Agreements, Blockchain, and Community Part 1: Shared Values as a Foundation
Language. It started with an idea to simplify the agreements and terms that people need to understand and embody in order to work together, well.
Communication. Truthful expression of what we perceive with our senses to one another, which goes beyond mere words and, upon delivery, may imply a contract if not refuted.
Say what we mean, be what we say, and do what we are.
I set out to narrow down the 10 Principles of Burning Man, the 19 Co-creators Agreements of Hummingbird Community, the 12 Core Values of Tribal Convergence Network and the myriad of other numbered lists of lines of words for playing nice in a collective, cooperative, co-inspired collaboration.
Principles, agreements, values.
Counting and stacking; simple for me is the rule of three. So into being came DreamGeneration: Regenerative Education for Community Activism.
Sharing this with communities I live in, work with, and build at has brought my dreams to life and I mean this literally! There are buildings, food forests, and a LOT of hand-painted signs with matching online documentation.
Structures — both physical and virtual, made of earth and air.
Awareness, Boundaries, and Consent really seemed to encapsulate all the components of reaching agreement on the invisible structure within which we can work together well.. in a tidy set of three.
Once this was seeded, it took root, sprouted and blossomed quickly; then went to seed again and the seeds took wing to wind, flying across the land.
EVERYTHING seems to come down to one of these three things. Until, they expanded.. to THREE sets of three.
- Welcome to the Circle! Agile, Brief & Concise
- The Nature of Being Human: Awareness, Boundaries & Consent
- Socially Accountable Activism: Allies, Borders & Culture
The Village ABC’s grew, then grew apart, and had to be ‘forked’.
So what does this have to do with the Blockchain?
The three words on which I have personally focused my community building work are People, Places, and Projects. Projects unite the power of the people in a place (physical and/or virtual) to collaborate on a collective intention.
And while I like to stick to three’s, I also like to use the three to drive home the ONE — the point. The point of people placing their projects is — the one thing we ALL share.. our home, earth.. the Planet.
WE the people have power, and we are more powerful when generating together. We amplify the message being transmitted for better distribution.
Using our power wisely requires agreement on that wise use. It takes team work, as a community — whether we cooperatively live, work, play, dream, celebrate, or create.. something.. TOGETHER.
To do this well, we need to reach a form of consensus on individual choices that affect the whole. And from what I have seen, heard and experienced, the majority of problems can always be solved by improving one single aspect.
Communication.
There is an ever-present need that exists in every team or circle I have ever been a part of, and that is for each voice to be heard clearly by all who have a stake, an interest, in what is being stated (or requested).
And to receive .. something (a signal?).. in return, that indicates the message has been first heard, then either accepted or altered for further review in the pursuit of Agreement. This is a conversation — an ongoing dialogue or group discussion, and what is often missing from clear communication is a record of the exchange.
The blockchain adds two of the fundamental elements of agreement in exchanges — transparency & accountability.
It’s a disruptive technology.. just like.. people.
And the thing it is disrupting is the secretive or forgetful, unclear and / or un/intentionally vague practices that current systems have embedded in their structures.
In researching the blockchain and specifically Ethereum, I came to MyCrypto. This presentation from Taylor Monahan really struck me, primarily because it nails one of the central themes of What we work on and Why.. That WE, the PEOPLE, doing stuff TOGETHER, fulfill our common purpose of making the world a better place.
Here are a few quotes and images from Taylor that resonate and inspire me, I hope you will be inspired to read the full story:
“The blockchain will revolutionize many of the established systems today. It will knock down borders and topple the centralized rent-seekers.
And we, together — the people — will be the ones who transform this idealistic vision into a reality.
We need to find the purpose for what we are doing. Something about Bitcoin or Ethereum or the blockchain has intrigued you, inspired you, and driven you to do something, even if that something is simply reading this.”
“Once you are inspired, once you have fallen down this rabbit-hole, you need to share, collaborate, cooperate and work together.”
