Now we must look directly at why this work is so urgent. As futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard said, “our crisis is a birth.” The systemic breakdowns we face aren’t random misfortunes — they’re the labor pains of a civilization giving birth to something new. But birth requires active participation. Understanding the depth and interconnected nature of our crises is essential to understanding what’s actually required of us.

Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF

Our Context is Crisis, Our Crisis is a Birth

Source: Wiki

As renowned futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard said, “our crisis is a birth.” The systemic breakdowns we face necessitate the emergence of entirely new systems and ways of being, reconstituting, renewing and reimagining ancient cultural foundations at a planetary scale for the first time. Never before in our history has our existential self-destructive capacity forced us to understand at the planetary scale how to explicitly align the underlying agreements and mechanisms of human civilization with living systems principles. We have had the freedom, throughout our adolescent history as a species, to explore many different expressions of how civilization could be organized. Now, our exponential technologies, driven by rivalrous dynamics to the brink of total species annihilation, are offering us a choice. We can either learn how to design and bind the underlying agreements of our cultures and systems in alignment with living systems principles and the holistic stewardship of the well-being of our planet, shifting the fundamental context of our modes of production, consumption, and reproduction, or we will destroy ourselves. While this proposition seems daunting, this alignment is materially the only viable path through the eye of the needle available to us as a species due to the runaway feedback loops of exponential technologies.

Looking at the world around us, it isn’t difficult to see that we live in a world in crisis. Ecocide, biodiversity collapse, climatic shifts, extreme weather, mass climate migrations and refugees, catastrophic topsoil degradation and food system collapse, homelessness, mental health epidemics, ideological fragmentation and escalating polarization, chronic illness, wealth inequality and economic centralization, national and personal debt crises, inflation, the potential of peak oil, the rising costs of energy, resource extraction, genetically engineered bioweapons, the truth and meaning crisis, and severe social transformations and risk as Artificial Intelligence progresses are among the many runaway crises we face as a species. These converging crises are an existential threat to human civilization. At this stage in the exponential curve of multiple runaway crises, a collective fundamental phase-shift is extremely urgent. Interoperable transition methods and a shared sense of global human solidarity are critical to our species’ longevity and survival.

Underlying these seemingly distinct expressions of civilizational decay and collapse are a shared set of systemic dynamics reinforcing the exponential feedback loops that drive these anti-social and ecocidal patterns. As a whole, these patterns can be referred to as wicked problems, the polycrisis, or the meta-crisis. The self-referential quality implied by the term meta-crisis refers to the particular self-reinforcing quality of systemic feedback loops whose path-reinforcing dynamics make self-correction more and more difficult as time passes.

For example, in democracies around the world, the complex feedback loop of “regulatory capture” produces dynamics that undermine the public’s ability to utilize the mechanisms outlined in constitutional frameworks for representative self-governance. Many elected officials, even well-intentioned ones, are elected into office to make change, but by the time they have the power to make that change, they are often already so influenced or inhibited by the incentives of corporate campaign finance and duopoly institutional entrenchment that they cannot effectively represent the will of the people who elected them. These elected officials may make some nominal or superficial gestures toward transformational change, but ultimately they are beholden to the already-captured institutions that provision them with access to power.

regulatory capture

When a regulatory agency, established to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special interests of the industry it is charged with regulating. This phenomenon happens when the regulated entities exert significant influence over the agency, leading it to prioritize their interests over those of the general public. As a result, the regulatory body may act in ways that benefit the industry rather than ensuring fair and effective regulation.

From the race to Artificial General Intelligence to the attention economy to military spending, multi-polar traps are system dynamics in which mistrust and rivalry force competing corporations and governments to continuously accelerate their tactics without regard for the consequences for and negative externalities to society. The behavioral dimension of a multi-polar trap is driven by the belief that “if I didn’t do it, someone else would.” This self-fulfilling logic, driven by an economic system that rewards these behaviors regardless of their existential risks they generate for humanity, creates a “race to the bottom” which risks the continuity of Life on Earth in favor of short term profits.

multi-polar traps

Situations where multiple actors, each pursuing their own self-interest, collectively contribute to a harmful outcome that none of them individually desire. This concept, rooted in game theory, illustrates how individual rational actions can lead to collectively irrational results. For example, in a competitive market, businesses might engage in practices that are detrimental to the environment or society to stay ahead, resulting in overall negative consequences.

tragedy of the commons

An economic theory that describes a situation where individuals, acting in their own self-interest, overuse and deplete a shared resource, leading to its eventual destruction. This occurs because each person benefits directly from using the resource, while the costs of overuse are distributed among all users. The concept was popularized by ecologist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 essay, where he illustrated it with the example of communal grazing lands.

In the contexts of socio-economic, technological, and military industrial systems, the system dynamics of multi-polar traps, the tragedy of the commons, and recursive accumulation of wealth and power form a nearly impenetrable mess of misaligned incentives and runaway feedback cycles. In an ideal world, democracies would provide a countervailing influence on unrestrained, centralized corporate power, but the same forces that drive extractive and anti-social behaviors in the corporate sector have overtaken our democracies.

