June Update
Request For Collaboration
Recently, Charlie Fisher came to the LDCRC Slack asking for assistance on how blockchain (and cryptocurrencies and DAOs) can be used for citizen-led governance of a revolving equity fund for land purchases.
If you are knowledgeable (or have the desire to learn) about this area or you are working on a project involving blockchain use-cases in financing land (or real estate) purchases, or you know someone who is, please send Charlie Fisher a message on Slack with your contact information and how you can help him on his project.
Here is Charlie Fisher’s initial message he posted on Slack detailing his project:
Hi! Not quite sure if I’m in the right place yet but I enjoyed going through the links above. I work for an architecture co-operative in Oxford and doing PhD research on citizen-led affordable housing models.
I landed here because I’m working with five councils in Oxfordshire (UK) to establish a £1–5m revolving equity fund for land purchase. Primarily for citizen-led housing but that’s just the entry-point (rewilding, growing, energy).
In my job I help groups of people set up the legal, financial and people-organising basis for community land trusts including advice on withdrawable share offers. I’m just coming to the potential of scale through digital as I get involved in bigger schemes (e.g. I currently have the task of suggesting approaches to creative governance for a new Garden Village of over 2000 homes).
For the equity fund I’m trying to work out if we could use a form of citizen-governed distributed finance to sit alongside the co-operative organisations so a) we don’t get slowed down by the structures that council officers/politicians sit within b) reduce cost and time-wastage of administering an equity fund manually and c) the value system for why projects get funded is discussed and decided at a neighbourhood or city scale.
This could be just the governance platform or it could be a token backed by stable land assets around Oxford.
I’ve been to courses and events on DAOs/DHOs/DiSCOs and my focus would still be on the human relationships — I don’t yet know if incorporating ideas from blockchain/DLT projects will be a distraction to actually getting land projects funded. I’m used to running funding decisions on Loomio.
I’ve started forming a list of examples but nothing that fits exactly so far. Getting involved in the Seeds community has been useful and the Greenpoint Land Reserve has similar elements.
Distroid
Distroid Issue 9 is now available.
Originally published at https://ledgerback.substack.com.
