NextMeta

What does it take to market the future? Amanda Cassatt, founder of Serotonin and former ConsenSys CMO, shares her tactics that helped build the biggest developer community in crypto and put Ethereum on the map - as well as her insights from shaping the future of crypto marketing.

Topics:

- From decentralized media to Ethereum and ConsenSys
- Early marketing strategies for Ethereum
- The evolution of crypto marketing
- ICOs to the current VC-dominated landscape
- Serotonin's Buffet-like business model
- The need for transparent and fair token launches

What if the future of cities isn't about building bigger metropolises, but creating tight-knit neighborhoods where people actually know each other? 🤔

In this episode, we explore how Cabin is building a "network city", aiming to combat loneliness and the rising costs of living in big cities, to create more fulfilling ways of living in our increasingly disconnected world.

We also talk about:
- From remote residencies to thriving local communities
- Differences between network cities and network states
- The Neighborhood Accelerator program
- Potential uses of crypto in local communities, neighborhoods & towns
- Community currencies and reciprocity economies
- Historical inspirations for building societies

The biggest regulatory threat to crypto is not Gary Gensler and the dreaded SEC. Why? We‘ll let Gabriel tell you all about it. Other than that, he‘ll be talking about upgrading DAOs with BORGs, about the whole suite of tools being built by MetaLeX and about his crypto lawyer journey of making the traditional legal systems obsolete.

"We can create our own legal structures and we can show to the world that our combinations of tech and agreements are better than anything that existed before."

Wait, WTF are BORGs, you ask? They‘re autonomous legal entities that work alongside DAOs to provide accountability and constrained operation. Overall, GAbriel shares how MetaLeX is building both legal and technical solutions to make crypto and law work together in a cypherpunk way.

"Bitcoin kind of separated money from the state, Ethereum kind of separated finance from the state. I think the third frontier is separating law from the state."

Gabriel also highlights a major regulatory concern in the crypto space that he believes is massively underappreciated: the CFTC's actions against DeFi protocols and the legal implications of cases like Avi Eisenberg's. He emphasizes the importance of creating crypto-native legal structures that preserve the core values of crypto.

"The CFTC has really gone after DeFi protocols over leverage as well as what are called swaps... if all these things are required by law to be intermediated, crypto is absolutely decimated."

Things discussed:

- Gabriel‘s background in corporate M&A

- Why law can be interesting

- Mattereum's approach to tokenization and legal compliance

- Introduction to MetaLeX and Borgs

- Evolution of decentralized organizations and modularization

- Separation of law and state

- Overview of MetaLeX's current projects

- Discussion of major regulatory concerns - Potential of crypto to create better legal and financial structures

In this episode, we dive into the evolution of DAO communities and events with Yalor and Stacey. From the early days of MetaCartel, MCON & MetaCamp, to the ambitious vision of MetaCampus, we talk about the importance of in-person gatherings and building the social fabric.

What are MetaCamp and MetaCampus? Why choose Costa Rica for building a Web3 village, and why choose Detroit for MCON III? And most importantly, why investing in relationships might be more valuable than chasing the next memecoin?

“More financial games are not what will move the world and save us from impending collapse." - Yalor

These are some of the questions and answers discussed.

Overall:

• Origins of MCON and MetaCamp

• The GM Bus project

• Evolution of MetaCartel and its impact on the ecosystem

• The concept and development of MetaCampus

• The importance of community-building in Web3

• Why Detroit as the new location for MCON

• Doing conferences differently

• The social layer and relationship-building at MetaCamp

• Reputation and identity in decentralized networks

• The value of in-person gatherings

  
  

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to MetaCamp, an offshoot of MCON that offers a more intimate atmosphere in Costa Rica. The guests explain how this event has evolved into MetaCampus, a permanent facility designed to host various Web3 events and foster deeper connections within the community. 👀

Throughout the episode, they emphasize the importance of building real relationships and communities, arguing that these connections, rather than financial gains, will be crucial in moving the world forward.

"I think it is around these real relationships and real communities actually forming a container for growth and progress." - Stacey

In this episode of NextMeta, we interviewed 0xJustice from the Polygon governance team about DAO design, rganizational efficiency, and a new tokenization mechanism.

0xJustice shares his journey from IT, team management and org design, to getting hyped about DAOs. As opposed to most DAOists, he is less interested in governance and decentralization - what drew him to DAOs is the idea that they are programmable organizations, which can be made more effective than current day corps.

The conversation covers a wide range of topics, from team topologies to the exciting new Quadratic Accelerator (q/acc) project.

Topics discussed:

• 0xJustice's background in IT and transition to Web3

• Efficient DAO design principles

• Team topologies and organizational structure

• The Quadratic Accelerator (q/acc) project

• Bonding curves and project tokenization

• Modern Monetary Theory and its relevance to crypto

• Polygon governance and upcoming initiatives

He emphasizes the importance of streamlining teams and eliminating handoffs to increase efficiency and ownership. He also discusses the concept of team topologies and the need for programmable org design in DAOs. He concludes by mentioning the governance hub on Polygon and the use of governance legos to create flexible and adaptable governance structures.

"It's the programmability that is interesting to me."

In this conversation, peth and 0xJustice discuss Boundaryless, a consultancy media brand that produces research and certification programs on platformification and team topologies - building DAOs since before DAOs.

"If you're not the platform, you're unconsciously operating on someone else's platform."

They also delve into the Quadratic Accelerator (QAC), a project incubated in Giveth that aims to tokenize projects and create a better way to do grants. They explore the concept of token economics, inflation, and the challenges of driving value to tokens.

"The point of DAOs is not governance, that's kind of a side effect... The game is like, what's the mechanism? What's the value accrual mechanism?"

Links:

Griff Green! An OG regen crypto veteran and a serial founder. From chemical engineering and being one of the first people ever to get a degree in digital currencies, to whitehat hacking The DAO, founding Giveth, Commons Stack, DappNode, a Burning Man camp called Camp Decentral, etc. etc.

Griff has no lack of projects, but he does have a lack of time - and even still, he found some to come on the NextMeta podcast to talk about Giveth‘s endgame of helping nonprofits bootstrap token economies, their collaboration with Polygon (q/acc) and a few other things he‘s working on.

We go through the evolving landscape of decentralized economies, public goods funding, and the revolutionary potential of crypto to reshape societal structures.

Topics:

• Evolution of Giveth and Commons Stack

• Token Engineering Commons

• Grant programs misalignment

• Quadratic Accelerator (q/acc) program

• Bootstrapping token economies

• Unicorn.eth wallet for easy and scamless crypto UX

• Environmental impact round and Givbacks

• Unicorn.eth, DeVouch and Pairwise

Griff Green discussed the value of nonprofits as alternatives to government, emphasizing the role of public goods and the potential for creating systems that recognize their value. Griff explained how bonding curves solve liquidity issues, making them essential for tokenizing smaller economies and value.

"Nonprofits are actually the free market replacement for governments."

In terms of grant programs, we talked about the flawed system where projects receive tokens, which they have to sell to cover costs, creating a negative cycle. Griff introduced the Quadratic Accelerator (q/acc) program as a potential solution.

The q/acc program allows projects to start their own token economies, collateralized by Matic (or other grant program tokens). Projects gain liquidity and earn fees, while donors get liquid tokens. This system incentivizes projects to stay within an ecosystem rather than hopping between grant programs.

