E2C: Crypto for Social Good

Community Notes, Apr. 29, 2021

Just look at all these meaningful community exchanges!

Webinar links

Info and video at https://www.crowdcast.io/e/e2c-crypto-social-good 

Connect with one another!

Add your name, organization/affiliation, email address, and anything you want to share:

We had over 100 RSVPs, including...

• Mark Daugherty, Healthy food and climate friendly farming. 3rdplanetpro@gmail.com
• Noel Putaansuu Acumentor LLC DBA Smokeless Chimney, www.smokelesschimney.com. Warm homes and clean air for everyone!
• Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado Boulder MEDLab, nathan.schneider@colorado.edu, ntnsndr.in, ioo.coop
• Nicole d’Avis, Founder, ENiD Co. www.enidco.com, enicole@gmail.com 
• Karla Córdoba-Brenes, Co-Founder, Cambiatus www.cambiatus.com karla@cambiatus.com 
• Danny Spitzberg, Lead Researcher, turningbasinlabs.com / @daspitzberg
• Alex Soto, Facilitator of collaborative teams.. alex.soto.digital@gmail.com http://alexsoto.digital/ 
• Alice Yuan Zhang, Artist and Community Weaver, Co-Founder of virtual care lab @aliceyuanzhang https://aliceyuanzhang.com/ https://virtualcarelab.com/ 
• Damiano Avellino, Hypernova-Platform Design Toolkit-CoopValley, damiano@platformdesigntoolkit.com 
• Jennie Robinson Faber, Damage Labs damagelabs.ca / @damagelabs / @jennie
• Arthur Poot, I grow businesses and active communities, double-agency.com, Telegram: arnathan, LinkedIn 
• Darren Smith, Traipse PBC and My Local Token; conducting a digital community currency pilot in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, USA. Learn more at mylocaltoken.org, and our just-launched campaign here: https://crowdfundmainstreet.com/campaigns/nibtmnab
• Jeremy Agnew, Nelson Melina, smart villages and metastructure (www.re-source.life) and collaborating with the www.re-build.co conference which starts tomorrow, for communities creating villages. Use FIRENDS20 for a 20% discount on tickets.
• Grant Storry, Entrepreneur (excited to participate in the acceleration of cooperative business ownership & participation), British Columbia Canada - https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantstorry/
• Michael Grossman (he/him) co-founder of Factr (https://factr.com) based in Brooklyn, NY. Factr is a member-supported platform for gathering, organizing, and sharing knowledge, a focus-friendly antidote to the distracting, always-on, data-sucking world of ad-supported social and content platforms. We are exploring exit-to-community and platform cooperative models, and we are very specifically interested in p2p transactions around exchange of expertise and membership in collaborative groups. We see blockchain as an inevitable component of the community, both for governance and for commerce.
• Tim McCormick, @tmccormick, http://tjm.org/about. Portland Oregon USA. working on cooperative product/project development, Village Buildings open/coop book project, Oregon Cooperative Housing Network.
• Ámbar Tenorio-Fornés (she/they/he) (ambar@decentralized.science) Quartz Open Access and Decentralized Science
• Annie Phillips, founder of IRL Art, Art Steward of ETHDenver, community member of unique.one || annie@irlart.com
• Martin Etzrodt, akasha.org & ethereum.world @EtzrodtMartin
• Sebastian Klemm, communicating solutions of doers for Climate Action, Social Justice & Tech for Good at https://proofingfuture.eu/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/proofing-future https://masthead.social/@ProofingFuture https://twitter.com/ProofingFuture

Currently, founding "Proofing Future: Bridging People + Ideas" as solidarity based, collaborative venture: contribute@proofingfuture.eu