Seen in this context, the meta-crisis is a coordination and adaptation failure, a civic crisis stemming from the long term effects of separation, rivalry, and the consolidation of wealth and power on the public’s ability to govern itself effectively. If markets, governments, and multinational corporations are systemically incapable of coordinating a response to the interconnected crises we face, it becomes self-evident that reformist efforts are ultimately insufficient to address our crises at the root. In actuality, despite the techno-optimism that occurs in elite conferences around the world, corporate-driven reformism not only distracts from the underlying system dynamics but also prolongs the perceived legitimacy of legacy institutions. While holding actions can slow the progression or reduce the harm caused by these systems, the systemic and self-reinforcing nature of these runaway processes implies that much deeper transformational actions are required to preserve the continuity of human civilization and perhaps even Life on Earth.

In short, the meta-crisis represents a nested set of feedback loops that not only drive exponential acceleration of existential risks but increasingly undermine our collective capacity to address those risks within the internal processes of our captured systems. In both our democracies and economies, these systemic drivers of runaway crises have consumed and undermined the capacity of elections and markets to mitigate them. Thus, we as a public have no choice but to formalize our own civic systems that address the failure modes of our current systems.

whole systems design

An approach that considers all components of a system and their interrelationships to optimize overall performance and sustainability. It involves understanding how different elements within a system interact and influence one another, aiming to create synergies and leverage points for improvement. This method is often used in fields like architecture, engineering, and environmental planning to ensure that all parts of a system work together harmoniously.

The meta-crisis is, at root, a coordination and adaptation failure — a civic crisis stemming from the long-term effects of rivalry, separation, and the consolidation of wealth and power. If markets, governments, and corporations are systemically incapable of coordinating a response, it becomes self-evident that we must formalize our own civic systems. In our next chapter, we’ll explore the three probable futures that emerge from current dynamics — and why the “third attractor” of distributed coordination is humanity’s narrow path through the eye of the needle.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• Chapter 5: Our Crisis is a Birth ← This Chapter

• Chapter 6: The Three Attractors

• Chapter 7: A Post-Tragic Protopian Audacity

• Chapter 8: Open Civic Culture

• Chapter 9: Open Civic Systems — Architecture & Transformation

• Chapter 10: Open Civic Systems — Design Principles & Living Systems

• Chapter 11: Our Choice

The third iteration of A General Forum on Ethereum Localism (GFEL) in Boulder carried forward and expanded the momentum from its Portland origins, establishing itself as an emergent, forkable protocol for convening localists, blockchain builders, and regenerative economy practitioners. Hosted in partnership between the Portland-based Ethereal Forest crew and previous GFEL attendees alongside Boulder-based allies The Riverside, Woven Web, OpenCivics, Boulder Commons, One Local, The Regen Hub, and The Wheel Collective, the event provided a clear example of the ethos of cosmo-localism in action—leveraging shared global knowledge while deeply rooting in local context.

From February 21st-23rd, 2025, Boulder became a node in a growing decentralized network of Ethereum localists, activating spaces of inquiry, collaboration, and experimentation. The gathering featured unconference sessions, panels and participatory fishbowl dialogues, and a celebratory closing event that showcased local community initiatives and Boulder-based musicians. A core experiment in the closing event was the real-time community allocation of a $5K matching pool to community groups, distributed via quadratic voting on an app custom-built for community budgeting by our friends and sponsor, Allo.Capital.

GFEL Boulder wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support of The Ethereum Foundation, Gitcoin, Celo Public Goods, and Public Nouns, all of whom contributed towards the matching pool for local non-profit and community organizations in addition to providing scholarships for all participants who needed them.

We’re incredibly grateful for their trust and support.

GFEL Boulder was more than just another Ethereum conference—it was a living, breathing experiment in cosmo-localism, a convergence of global knowledge-sharing and local self-determination.

The gathering explored what it means to reclaim economic sovereignty, strengthen local resilience, and coordinate across planetary scales using Ethereum and other tools. With a focus on practical implementation, the event surfaced concrete experiments in local governance, mutual credit, commitment pooling, and regenerative finance.

Here’s a deeper look at the rich conversations and key insights from thematic panels and discussions that shaped the weekend.

Unconference Sessions

True to its decentralized spirit, GFEL Boulder was an unconference—an open, self-organizing format where participants proposed and facilitated their own sessions. The topics explored ranged from technical and economic frameworks to deeply cultural and existential inquiries about collective governance, storytelling, and planetary-scale coordination. Some standout sessions included:

• Cosmo-local Federation Formation – Designing governance models that link localists and builders through shared funding, information, and coordination infrastructure.

• DAO Tooling & Community Councils – Exploring how decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) can support grassroots organizing. Several DAO tool demos were shared including Conviction Voting and staking as a governance signal.

• Planetary AI & Ecological Intelligence – Discussing AI models that enhance decentralized decision-making for ecological stewardship and expand the ways in which we can interact with and relate to the intelligence of nature.

• Open-ended Mutualism – A pluralistic and creative exploration of collaborative and participatory design of mutual aid infrastructure.

• Ethical Capital Formation – Reimagining finance to prioritize reciprocity over extractive models.

