The Genesis: Protea Gather
How social capital is growing communities of tomorrow
May 2019 we launched Protea Gather on mainnet, the first dApp built on our community-centric protocol Protea [x]. Leading up to this moment in time we experienced an insightful journey into the meaning and purpose of communities and commons.
In our quest to grow communities of tomorrow, we experimented, explored, challenged the status quo and made many meaningful connections.
Read more about our journey here:
In this post I’ll provide a detailed understanding of Protea Gather. In other words, “what” and “why” is Gather.
A bit of context
Our journey started in South Africa, where the name Protea is rooted. Proteas are an integral part of a unique local vegetation known as fynbos. South Africa frequently experiences devastating wildfires. Astonishingly Proteas regrow after these wildfires, stronger & healthier than ever before. They thrive in adversity, and quite literally symbolise resilience and adaptability.
It is these principles of resilience and adaptability we strive to ingrain in the design of our community-centric protocol Protea [x]. At the core of Protea [x] is the notion of tokenised trust, which signals commitment within the context of community interactions. “Tokenising trust” is just another way of saying “let’s put skin-in-the-game” and associate risk/reward mechanisms with this skin-in-the-game. This enables sustainable ways of engaging within communities, regardless of scale.
Ultimately, with Protea [x] we are creating an open and adaptable SDK that will enable the realisation of many commons — crafting possibilities for novel coordination around cohesive & purpose-driven human networks.
The Genesis: Protea Gather
It all starts with Gather, the first dApp built on Protea [x]. Gather takes the protocols notion of “tokenised trust → commitment” and applies it to communities that have an element of mobilising and gathering around shared initiatives.
Community Markets
At the core of Gather are community markets (driven by Token Bonding Curves). These act as gateways, wrapping communities into micro-economies. Anyone can join a community through its community market, by committing value in form of DAI (1 DAI equals 1 $ — more on DAI here).
As you deposit DAI into a community, that DAI is still yours, and is now seen as your social capital in the context of this community. Think of it as a deposit in a big pot of deposits. The big pot of deposits measures the collective social capital of your community.
Community markets add a novel twist to this:
- As others add deposits to your community, the value of your deposit (social capital) increases
- Inversely, as others take their deposits from your community, the value of your deposit (social capital) decreases
You, as anyone else, can take your social capital out of a community at any point in time. This mechanism rewards and incentivises early adoption, engagement & loyal following of communities you are care about.
Note: Community markets are driven by Token Bonding Curves, a core token engineering primitive. Token Bonding Curves are transparent, secured by the blockchain, act autonomously, have flexibility and apart from measuring social capital and incentivising early adopters & loyal members in the context of Gather, can also be used to create collective funding mechanisms for a community. If you are new to Bonding Curves and would like to find out more, this introduction presentation of ours is a good starting point.
What to do … with your social capital
In the context of your community, your social capital is used as “skin-in-the-game” when RSVPing to free gatherings. In other words, you’ll be able to put some of your social capital on the line, to signal that you’ll be coming to a gathering (as in, yes I’ll actually come as I don’t want to lose my $).
- If you don’t attend, you’ll lose your skin-in-the-game
- If you do attend, you’ll get your skin-in-the-game back + a share from those who lost theirs for not coming
This incentivises sustainable engagement.
As Gather evolves beyond this first iteration, the setup of this incentivisation mechanism will be highly flexible & adaptable. A community might, for example, want to apply a redistribution mechanism of lost skin-in-the-game to a community fund or an external source.
With this first iteration, we already see a product-market fit both for meetup and volunteering communities.
Meetup communities
Running free meetups can be challenging, both financially and from an engagement perspective. Meetup communities, of any kind, that coordinate around free gatherings are a perfect fit for Protea Gather. They benefits from creating a micro-economy around their community, visualising collective social capital and incentivising meetup engagement.
Community Markets & Social Capital
Turning your meetup community into a tradable market, effectively a micro-economy, has multiple benefits.
Community Markets measure social capital both for the individual and community as a whole. This amplifies the voice of your meetup community, be it for attracting new members, receiving outside sponsorship, or strengthening your mission.
The genesis community on Gather is a meetup community — Token Engineering Cape Town. After the launch, the community already had 40 members and a collective social capital of over $340.
Community markets can be calibrated so that a percentage of the deposits flowing into the community are collected by the community. Token Engineering Cape Town, for example, collects 10% from every member on entry. As all social capital stored in the community, this collection grows in value, whenever deposits in the community increase.
This very effect of the value of social capital growing as more join the community, also incentivises alignment and growth in the meetup community. Those who care about the community, are incentivised to join early, stay loyal and spread the word.
Social capital incentivises meetup engagement
When you create meetups in your community on Gather, you can define how much social capital attendees are required to stake when RSVPing. This mechanism counteracts the tragedy of commons faced when creating free meetups. Attendance ratios are significantly improved when using this mechanism for managing meetup attendance.
Volunteering communities
Growing a flourishing volunteering community comes with it’s obstacles. Both finding volunteers and effectively coordinating their efforts is tricky. Any volunteering community that focusses on bringing people together to donate their time towards a greater cause is a perfect fit for Protea Gather. Like with meetups, volunteering communities benefit from creating a micro-economy around their community that visualises social capital and incentivises engagement.
Running a volunteering community on Gather incentivises people to join, not only because they believe in the cause, but also because they are actively invested in it’s success. Incentivising engagement at gatherings makes coordination a lot easier. Beyond that, with volunteering communities there is a clear benefit in being able to showcase undisputedly who has been part of a gathering. This on-chain information can easily be linked to rewards such as bounties from the Bounty Network.
We have a dedicated early adopter program. If you are part of a meetup or volunteering community or would like to experiment with Gather, email us at hello@protea.io or get in touch via our Telegram.
Together, let’s grow communities of tomorrow.