"I believe we can create an economic model that can appreciate the value of that clean river."

Griff also shared his new wallet project, Unicorn.eth, aimed at improving UX and safety in Web3, DeVouch, a project using Ethereum Attestation Service for people to vouch of projects, and Pairwise, a voting tool that‘s meant to make voting more fun.

With his ultimate aim of replacing traditional government mechanisms with more efficient, decentralized systems - Griff offers insights into mechanisms that could redefine how we fund and govern our communities. From bonding curves to quadratic funding, and from improving crypto UX to launching sustainable token economies.

"If we want to replace governments, we still need to fund public goods."

Links:

Cooper Turley, also known as "the music NFTs guy," joins NextMeta to talk about his humble beginnings, ascent, the evolution of crypto, onchain music, memecoins, celebcoins and building a web3 record label.

The meta he keeps going on about is the one of onchain music and the future of artist-fans relationships that keep giving 👀

Topics:

• Cooper's journey from music business to crypto back to music

• The rise and fall of music NFTs

• The role of record labels in Web3

• Celebrity tokens and memecoins

• Building Coop Records and Sonata

  
  

From studying the music business to dropping everything and joining crypto full time from his parents basement, over MetaCartel DAO, dozens of DeFi and NFT projects and back to the music business - Cooper has done it all.

"Crypto is this technology that can empower anyone in the world."

The main piece of advice you can gain from Cooper, is to just follow your interests and create value where you go. Despite not having any technical skills, Cooper found his way, contributed everywhere he went and found himself climbing the ladders fast.

By consistently sharing about his journey and learnings through DAOs, DeFi and NFTs, Cooper rose up in CT fame to gather 150k on Twitter, no small feat.

But more importantly, by consistently learning, contributing and sharing, Cooper catapulted himself to exactly where he wanted to be - in LA, building his own Web3 record label and helping artists make more $ as well as connect with their fans.

"Be early and be consistent, and good things are going to happen."

Whether you're an onchain enthusiast or a music lover, this episode will help you uncover the evolving landscape of digital assets, artist empowerment, the opportunities of redefining artist-fan relationships and the potential of (non-shitty) celebrity tokens, as well as what it takes to build a successful web3 record label!

Links:

Primavera de Filippi, a legal scholar and researcher, discusses the governance of blockchain technologies and the challenges they pose. She explains the concept of governance by design, which involves embedding governance structures into technological architectures. Primavera also introduces one of her past projects, Plantoids, blockchain-based life forms that replicate and reproduce autonomously. 

She highlights the legal questions surrounding these entities and the need for recognition and regulation. Primavera explores the potential of CoordiNations, networks of collectives that mutualize resources and engage in collective action. She emphasizes the importance of fostering cooperation and tackling global problems through decentralized governance.

"A CoordiNation is not a community, a CoordiNation if anything is a community of communities. It's a network of collectives...And so everyone becomes more incentivized to contribute to the whole because they are all intertwined with one another."

In this episode:

- Collaborative economies

- Governance by design

- Plantoids

- Legal recognition and regulation of DAOs

- CoordiNations

In this episode, TokenBrice discusses the challenges and shortcomings of DAO governance. He emphasizes the concept of governance minimization, where automation and incentivization are preferred over relying on governance which can be twisted to serve individual or external needs for profit.

He talks about shortcomings of plutocratic DAOs but also shares his experience as a member of the GHO Liquidity Committee, raising concerns about the selection process for committee members or delegates - and the prevalence of conflicts of interest in DeFi DAO governance landscape with the rise of DAO politicians that aren’t much different to real world politicians.

On the bright side, he talks about transparency & the ability to track funds as significant improvements to governance in the real world - but stands firmly behind the idea of governance minimization. The episode concludes with the introductions of the DeFi Collective, a nonprofit association supporting growth and resilience of DeFi protocols.

Takeaways

• Governance minimization & automation

• Pitfalls & conflicts of interests in plutocracy & committees

• Professionalization of governance

• Conflicts of interest

• DAOs bleeding money

• Transparency and tracking of funds

• The DeFi Collective helping DeFi protocols for free

In this episode, we're excited to welcome Sero, a key player in MetaGame, whose unique journey from a high school dropout to a tech and Web3 enthusiast offers a fresh perspective on self-learning, autonomy and the future of decentralized systems.

Sero’s story is not just about overcoming traditional educational hurdles but also about finding his path in the dynamic and often challenging world of freelancing & Web3. His experience with various programming languages, his approach to learning, and his transition into MetaGame showcase a blend of determination, skill, and adaptability.

- Sero’s unconventional educational journey and career experiences.

- How the Odin project and COVID-19 led to a breakthrough in learning

- Entry into the world of crypto through a DeFi project

- Sero’s rank in MetaGame and his perspective on its working environment

- Importance of a product mindset versus an open-source approach

- MetaGame's culture, meritocracy, and financial sustainability

- The role of autonomy & mentorship in personal & professional development

"I always like to learn by myself and kind of be my own leader. It's about not wanting to waste my life... if I want to do something, I try at least. It's a habit that you have to build."

We uncovered layers behind a self-taught tech enthusiast's journey. Sero’s story is a testament to the power of self-motivation, the importance of adapting to changing learning environments, and the potential impact of mentorship. Sero’s insights into MetaGame and the broader tech landscape provide valuable lessons for anyone navigating this dynamic space.

Resources:

In this episode, we dive in with Trent Van Epps, a non-technical core contributor to Ethereum and the founder of Protocol Guild. Trent shares his journey from studying to be an architect to working at the Ethereum Foundation & founding the Protocol Guild.

Currently serving on the Protocol Support team, overseeing network upgrades & maintenance; Trent highlights the need for non-technical people to make it all gel. He also outlines the decentralized governance & compensation mechanics of the Protocol Guild as well as the criticism he’s faced about it.

"Time weighting is one of the most important aspects because we're able to sidestep a lot of the... things that members are responsible for managing."

Overall, peth & Trent cover everything from the original Mist demo back in 2016 that got them both excited about Ethereum, all the way to the time-weighted compensation inside the Protocol Guild, contributor retention, decentralized protocol development funding, public goods, their favourite applications of Ethereum & their long term hopes for it.

"I think there's still something to build, there's still a lot of work to do to shape this blockchain substrate that we're all constructing together."

Key Topics:

• Mist Demo 2016

• Architecture to Blockchain Transition

• Protocol Guild Initiative

• Decentralized Applications & Usecases

• Evolving Blockchain Design

• Protocol Guild Origins

• Funding Model

Resources:

Hugi is an Icelandic entrepreneur & technologist involved in participatory political movements & decentralized organizations for over 15 years. He was a founding member of the Swedish Pirate Party, he helped build the participatory festival Borderland & currently works on open source platforms like Open Collective & Cobudget, empowering collaborative communities.

Hugi shares his early experience co-founding the Swedish Pirate Party, one of the first political movements organised as an online swarm. After that, he got involved with the Borderland festival. He saw it as an experimental sandbox for new coordination methods in decentralized decision-making.

Besides putting on the most decentralized festival for thousands of people, people of Borderland also built tools for doing so, one of which became Cobudget - an online tool for decentralized budgeting.

