In this episode, Martin and Jahed connect with Austin Robey, founder of one of the first platform tech co-ops Ampled, and a prolific doer and thinker when it comes to self-managing organizations. We cover the full gamut of self-management, from Austin's formative experiences with co-operatives in his neighborhood in New York, bootstrapping and sharing ownership in the music platform Ampled, to his learnings working in Forefront DAO and then forming his own digital community in Metalabel. This episode will be of particular interest to founders and investors interested in how DAOs and Co-ops fundraise, fund their ongoing activities, and coordinate their labor to ship new products.

Show Notes:

In this episode, Jahed and Martin spoke with Dr. Jaya Klara Brekke, a researcher on the political economy of blockchains at Durham University and Chief Strategy Officer at Nymtech. Nymtech is reimagining a world where resilient digital platforms and ecosystems and individual privacy are not mutually exclusive. We connected with Dr. Brekke on a variety of topics including identity, security, control and power. Dr. Brekke’s work is guided by both political economy and anthropology and she brings a discerning eye to both the potential and limits of blockchain applications.

Show Notes:

1.)   Distributed Ledger Technologies for Social and Public Good - https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/65645/1/jrc121675_dlt4good_scanning_the_european_ecosystem_online.pdf

2.)   Digital Scarcity - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351076380_Digital_scarcity

3) The market as a gun to your head, tool in your hand or escape route from hell https://agorist.xyz/files/Agorism_XXI_I_2022.pdf

4) Cryptopolitics - an update

http://sumrevija.si/issues/sum-15/

5) The Dissensus Protocol https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2021.641731/full

6) Hacker-engineers and their economies https://sci-hub.wf/10.1080/13563467.2020.1806223

6.)    “The World of Anonymous Credentials” - https://blog.dock.io/anonymous-credentials/

4.)   “Why I am Joining Nym” - https://medium.com/nymtech/why-i-am-joining-nym-2bcae776f7a7

5.)   The Age of Survelliance Capitalism - https://www.amazon.es/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1781256845

6.) Cloud Money -  Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets

7.) How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

8.) Louise Amoore - https://www.dukeupress.edu/cloud-ethics

In this episode, Jahed and Martin connected with Tamara Helenius, who is a Program Manager at the Commons Stack and Steward in the Token Engineering Commons. In an earlier episode, we spoke with Jeff Emmett at the Commons Stack about token engineering. In this episode, we discuss the human side of building ecosystems, commons and companies that embrace decentralization. It builds on the conversation we had with Richard Bartlett on the human work of how to create culture, and how technology can support this work rather than undermine or replace it. Anyone working on thinking through how to pragmatically decentralize a part or an entire company or build for the commons will be interested in this episode.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Jahed and Martin talked with David Casey, the Founder and CEO of Resource Network. Trained in political economy, David spent nearly a decade thinking about how to build local, mutually supported communities in the real world. He is a co-founder of Numundo, a network of ecovillages, intentional communities, permaculture farms and retreat centers. That experience informs his current work on Resource Network, a marketplace and ecosystem that is using blockchain technologies to bring mutual credit onchain. We talk about the history of complimentary currencies, how they worked before blockchain, and why the composability of web3 solves some challenges that historically limited the ability of mutual credit to scale. In doing so, we dive deep into Resource Network as a case study in decentralized finance. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Jahed and Martin talked with Jen Horonjeff, the Founder and CEO of Savvy Cooperative. Jen has a truly interesting background, having worked in academia after completing a doctorate in Environmental Medicine, subsequently working as a consumer representative with the Food and Drug Administration in the USA, and even as a scout for an early stage venture fund. Dr. Horonjeff took her experience as a life-long autoimmune disease patient and cancer survivor and channeled it into building Savvy, a cooperative owned and governed by its patient members. In this episode we get into the details of life as an entrepreneur and the challenges of starting and growing a multi-stakeholder digital platform. Hope you enjoy this episode.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Dr. Shaun Conway of IXO Protocol, to talk about the future of measuring, verifying, and delivering social impact with new mechanisms and designs enabled by blockchains. In the conversation, Dr. Conway leads us through his history working as a medical doctor, then transitioning to HIV / AIDS impact projects in his native South Africa, to working with the WHO, UNICEF, and other NGOs on policy measures. This experience led him to conceive of an impact marketplace long before the current ReFi space brought together off-chain impact with on-chain data. We cover the possibilities for better incentive design, governance structure, and real-life impact measurement through the IXO protocol. This episode will be particularly insightful for those working in NGOs, sustainability and social impact projects, and social impact entrepreneurs.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode we speak with Richard Bartlett, co-founder of the tech cooperative Loomio, and The Hum, management consultancy for organizations without managers. In the conversation, we cover his history and experience with patterns of decentralized organizing picked up from the punk scene and Occupy Wellington in the early 2010s, what he learned from those patterns, and how he co-created new organizational structures that put them into play with his co-founders and fellow workers. This episode will be particularly interesting for listeners who want practical advice on how to organize in DAOs, cooperatives, and other organizational forms that seek to work in non-hierarchical ways, but still get meaningful work done.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin and Jahed talk with Dr. Hamid Rashid, a former director-general for multilateral economic affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bangladesh, is Chief of Global Economic Monitoring at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. We take a bit of a detour from web3 and blockchain to discuss macroeconomics with Dr. Rashid. We dive into the functioning of the fed in the US, and how its policies impact economic opportunity and inequality in the US and abroad. We then use this framework to discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of the fed introducing a Central Bank Digital Currency. 

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Joshua Tan, executive director of the Metagovernance Project and the DAOstar One, building standards and infrastructure for digital self-governance of communities. He also conducts applied research on collective intelligence and the governance of online communities. In the conversation, we cover institutional innovation in web3, modeling patterns for decentralization in digital communities, and what the worst DAO dystopias could have in store for us.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Jeff Emmett, who is a prolific researcher at the Commons Stack, Token Engineering Commons, and BlockScience Labs, studying how to build community collaboration tools with blockchains. In the conversation, we cover how new forms of voting mechanisms can help communities make clearer, better decisions, measure and aggregate their own preferences, and execute and measure their impact, so they can ultimately achieve their goals. This episode will be of special interest to people working in impact assessment in NGOs, people building DAO governance tools, and communities looking for new, inclusive forms of democracy to experiment with locally.

Here are the show notes: