2022

We hope that 2022 is off to a good start and that you are feeling refreshed for the mighty year ahead. (If you missed our 2021 end of year reflection, you can read it here.)

Unfortunately, (well, fortunately for democracy), we have not come bearing gifts of a technocratic utopia. Although it’s tempting to get caught in promises of the latest technology, there is a wisdom in ensuring that we leverage technology as a tool in service of shared purpose. We predict that the necessary revolution ahead will not be shiny and cybernetic. If done well and in time, it will look strikingly ordinary. It will look like picking lettuce from a garden, collecting soil and water samples, kids learning to read; it will look like sharing meals, dirty hands, tired feet, and petitioning for safer transit where we live.

It is through these sometimes mundane daily efforts that we will till the fertile soil for new paradigms: restoring forests, rehydrating lands, and even reshaping (and redefining) value exchange. We will begin to collect the wisdom that will inform the shared civic, technological, and economic infrastructures required to move forward together with the scale and savvy that this moment calls for.

With the pace of current climate crises, we will also continue to see societal disruptions, natural disasters and tremendous suffering within our lifetimes. But we will learn to hold one another, to be responsible to one another, to build more resilient communities, to share our learnings and repeat our mistakes less and less. We will learn to truly listen to and integrate with (and as) natural systems. And by swelling a movement of support around those who are already acting now, we can mitigate the impacts of our past as we weave a more resilient future.

We have spent the winter in deep listening to what is required of us over the coming year, and how we can best serve the emergent needs of our communities. We are here in service to the coalitions that are forming around, among, and between us, and see our role as facilitating our capacity to harness the swell of these tributaries into a mighty river of collective action.

The future begins with us, each of us. We are all participating in our collective future whether we opt into it or not. But we hope you will join us in considering and modeling what a coalition in service to a thriving future might look like, feel like, and become through our shared stewardship.

— Kaiti, Jamaica, & the OFC Team

Futurecasting

As we look to the year ahead, we know that it is essential to embody our theory of change and learn forward through applying and modeling — in our own selves and our work — the necessary transition to more whole and resilient systems.

As we grow towards our public launch and beyond, we have identified 3 horizons of engagement to help build momentum among the “many-to-many” and give rise to the “movement of movements.”

Horizon one: Support the groundswell solutions

Our first horizon is to grow our initial community within the impact ecosystem, supporting those organizations and projects on the ground who are doing the work of systems change from the roots up. We see solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges all around us and yet these endeavors have been largely unseen and under-resourced. Our aim is to build capacity within these impact projects and enable value flows to advance our common efforts with one of our richest resources: one another.

Horizon two: Strengthen the emergent architectures for systemic transition

As we continue to support the emergence of solutions within communities of practice, purpose, and place, we will also identify opportunities to apply these learnings through both bioregional organizing and partnership on demonstration projects. Through these whole-systems prototypes, we have the opportunity to model a new way of resourcing and scaling collective efforts, by facilitating the transparent documentation and sharing of solutions, data, resources, and curricula among rich peer networks. As we evolve the patterns, processes, and protocols needed to nurture the co-evolution of practices & shared infrastructure, we can move in common to implement, fund, and steward solutions. We will also equip these efforts with the frameworks needed to model their own forms of collective decision making, resource sharing, and value formation.

Horizon three: Change the narrative, spark the movements

Who is authoring the story of life on planet earth? In order for behavior to shift, a change in consciousness is required. We see the potential to tell new stories- giving rise to voices of purpose, empowerment and interconnectivity to transform the dominant narratives that propagate divisiveness and despair. Through partnerships with media, events and existing networks, we are working on mechanisms and frameworks to inform, incentivize, and inspire mighty swells of collective action. Along the way, we will gather stories, data and solutions making visible true impact of many hands and hearts contributing to a thriving world.

In 2022, our aim is to advance the growth of this mighty network-of-networks in 5 key areas:

Provide & empower shared infrastructure

We see the first layer of required capacity building as improving our coordination with one another, pooling our shared resources, and helping the network to better see itself — so we can all benefit from each of our growth. Starting with the launch and continued advancement of the Open Impact platform, our aim is to continue to grow our capacity to share services, knowledge, data, and frameworks for collective value flows and decision making (more on that down below.)

Key focuses in 2022 include:

• Extending core functionality of the Open Impact platform to public launch, including crowdfunding and validation of measurable impact
• Extending educational tools
• Extending distributed research & citizen science tools to support civic “challenges”
• Beginning solutions library
• Aggregating, incentivizing, & enabling peer review of stories from on-the-ground efforts

Curate & improve best practices & solutions

When we come together around our common challenges, we can benefit from all of our learnings. We aim to support a self-organizing network of communities of purpose, practice, and place, who are equipped with the communications, measurement, decision making, and incentives required to continue to advance our thinking and apply within each of our efforts. To start, we’re partnering with existing networks to model such patterns.