He hopes for more cross-pollination between DAOs & civil society organizations. DAOs can learn governance models from 100-years of experience. On the other hand, DAOs need to start interacting with & prove real-world impact before being taken seriously by the 99%. He suggests people build web3 solutions for civil society needs, as a bridge between the spaces.

“I realized that in a lot of these communities that are running open source software or DAOs, there's not a single person that has any experience from regular civil society organizations, because if they did, they would already have the blueprints in their heads of how this can look, because the blueprints are already there."  - Hugi

Key Topics:

• Origins of the Swedish Pirate Party & swarm organizing

• Borderland festival as a decentralized sandbox

• Self-organization and emergent leadership

• Advice process for decentralized decision-making

• Participatory budgeting with Cobudget

• Learning from historic worker cooperatives

• Real-world impact and adoption challenges

• Bridging web3 and mainstream communities

• Technocratic elitism in web3 spaces

• Hybridizing DAOs and traditional nonprofits

Resources:

This time we got Stephen Reid - a teacher, technologist and coach who is involved in a variety of projects related to web3, metacrisis, metamodernism, psychedelics & personal development. He has taught numerous courses including Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance, DAOs, Web3, and AI. Currently he is studying for a certificate in machine learning and artificial intelligence from UC Berkeley.

Steven starts by describing his background and interests. He first became interested in metamodernism and the metacrisis around 2016-2017 by listening to thinkers like Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall. He sees himself as a bridge builder between different communities like web3 and psychedelics that have more in common philosophically than people realize.

Peth & Stephen discuss the concepts of metamodernism and the metacrisis. The metacrisis examines the common drivers behind global crises like climate change, inequality, and more. It's about systems thinking and understanding how everything is interconnected. Metamodernism focuses more on inner development of individuals with the idea that if more people are self-actualized, it will be easier to address systemic issues.

Stephen shares his insights and experiences, exploring the interconnectedness of global challenges and how understanding underlying generator functions can pave the way to solving multiple crises simultaneously.

Some key ideas covered:

- The multipolar trap - how even good people can be driven to bad things when coordination systems fail. For example, countries not wanting to be the first to decarbonize their economy out of fear they'll fall behind competitively.

- The importance of both inner development and compassion as well as designing better external coordination mechanisms. You need both personal growth and systemic solutions.- Concepts from integral theory & the book Reinventing Organizations - which distribute ownership and decision-making rather than having rigid hierarchies.

- Practices like authentic relating that help groups attune to collective intelligence and make decisions together.

They discuss the challenges of governance in DAOs. Having tokens be fully transferrable often leads to plutocracy, but more experiments are happening with reputation-based voting and other models. The goal is distributing power but avoiding the issues of both "one person one vote" and pure token-based control.

He emphasizes the need for people in the web3 space to focus on how their work really contributes to human thriving, especially with the urgency of interconnected crises. Overall it was a wide-ranging conversation about systemic issues and personal growth.

Metacrisis thinking is joined-up thinking, holistic, and systems thinking. It's about understanding the interventions in any domain and how they can affect other domains. We should create a culture where everyone is aware of the possibility of downstream consequences and takes responsibility for understanding and mitigating them - Steven Reed

Key Topics:

- Systems thinking and the meta-crisis

- Coordination problems like multipolar traps

- Inner development, compassion, and practices

- Distributed ownership models for organizations

- Projects related to the meta-crisis

Resources:

In this episode, we welcome Zakku of Coordinape, a platform for decentralized compensation where people acknowledge & reward each other's contributions.

Malcolm & Intentions

In this episode of the MetaView Podcast, we welcome Malcolm Ocean; a goal-setter, developer & a solopreneur who’s been building Intend for the better half of a decade.

Reflecting on his own experience of realizing the power of setting intentions & pursuing values-aligned projects, Malcolm shares his journey of exploring intentionality & his motivation behind starting Intend and how it helps people gain clarity & realize their goals.

His overall idea is that motivation is not something that needs to be forced but simply recognized & channeled, highlighting the importance of understanding what blocks or inhibits motivation.

Why Intend

He primarily built Intend for himself & his friends whom he was helping with goal-setting, but the thing quickly took off to become his primary source of income.

Malcom also explores the differences between Intend, habit-tracking, and to-do apps, noting how Intend focuses on long term goals & fresh daily intentions rather than backlogged tasks or recurring habits. Qualitative reflections instead of metrics.

Like most guests of MetaView, Malcolm emphasizes the importance of playing win-win games & creating collaborative cultures to maximize positive outcomes for everyone involved.

Win-win Games & Self-energizing Teams

Malcolm’s interest stretch far beyond Intend and into team dynamics, consciousness & culture. By showing people how to play better games, he believes that a shift towards collaborative cultures can lead to a more fulfilling and harmonious society.

They go on to explore the idea of self-energizing teams, where individuals find collaborations that align with their own goals & where the motivation becomes effortless.

Highlighting the importance of accountability & the role of financial stakes, the episode concludes with a reflection on the role of clearly set goals & the misconception that monetary incentives are the primary driver of motivation.

"The moment you think you might want to get yourself to do something, you already have motivation to do it. Instead, focus on how to allow yourself to do it."

Some of the topics

• Power of intentions

• Choosing goals & the importance of deciding what not to do

• Recognizing and channeling motivation

• Fractal reviews and the satisfaction of tracking progress

• Leveraging strengths & collaborations

• Self-energizing meta teams & effortless motivation

• The role of stakes in goal commitment

• The role of money in motivation

Resources:

In this MetaView episode, peth talked to Rob Morris; a metamodernist, a game b player &  a serial entrepreneur since the dotcom era - currently running FunDAOmental & Prismatik as well as advising & investing in several other projects along the way. His passion for technology and people, cooperative coordination and the metacrisis led to a deep conversation on these topics & the role that technology plays for humanity to move towards more positive outcomes.

“At a very high level I think that the way that humans get things done reflects what's advantageous in the environment that we find ourselves in and also in a broad sense reflects a gradual evolution of the perspectives that we collectively hold and how we approach things”, he says. 

Some of the topics:

• Hierarchical coordination vs alignment based coordination

• Coordination by control vs Coordination by alignment

• SaaS software vs protocol style organizations

• Network effect vs protectionism and monopoly, economy of scale

• Coordination tension

• The Mathew effect

• Metacrisis & ways to address it

• Meeting people’s needs to enable collective action

• Sociocracy

• Coordination failures

Resources:

Visa Veerasamy is a prolific writer and creator. With a large list of followers on twitter, he is known for crafting a web of curious exploratory threads as well for being the author of the books Friendly Ambitious Nerd & Introspect. On a mission to spark curiosity, creativity, and prolificacy in the digital age, he is knitting a global network and encouraging other people to chase their curiosity & make friends.

Having grown up in libraries, he thinks of the internet as a grand one, a place with infinite possibilities where you can find people all over the world with the same interests and values. To find them he advises to create, share and dare to be bad at what you do when you’re starting, which will lead to form a cluster of great people thriving together.

It sounds simple because it is - but he has a whole vision around how individuals simply following their interests & making friends will lead to great positive outcomes for the society as a whole, not just individuals doing so.

Some of the topics:

• Becoming a friendly ambitious nerd

• Advice to younger people

• Identity vs Anonimity

• How to be a friendly ambitious nerd

• Why become a friendly ambitious nerd

• Good marketing

Resources:

Simona Pop has been involved with the Ethereum community and DAOs since the early days and recalls the levels of enthusiasm and energy that made her get involved into many different projects in the ecosystem among which are co-founding Bounties Network and organizing Schelling Point, a unconference around coordination, regenerative economics and DeSci. She’s currently the Metagovernance Steward at ENS DAO - among other things.