• Regen Movement Mapping – Visualizing and coordinating the growing network of regenerative finance and local economies.

• Obstacles for Local Builders – Addressing barriers to localist organizing as well as corresponding solutions.

• Commitment Pooling - An interactive exercise to learn how commitment pooling works in contrast to traditional monetary systems.

• AI Hyperstition – Speculating on how stories and mythologies shape the development of decentralized tech.

• Collaboration Monsters – Creating new kinds of networked inter-organizational structures that enable aligned groups to swarm together via novel legal and governance mechanisms.

These sessions reflected the diversity of perspectives present—bridging blockchain developers, urban planners, cooperative economists, artists, bioregionalists, and community organizers.

Panel Highlights

Local Coordination

Weaving a Community Network That Sees Itself

This panel dug into the mechanisms of local coordination—not just the technology, but the cultural and relational layers that underpin any functional localist economy.

• Cameron Murdock (One Local) shared his experience with creating a local mutual aid network during the pandemic. He described how the act of planting 7,000 vegetable seeds in an abandoned parking lot led to the development of a cooperative digital platform that tracks and distributes community resources.

• Nidhi Harihar, working with Voice Deck to ensure decisions are taken closest to the people they impact, reflected on urban coordination, emphasizing that in a highly dense city, daily life is deeply interwoven, yet modern economic structures create artificial barriers between people. This realization drove her to work on digital systems that restore social ties in the urban fabric.

• Nidhi also spoke about using blockchain to fund citizen-driven impact on the ground. She connected this to her experience in Auroville, India, an experimental self-governed city, where communal governance flourishes but also struggles with power dynamics.

One of the most memorable quotes came from Cameron:

“One of the best technologies we have is still just knowing each other. We can talk about DAOs all day, but the most effective mutual aid networks still function through people who know where the food is, where the money is, and who needs what.”

This panel illuminated the essential pragmatism of community organizing: technology can amplify coordination, but it can’t replace the trust-based social fabric that makes localism work.

Climate & Bioregional Stewardship

Grounding in Place Without Losing Global Solidarity

A theme throughout this panel was oscillation—the need to zoom in on local ecological stewardship while maintaining planetary solidarity.

• Gregory Landua from Regen Network described how carbon markets often miss the mark by prioritizing abstract credits over relationships with land stewards. Instead, he emphasized the importance of bioregional DAOs that actually fund people doing the work.

• Gregory also shared a powerful personal story about salmon fisheries, exposing the deep contradictions in so-called “sustainable resource management.” He recounted how, as a fisherman, he spent days burning diesel to find salmon, while knowing full well that they were all heading upriver to spawn. In contrast, Indigenous fishing practices used fish wheels that required no fuel and took only what was needed.

• Colleen Chase, co-founder of Solar Foundation, spoke about experiencing the inequalities of wildfire response firsthand. Wealthier homeowners were able to hire private insurance and security teams to protect their homes, while working-class residents—often employed in those same homes—had nowhere to go, no way to leave, and had to keep working through the disaster.

One of the most stirring moments came when she described watching her daughter develop asthma from wildfire smoke:

This panel cut through greenwashing rhetoric and surfaced real questions about power, extractivism, and economic justice in the climate space.

Local Economies & Alternative Finance

What Comes After Money?

This panel featured visionaries in complementary currencies, blockchain-based economic coordination, and regenerative finance, discussing how to build economic sovereignty beyond extractive financial models.

• Njambi Njoroge (Grassroots Economics) described how commitment pooling—a system where communities guarantee shared obligations without cash—has enabled local economies to flourish without dependence on national currencies.

• Will Ruddick (also Grassroots Economics) connected this to historical mutual aid practices, sharing how cooperative labor pools and local credit systems have functioned for centuries before money.

• Nathan Schneider (CU Boulder, Media Economies Design Lab) spoke about the potential for cooperative media ownership, arguing that platforms like Patreon and Substack could be radically reimagined as member-owned economic systems.

• Azuraye Wycoff, a farmer and business owner from Yellow Barn Farm, described the challenge of running a regenerative agriculture operation within an economy that doesn’t value soil health. She called for land-backed cooperative finance that allows farmers to build wealth in their land without selling out to developers.

One of the most provocative insights came from Scott Morris (Citizen Wallet):

“We talk about ‘fixing’ money, but maybe money itself is the problem. When we say ‘money,’ what we really mean is power over others. We don’t need ‘better money’—we need better ways of trusting each other.”

This panel pushed beyond crypto hype and into fundamental questions of economic design, asking how we replace markets of competition with networks of care.

Narrative Shifts

Breaking Out of Outdated Stories

The most philosophical and politically charged discussion of the weekend, this panel took aim at the ideologies shaping Web3, global finance, and governance.

• Exeunt opened with Umberto Eco’s 14 points of Ur-Fascism, drawing eerie parallels between historical fascist movements and modern corporate control of digital infrastructure.

• A participant referenced Antonio Gramsci, saying: “We are living in a time of monsters—the old world is dying, but the new one is struggling to be born.”

• There was heated debate about capitalism and communism, with some arguing for crypto-socialism, while others pushed for post-capitalist models that transcend old political binaries.

