’s time.

Let’s make better faster.

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If you’ve read this far, come and check us out. Our governance structure is clearly defined and open. Projects and squads are underway.

Come, let’s make better faster.

* $SPRB is governance token with a 10M supply. NFT collectors will receive an allocation after the collections have sold out in the following amounts: 1,000 $SPRB per Fast NFT; 2,500 $SPRB per Faster NFT; 10,000 $SPRB per Fastest NFT. $SPRB is purely a governance token and has no financial value. Join us in discord to learn more.