Some of the topics:

• Bounties Network

• Interoperability vs personal interest

• Biggest lessons over the years

• Creating initiation experiences

• Kernel mentorship

• Schelling Point & lessons learned

• Unconferences

• Biomimicry

• DAOs’ biggest problems

• Standardization & framework for DAOs

Her project, Bounties Network, was about building a bounties platform as a protocol - interoperable. It was also possibly the first Web3 project incentivizing regeneration in the real world by putting bounties on things like beach cleanups. One of the constraints she encountered was the mentality of ownership over collective interests, which complicates the move towards interoperability. A mindset that must go through a process of unlearning to prioritize collaboration, one of her key takeaways from her years in the space.

If you’ve been following Simona on twitter, you might have noticed she likes looking at collaboration & decentralization through the lens of biomimicry, which aims to emulate nature’s processes, forms and ecosystems from the awareness that we as humans are part of a greater network. In this sense she proposes standardization in DAO frameworks & communications, which would be a baseline and  a soil ready for planting that also allows navigation easily and that would organize the circuit of information, resource and decision making.

Resources:

In this episode of Share What You’re Making Chair & Bacon have a chat with Derrick Coleman, who is the community steward at Ethereum Denver as well as a regular contributor on Raid Guild, where his journey in Web3 began.

From there he would make the bridge to his current role, taking care of the health of the community. An appropriate role for him considering it has been precisely the sense of community what has kept him in Web3. “The reason I'm in the space is because there are these communities of people that care for each other and look out for each other because of some shared values or goals. I'm not here for the libertarian not-your-keys-not-your-coin-get-off-my-property vibes. I'm here for the let's make an internet co-op so we can work together and have less extractive value systems sucking out whatever value we create for the sake of the shareholders”.

With that in mind and a strong purpose on education, he’s been aligned with ETH Denver Ethos to buidl, to create the world we live in and shaping its tools and foundations; this is what excites him about bringing together the people and the technology in a cooperative of people that are incentivized to see each other succeed.

“I care first and foremost about the buidling. The only thing you can do with Bitcoin is hold it, so maxis turned that into a meme; you can Hodl aka not sell, but over on Ethereum, which has a smart contract layer, it gets more interesting because you can build code on top of the machine, so instead of Hodl we Buidl interesting projects using that technology, so our entire ecosystem of buidlers buidling their projects is the key thing and the part I'm excited about”.

Some of the topics:

• How he was onboarded to Web3

• How he got into Raid guild and Sporkdao and ETH Denver

• His role on ETH Denver team

• Camp Buidl 

• His take on onboarding

• Code along with Derreck videos

• Lens merch stolen?

• ETH Denver reach

• Some lessons learned and ETH Denver 2024

• Path to ETH Denver 2024 with Infinity Keys

• Buffycorn Ventures

• Projects that started at ETH Denver

Resources:

On this episode of Frontiers of Coordination Peth welcomes artist, philosopher and researcher Travis Wyche. After a couple of years in the Web3 space he considers himself a more culturally focused contributor rather than a technical person even when he spends part of his time doing a variety of research on UXs and developing UI design. The fact is that the interweaving of his skills and interests led to Pluriverse, a transmedia lorecrafting experiment in collective imagineering.

Screaming at punk shows was his first approach to the Moloch meme. Later in life when he entered Web3 he would connect it to Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, an event that in a way funneled him down a rabbit hole of connecting these cultural influences with the technical game theory of coordination. That is what attracted him to the space in the first place: “I'm not really a Degen; I didn't get drawn into crypto through DeFi or anything like that, through the tokens really at all, but more of the high level philosophy, politics, the various kinds of connections to things in my own background as an artist, as a musician, as a community organizer, as an anarchist, as an aging punk. All those kinds of cultural affinities are what brought me in”.

It's from that perspective that he appreciates the meaning of the Moloch meme, known as the god of coordination failure while also associated with child sacrifice among other things. For him,it’s an image that serves as a “memetic filter” for people to understand the potency that image creates for a “community first” kind of orientation. 

Some of the topics:

• His origins in the space

• The rise and fall of the Moloch meme

• Moloch memetic filter

• Individual mindshift for successful coordination

• WTF is Pluriverse

• Pluriverse current projects

• Genres, themes and characters in Pluriverse

• Regen in the space

• Regen beyond crypto

• MetaCrisis

• Intentional communities

• A.I.

Resources:

Will Ruddick is an econo-optimist; in his words. A physicist that got into economics. Experiences such as being in the Peace Corps helped shape his vision around using technology for mutual credit on community groups coming together to produce mutual aid for each other. So he founded Grassroots Economics, a non-profit foundation developing economic empowerment to help communities realize and share their abundance. In this episode he shares with Peth his motivations and experiences with the project.

The proposal is to have communities form a type of agreement on their means of exchange, goods and services that are redeemable from vouchers that can be used in or out of the community. Through blockchain, these vouchers have an expiration built in and the contract holds the legal instruments for it. This type of exchange is actually similar with traditional systems, which in Kenya have not only a rich history but 42 different names to refer to.

For Ruddick this is a basic use case of blockchain that allows creating endogenous instruments in an association. However, in his opinion, for it to succeed there needs to be liability. “When I read the Bitcoin whitepaper and they talk about community currencies this is what I think they're talking about and historically if you look at a lot of the community currency research and all these examples over the years, the ones that were very successful had clear liability; it was clear who was backing this vouchers with what services”. 

Some of the topics:

• How he started Grassroots Economics

• How does Grassroots Economics work

• Adoption of the tech in these communities

• Workshops for collective vision

• Blockchain for accountability

• Limited and trackable liability

• Grassroots Economics spread and outreach 

• Sustainability

• Toughest part on his journey

• Hopes for the future

Resources:

Brandon Norgaard is a researcher, writer and founder of the Enlightened Worldview, a project described in short as a quest to promote peace through societal understanding and inner awareness. In this episode he shares with Peth about the perks of building an organization that will help people improve self-awareness and mindfulness. 

Jim Rutt remembers his days as a businessman, CEO of Network Solutions and CTO of Thomson-Reuters. When he retired in 2001 he went back to his original love: science. He then started working with the Santa Fe Institute as a researcher -where he met Jordan Hall- and eventually became the chairman. It was 2012 when he and some friends started the social movement and philosophical set of ideas known today as Game B. 

In this episode Rutt and Peth dive deep into the movement that aims to create the social operating system for the future, from the early attempts as the Emancipation Party to the current state and possible scenarios.

Rutt recognizes the damage caused by Game A's exponential growth approach of the world while he also acknowledges the process of “bottom-up” culturalization that has to take place first for Game B to succeed. “The Game B turn is to do two things. One is to develop a way of living in the world that fully honors our natural world and actually helps it regenerate from some of the harm that's been done in the late stages of Game A, and does it in a way that is organized around increasing human well-being and puts human well-being central”.

Some of the topics

• Complexity science

• Game A Background

• WTF is Game B?

• Mental Health crisis

• Network technologies

• Building growth inwards vs macro growth

• Game B Communities

• Face-to-face aspect of Game B

• Consumption ratings in the western world

• Failure modes of game B

• Roles in the Game B community

• Bad attractors or scenarios

Resources:

Chair & Bacon are back with a new episode! This time they take us into ETHDenver, with Chair telling us about his experience at the largest blockchain festival in the world.

In this episode Peth has a talk with one of his favorite people in the space to chat about the challenges and the future of DAOs and governance.

Dekan Brown is a developer and a Daoist. He’s one of the founders of DAOHaus, Raid Guild and Metacartel. His work has been focused in governance and community type experiments. This time he shares the lessons and perspectives he’s gained over the last three years working in the crypto space.

"We are basically trying to reinvent the system and get people to think about things differently," he states. In his opinion there’s the idea of digital organizations but the idea of decentralization, resiliency, robustness and anti-capture has been forgotten.

Reflecting on past experiences he shares that avoiding what he calls “operational overhead”, minimizing governance and having a high-level purpose are some of the areas for improvement in DAOs.

“What we should be going for is millions of different kinds of sovereign nations where every person is a citizen of maybe hundreds of thousands of other nations and, as an individual, you have the sovereignty to move wherever you want, to use your money however you want and to form in this groups and understand where the publics goods for this groups are and how are you funding them”.

Some of the topics:

·  DAO narrative pushed in the wrong direction

·  DAO Citizenship

·  Digital corporations vs DAOs

·  Token holders vs community

·  Treasury less DAOs

·  DAO governance

·  Burocratic ingroups and “operational overhead”

·  Setting a purpose and guiding principles

·  Minimizing governance

·  Seasonal leadership changes

·  Periods of reflection and goal setting

·  Voting periods and grace periods

·  Retroactive reviews

·  MolochDAO framework

·  DAO purism vs pragmatism

·  The future of DAOs

Resources:

Just days before starting her 6 week workshop, DAO consultant and co-founder of PricelessDAO Grace Rachmany, talked to Peth about her journey on team management and her perspectives on the ReFi space, decentralized organizations, independence, autonomy & much more..

As someone who has specialized in team management, leadership & governance, she raises a question: How to bring out the best in people and communities?

The structure of a DAO, adequate voting systems and the ability to track your reputation as well as hardware production are some of the proposals she highlights in order to create a self-sufficient system that does not operate by the same rules as the default.

“If it’s just a general movement then you’re missing something. If DAOs can offer us some structure where we could recognize one another, be united under some sort of federated protocol that allows us to communicate, then the question would be ``what do you want to communicate?”

For more nuggets of wisdom, listen to the full episode.

From sunny Croatia to sunny Miami, Peth talks to Aaron Soskin and Stefen Delev from Govern friends with vibes of epic proportions, working on, an open platform that helps DAO contributors to track and record their own work, while enabling communities to value & reward such contributions.

The idea, as they explain, is to make sure that DAO contributors are as autonomous as possible and that the work that they do is owned by them with reputation verified & an option to fork their & other contributions into their own project, if the ideas diverge or contributions grow too much.

“We found that for DAOs to stay autonomous and as decentralized as possible, there needed to be a better way to coordinate work” – explains Soskin. As a response, they developed a protocol not only for tracking contributions but for assigning value.

Besides tracking & rewarding contributions, the whole point is for the contributors to be as autonomous as possible. There will even be measures put in place so organizations can cyclically go from diverging to converging & diverging to converging on a cyclical basis, allowing people to experiment on their own, together evaluate experiments & merge ideas back into strategic goals of the organization - or pursue separate paths if needed.

“This idea –says Delev– of having ownership of your contributions and having a contribution layer that interacts with reputation tools, identity tools or payment tools, etcetera; and combining all this within DAOs opens the doors of governance as based on contribution rather than based on the tokens you buy or the airdrop you got”.

Some of the topics:

• Why tracking contributions
• On-chain contributions
• Govrn protocol
• Layers of verification: records, attestations and assignments
• Experiences with Sourcecred
• Fungible contributions for autonomy and trust
• Autonomy vs alignment in DAOs
• Bootstrapping vs fundraising
• Challenges at Govrn
• Coordination challenges for DAOs
• Centralized vs decentralized governance
• Contribution-based governance

Resources:

Ven is a designer and a general coordinator in several DAOs such as MetaCartel, DAOhaus and Raid Guild, among others. In this episode he shares his views and perspective on pioneering in DAOs and how to expand the frontiers of coordination.

“One thing the community have to do is sustain itself but the other thing is to explore the frontiers”, he shares. “currently there are DAOs that are very tight circles and when people want to pioneer, they have to go outside the circle to do it, which is necessary but also creates difficulty in coordinating”. For him, instead of DAOs being a rigid structure, there need to be protocols and mechanisms within the communities for pioneers to be empowered.

He believes that the future is oriented towards cross-DAO collaboration; however they need to figure out how to coordinate better before they can start coordinating across them.

“We need to be able to go fast and go far together and if DAOs can do that, we can actually start doing really effective governance”.

Some of the topics:

• What is a frontier of coordination in DAOs
• Pioneering in DAOs
• His key take-aways from his work within DAOs
• How to incentivize pioneering and coordination
• Growth vs sustainability
• His view on the future of DAOs: collaborative initiatives
• The use cases for protocols and platforms for DAOs and communities
• MetaOS

Resources:

Back home in The Bahamas after doing several conferences at Austin, New York and Barcelona, Stefen Delev took time to have a casual conversation with Peth.

Stefen came up as being the president of the Caribbean Blockchain Alliance, a NGO that promotes the adoption of blockchain technology in the region mostly through education - eg. with a big event coming up. Other than that, working on projects like PrimeDAO, The DAOist & most recently Govrn, also known throughout the DAOsphere as a man of great vibes.

Some of the topics:

• Challenges for adoption
• His journey into DAOs
• Radical participation in DAOs
• Short term vs long term vision
• Cross-DAO collaboration
• GovrnDAO and contribution management
• The future of DAOs and governance

“I definitely see DAOs being the main point of access for the Caribbean because in a lot of places, pretty much the most part, exchanges are pretty difficult to get access to.” - DAOs making it possible to earn instead of buying.

He currently serves as Growth Leader in Govrn and believes in building cross-DAO collaboration from contributor work.

Resources:

Dawg is a freelance designer & token engineer that has been deep in the Web3 ecosystem since 2017. He is a founding member of Moonjelly DAO and Natix Network, both projects with the goal, among others, to “decentralize the entire aspect of ocean conservation and ocean ecosystem restoration”. In this episode he shares with Chair and Bacon more about the project's mission, regenerative action and how and why to verify impact through NFTs.

“The goal is to become a DAO where individuals can scientifically validate project proposals for conservation”, he says. “We’re trying to gather a living group of people that are trying to upgrade themselves as human beings and then become able to serve the ocean”.

Some of the topics:

• Mission of Moonjelly DAO
• Verified Impact
• Web3 oracle data feeds
• Natix Network
• Usecases for monitoring and impact verification
• Regenerative action meaning
• DeepWork Studios
• NFTs to gather information

Resources:

Anthony D’Onofrio, better known as Texture, started coding at a young age by learning BASIC on his grandma’s computer. From there, he became a full-stack developer and got involved in different projects that ultimately failed, but always with a mindset of embracing opportunities while developing himself, which led him to be one of the co-founders of Ethereum.