• Kalindi Pathare, Cofounder https://hashrem.com, kalindi@hashrem.com - building an opportunity ecosystem: #Remarkable is a fair and ethical opportunity ecosystem that empowers everyone to create an inner compass, pursue passion projects, learn lifelong, create multiple income streams and do social good along the way. Interested in making #Remarkable a cooperative.,
• Leslie Borrell, Founder/CEO Carefully - a platform for parents to create connect with people they trust to share care and organize playdates www.carefullyapp.com, leslie@carefullyapp.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslieborrell/ 
• Connie Jehu, Interaction Designer working on my masters thesis at the Umea Institute of Design in Sweden. Topic is around transparency of taxes and am looking into how blockchain could help with that. conniejehu@gmail.com
• Lee Pera, founder of a tiny house community in Washington DC, now working on using mobile houses & businesses for landowners who want to develop short to medium term pilot communities - just underway starting this initiative (ReCommune) with Jewel Pearson and a few organizations & landowners in NC. Working on our website now, but my website around my tiny house work is www.kotierra.org. Looking to connect with those who are exploring developing tokens for investing in community & land development. leepera@gmaiil.com
• Marlon Barrios Solano,  http://www.dance-tech.net/page/motion-dao  MotionDAO, is a social innovation/art research project that uses a crypto economic and token design frameworks as a way of exploring new ownership, governance and economic design in order to transfer ownership and authority to the community members. http://www.dance-tech.net/profile/network_producer marlon@dance-tech.net

• Dominic Mathew, City planner managing a transportation program called the Paradox Prize. Working to test a cooperative transportation model using community resources like church vans. Interested in exploring a data trust model with participating neighborhoods and whether blockchain can be a basis for that
• The Blockchain Socialist - I blog and podcast about blockchain and the left at http://theblockchainsocialist.com 
• Greg Liburd - Founder of a crypto-enabled voice-first community concierge platform. I’m a “full stack Afrofuturist” focused on better BIPOC futures through enterprise, art and activism. Co-lead of Freedom Market, the economic empowerment initiative of the longest standing protest in NYC history, McCarren #BLM Gathering. greg@buzzz.it
• Mike Margolies
  PEACH token: https://www.peach.vision/
  CryptoPsychedelic: https://www.psychsems.com/cryptopsychedelic
  Psychedelic Seminars: https://www.psychsems.com/
  Personal site: https://mikemargolies.net/
  Email: mike@mikemargolies.net
  PsychSems Twitter: https://twitter.com/psychsems
  Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikemargolies
  
• Marie Mainil. Fan Artist Inter Empowerment, among other things. Social and Environmental Impact Manager (ex: green tours/shows, kind social media, and more). Move your fans, make impact, grow business. http://mariemainil.com 
• Pablo Lacasia (Argentina) sharing this pitch-NFT from a friend in Brazil: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/96777800796722553132898020329423306407018950126287179375088407033630511071233 Co-Founder of Brodr.

remarks

Nathan Schneider // MEDLab

• Open slide
• MEDLab is doing lots of stuff around democratizing ownership and governance. See our other “Exit to Community” stuff here.
• Thanks to Zebras Unite for support on this event, Crowdcast, cohort that led to this.
• Thanks to Danny - point to this doc for ongoing conversations

Nicole // ENiD

• About me, about us:

• Nicole d’Avis, enicole@gmail.com 
• Founder, ENiD Co. www.enidco.com
• Co-Founder, ENiD + RAD, www.enidandrad.com
• For 5+ years I ran Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship and the Open Music Initiative, and founded RAIDAR.com, a blockchain-based, student-artist led music licensing platform. I’m now working with companies and individual artists to launch projects, build and sustain community, and design strategic communications and visions, especially in the Web3 space.

Karla Córdoba Brenes // Cambiatus

• About me, about us

• Karla Córdoba Brenes

• Passionate about sustainability, innovation, new types of money, exponential tech and collaborative businesses... but mostly, I believe in our capacity to transform the world in a better place. - Satisfied Vagabonds CoFounder - Shuttleworth Alumni - Singularity University Alumni - UCI Empowering Sustainability Fellow - TIC-as Women in Tech Costa Rica Member.
• https://www.cambiatus.com/ 

• Current focus:  

• Facilitating the Exit to Community process for Cambiatus, and energizing two new collaborative business in our ecosystem: Cambiuu https://www.cambiuu.com/ (Cambiatus University for Social Entrepreneurs building collaborative businesses) and Natus https://www.natuscoin.com/en/home  (a digital asset system supporting private forest conservation).

