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:

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with James Young from Abridged, the developers of the popular Collab.land software that many digital communities are using to engage, grow, and coordinate their members. In the conversation, James traces his arc from software engineer on Farmville in the early days of Zynga and how those experiences with Web 2.0 companies shaped his focus on the promise of user-owned digital communities, eventually settling on tools that help communities own their own data and experiences. This episode provides a peek at the future of work enabled by data economies in web3 and will be useful to founders and entrepreneurs who want insights into how the unique interactions enabled by web3 wallets can create new trails of data and economic value both for users and platforms.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin and Jahed chat with Mark Beylin, co-founder and CEO of Myco, where communities can bootstrap themselves with labor, co-own the business they launch, and not be beholden to the platform economics of the last wave of the internet. In the conversation, we cover how communities can use Myco’s unique LLC structure to protect themselves from liability while they extend ownership and upside to the people who contribute to it, how governance in these communities works, and how to build communities that last for decades by taking a long term, dilutive view of stakeholder ownership. Founders, entrepreneurs, and DAO contributors will get a peak at how an ostensibly web3 community is building front-end products that do not require any of the clunky UX that we’ve become accustomed to in web3, and can learn from the myco blueprint on how they might form tokenized digital communities.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Jason Prado, Director of Platform at the Driver’s Cooperative, to chat about the history of worker-owned cooperatives, the failure modes of the gig economy, and the challenges of building a cooperative in the current funding ecosystem. In the conversation, they cover the market competitiveness of the cooperative form, access to financing options that are uniquely available to cooperatives (and barriers to accessing them), and what governance innovations in web3, such as DAOs, might indicate for worker-owned initiatives in the future.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Kevin Owocki, co-founder and CEO of Gitcoin, a community developing digital public goods that has put $52 million in the open source ecosystem's hands since its founding. In the conversation, Kevin covers how Gitcoin's mission came to be, why its important to fund public goods, and the bleeding edge of democratic governance innovations Gitcoin is spurring on with quadratic funding and quadratic voting with Gitcoin Grants. This episode provides a unique view behind the scenes of a thriving, well-funded community experimenting with new democratic methods that politicians, technologists, and founders seeking to expand the agency of their community can borrow from.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Jason Wiener, an attorney at Jason Wiener p.c. He is a social entrepreneur, advisor and a long time board member to renowned digital platform cooperatives, including Stocksy United. In the conversation, Jason discusses the history of the cooperative movement and how this traditional structure can inform new organizational designs such as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). In so doing, this episode provides entrepreneurs and investors with insight into the technical and legal innovations, opportunities, risks and limits of these new organizational designs.

Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Jordi Riulas, angel investor, entrepreneur, and board member at EthicHub. In the conversation, Jordi covers how EthicHub's DeFi platform is leading the regenerative finance movement by helping investors provide loans to unbanked coffee cooperatives in Mexico, creating a circular economy for their products in the EU and the US, and turning over ownership and governance to the farmers themselves with the Ethix platform token. It's a fascinating case study in co-designing products with communities, learning and iterating, and picking objectives that benefit not only your company, but the community that contributes value to it over the long term.Here are the show notes:

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Pia Mancini, co-founder and CEO of Open Collective. In the conversation, we explore Pia's early work broadening access to democratic governance and starting a digital-first political party in Argentina, borderless democracy, commons-based projects, and the future of Open Collective as a community-owned project as it explores Nathan Schneider and co-authors vision for exit-to-community.

Here are the show notes:

Pathways for Open Collective’s “Exit to Community”

Early musings on "Exit to Community" for Open Collective

How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era (TED Talk)

Exit to Community: A Primer

Steward Ownership