“As long as you can handle what most people might consider failure for an indetermined amount of time and not lose that drive, success is just a matter of time”, he says.

Sounds like a usual story to success but you’ll learn Texture is far from an ordinary person.

In this episode, he chats with Chair and Bacon about his personal journey, the ups & downs, his role on the genesis and early days of Ethereum, his NFT project Texture Punx which started as a joke, and his perspectives on Web3.

Some of the topics are:

-    His origins as a developer

-    The concept of success

-    Contributing in Web3 vs extracting value

-    Big corporations’ adoption of the technology

-    The genesis and early days of Ethereum

-    The importance of a good website

-    The problem of scams and misinformation

-    Future of Web3

-    Texture Punx NFT project

Now he wants to start his own podcast, not exactly about Web 3 but instead as a way to make a bridge to other things that interest him in all areas of culture and keep adding to the future of the space. “I really want to see a world in which people can offer value, other people can be inspired by that system of value whether it be very small or something local (…) I would like to see people be able to take ownership of their world a bit more”.

Resources:

Chair and Bacon have their second episode with a first recurring guest: Penguin, a platinum member of MetaGame and CTO of Mud Games, among other titles.

Penguin started playing at the age of 12 and has a long journey in the gaming industry. In this episode he shares about Battle for Evermore, his new NFT gaming project, and his perspectives on the evolving industry of gaming.

“I started playing when I was 12 and really shaped who I became and gave me an outlet in all this fantasy stuff and becoming active in these virtual worlds and creating virtual worlds and interacting with people in a metaverse level that people are getting into now”. With Battle for Evermore he wanted to make text based games fun for everyone.

He recognizes that the NFT space is “suffering from the hype and oversaturation of projects” so that the projects that will remain successful are the ones with a team that's there to support and that keeps pushing no matter what. In the case of Mud Games, he says they strive to make all the characters fun to play and make it competitive. “The main thing is that the game is fun to play, the token price is secondary”.

He will be at MetaGame’s MetaFest with a presentation and a couple of workshops.

Some of the topics:

• Mud Games
• Status of the NFT and NFT game industry
• Evolution of gaming
• Game Modes
• Balancing games
• How to join
• Backstory of Battle for Evermore
• Future of the game
• MetaFest

Resources:

It's been around two and a half years since The Blockchain Socialist started his website to explain Blockchain 101 from a socialist point of view, and although the name was just tentative, in time he got stuck with it and the project expanded to different analysis and, eventually, to a podcast.

He is currently working on a documentary called Crypto Futures to “hopefully distinguish what the different futures of crypto are and make a call to action for viewers to make a choice on which one they want to support”. Going on to explain how the crypto “community” is far from homogenous - how the perspective & philosophy of an average Bitcoin Miami & Crypto Commons Gathering conference-goer are vastly different.

In this episode he and Peth exchange some views and perspectives on anarcho capitalism, anarcho syndicalism, socialism, DAOs and the blockchain ecosystem.

Some of the topics are:

• Crypto Futures Documentary
• Crypto Commons Gathering
• Libertarian & hyper-capitalist crypto mindset
• Leftist critiques of crypto
• Anarcho Syndicalism and its relation to DAOs
• History of unions and decentralization
• Differences between anarcho communism and other strands of socialism
• Token governance???
• Universal basic income vs universal basic services

He addresses the importance of showing different people’s visions about crypto in the future to break the tendency of trying to define the entirety of it in a particular way. “It's a good thing that we don't try to impose those mental models onto this new thing because that would limit us in thinking about how we use crypto and blockchain for different goals than the libertarian ones”.

That is what in his opinion would allow people who are building to have an alternative mental model to what they’re developing and help them think thoroughly about their political and economic consequences and whether or not there are ways to build them that are more “progressive minded”.

Therefore his goal is to expose different alternatives socialist ideas and models that have an interesting history and that, in his opinion, are relevant for DAOs, such as anarcho syndicalism.

Resources:

Back from a long hiatus since their last podcast, Chair and Bacon come back to catch up. In this episode, they welcome CupOJoseph from HeroDAO who shared about how they’re creating the first community owned superhero franchise, a very competitive field, which he views as a long term media franchise.

He also shared how he’s building for an easier onboarding experience to Web3 through TreasureChess. He compares this onboarding experience with a bicycle with training wheels that teaches users all the concepts to later allow them to download their wallets and make a progressive onboarding knowing a little bit more about how it works. “This is a learning experience for people. We’ve designed every aspect of this to be fun and teachable, not for speculation. We’re optimizing for user experience”.

Some of the topics:

• What is Hero DAO
• How Moon Girl series started
• The importance of having specific goals in DAOs
• NFTs as a funding mechanism
• Web3 onboarding obstacles
• TreassureChess as an onboarding experience different from play-to-earn
• Building Crypto Lite onboarding stack
• Web2 logins to Web3 and gasless L2 transactions

Resources:

Mike Gilliland is the co-founder of Future Thinkers and The Portal DAO. At present-day, he is building a smart village in Canada along with his partner & family. In this episode, Peth and Mike talk about his vision of regenerative living and how to make bridges between the virtual and the physical realm.

Mike explained how they plan to use the village space as experimental ground, not only for regenerative experiments but for living. Therefore, the smart village will also be an experiment in governance and living in a healthy and holistic way. “We want to create a culture of willingness to fail and try things out. The Portal DAO will be responsible for suggesting a lot of these different experiments and participants will benefit”.

Some of the topics:

• The beginnings of the Future Thinkers podcast
• Shadow work as foundational work
• How the smart village project started
• Virtual reality as a replica of the physical world
• The Portal DAO?
• Funding experiments & cultural projects
• AI to enhance abilities for creativity and personal development

According to Mike, it all starts with facing your own demons and the dark parts of the world, looking at environmental and economic collapse. Then aligning yourself & taking action - not out of desperation, but duty.

Resources:

Although their next event, Global Governance Gathering during Devconnect in Amsterdam will be their biggest yet highly experimental event to accelerate DAO creativity - The DAOist plans on going way beyond organizing conferences.

In this episode, Felipe shares his story, The DAOist’s story and some philosophical thoughts about life and DAOs.

Some of the topics are:

• The DAOist
• Global Governance Gathering
• The DAOist’s MetaHub in Lisbon
• Entrepreneurship metaphors
• Punching walls
• The ADHD of DAOs
• Metaphysics, poetry & pottery

Felipe is one of the DA-OGs that was involved in projects like DAOstack, DAOFest, Metafactory, and PrimeDAO. Then he gathered around himself a team of artists to form The DAOist. The DAOist is a story about people who want to think differently about events and organize more intentional gatherings.

Recently they created the MetaHub in Lisbon as a “plug-and-play creative retreat for the DAO space.” This hub for decentralized creativity attracts projects and groups to come together and focus on creative problems, as well as complex technological or political discussions. The MetaHub plans on providing every tool needed to catalyze thoughts and actions and, at the same time, feels like home.

Felipe promotes focusing on things that are immediately doable to us and set actionable steps, keeping us grounded, feeling achieved & on an upward spiral while always keeping in mind that thoughts are actions and can affect the outside world as well as ourselves.

"I don't think governance is like code, that you can just fork the system, and it works. I think governance depends on contextual navigation and hyper-aware practitioners."

