Govrn November Update
Hey Team,
For this month, I’m deviating from our normal template to provide a higher level update on a shift in Govrn strategy.
After working on Govrn for over 2.5+ years, we’ve learned a lot of lessons. Not only have we been testing our original governance model, but we’ve been active in non-Govrn communities as well. This has given us a broad perspective and set of learnings we’ve incorporated into Govrn.
Before introducing the updated Govrn Model, I wanted to give a preface with key learnings and new assumptions.
- Outcome-Based Donations are just one tool that should exist in a broader governance toolbox.
- Current city and government ecosystems aren’t robust enough to support original Outcome-Based Donations yet.
- DAO Tooling (aka decentralized, open-source governance tooling) is not yet ready to support complex Nation-State or City-State Governance and Politics use cases.
- Nation-State or City-State ecosystems are just becoming ready and demanding DAO Tooling.
Our goal has always been the following:
Anything that governs you, you should be able to govern.
You should be able to be your own politician, your own lobbyist, your own political party. You should have ownership over your own politics, over your own governance. Being a constituent shouldn’t make you subservient to leaders, but rather partners with them.
This applies to everything from national government, to your local parent-teacher association, to your college club.
That will always be our goal. We now believe that by incorporating these learnings into a shift of Govrn Strategy, we are putting our movement in the best position to succeed. We’re zooming out to focus on the intersection of DAOs and Politics. We’ve tested this shift over the past several months and have seen positive results.
This means our first product users will be DAOs instead of politicians. But while the tools we build will be deployed to DAOs, we will be filling our community and movement with politicians, government officials, community organizers, and activists. Further, we will be creating content on how to apply open-source and decentralized governance tools to physical government organizations.
The Garden Strategy
The way I like to envision this strategy is as a garden. When building and tending to a garden, you need to choose your tools and the seeds for what you will be planting.
We will be building DAO tools that can be used for any type of garden, but we will be planting a garden of political and nation-state governance use cases.
Many DAOs and other digitally native organizations have properties similar to Nation-State and City-State governance. By identifying these communities and working with them on the Govrn Governance Model, we can keep improving the tools while waiting for the physical governance world to be ready for DAO Tooling.
Once DAO Tooling is ready for Nation-State/City-State governance and vice versa, we will be in a position to help all the stakeholders leap into the future. DAO Governance is the next generation of political governance. We want to be there to shepherd and empower others to harness its value.
Even in the early days of this shift, we’re already receiving inbound interest to use our tools for political candidates running for government. By pairing our actual product usage with content explaining how these tools can be used for politics, we are positioning ourselves as the go-to movement for “Decentralized and Open Source Politics.”
What is the Govrn Governance Model?
The Govrn Governance Model is the evolution of learning how to implement Outcome-Based Donations.
While working on implementing Outcome-Based Donations (OBDs), we learned that the required ecosystems were not yet robust enough to support OBDs in their current form. We also realized that our governance model was bigger in scope than just Outcome-Based Donations. That Outcome-Based Donations were actually just one tool that sat in a bigger governance model.
We’ve been working on our model for a while, but we wanted to go ahead and publish our current thoughts. This is a living model and we anticipate (and hope) that it continues to evolve with new learnings.
Learn more about the model here.
A smarter way to work
Our confidence in the governance renaissance is high. We have more conviction in the future than ever before. We are having some of the most mind-bendingly awesome conversations we could ever dream of. I have never seen so many smart and driven people working on the biggest problems in politics.
We know that an update to politics is not only inevitable, it’s already happening. We know that politicians and people are going to be working together on the same team, very very soon. Our new shift is putting us in a position to play the long game. It’s putting us in a position to work with the current players.
The Journey is Long (and fun)
As I’ve said since the beginning, this is going to be a long journey. We’re going to hit more twists and turns than we could ever anticipate. But I’ve seen those that are on the path with us. I’ve watched those that came before us. I see those that will come after us and pick up our work… And I have never felt better. While the journey might be long, it has been and will continue to be fun as well.
If you have thoughts or ideas on this, come get more active in our community. We have plenty of ways to get involved (check out our new Foundations repo) and our discord alone is home to some of the most dope, inspiring, and amazing conversations you’ll be a part of.
Talk to you soon.
Be good,
Aaron
