Zen and the Art of Understanding Commons Stack
Aligning Workstreams to Nurture an Ecosystem
In recent months, we have seen a huge influx of commoners flocking to the new Commons Stack Discord to earn & dish praise and become part of the Trusted Seed. Some of those new community members requested less technical explanations of the Commons Stack, which inspired this new lens through which to view our organization and ongoing workstreams.
Spring is here, and there is something new in the air at the Commons Stack. Many of the seeds we have sown over the past months are beginning to blossom, and we are transitioning into a new phase. From the foundations we have established in our team, processes, research, and tools, we are now activating and engaging the Trusted Seed and building momentum by collaborating to plan and deploy the first Commons, with many communities eager to be next.
With the support of our incredibly generous community, we have expanded our core team, welcomed dozens of new contributors, and have dug into work on research and development initiatives in the Commons Stack and Token Engineering ecosystems. (For a glimpse into our previous work, check out the What We’ve Accomplished section in our Gitcoin Grant, or watch this 2020 review video.)
Through this journey, we have gained new insights and expanded our perception, as individuals and as a community. Growth isn’t easy — we realized that we need to make space for both structure and emergence, encourage a diversity of viewpoints, and learned how to transform tensions into growth for collective benefit.
In this article, we present the ongoing workstreams of the Commons Stack project through a new lens, drawing inspiration from yogic philosophy and chakras.
A Holistic View
The Commons Stack’s work is multifaceted, so we have broken it down into seven main ‘energy centers’. Although they form one larger system, this polycentric framing allows for more autonomy in decision making and ease of comprehension of our different work streams. Let’s take a deeper look at each area and what purposes they serve, starting from the bottom up.
🌱 1. Curators of the Trusted Seed
Purpose: Perhaps most importantly, the Commons Stack has a mandate to curate a list of trusted experts who are invited to provide safe initialization conditions to Hatch future Commons. Participants are given a reputation within the Trusted Seed via their CSTK Score, which is represented on the xDai chain by a non-transferable token. This score is based on their “skin in the game”, the amount of time and/or funds contributed to the build of the Commons Stack project and tools. To activate their membership, receive the tokens and full benefits, members must join the Trusted Seed’s Swiss Association. The Trusted Seed Swiss Membership gives members legal protection that mitigates the issues that can arise with most DAO’s classification as ‘general partnerships’ legally.
Current Work: The Trusted Seed layer within the organization acts as the foundation for the community, and works tirelessly to support community members, integrate their feedback, review member applications, manage CSTK Score accounting, engineer and improve processes and communications in this area, and manages requests from groups looking to engage with this core community of the Commons Stack.
Opportunities to collaborate: The Trusted Seed can be invited by communities who are raising funds in a Hatch (i.e. a Commons launch) and want to grant access to a list of altruistically oriented and reputable participants. Trusted Seed members receive legal protection, invitation to participate in Hatches, and Commons Stack swag, among other great opportunities. If you are not already a member, apply now! Once you receive your acceptance notification (usually within one week), you can activate your membership by joining the Swiss Association.
🌐 2. Supporting Community Commons Deployments
Purpose: The Commons Stack is an evolving design pattern, and in order to continuously iterate on the development of our tools, we partner with communities that are deploying their own Commons. Supporting deployments provides the mutual benefit of transferring subject-matter expertise to hatching communities, while simultaneously expanding our cultural and technical toolkits with real world learnings.
Current Work: The Token Engineering Commons (TEC) is the first deployment of the Commons Stack pattern and the TEC community voted to have the Trusted Seed to act as founding members in its Hatch. The TEC is focused on advancing the field of Token Engineering by fostering a web3 engineering community underpinned by a token economy that continuously funds Token Engineering public goods. The Commons Stack is supporting the TEC’s incubation phase with seed funding via donations, administration, development, and advisory support.
Opportunities to collaborate: The Hatch of the TEC is coming soon. To participate, you must be a member of the Trusted Seed’s Swiss Association. Following the Hatch of the TEC, subsequent community deployments will be under consideration, and we would love to consider working with your community! Stay tuned, and engage on the TE Commons forum to learn more about the steps and details involved.
💻 3. Decentralized Development Team
Purpose: To implement our design patterns and ideas, we need this innovative tech to be built, documented, and maintained. Enter the Commons Stack decentralized Dev Team! Several teams have emerged around the Swiss Membership DApp, the Commons Simulator, the Hatch & Commons Configuration Dashboards, and of course the Commons Swarm. This global team of designers and developers share knowledge and resources, and are pioneers in the field of Token Engineering.
Current Work: The Commons Swarm is currently focused on developing and auditing the smart contracts for Iteration 0 of the Commons Stack design pattern that the Token Engineering Commons will use as our first Commons. This will — for the first time ever — connect an Augmented Bonding Curve to a funding pool, governed via real-time Conviction Voting. The Hatch Config Dashboard is also under development, which can later be generalized or customized for other groups who are looking to model and choose the parameters for their token economy.
Opportunities to collaborate: All of the smart contracts and development libraries are open source on Github. Join in the Commons Stack dDev channel to get in on the fun, and check out the various workflow boards in Zenhub below:
- Commons Swarm Board
- Swiss Membership DApp Board
- Commons Simulator Board
- Ending the Crypto Technocracy Board (Hatch & Commons Config Dashboards)
💚 4. Public Goods Ecosystem Accelerator
Purpose: Our work focuses heavily on creating funding streams for non-profit groups building open-source public goods. These groups create enormous value that is not recognized by traditional business models. While we continue to work on new tools for regenerative funding, like the Augmented Bonding Curve, we also support mission aligned projects in bootstrapping funding using existing platforms and tools in our networks, i.e. Giveth, Gitcoin Grants, Panvala, and Stakes.Social, among others.
In addition to supporting fundraising for dozens of projects in our ecosystem, this node of the Commons Stack is focused on cross-pollinating networks, weaving threads across ecosystems — matching opportunities and needs — in order to support the growth of the awe inspiring people and projects working on high leverage impact work in the web3 space. Through these connections, we can amplify and extend our collective signal and voices, sharing messages of inclusion, ethics, generosity, inspiration and hope.
Current Work: The Commons Stack Community Fund leverages our networks to create massive outreach and fundraising efforts to support our community. In the past year as part of the Commons Stack Panvala League, we raised and distributed $175,000 USD (in $PAN equivalent) for mission aligned projects, while “dogfooding” early Conviction Voting smart contracts on cv.commonsstack.org. Other ongoing work includes connecting with organizations around the world, establishing processes to facilitate partnerships, coordinating and promoting inter-organizational/DAO2DAO collaborations, production and participation in events, multimedia production and distribution, public relations, and community care work.
Opportunities to collaborate: We envision a larger alliance and network of partner organizations and projects that are aligned with the Commons Stack mission. There are endless opportunities within the ecosystem for knowledge and resource sharing, event co-production and participation, research collaboration and educational opportunities. We look forward to connecting with any individual, ambassador, project or organization that feels a resonance with our work. If you are part of an organization that would like to explore synergies with the Commons Stack, please contact us.
📣 5. Communications & Legal
Purpose: Due to the nature of our work, communicating all of our ideas, research, and development is no easy feat. The work of this node could be likened to translating different languages, including to legal interfaces available in the real world. We listen and speak across many communities — academia, blockchain, community currency organizations, and more — so not only does this group act as a voice for the Commons Stack, but also supports cross-communication between various ecosystems. This group also supports our legal innovation and infrastructure, including the Trusted Seed’s not-for-profit association.
Current Work: The Communications and Legal node has many moving parts and ensures internal and external communications are flowing. The team members supporting this work run our communications platforms, including our newsletter, publication and distribution management, promotion and media production. The Comms & Legal group works with all of the other areas to support knowledge co-creation and information sharing. On the legal side, this team also works to make sure we are aware of, and compliant with regulation and legal requirements when it comes to participation in the Trusted Seed and Commons Hatches.
