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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:

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."

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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:

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."

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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:

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:

DAO Brussels

Citizen Corner Brussels

All for Climate DAO

extinction rebellion

Fridays for Future

Sociocracy

Deep Democracy

Nonviolent Communication

Vipassana Meditation

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:

"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.”

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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:

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."

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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:

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.

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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:

“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!”

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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:

“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!

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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

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.

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”

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