Julio Linares // Circles

• About me, about us

• Julio Linares

• Researcher at Circles, a blockchain based basic income made to promote local economies. https://joincircles.net/ 

• Current focus:

• Economic anthropologist, from Guatemala, now in Berlin, have been researching UBI and how might a state bring a basic income into being
• I am now with Circles doing basic income instead of waiting for the government

Framing of Session:

• Reference past talk on emerging crypto tech, discussions with Roll & Fairmint & Launch Legal

• Utility / how-to of what’s out there and how it works

• Nicole’s past experience with crypto / building in crypto
• Framing crypto conversation in terms of Exit to Community and Zebra principles. What are the characteristics of blockchain / crypto that can be aligned with these approaches to entrepreneurship and business, and what are the models out there that are exploring and building based on those fundamentals (sustainability - environmental & financial, community responsiveness, focus on equity & values).
• **This continues to be a REALLY new space, and as always, due diligence. Shortly after previous talk, Roll experienced a hack, and continues to balance usability and easy on-ramps with high security in an industry where the UX learning curve for many is still steep. They are now undergoing an entire security overhaul and investigation, and I think will come back even stronger, but again, this space is new. Do your own research.
• Today’s discussion will focus more on the why and how of these particular platforms, and more broadly, of the space they are developing, with a focus on social/community tokens or currencies. Again, this is a new space, and no one should take any of the following as financial advice, always do your own research and diligence, especially when it comes to finances!

Discussion:

• Nicole: Level set, what are the things that money, currency or tokens do for a community? What are the needs that money/currency/tokens solve for?

• Exchange
• Investment / Debt
• Trust
• Value(s)

• Karla:

• We should start with definitions.
• What is money? Central banks say, it’s debt. But we’re not going into that topic now… this is the definition of fiat money right now- and that’s only one definition.
• I love to use this: “an agreement between a community/group of people with a common goal, to use something - cacao, shells, pieces of paper with people’s face on them, or digital bits today - as an exchange mechanism (based on Bernard Lietaer’s work). That’s just one function. Others include voting, and more.
• We can’t expect one type of money to do everything- to be used for exchange, savings, investment, voting… paying taxes

• Julio:

• I’ll add that money helps the specific imagination of a community.
• In the US the Iroquoi used beads - little shiny rocks from the river - that they’d use for their treaties for piece, and also for war. It embodied their idea of the world and myths and more.
• Now we’re seeing a plurality of money, and we should learn to accept and embrace  
• Compound interest is based on money. The interest is based on the principle. And it doesn’t come from the nbank but from people competing with each other in the labor market. And so the scarcity by which money is created is part of the growth imperative by which we operate
• And so UBI says, what if we claim the power to give each other money, pay it back with interest maybe but that’s up to us. The idea is to give people access to what they need.

• Karla:

• I love the idea of becoming more resilient by becoming more diverse in our currencies -- and the behaviors it enables/encourages, based on the values embedded in those currencies.
• A practical example: one community of Cambiatus in Brazil uses a social currency, two thousand people from the favelas using Muda for exchange inside the community, and using ‘reals’ for exchange outside.

• In the US, we often take for granted that our currency can reliably serve these needs, but this is not true globally. From your non-US perspectives, can you give context on some of the challenges when currency can’t solve for these needs?

• And so, how has that, or has that, informed the development of Circles / Cambiatus?
• In the most basic form, what is the challenge that you were trying to solve for, and what are the characteristics of crypto, or what elements of blockchain tech, did you apply to address that challenge?

• Ownership in Web3 (how do you build something that’s meaningfully different?)

• How define and how does it work within each of your platforms?

• Disintermediation

• Others who are doing interesting experiments in this work

• Community. How do you start establishing connections or building the trust?

• 2 different ways of creating community: place-based vs remote
• How go about it? How have you either built community, or built on top of community?

• Governance
• Trust
• What power does community have, how is the power defined that community members hold?

• Julio:

• The Circle system is meant to be glocal, it can be established anywhere
• We started first in Berlin, building slowly and engaging relations wit different people. Then Twitter found out and slowly we got the pirate ship into steady waters so we could manage things better
• Community is a social relation that exists between people with shared values, so it can be as small as a cafe in Berlin or at a beer garden or a coliving space… or farms or networks of farmers… but what is important is the interdependence that exists between different actors.

• Once you start seeing the interdependence that exists… you have to start creating more regional ways to support communities
• That’s how we’re applying direct democracy to the community- in a media group, one about housing, etc.- and then self-organizing and building economic power from below

• BUT/AND to really create an alternative, you need trust.
• In Circles, it’s really based on “trust” - what we mean is, “trust is power” and by allowing people to enter the system you’re sharing access.