One of the most electric moments came when someone declared:

“We aren’t here building products. We’re building economies. We have to stop acting like startups and start acting like revolutionaries.”

This session underscored a key tension in Ethereum Localism—how to harness decentralized technology without reproducing the same systems of control and exclusion that Web3 claims to oppose.

Conclusion

A Living Protocol for Localist Experimentation

One of the key takeaways from GFEL Boulder was the evolution of the forum itself. Originally sparked in Portland, the event is not a centralized brand, but an open protocol that can be forked, adapted, and remixed by local organizers worldwide. The collaboration between Boulder and Portland teams demonstrated how GFEL can spread as a decentralized pattern—each iteration uniquely shaped by its local context.

GFEL Boulder affirmed that Ethereum Localism isn’t a tech stack or an ideology—it’s a living experiment in place-based coordination, weaving the local and the planetary.

The most striking takeaway from GFEL Boulder was its refusal to be a static event. Instead, it functioned as a living experiment, a collaboration monster, an emergent protocol that decides for itself where to go next.

With whispers of Berlin, Bangalore, Mexico City, and Amsterdam, the movement is alive and mutating. Wherever it lands next, it will be a testament to the power of self-organizing networks to reshape the world from the ground up.

Overheard At GFEL Boulder: Quotes From The Weekend

“Everything that is heavy should be local and everything that is light should be global and shared.”

— Referencing Michel Bauwens

“We’re not trying to put the sage on the stage. The people up here are not the saviors we’ve been waiting for—they’re here to inspire you into the work that you’re here to do.”

— Benjamin Life

“Local coordination is about acting as one organism.”

— Nidhi (VoiceDeck)

“One of the best technologies that we have are still just those of us who are those central hubs, those nodes in the mycology where a bunch of information is flowing.”

— Cameron Murdock (One Local)

“We wanted to create this frame, this 10-day space and time, where it felt like the community was much more interconnected and activated.”

— Eileen Walz (Woven Web)

“We are trying to create a world where people are actually paid for doing the work of tending to communities and our commons and our planet.”

— Benjamin Life

“Climate change is this wake-up call for humanity realizing how mutually interdependent we are.”

— Ale K

“We know that the salmon are all going up the river, but we can’t coordinate ourselves as a society to accept that abundance in a good way.”

— Gregory Landua

“My daughter says she doesn’t think she wants to have grandkids. I want grandkids. My gosh.”

— Coleen Chase

“Why is it that we have to force ourselves to play these strange competitive economic games in order to ‘manage’ this resource?”

— Gregory Landua

“Over hundreds of years, the Global South and our Indigenous cultures have cultivated and maintained deeply interpersonal economic relationships based on trust, communal dialogue, consensus building.”

— Njambi D. Njoroge (Grassroots Economics)

“We are not reinventing anything. We are just adding on technology to exactly what has been happening and what is still happening.”

— Njambi D. Njoroge (Grassroots Economics)

“We talk about ‘fixing’ money, but maybe money itself is the problem.”

— Scott Morris (Citizen Wallet)

“We aren’t here building products, we’re building economies.”

— Zachary Marlow

“Ethereum as a substrate is a place where we can organize. And localism is where that change really matters and needs to be rooted in place in service of people and ecologies and communities.”

— Benjamin Life

“We’re really trying to find ways to communicate across differences and build real functional solidarity to create grassroots systemic change.”

— Benjamin Life

“So this inquiry that we’re exploring this weekend is: what is the relationship between that global solidarity and that local action?”

— Benjamin Life

“We’re in a time of monsters. The old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born.”

— Referencing Antonio Gramsci

“This archaic, ancient coordination system we call the free market… we just have to move beyond it.”

— Unknown Speaker

“We are stuck in a bad story that is driving us—terminally—toward something that doesn’t work.”

— Unknown Speaker

“This isn’t communism, this isn’t capitalism. We are beyond those binaries.”

— Unknown Speaker

“The best thing we can do right now is build bridges—between ideologies, between communities, between movements. That’s the real infrastructure.”

— Unknown Speaker

“We don’t need better money. We need better ways of trusting each other.”

— Scott Morris (Citizen Wallet)

“At the end of the day, the measure of a regenerative economy is simple: do people have what they need to live, with dignity?”

— Nathan Schneider (CU Boulder)

Overall, the round was the most streamlined that we’ve run thus far. We chose not to implement a cap to the total number of projects included which minimized the deliberative process and resource triage of our previous round. Each round creates an opportunity for on-going learning and development of our Grants Program and we look forward to sharing what we learned!

Results Overview

OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round 03 distributed $38,750 USDC in matching funds to 16 projects. The round raised $3,778.70 in crowdfunding from 141 donors with 337 total donations, averaging $11.21 per donation. Overall, donors generated a 10x multiplier of their donations in matching funds.

Compared with our previous round, both the number of donors and the total crowdfunding amount saw significant decreases.