Resources:

Star Trek and Star Wars both picture a future where space has become a geopolitical battleground for nations. Stellar Magnet wants to build the counterpart to that dystopian image.

Her goal with “Black Sky” is to create a decentralized and non-governmental organization that is a serious contributor to the future of humanity and space.

Some of the topics of this episode are:

• Large-scale cooperative DAOs
• DAO2DAO collaboration
• SubDAO design
• Decentralized space agency
• What else Black Sky wants to do

Huge aspirations require specific designs: Stellar wants to build a very large-scale cooperative DAO, where millions of people own a small part, and that stands opposed to DAOs where whales own most because they put the money.

A decentralized space agency is a project that needs billions of dollars to be successful. But if it is, then Stellar believes this project can make the world more connected and inspire future generations to think beyond nationality and race.

“If we have a more peaceful, united world that is no longer in constant war, then what the world would be doing is exploring space, understanding the cosmos, trying to find out where we come from. Finding answers about evolution and if there's extraterrestrial intelligent life out there.”

To get started on this great journey, Stellar is seeking for funding for two smaller projects. One is “Black Sky Nexus,” a zine and a wiki that wants to teach people with articles and guides about privacy and anonymity.

The other project is an artist's residency in New Mexico that wants to support women that create digital art to experiment with NFTs.

Resources:

As you may already know, Owocki & the gang have been shifting Gitcoin into being a DAO. However, trying not to be the benevolent dictator anymore doesn’t mean he has less work to do. He wrote a book, he’s trying to figure out how impact DAOs can scale, and he and the Gitcoin team just announced Grants 2.0. While doing all this, the mission remains the same: funding public goods & greenpillin’ the world.

Some of this episode’s topics are:

• What Gitcoin DAO is up to these days
• bdfl to bdf5y (benevolent dictator for 5 years)
• What scares Kevin the most
• How to play the Green Pilled game
• Schelling points
• Regenerative crypto

Owocki and the Gitcoin community want to build “the Schelling point for building and funding public goods.” Grants 2.0 is an architecture to do exactly this with a pluralistic vision. It will be not only a decentralized protocol but also a list of projects and a grants registry to find the best ways to fund those projects.

Kevin’s vision is to build “more than decentralized casinos.” His book Green Pilled explains how to scale coordination to have a positive and regenerative impact on the world.

"Regenerative crypto is all about creating a world in which we can coordinate positive impact."

While Green Pilled describes the theoretical concepts, Kevin is working on a second book that will be an empirical resource of impact DAOs and their missions. The book’s title will be "The impact DAO cartography club."

Resources:

Jordan saw himself pulled into the technology milieu early on and lived a life as an archetypical west coast tech entrepreneur until seeing through the facade & carving another path, of digging into misaligned incentives & existential risks in the world at large. Years later, we see him as one of the originators of the GameB meme.

In this episode, Jordan explains to Peth that we are in the middle of a changing system, from an old parasitical system that needs to die. But this is good because it’s the chance for us to redesign every institution, all human infrastructure, and navigate the transition to something new.

Some of the topics:

• GameA & Game
• Crypto space
• One sentence on the Moloch problem
• Incentive landscapes
• The ecology and evolution of crypto
• Signals that tell you when a system is dying

The meme of GameB has two notions. Firstly, the notion of the game. The human world is constructed by humans, and we are making choices in the game of life. We need to realize that we can make different choices and change the game's rules.

The second notion is the movement from A to B. How do we go from Game A to Game B? What’s the right direction to take?

Sure is that every living thing & human-made system has a finite life span. Every system will eventually get parasites, so we have to gracefully put it to rest and make space for the birth of a new system. How do we know the time has come? "If it's shitheads everywhere then you know it's the end of the cycle."

Resources:

DAOs should aim for local actions and reconnect citizens with nature, the city, and with their neighbors, say Xavier and Leen from DAO Brussels and All for Climate.

In this episode, they talk with Peth about the ability of DAOs to have their own economies and to reward people for community work.

Some of the topics are:

• Localism: starting the system’s change in front of your doorstep
• Community-owned economies
• Permissionless experimentation
• The concepts of liberating structures and artful participation
• Reasons to look more towards the east and less towards the west
• Active citizenship

Xavier is originally from Belgium and lived in San Fransisco for ten years, working on a start-up. He and Leen met in Brussels, and together, they want to contribute to solving the climate emergency. With DAO Brussels, they create an inclusive space to experiment with new coordination and build bridges between the crypto community and local citizens.

They say “doing is the new thinking,” and only experimenting can navigate us through the chaos we live in. However, speed is useless if you go in the wrong direction. "The fastest way to accelerate a systems change is to actually slow down and take a minute: Why are we working together? What is our goal? What is around us? What is right now right here needed to make a tiny change today?"

Resources:

Daniel is a design facilitator and leadership nerd that started as a chef. From a restaurant where he learned about molecular cuisine and the intersection of science & cooking but got annoyed by hierarchy, to helping people build decentralized organizations & starting rnDAO.

His journey was anything but straight. From the food industry through consumer electronics, he played various roles before transitioning to creativity consultancy and organization design with a specialization in self management, a path that led him through systems thinking and cybernetics and finally into web3 and DAOs.

Some of the topics:

• Molecular cuisine???
• Governance and coordination in Web2 vs Web3
• Making innovation communities sustainable
• The tension between communities and investability
• Discipline & creativity
• The issues with VC funding
• The importance of communities
• Metrics and OKRs

"Hopefully with these new mechanisms we can create a more sustainable and

collaborative way to do these sorts of deep innovation that is happening to some degree in crypto and Web3, but really now take it to the next step and help bring DAOs mainstream. We need a lot of perspectives because governance, community-architecture and this whole new types of organizations and this better way of organizing are very complex.”

Resources:

It's never too late to talk about decentralized governance, says Aaron the founder of Govrn. So in this episode, Peth and Aaron discuss the question of "How do we turn politics from a negative-sum game (what it is right now) into a positive-sum game? How can we realign our incentives to be on the same team?"

Govrn builds bottom-up coordination tools for DAOs with the motto "For everything that governs you, you should be able to govern back." At Govrn, they see all types of contributions as governance; you are voting with every action you take.

Some of the topics are:

• Bottom-up incentive structures
• Bounties for politicians
• Outcome coalitions
• Staking your work
• Arguments for transparent bribery
• Putting check and balances on the leaders
• The importance of rewriting Manifestos
• How to keep organizations fluid

Growing up, Aaron was always interested and engaged in politics. He did a lot of work on incentive alignment to understand organizational behavior while doing management consulting for a large firm. This firm made him learn about blockchain and DAOs. When he realized the possible implications of DAOs on society, he became obsessed with it. So he quit his job and went full time into DAOs.

“I think a lot of people define themselves by the organization they're part of. But that's not it. The organization doesn't define you, you define the organization."

Resources:

The whole space is wrestling with the question, “What is a DAO?”. Spencer from DAOhaus has thought about this intensively and shares his definition and the reasons why he loves working for DAOs in this episode.

“I realized that the thing that DAOs are really great at, or what makes them so different from traditional organizations, is that they are resistant to capture. Their coordination mechanisms and the resources that they control are not capturable by bad actors.”