Key focuses in 2022 include:

• Partnering to launch communities of practice across sectors of impact (such as regenerative agriculture, water, education, community wellness, & economic equity and racial justice), as well as for the cultivation of best practices (such as measurement, governance, & funding)
• Organizing series, salons, events, and design sprints to model cross-pollination while highlighting and supporting existing interventions and best practices through technical assistance and peer networks
• Partnering with wealth holders, community members, and service providers to model wealth stewardship patterns to support collaborative initiatives within and between these groups

Apply, learn from, & scale prototypes

We see one of the biggest problems with innovation today as our lack of capacity to maintain context and fidelity at scale. When we branch off into silos, we lose essential opportunities to apply and integrate our learnings. Our aim this year is to partner on on-the-ground demonstration projects to model this pattern from application, to learning, to integration, by directly connecting these efforts with relevant communities of practice, and documenting and templatizing what’s working well on the ground. The result? The beginning of a library of adoptable templates and curricula that we can all begin to learn forward from.

Key focuses in 2022 include:

• Partnering on demonstration projects in areas like civic infrastructure
• Partnering on white label versions of the Open Impact platform, to model interoperability & a “many to many” shared marketplace
• Launching project template & solutions marketplace
• Publishing curricula & toolkits in areas of common need

Model new forms of governance & value exchange

What does it mean to truly belong to one another, and materially benefit from each of our growth? Is it possible to redefine value as benefit to our communities, our earth, and to one another? Over the course of this coming year, we aim to begin to model new forms of value formation at community, network, and global scales.

Key focuses in 2022 include:

• Incentivizing members of the growing “coalition” for their contributions
• Equipping communities with the levers to model and apply their own sovereign yet interoperable community currencies, along with their own models for decisionmaking and governance
• Supporting asset formation through project portfolios, to meet the needs of existing markets and begin to regeneratively fund these efforts
• Becoming increasingly member-led, modeling democratized forms of asset allocation, civic participation, and feature requests

Resource & grow a movement of movements

Right now, around the world there are so many citizens unifying to rally for causes they care about. Many movements exist and yet often they are under-resourced, struggle for visibility, and not connected as common efforts for a more livable planet and equitable society. Along with the need for change at institutional levels, we believe the resourcing and coordination of groundswell solutions and efforts for change are essential to swell civic participation in restoring the biosphere and taking positive action for a better world. In fact, we believe that by empowering the collection of day to day stories from the ground, we can support the upswell of story, media, and policy to inform behaviors, invite further participation, & help write a new story for humanity.

Key focuses in 2022 include:

• Inviting & rewarding participation in global challenges & citizen science
• Facilitating storytelling & data from on the ground efforts, to inform media, policy, & action
• Building partnerships with existing media, platforms, policymakers, events, networks, and movements to help the movement see itself, build capacity, & swell the movement of movements

Inquiries for the New Year

As we head into the year ahead, we are also interested in instigating and exploring dialogues around some of our “how.” Here are a few inquiries we’ve been mulling over to start:

The role of the bridge: while we hold a grand collective vision for a more equitable and distributed future, we have seen many leap ahead to prototype new systems — including DAOs and alternative currencies — in parallel to old ones. This is mighty and essential work, and at the same time, we ask ourselves: who are we excluding from these new spaces? How do we prevent the re-emergence of existing paradigms in a newer package, unless and until we do the labor of confronting head on the difficult conversations, cultural and institutional shifts that are essential to learning a new pattern of organizing? We see a part of our role as holding the bridge to engage existing structures in a more just transition: not bending towards them, but transcending and including, especially as we know that the collapse of existing structures will especially impact the most vulnerable.

The risk of speculative currencies: human cultures and economies are rooted in story. Money is a story. Since the advent of the printing press, we’ve begun to slowly, (then exponentially,) reach run away scaling of these narratives while losing sight of the initial context of value creation. This form of economic inequity through arbitrage has spiraled further over the past two years. Many well-intentioned approaches to forming alternative currencies have inadvertently replicated speculative forms of “casino capitalism” and deepened economic inequity. We’re interested in continuing to hold space and provide tools to model the emergence of forms of value based on contextually relevant and measurable value to people and planet.

(R)evolution through reintegration: while we see great promise in the emergence Web 3, the metaverse, and virtual reality, we also see danger in bifurcating from lived reality. In order to enable a transition towards regenerative patterns, we must first grapple with the fundamental disconnect between a worldview that relates humanity as separate — and therefore superior — from the rest of the living world. This “otherness” propagates dangerous mindsets that permissions the extraction of the Earth’s resources and the oppression of peoples. We look to leveraging technology to support a deeper re-integration with living systems, including the launch of more participatory, “human-in-the-middle” algorithms.

A phase shift in leadership: What does radical humility look like — knowing that there is much that we don’t know, and being willing to try anyway and learn from our mistakes? We are examining existing structures of power and leadership to support the emergence of a paradigm that distributes power without compromising our collective ability to coordinate: honoring each being’s inherent worth and sovereignty, and demanding our mutual responsibility for our collective future. We aim to support and prototype tools and frameworks that enable the innovation of governance, the application of circular leadership principles, and the inclusion of diverse participants and perspectives.

by Kaitlin Archambault & Jamaica Stevens