• Total Number of Donors:

  • Consortium Grant Round 02: 1,062 donors

  • Collaborative Grant Research Round 03: 327 donors

• Total Crowdfunding Amount:

  • Consortium Grant Round 02: $10,306.50

  • Collaborative Grant Research Round 03: $3,778.72

The percentage change between the OpenCivics Consortium Grant Round 02 and the OpenCivics Collaborative Research Grant Round 03 is as follows:

• Total Number of Donors: Decreased by 69.21%

• Total Crowdfunding Amount: Decreased by 63.34%

Overall Data Insights

Key Findings:

1. Top Performing Projects:

   • MycoFi for Municipal Resilience and Stephen Reid: Technological Metamodernism both received the highest matching amount of $5,518.75. These projects also garnered a significant number of contributions (33 and 37, respectively) and large amounts of total received funds. The high matching allocation suggests strong donor engagement and broad support.

2. Moderately Funded Projects:

   • Ethereal Forest’s Open Protocol Research Group and VoiceDeck: A Marketplace for Journalism Impact received moderate matching amounts of $4,271.33 and $4,012.55, respectively. These projects had a reasonable number of contributions (23 and 28) and received significant crowdfunding amounts.

3. Lower Funded Projects:

   • The Bonding Curve Research Group (BCRG) received the lowest matching amount among the highlighted projects, totaling $2,621.20. With 21 contributions, this project still managed to secure a reasonable level of support, but it fell below the others in terms of both contributions and matching funds.

Click here to view the automatically generated Gitcoin Report Card for the round.

For a detailed data, tables, and graphs of the grant round results, check out Collaborative Research Round Analytics on our wiki.

Round Operator Insights

Crowdfunding Decline & Community Engagement

One of the most notable observations during this round was the decline in crowdfunding donations. This reduction might be partially attributed to the broader market downturn, but it is more likely linked to the absence of an open-source software round that typically runs concurrently with key community rounds.

A critical lesson from this experience is the need for the impact-focused segment of the Gitcoin community to extend its outreach beyond the existing web3 space. We see a significant opportunity to engage with other communities that are interested in funding social impact projects but are not currently involved in the space. This challenge could be addressed by coordinating efforts to bring traditional nonprofit ecosystems and climate organizations into the quadratic funding ecosystem.

One of the main barriers to this type of expansion has been the lack of web3 knowledge within these communities. However, the introduction of a fiat PayPal donation option in this round has proven to be a significant step forward. This innovation, made possible through a partnership with viaPrize, allowed us to create a seamless donation process for those unfamiliar with web3, while still ensuring that donations were eligible for matching funds. The success of this experiment suggests that we can now onboard non-web3 participants using traditional payment methods, allowing them to engage in the ecosystem without the steep learning curve associated with purchasing and bridging different cryptocurrencies on different blockchains. For a full retrospective on the viaPrize payment system experiment in GG21, please review founder Noah Chon Lee’s post on the Gitcoin Governance Forum.

Challenges in Matching Calculations

Another key learning from the round was the complexity involved in calculating matching amounts using cluster matching, minimum matching amounts, changes in matching pool size, and whitelisted wallets.

Upon reviewing the cluster matching results, we observed discrepancies between the expected matching results and the actual outcomes. This discrepancy was traced back to a parameter within cluster matching that reduces the matching for wallets that only donate to a single project. While this serves as a useful Sybil protection mechanism, it also unintentionally penalized grantees with unique donor bases mobilized specifically for their projects. To address this issue, we employed a 50/50 split between cluster matching results and quadratic funding results.

Additionally, we had to adjust the results due to a reduction in the matching pool’s size, caused by holding a portion of the pool in ETH rather than USDC. While we immediately swapped ETH for USDC as the market turned, but still lost about $4,000, which we corrected for after the round by manually modifying the matching results to reflect the correct matching pool size.

Lastly, we deployed an experimental $1,000 minimum matching to ensure that all projects selected for the round would receive at least enough grant funds to complete a portion of their research inquiry. Round results were modified by filling the gap in matching for projects that fell below the $1,000 threshold by redistributing matching funds proportional to the amount that each project over $1,000 received.

All of these modifications, the calculations used to derive them, and the original figures are listed on our wiki and can be audited by anyone to determine how those choices were made. In the future, we would appreciate features within Gitcoin Manager that would allow us to reduce the matching pool size, set minimum matching amounts, and modify sybil parameters.

Sybil Protection and Model Transparency

While the cluster matching results in our previous round were intuitively smoother and generally more equitable, cluster matching results in this round were vastly different than the traditional quadratic funding results. Given the large difference, we began to look deeper into what was driving the changes in the underlying model, something we had not thought to inquire into prior. Given what we learned, we want to instantiate a larger public conversation around sybil protection, the tradeoffs between transparency and opaqueness for model-based sybil detection, and other ways we might be able to rethink matching mechanisms.

While the Passport team’s decision to reduce matching for single-project donors is well-intentioned, it highlighted the importance of donors understanding the evaluation metrics of cluster matching. Without this understanding, the algorithm’s outputs may lead to unintended consequences. We believe it is crucial for donors to be informed about the factors influencing their matching scores upfront, enabling them to consciously adjust their behavior. Of course, this transparency could also be used to game the system, but we felt concerned about the unintended negative consequences for some grantees who could have otherwise informed their donors that they would need to also donate to other projects in order for their donations to be eligible for matching. We feel that this kind of information could actually generate positive effects for rounds by encouraging donors to consider all the projects for donation instead of just the projects of their friends. In the future, we may tell our donors something like:

Your donation is a weighted preference vote for which projects should be funded. In order to know how much you value a project, we need to understand your preferences in relationship to at least one other project. If you do find that your preferences are nearly 100% aligned with only one project in the round, please make at least one other small donation to another project to ensure your primary donation is eligible for matching.