Opportunities to collaborate: It takes a village of communicators to document all of the exciting research and developments at the Commons Stack and in our ecosystem. We are currently expanding our team, and have one open position — to read more and apply, check out this job description. We also welcome contributors with experience in graphic design, video production and animation, writers, and editors.
📚 6. Knowledge Commons
Purpose: The Commons Stack is at the nexus of several disciplines and social movements. There are many opportunities in this exciting and innovative space, but the challenge often lies in creating appropriate documentation, education, and communication. We must build use cases and create guides to share and integrate learnings, and to avoid repeating the mistakes of past web3 experiments. We have much to learn from economic research and socio-political movements of the last three decades, but we are also writing new pages in history. You can think of the Knowledge Commons as a group of interdimensional librarians, who are patiently writing, researching, co-creating, curating and sharing knowledge in the space.
Current Work: This energy center of the Commons Stack is focused on creating deployment case studies for everything ranging from incentive and governance systems, legal prototypes and novel DAO launch patterns to comply with evolving regulation (i.e. the use of the Trusted Seed and Swiss Association membership), to cultural best practices and ethical frameworks in token ecosystems and Commons. Much of the work now is focused on studying the work of Nobel prize winning political economist Elinor Ostrom, and documenting the creation of cultural frameworks in the Token Engineering Commons based on that research. In additional cultural work, the Knowledge Base group is documenting alternate dispute resolution and best practices for conflict management in the TEC’s Gravity Working Group and Graviton Training.
Opportunities to collaborate: The Knowledge Commons is the beginning of what we hope is a larger open-source library that can be used to guide communities looking to use these tools to launch a Commons. We are open to collaborating on knowledge curation and sharing initiatives in areas relating to our work.
⚗️ 7. Research Lab
Purpose: The Commons Stack’s Research Lab maintains a high level perspective in assessing opportunities to create high leverage impact through collaborative research with ecosystem partners. The Research Lab is inquiring into everything from systems modeling and engineering, to DAO2DAO interaction patterns to scaling the global commons. This group facilitates research collaborations, produces research digests and academic papers, walkthroughs of cadCAD models and more.
Current Work: The Research Lab is engaging in high leverage research work with esteemed organizations like BlockScience, 1Hive, Curve Labs, ixo Foundation and cadCAD to push forward our open source scientific knowledge of new Token Engineering primitives.
Opportunities to collaborate: There are endless opportunities in the nascent, transdisciplinary field of Token Engineering to explore. Some of the areas we are most excited about looking at in potential upcoming collaborations are research around Dynamic and Risk-Adjusted Bonding Curves, continuing work with 1Hive’s Luna Swarm in Computer-Aided Governance, further work in modeling sustainable local currency systems, and exploring deeper into the Invisible Economy and Feminist Economics. We welcome academic and independent researchers and organizations looking to collaborate with the Commons Stack Research Lab.
🕸️Come Weave with Us
As you can see, there is a lot happening at the Commons Stack!
We are incredibly grateful for this opportunity to share with you the learnings and perspectives, and this new framework through which to understand our organization and all of its dynamic parts. We hope this provides a more approachable and tangible view of the work we are engaged in, and we look forward to connecting more deeply with our community in the realization of our mutual goals.
There are several ways to engage with the Commons Stack team and community:
🌱 Apply & Activate Your Trusted Seed Membership 🌱
🗣️ Join the conversation on Telegram or Discord
🐦 Follow the latest news, updates & events on Twitter
🎥 Check out our latest videos & interview on YouTube
📚 Read more on what we are building and check out our new Content Map
💻 Find more resources on our website
📆 Add our calendar to yours (click the blue ‘+’ in the bottom right corner)
📞Join our Community Calls on the Community Hall Voice Channel in our Discord:
Trusted Seed Office Hours — Tuesdays, 12pm EST / 6pm CET
Contributors Sync — Thursdays, 12pm EST / 6pm CET
Monthly AMA — Last Wednesday of every month at 11am EST / 5pm CET
Article by Jessica Zartler and Jeff Emmett, with input and feedback by Griff Green, Tamara Helenius, Kris Jones, and Dan Knobelsdorf.