Some of the topics:

• How the broken health system pushed Spencer into the crypto rabbit hole
• Managing your commitment, time availability, and workload
• What it takes to be a DAO
• The problems of token governance and multi-sig solutions
• Integrating cultural values into technology
• The importance of decentralized executive power

Spencer has a background in economics and psychology. After working as a product manager in the healthcare industry, he started contributing to different crypto projects like Safe DAI, and Raid Guild, until DAOhaus became his main focus.

When he got into crypto, he thought this could revolutionize the healthcare system by giving patients control over their personal data that corporations, hospitals, and insurance companies have been fighting over for years.

But the hierarchy and dysfunctionality made it impossible for him to do anything & for these new solutions to work properly, so he left the healthcare industry and focused on DAO tooling and infrastructure to help enable a better way of working together.

Resources:

Starting as a video editor, Misanth joined MetaGame in late October of 2020. Having never been a part of a DAO, he wasn’t sure what to expect and was sweating when needing to talk in the community calls. Since then, he grew into the role of the onboarding champion, which turned out to be a natural fit for Misanth.

In this episode, Peth talks with Misanth about his life before MetaGame, his journey from quitting IT studies, being a tourist guide for many years, and struggling to find a “normal” job due to lack of formal education until he joined MetGame where he is now shining as the Champion of Onboarding - making sure others are properly welcomed & find their spot as smoothly as possible.

Some of the topics are:

• The benefits of waking up early
• The Misanth before MetaGame
• Decentralized working opposed to classic hierarchical structures
• The clash and the crossovers between hype and getting things done
• The innovational technology behind NFTs, overshadowed by cash grabs
• Ideas for a web3 community tool
• Meta OS

“Honestly, I was looking for a way out of the loop. [...] In regular jobs, everybody knows their position in the company. And with that comes a lot of either ego or roleplaying. I didn’t like the attitude in general.”

Misanth came in hope of an opportunity to stop doing those jobs but stayed for the community and a sense of purpose. MG wants to build bridges between those enthusiastic about changing the current way of things and who want to improve and create things.

The episode concludes with Peth and Misanth saying that we’re all still figuring things out.

“All of this is really new. A formation of culture, I would say.”

“So, just jump in, don’t be afraid to try things, and give us feedback. And wait for the MetaOS!”

Resources:

In February, it’s time again for ETHDenver, which continuously has been the largest web3 event in the world with about 10.000 guests in person and 50.000 tuning in online. Projects like POAP and 1Inch came out of ETHDenver, and it’s the first event for many folks coming into the space.

Josh left Consensys in February 2020 and found his new job at ETHDenver, volunteering at the registration and merch table. He ended up with Opolis. Now, Josh is building the community at Opolis, he is the merch steward of ETH Denver, the treasurer at Spork DAO, the founder of RainbowRolls, a member of MetaCartel, and Patron of MetaGame.

In this episode, Chair & Bacon discuss with Josh the legal liability as a freelancer in the US working for a DAO, and Josh shares some ETHDenver alpha in February.

Some of the topics are:

• How Opolis helps with your payroll, taxes, health benefits, and more
• Spork token & benefits of the Bufficorn Buidl Brigade
• The Colorado cooperatives law and the legalization of DAOs
• A DeFi dev running for congress in Oregon
• Reading tips for web3 newbies
• What to look forward to at ETH Denver

“We are living in this wild, wild west. We don’t know how legislation is going to look like in the future & we don’t know what security will be there. So contributing to a DAO as an individual is incredibly risky.”

Opolis is a cooperative that wants to bring peace of mind to freelancers, not only those working in web3. The requirements to join are minimum wage income and having an employment entity in the US. Opolis helps with setting up a company, paying invoices in crypto, it takes care of your taxes, insurance, and even provides unemployment benefits.

The episode concludes with Josh sharing some highlights for ETH Denver. Check out ColoradoJam Incubator and Bufficorn Ventures from Spork DAO. And claim your Spork token, if you haven’t yet, for attending ETH Denver in 2018 or 19!

Resources:

Lauren, aka karmaticacid, is a Giveth comms steward, GIVeconomy product manager, TEC steward & self-proclaimed hippie living in the jungles of Costa Rica. She usually lurks behind the scenes as a MetaGame Player writing shownotes for our podcast… like this one. She escaped her soulless 9-5 as a mechanical engineer some years ago to study permaculture & organic farming. She discovered Giveth & the DAO space through a friend from an intentional community and fell in love with the concept of saving the world with engineering.

Lauren explains Giveth as a group of value-aligned people revolutionizing giving, so it’s no longer a system of giving and losing, and exploiting the altruists so society wins and individuals lose. Giveth is a place where you can give and receive and in the future the platform will transform into a place where givers become investors in for-good projects, and projects are empowered to become their own DAOs. In this episode, Lauren & Peth discuss everything from the GIVeconomy to Ecovillages to DAOs - it’s one you don’t want to miss.

Some of the Topics

• What is “Revolutionizing Giving”?
• The GIVeconomy - 5 parts
• The history of the GIV token
• Eco Villages in Costa Rica
• Making building materials out of waste plastic
• Collaborative Economics
• Inspiring intrinsic motivation
• Teaching kids to be autonomous
• The meaning of decentralization
• Conflict management & community building

Lauren & Peth dive deep into the concept of bridging the metaspace with the meatspace. The long-term vision of Giveth is to bring the tools of web3 to on-the-ground projects, and to use tokenonics and DAO coordination on-the-ground. In this future “no longer do we rely on altruists & nonprofits to give of themselves to have clear water & clear air to breath, we can make everyone in the system be rewarded and benefit. We are creating collective universal abundance.”

The conversation flows from philosophical chats on conflict resolution, decentralization, intrinsic motivation & more. GIV’r a listen if you like fun, inspiration & abundance.

References

Peth and David Ehrlichman, author of the new book Impact Networks discuss his background, experiences with social impact networks as well as the importance of leadership & collaboration between multiple sectors to tackle core systematic issues.

In a classical story of disillusionment with his corporate job, helping share holders grow more wealthy whilst living amongst such obvious systematic problems like homelessness, David went on to work for a nonprofit organization - where he noticed a broken system. People working towards their individual organizations and projects and looking to solve only a small piece of a much larger puzzle.

After his work with the nonprofit and realization of these real world problems, David continued his social impact journey by founding Converge and helping build over a dozen social impact networks, aiding more in their Journey. This ultimately is what led him to write Impact networks and down the rabbit hole that is Web3 and DAOs.

• David’s background and inspiration behind Impact Networks
• How to solve core systematic issues through proper communication & collaboration
• Importance of leadership in a decentralized networks & communities
• Maintaining balance between self direction and convergence with the community
• The need to create opportunities for people to contribute and be rewarded for their effort

Leadership and collaboration are the fundamentals to success in this space. “Human communities organizing with technology is where a lot of potential and magic lies. Technology without humans is just tech, it can support coordination but ultimately comes down to people working with people and that presents a lot of challenges.”

It is amazing that people wish to come together to collaborate on common goals of any kind, however, organization and communication are crucial to ensure everyone is moving forward in alignment. Decision making becomes more difficult as groups grow larger, meaning, it's better to start small and expand thoughtfully and intentionally. In conclusion, Peth and David fully explored the complexities around collaborating and the importance of creating leadership roles in decentralized networks while solving real world problems in the process!

“Leadership always matters its just a different type of leadership that we see in hierarchical environments.”

“Community without a boundary sometimes is not a community at all”