This article provides an updated vision and roadmap for Serous.
Formerly described as a “collaborative urban design platform”, Serous is generalizing towards a coordination super app for nested communities of place. The reason for this is that it became clear the same core features needed to empower communities to collaboratively design virtual cities are relevant to residents in existing cities. Furthermore, this new roadmap is also more gradual so it should make it easier to build the platform, gain real world adoption, and prioritize refinements.
The mission for Serous is the same as it always has been: improve the way urban environments are designed, built, and operated by empowering (current and future) residents with better coordination tools.
In the long term, the greatest potential still lies in the construction of new cities because rethinking their physical layout in parallel with non-physical societal infrastructure (governance systems, property rights, etc.) allows for comprehensive societal design freedom.
Unfortunately, this is impossible in existing cities since there is no realistic way to reconfigure street networks or the general distribution of buildings. Even trying to change local governance systems and property rights is an enormous challenge when there are so many stakeholders with different views and conflicting incentives.
In contrast, designing from scratch allows for entirely reimagined urban morphologies and administrative frameworks. Furthermore, iterating virtually before committing to a final plan would result in a better final product and future residents could help to optimize it for their specific desires.
While providing tools to achieve this remains a long term goal for Serous, building new cities is a giant undertaking that we must work towards gradually. In the meantime, there are countless problems in existing urban environments that could be solved with the same set of coordination tools that collaborative city design will require.
Roadmap
Going forward, Serous will be positioned as a coordination super app for nested communities of place that can serve a much broader range of use cases. In order to gain user adoption and test the platform in real world use cases, while also continuing to work towards the original vision, Serous will pursue two distinct paths in parallel:
- Provide a SaaS product that helps residents of existing cities to coordinate with their neighbors and co-manage common spaces
- Launch an NFT-based DAO that will experiment with collaborative virtual city design and modular Urban Formats
Both of these paths will rely on the Serous application, which will leverage DAO capabilities to make it easier for people to coordinate within and across nested community layers (eg. buildings, blocks, neighborhoods, districts, and cities). Key features that are required for this are:
- A token-gated access framework with easy onboarding and a democratic member management system
- A community specific chat forum and event calendar
- A governance process for gauging sentiment, voting on specific actions, and delegating certain types of decisions to sub-committees
- The ability to co-own and democratically manage digital assets, files, and code repositories
Software as a Service (SaaS) for HOAs & Public Participation
The primary focus of Serous initially will be to build the application and get HOAs or other community associations to adopt it in place of their existing rails. In other words, Serous will first be positioned as a SaaS product for HOA management that enables more transparent and democratic oversight by members. Additionally, it will make it easier for HOAs to operate at multiple scales simultaneously, with smaller scale decisions made by the relevant neighbors and larger ones by the overall organization.
The next focus will likely be to convince developers of new large projects to implement Serous as the HOA management software from the start. In doing so, they could also allow future residents of the not-yet-finished development to have a voice in certain design decisions or the initial structure and rules of the HOA.
Another goal for this SaaS track will be to engage with city governments and try to convince them to experiment with using Serous for public participation. Currently, there is a major disconnect between residents and the decision makers in city governments, even though most cities host frequent public hearings. While these efforts are well intended, they are essentially symbolic gestures since they have very low bandwidth for accepting feedback and they are a terrible mechanism for accurately gauging sentiment. Serous would be able to provide a much more streamlined means for soliciting (verifiable) feedback from large groups of residents.
Over time, the hope is for Serous to become the default platform for coordination within and between local communities of various sizes.
Kernel DAO
In parallel to these efforts, Kernel DAO will be launched to experiment with collaborative urban design using the Serous platform. This project will start with 1,000 dynamic, multi-resourced NFTs that are small (~100 person) community subunits (“Kernels”) that comprise a city (based on the Kernel Urban Format). The resource files for these NFTs will include a composite virtual environment (.usd), the constituent 3D models, a 2D site plan, and a description of the lifestyle/community dynamics it is intended to support.
Each Kernel, along with its nine neighboring Kernels, will be a member of the DAO that co-owns the second layer “Group” that they comprise (along with a common center). This Group DAO would, in turn, be a member of the DAO for the third layer “Cluster” it is part of, which would be a member of the overall city DAO (see the image and caption below).
Initial purchasers will be able to edit the 3D models that comprise their Kernel and configure its initial governance parameters, before selling (or giving) fractional ownership to others. After decentralizing control over the Kernel, any members will be able download the canonical files, edit them, and propose the updated version be adopted, which all members would then vote to approve, or not. Similarly, the Kernels that make up each Group, Cluster, and the city will oversee and collectively approve changes to these larger urban subareas.
Each community unit will have an exclusive portal in the Serous application for (partial or full) owners of the constituent Kernels’ NFTs. These token-gated pages are where members will be able to discuss ideas, propose edits, vote on them, and schedule times to review the current model (in a third party virtual world platform).
More details regarding Kernel DAO will be published in an upcoming article, but the intention is to provide a starting point and the necessary tools for collaborative co-design of a virtual city. This process should help to refine the Kernel Format, generate differentiated Kernel variants, test the Serous application for this use case, raise some of the funds needed to build the app, and bring together a community of people that are passionate about this use case.
Next Steps
The next article will break down the features of the application and how it can be used for HOA & community association management. Following that, we will dive deeper into the vision for Kernel DAO and how it fits within the long-term vision of catalyzing a new city building movement.
***Keep in mind, however, that this is the current vision for Serous and thus a tentative roadmap that is subject to change. Sharing this publicly is meant to create interest, engagement, and hopefully some useful feedback***
Jona Perkins is the founder of Serous (and, for now, the sole person behind it). He is actively involved in the Polkadot ecosystem as an ambassador for InvArch Network, which Serous will be built on top of. He has a Master’s Degree in Urban Design, where he wrote a thesis on why the world should be building new cities and a novel urban morphology.