“Building this future takes writers and educators and artists and sharers just as much as it takes coders and engineers. Building an ecosystem takes all types of people, doing all sorts of things.”
“As much as we love to talk about all this fancy tech and think about the product and the code and the blockchain, we cannot forget that at the end of the day, the decentralized future is people.
We need people like you, people like me, all of us working together. We need my mom or your professor and everything in between. …We need those who have the perfectly accessible analogy for everything to help introduce new people to this space.”
“So often people come up to me and tell me “I can’t do this…” or “I don’t know that much about the blockchain…”
Screw that. If you are reading this, you are an expert compared to the 99% of the world who doesn’t even know what the blockchain is.”
Yeah!!
Definitely shifted my thinking, and also rearranged a few of my priorities.
Let’s circle back to Agreements — Principles, and Values.
These are the values of Status, one of the co-sponsors of this summer’s Blockternship (Blockchain Social Coding Internship):
People need this foundation of shared values, principles to guide our work and collaborate effectively with an underlying belief that we are in this together for the same purpose… or at minimum, that we agree to operate based on acceptance of these stated terms.
And as we bridge the span between the past and the future with what we build in the present, we also need something else.
I’m going to go there, and use the word “JOB” here.
We all have our work. We’re doing the work, we’re working to build a stable foundation for the structures, we’re building the structures, and often we’re doing this ‘on the side’ .. as a passion project separate from our “Jobby-Job”.
How does one start learning about these new transparency and accountability tools available to communities through the Blockchain with all the other things going on in life?
Well, I can’t tell you that entirely, what I can tell you is pick something.
Pick a person, a place, or a project that you really care about and want to support.
Now, *I* picked the whole darn planet, and gave up having my own home and car and.. stuff, for a while.
I am the change in my life, and I do what I am full time.
The other thing I can tell you, and will continue to talk about in this series, is that there are a LOT of JOBS in this realm, for all kinds of people, to do all kinds of things.
There is a place for you here, you just have to do a little work to discover what you want to create and how your present skills can contribute to a project team that is already out there looking for YOU.
Then make sure it’s a good match for your future with a learning path toward developing the new skills you want to embody going forward.
I recommend reading this story from Ceri Power about working in a decentralized organization.
As she states early on:
“A decentralized organization encourages permissionless participation (anyone, either within the organization or outside, can get involved by contributing their skills).”
“It takes a lot of belief in the core values of autonomy, privacy, personal liberty, and open source.
A big challenge is that there are only a handful of similar communities out there doing this, so it can feel like pretty new ground for many contributors entering this world. It can be hard to change thought patterns and start thinking in a community versus company way (for those of us from more traditional backgrounds!)”
I really relate to that, being from a traditional background in corporate information technology.
The entities listed below are currently in collaboration on the ‘Blockternship”, and some also have job openings — check ’em out.
Time-sensitive Notice here for Social Coders!
HOW TO ENTER
#1 Head to https://github.com/blockternship and take a peek at the `take-off` repo for all the details, then when you’re ready to start your own project head to the `projects` repo and submit and issue before August 7.
Giveth
At Giveth we believe in the power of communities to change the world, it’s why we created the Giveth DApp that enables truly transparent donation tracking using the Ethereum blockchain. We are all about experiments in decentralized governance and we strongly support “open-source” as a way of life. All of our software is considered a gift to the Ethereum community, that is the source of inspiration for this hackathon.
Aragon
Aragon is a project that aims to build decentralized organizations and enable their governance. We’ve launched our initial Aragon Core client, loaded with a few starting apps to ignite your imagination of how organizations of the future may use decentralized tools to both manage themselves and invite participation.
Swarm City
We at Swarm City are passionately building an interface for Ethereum that is so friendly our moms can use it. Users of Swarm City can communicate, exchange value with each other, and earn reputation as good actors, without getting ensnared by the minutia of blockchain technology. In fact they will barely even know a blockchain is involved, which encourages adoption.
Also, these folks have awesome resources for blockchain beginners:
You CAN have more than one target.
Just, pick which one to aim for, first.