We recognize that the previous stamp-based Passport system is cumbersome for most users and were very excited for the new donor UX made possible by cluster matching, but we believe that greater transparency is needed regarding how cluster matching scores are determined. The lack of transparency, which makes sense from the perspective of sybil protection, puts us as round operators in a difficult position, as we must justify round results that stem from an algorithm we do not fully understand.

Furthermore, upon understanding more clearly how the cluster matching method does reflect a set of values and perspectives (ie what behaviors are encouraged or penalized), we believe that such value judgements should not only be made transparent but should also be composable by communities to reflect their values and needs. Moving forward, we aim to make this value judgment more transparent while also exploring the possibility of new features and approaches that empower communities to customize matching parameters. This customization could include incentives and rewards for specific behaviors, creating a more pluralistic approach to sybil resistance and community participation. For example, we are interested in exploring “tunable QF,” an approach to matching that modifies matching amounts based on the particular token holdings of any given address. We would be interested in experimenting with a pluralistic approach to matching modifiers and would love to beta test tooling that enables us to link various ERC-20 and ERC-721 contract addresses as matching criteria, enabling us to increase the matching signal from OpenCivics Network members with membership NFTs, $REGEN token holders, or staked GTC, as a few examples.

Round Innovations and Feedback

One piece of feedback that emerged early on in our application for matching funds was the ease and clarity of attestations in a research-focused round. The binary nature of research publication—either a project publishes its research or it does not—makes impact attestations straightforward to document. This simplicity may make research-based quadratic funding rounds more attractive and easier to manage. We’re incredibly happy with the grantees in this round which demonstrated a wide diversity of inspired, useful, and forward reaching research inquiries into a wide range of domains within the field of web3 civics or DeCiv. To hear from just a few of the amazing grantees in this round, head over to our Round Showcase Space on X. We look forward to sharing the research that’s produced through the funding of this round!

We consider our PayPal fiat experiment with viaPrize to have been a massive success. Thanks to the amazing work of Noah and his team, combined with efforts from the Gitcoin Grants Labs team to enable a feature for white listing the addresses generated by viaPrize, we were able to process fiat donations for the first time while addressing sybil protection. We encourage folks to read more about Noah’s method and results in his retrospective post to learn more about how it works and to decide for themselves if they want to deploy it for their own rounds in the future.

Lastly, we experimented with implementing a minimum matching amount to ensure that all grantees received enough funding to impact their proposed research meaningfully. We set a minimum of $1,000, redistributing matching amounts proportionally from grantees who received a larger percentage of the pool. Given the circumstances we’ve encountered in both of our previous rounds in which some grantees do not receive enough funds to take meaningful action on their grant project, we feel that the additional redistributive burden on the higher performing grantees, as well as the burden on round operators who must review applications much more carefully given the cost of minimum matching per project, is ultimately worth the tradeoffs and we look forward to experimenting with matching minimums again in future rounds, perhaps with different approaches to the threshold and the threshold qualifications.

Conclusion

Overall, this round provided critical insights and valuable lessons that we’re already beginning to build upon for next round. We are committed to continuing our partnership with Gitcoin and the entire Community Round Operator ecosystem, and we’re grateful for the incredible support we’ve received from the Gitcoin and Passport teams as well as other round operators. We look forward to building upon these experiences, refining our processes, and exploring new possibilities for fostering impactful, transparent, and equitable public goods funding.

We’re building upon the success of the grants program thus far to explore building a prototype for Streaming Quadratic Funding that will provide our members with ongoing financial support for their critical social impact work, leveraging the collective intelligence of the Consortium to allocate funds outside of one-off grant rounds. We’ll have more to share about that prototype experimentation soon!

In the mean time, continue reading to see what we learned from #GG20!

Results Overview

OpenCivics Consortium Round 02 distributed $66,000 USDC in matching funds to 16 projects. The round raised $10,309.37 in crowdfunding from community donations, totaling $76,309.37 in funds distributed. A total of 492 donors generated 1,090 donations, averaging $9.45 per donation. Overall, donors generated a 7.4X multiplier of their donations in matching funds.

Compared with our last round, the second iteration of OpenCivics Grants was the most successful round we’ve run so far with 40% more donors, 20% more crowdfunding donations, and 200% larger matching grants for the top grantees.

Click here to view the automatically generated Gitcoin Report Card for the round.

For a detailed data analysis, tables, and graphs of the grant round results, check out Consortium Grant Round 02 Analytics on our wiki.

Overall Data Insights

1. Significant Matching Contributions

   • Ethereal Forest, Urbánika's bus, and Metagov received substantial matching funds. This indicates that these projects were able to leverage their donor base effectively to secure matching contributions. It suggests a high confidence level from matching funders in these projects' potential impact.

