“The Dream” | Chapter 3 of the Outpost Story
A novel 3D metaverse hub that connects hundreds of Web 3.0 projects and welcomes the next wave of early adopters to the future of the internet.
A Dream
Emerging out of this broken world, we can see groups of technology innovators, community builders, passionate creatives, and economic strategists building a better digital future for each other. The world needs an Outpost.
These pioneers aren’t just building a community-driven technology project, 3D open metaverse hub, or next-generation digital economy. They are building a society of people who care about each other and hope to make the world more beautiful, interesting, and helpful.
Control is distributed through transparent community governance, open-source code is created together, and entertainment, gaming, & experiences are the product…not people or their data.
We’ve been having this dream for the past eight months. Now it’s time to see if you have similar dreams.
Becoming a Reality
Some of us started meeting about this late last year and we’ve made a lot of progress. What we’re envisioning has never been done before, so we wanted to make sure it was possible before discussing it with you.
Besides the Cipher Proxy and Creative Northern teams, we’ve made friends with leading contributors from Oneirocom, Thoth, Webaverse, and other projects that have been pioneering new technology for years. We’ve been developing new technology standards and jamming on pieces of the puzzle together.
The Cipher Proxy team is building out a decentralized development workflow and leading conversations about the technical vision for the Outpost and Altaverse protocol. Jimi, Jenni, Sydney, Frederick, and I designed a 3D world and wrote a story to go with it. It is walkable inside the Internet Computer. You may have seen a sneak peek of the avatar creator during the Supernova Hackathon. That was quietly built inside the Outpost.
We’ve been very busy.
Community Governance
We believe something as potentially pervasive as the metaverse should be governed by its users to prevent the abuses we’ve seen with current large-scale web platforms.
Many early efforts at Web 3.0 community governance suffer from a lack of flexibility needed to address the needs of complex multi-disciplinary projects like Outpost.
We aim to build a governance protocol that acknowledges the value of various types of community members and empowers servant leaders. Community members (Pioneers) can commit their POST governance tokens to one or more specialized guilds and delegate authority to elect a council of seven guild leaders serving the guild with day-to-day operations. Guild and community-wide votes will also take place periodically on proposals.
There are many more details to discuss in the future, but right now we see four guilds operating inside the Outpost at launch.
Technical Guild
As a digital platform, nothing inside the Outpost functions without the pioneers who build, maintain, and push the technology forward.
The Technical Guild collaborates on changes to the technical infrastructure of the Outpost and the emerging Altaverse protocol that will connect sovereign metaverse projects together.
Community Guild
People are our priority and the value of our project is determined by the innovation, imagination, commitment, and passion of the Outpost community bringing it to life.
The Community Guild leads the effort to ensure community members are heard, issues are addressed, and our values are respected. It also guides outreach efforts, development of the Outpost Constitution, and other people-focused initiatives.
Artisan Guild
People will stay for the community, but many will first come for the beautiful, innovative, inspiring, or fun creations they find in the Outpost.
Guild members will attract, curate, and support non-technical creative efforts by our community and help bring the Outpost to life visually and audibly. They will lead public space design, curate projects available in the marketplaces, and select creative professionals for artisan grants.
Economy Guild
The dream only works if the Outpost is economically sustainable. The Treasury Guild is the protector of community wealth and a decentralized consultancy for economic operations.
The Outpost aims to be a strong economic engine, which will require many negotiations, discussions, and strategy decisions to be made quickly.
Guild members with experience in business, economics, finance, and marketplace dynamics will be vital to our efforts to balance supply, demand, and complex tokenized economies.
A Trilogy
Most of us love where this is all headed and are planning to continue on with the community for many years. We dream of three inter-connected projects built in stages.
Outpost
Together we first build the Outpost, a 3D virtual basecamp for community expeditions into the next generation of the internet. We see a future with boutique marketplaces, entertaining experiences, games, private spaces, meeting areas, and a library.
Altaverse
After the Outpost is operational, the new standards will go into a tool kit that enables a connected, interoperable, open metaverse hub called Altaverse. People will be able to seamlessly travel between worlds, opening up an entirely new way of seeing the internet.
Altaverse will provide a way for the energy, experience, and community that develops inside the Outpost to be shared among sovereign metaverse projects seeking a way to be interoperable with other metaverse worlds.
It will have its own community governance system and treasury.
Worlds Beyond
A strong community is the core of what we’re building and that community will continue to lead the charge into Web 3.0 and community-driven metaverse experiences. Once the Altaverse is developed, we’ll all use that system to build new projects together. There are dreams of Deef Island (financial center), Gamef Island (gaming), The Enclave (Residences & Entertainment), Third Eye Land (spiritual experiences), and Holiday Isle (augmented reality vacation world & hub for adventure islands).
It’s too early to clearly see that far ahead, but we know there are worlds beyond the Outpost.
Values
Together we are stronger.
Time and energy are valuable.
Transparency is key.
Open-source code is foundational.
Leaders are needed, but accountable and collaborative.
We seek to unite, not build new silos.
Respect & concern for others — In the Outpost, we are all refugees from a broken & divided world. Respect & concern for others is the goal of any community, and it’s an expectation inside the Outpost.
Property rights — The success of our new society will require property protection (intellectual, virtual, digital, and artistic) and due process. While the Outpost community will have community-owned property (common areas, treasury assets, etc.), individual property rights will be fiercely protected. We protect creators & their creations, as well as investors of time & talent.
Funding & Sustainability
Outpost and the future Altaverse protocol will be developed by community contributions of code, craft, time, and energy. Contributions will be rewarded through a bounty system that draws on the community treasury once the project launches.
Since we’re building open-source tools that other projects can use, there will be external grant funding available in addition to POST token allocations. There is no idea what POST tokens will be worth, but they will be a critical part of making the Outpost your basecamp for adventures into the open metaverse.
We have no plans to raise community treasury funds from the public. However, the community may elect to create a token swapping pool in the future so enthusiastic new community members can participate in governing the Outpost.
What’s Next?
As far as we can tell, a guild-governed open metaverse hub built inside a blockchain (with interoperable objects that can move between games, markets, events, private virtual spaces, and other metaverse projects) has not been done before.
There is plenty we don’t have figured out yet.
The governance system is complex and crucial to maintaining a well-balanced community and empowering delegated leaders, teams, and interdependent projects building inside the Outpost. We are eager to see what tools Daowabunga releases soon. There are many technical innovations & creations still needed to bring this all to life.
We’ll share a technical vision paper in the future.
In the next few months, we’ll begin hosting “Dream State” experiences where early community members can test out what’s in the works, share feedback, and offer to help get involved. We’ll need hundreds of people and projects to join the Outpost before it launches.
All of this information may change. It’s still early in the project. However, we wanted to share this dream as soon as possible.
Take Action
In the early stages, we are interested in collaborating with people, projects, and other decentralized communities who have similar dreams and experience with software or game development, economics or business leadership, community leadership, or crafting really cool stuff in the digital world. Together we will make something very special.
Let us know if you’re interested in collaborating during the early stages.
One of our core values is respecting the time and energy of others. We’re busy building a shared future, not a noisy hype machine. If you are ready to join this journey, please connect on Medium, Twitter, or the DSCVR portal.
We’re pretty stoked. Let us know if you are too.
— Daniel, Jimi, Jenni, Sebastian, James & Aaron
“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”
— Anaïs Nin