• Karla:

• In Cambiatus we have “the Cambiatus process” - and it’s really intense

• We have the methodology and the software both to create the currency. Each community has their own currency.

• For example in Muda, it was created 1.5 years ago by artists to create exchange among themselves, and in the pandemic they moved all art and cultural shows online.

• And for your contributions in that community you get 10-20 Mudas
• It started with 40-50 individuals and has grown by invitations and vouching for others

• For another example in Costa Rica? there’s Verdes

• You get currency for volunteering, or for have a charging station at your business or a composting setup at your house
• And every two weeks there’s a fair/market and you can sell everything in exchange for Verdes

• Nicole: what are the elements that can make local currency like Ithaca Dollars more possible? And what is it about blockchain that helps us get to the next level of what we’re trying to do, with Web 3.0?

• Karla:

• I’m glad we talked for 45min about community and leavin tech to the end, as the tech should be a support for that. And that’s how we built Cambiatus- our decision-making, and more.
• Social currencies can be created with little bits of paper,... and now there’s a way to ensure 1) transparency and 2) trust that nobody can change the records with blockchain

• But to make the tools approachable and easy to use… for mothers and shop-owners and people with low tech knowledge… we REally need to invest more in UX/UI because right now most of blockchain tools out there looks awful and it’s a pain in the you-know-where. Not Cambiatus!

• Nicole: in RAIDAR a music platform we were sort of already building in community before an exit to community…
• Julio:

• Tech has a design, a way power is distributed. We might call it a “political economy” - and I’m critical of much of the blockchain stuff because it’s obfuscated who has the power, and even when systems are automated there’s usually someone behind the scene updating code or fixing bugs and doing the care work
• The values embedded -- the interests among the miners, the coders, and the exchangers -- are all important
• For me trying to create a UBI, … I want to make money itself a commons. Otherwise you’re just changing one infrastructure for another

• Scarcity vs abundance

• Digital goods became ubiquitous (not really abundant), and so we course-corrected by manufacturing digital scarcity, which led to the NFT explosion.
• I’m interested in the question of valuing and compensating and encouraging abundance. Is this a topic explored in the building of your platforms/models? How?

• Give a “tactical/practical” wash on the above - literally HOW does this work?

• Ways that crypto / their platforms specifically or just in general how are they (are they) crafting actual E2C strategies and moves.
• Can crypto be a strategy for existing companies to be community owned/exited?

• What about the environment. . . . ?

• Can’t end without addressing environmental concerns. What are your models impacts on environment / fossil fuels? How are you impacting?

Audience Q&A:

Write your name and your question using the format below, so everyone can ask & respond

• Name, question

• Name, response

• Darren Smith; I love hearing about all the exciting social-impact crypto projects worldwide, but I’ll take issue a bit with the discussion statement above: “In the US, we often take for granted that our currency can reliably serve these needs, but this is not true globally.” It may be true that our currency in the US operates well as money in terms of trust, value, etc., but it’s also true that our advanced(?) financial system has become great at extracting value from communities through transaction fees and other things that harm communities and sap their capital. The need for creative crypto projects is still there, but it’s harder to experiment because of a regulatory environment that prevents a lot of innovation. Is anyone here working on interesting local crypto projects in the US and if so, how are you avoiding regulatory issues especially with moving b/w tokens and USD?

• Thanks for addressing this! I’ll have to check out the previous session - does anyone have a link?

• Check out https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/events and see the previous session at https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/2021/02/01/exit-community-emerging-crypto !
• 
• Thanks, Danny! Go Buffs!

• Lauren Garcia (@_eljee on twitter) Question for Julio: Circles UBI is really interesting. Identity is obviously important to making it work (for Sybil resistance). Question is: who OWNS this data at the end of the day? What kind of entity is it, who is behind it, legally and financially ?

Final thoughts

• Nicole

• Thanks to guests, thanks to E2C & Zebra community, Nathan, Danny, Sheezah & Mara

• Nathan

What’s next

Resources

Resources on accountability - article, tools, anything you’d like to share:

• The Exit to Community website and wiki – www.e2c.how