2. Top Fundraisers

   • Ethereal Forest stands out with the highest total amount received ($14,227.02). This project not only received the most substantial total funds but also had the highest number of donations (165), reflecting both broad and deep support. The high number of donations and matching funds indicates effective fundraising strategies and strong donor engagement.

3. Potential for Increased Engagement

   • Projects like Mycelial Civic Knowledge Networks and Exploring Post-Capitalist Crypto Pathwayshave moderate total funds and a relatively high number of donations. These projects could potentially increase their total funds by focusing on increasing the size of individual donations.

4. Low Engagement with High Potential

   • VoiceDeck: A Marketplace for Journalism Impact Certificates and Moos: A Berlin hub for reimagining our cities received substantial total funds but have relatively low ratios of donations to total funds. This suggests that these projects received significant donations from fewer contributors. They may benefit from strategies aimed at broadening their donor base to enhance sustainability.

5. Diverse Fundraising Success

   • The diversity in donation patterns and matching fund success across projects indicates varied effectiveness in fundraising strategies. Projects with lower total amounts but high donation counts might explore methods to increase individual donation amounts. Conversely, projects with high total amounts but fewer donations could focus on broadening their engagement strategies.

Round Operator Insights

Overall, we learned that Quadratic Funding is unpredictable and, even by constraining some variables, the outcomes are very hard to sculpt or shape. We failed in our goal of ensuring each project walked away from the round with at least $3,000 - $5,000 USD, a goal driven by our first hand experience as grantees of extremely low returns of grant funding when compared with the time it takes grantees to promote their grants.

Limiting Grantees Hypothesis

This round, we were experimenting with the hypothesis that reducing the total number of projects while increasing the matching pool would ensure that the minimum grant allocation would be large enough for all projects to create meaningful, documentable impacts created through the grant funding. We calculated the range of matching pool distributions based on our Genesis Round which reflected a 2-3x spread between the smallest matching amount and the largest. To achieve our goal of significant funding for each project, we chose to restrict the total number of projects to 16, a number derived from our analysis of the previous round’s outcomes and the volume of matching funds available for our second round.

Our insights from this aspect of the round were twofold. First, the matching distribution for this round was far more extreme than anticipated. The range from the lowest matching amount to the highest amount was closer to 10x, a significant increase from our previous round. In one sense, this is a positive discovery because it shows that the Quadratic Funding mechanism is successfully allocating funds based on the preferences of the collective intelligence of donors. On the other hand, it means that the hypothesis we were testing failed to achieve our desired goals. Rather than seeing this as a failure, we see it as a learning opportunity that reveals the high variability of matching amounts and the impossibility of using the variables that are within our control to influence the outcome, even if our desired influence on the outcome is holistically considered and well intentioned. This feeds into the second insight from this aspect of the round. As round operators, we struggled to limit participation in the round to only 16 projects. There were many deserving projects who submitted applications whom we rejected simply based on the premise that we had an obligation to test our hypothesis that a smaller number of projects would yield significant funding for each project. Filling the final spots in the round was a painful process that required over a week of deliberation, weighing a number of variables like use of funds, project history and track record, and available grant size vs scope of the project.

Based on the feedback and data generated by this round, we are unlikely to limit the number of projects in future rounds in the same way. This doesn’t solve the issue of unpredictable results and the potential for grantees to spend 10s or 100s of hours on project promotion only to receive a few hundred or a thousand dollars in matching funds, but it does embrace the philosophy of quadratic funding which places the entire allocation process in the hands of donors. Accepting and acknowledging this as a fundamental limitation and benefit of Quadratic Funding, we will encourage grantees to consider allocating only the number of hours they are willing to lose (without a guarantee of earning the value of that time back in donations) for their grant promotion.

Updates To Gitcoin Passport

For those not familiar, Gitcoin Passport is a sybil resistance mechanism for Quadratic Funding rounds that attempts to ensure donors are unique human individuals and not bots or scammers attempting to rig the system for their benefit. Prior to this round, the Gitcoin Passport was based on Stamps, attestations of identity that included a number of different identity verification mechanisms like Google and GitHub accounts. This round, Gitcoin introduced Cluster Matching, an AI-enabled system that autonomously reviewed the on-chain transaction history of each donor to verify their “proof of humanity.”

Comparing the Gitcoin Passport Stamp-based matching results with the newly created Cluster Matching-based results, we were pleased to discover that the new Cluster Matching approach generated a more equitable and holistic distribution of funds. We believe this occurred because the Stamps system was an unwieldy user experience that took tremendous time and effort to reach a “passport score” that made a user eligible for matching funds. Even as web3 experts, it took us extensive time and energy to achieve a passing score and we imagine that the user experience was so challenging for most ordinary donors that they were discouraged from completing their passport or perhaps even donating to projects. Cluster matching reduces friction for donors and empowers non-web3 savvy individuals to make donations that qualify for matching funds.

Arbitrum x Gitcoin User Experience

This was also our first round using Arbitrum, having run our previous round on a more obscure Layer 2 blockchain, the Public Goods Network. Overall, this was an incredibly positive experience. While the user interface for program managers is almost entirely the same other than a slightly different process for bridging and adding funds to the smart contract, as a donor, the experience of donating across multiple rounds on the same chain was incredibly streamlined and supported the cross-promotion of projects with grants in multiple rounds. Gas fees on Arbitrum are incredibly low which was another massive benefit for our grantees, donors and the round overall.

With that said, many of our donors still expressed challenges with bridging funds from Ethereum mainnet to a Layer 2 blockchain. We look forward to a future in which the donor experience on Gitcoin can include fiat donations as well as some kind of inter-chain mechanism that makes it irrelevant to the front end donors which chain the rounds themselves choose to operate. These challenges are persistent across the web3 ecosystem and are not unique to Arbitrum or Gitcoin, but we look forward to collaborating with both teams to co-develop the underlying infrastructures that help Quadratic Funding enter the mainstream, a path that serves the entire public goods ecosystem.

Looking Forward

We’re excited to continue offering Gitcoin Grants rounds as a service to our members. We are well positioned to advocate on behalf of the entire Consortium of civic innovators we serve to raise matching funds and provide the support structures for funding rounds. We are currently exploring a large grant from ThankArb to develop a new funding mechanism for our members that distributes drips of funding to each project on an ongoing basis. This method, Streaming Quadratic Funding, will be developed by a new initiative called Flow State and we’re excited to collaborate with them to explore adding specific functionality that is custom-made for the OpenCivics Consortium. The platform will offer a token-gated environment where OpenCivics members can use Quadratic Voting to express their preferences on where the continuous drips of grant funding are allocated. This mechanism breaks fund allocation out of the time-locked grant round context into an ongoing stream of funding that supports the sustainability of projects over time.

Additionally, we forged lasting bonds with the other community grant round operators who all expressed an interest in co-hosting a collaborative round in the future. As ever, Gitcoin is all about relationships and this round deeply strengthened the relationships between community round operators. There seemed to be a universal sentiment that the entire public goods funding space could benefit from a funding round tailored to synergistic collaboration between different impact sectors, working together as ephemeral DAOs to generate outputs based on the unique contributions of multiple projects. We’re excited to explore this possibility and to work with other community round operators to continue serving our grantees in innovative ways.

Conclusion

We believe Quadratic Funding for public goods funding allocations is one of the most promising and useful contributions of web3 infrastructure to the social impact space. This round taught us an immense amount about the limitations and benefits of Quadratic Funding related to ways we can improve the donor experience, grantee experience, and overall impact of the grants themselves. We are currently engaging our grantees in a participatory process to identify and report on the milestones they achieve with the funds they’ve received from our Consortium Round 02 which we will share with you here in a few months. Our grantees have already started to identify pathways to synergize their project efforts within the context of emerging collaborative initiatives within the Consortium and we can’t wait to see what we’re able to create together.

Thank you to all our donors, grantees, and members for supporting public goods and for funding the critical work of civic innovation.

In Us We Trust,

OpenCivics Stewards

Round Analytics

We’re honored to have been among the top three Community Rounds in terms of crowdfunded donations, with a total of $8,707 USD contributed from 353 unique donors.

Click here to view the automatically generated Gitcoin Report Card for the round.

For further analysis of the grant round results, check out our wiki.

Learnings

Collaboration Between Grantees

One of the highlights of the round was our Grantee Showcase. During an hour long conversation between grantees, we witnessed new collaborations emerge between project leads as the conversation wove together the different areas of impact that each grantee’s project is working towards, ranging from water policy and regenerative action to local civic technology and community organizing. This was a tremendous milestone for the Consortium as it demonstrated what becomes possible when a group of innovators come into deeper relationship with the tools and frameworks needed to work together and scale their impact. We’re excited to see where these collaborations evolve in the new year as we begin to roll out our first collaborative initiatives and open session calls later this month and early next year.

One of the hypotheses that OpenCivics is testing in the Gitcoin and Quadratic Funding ecosystems is the notion that funding for projects has an amplified impact when projects utilize those funds to work together on achieving shared goals. We required participants in the grants round to be members of the Consortium to test this hypothesis and the early results are incredibly promising. Our grantees will be sharing their milestones and collaborative goals in the coming weeks, and we’re excited to share that documentation with you so that we can collectively track their progress and the impact of grant funds.

User Experience

As many others in the Gitcoin and web3 communities have noted, the primary challenge in the decentralized technology portion of our work is increasing access and participation through innovations in user experience (UX). We need wallets that encrypt keys on-device without needing to write them down. We need to make it irrelevant which blockchain you’re using and move bridging or switching between blockchains into the background of the UX.

Many of our friends, allies, and colleagues reported challenges in securing and bridging crypto currency onto the Public Goods Network (no one’s fault in particular, simply a design challenge for any cross-chain process) and more still reported challenges in securing a sufficient Gitcoin Passport score to ensure full matching of donations. As web3 natives ourselves, we recognize the double edge sword of this type of innovation.

Web3 is powerful because it enables non-custodial and peer-to-peer technologies which comes with inherent tradeoffs in terms of learning curves and usability, but we believe that Gitcoin and web3 more broadly can continue to innovate the user experience while retaining the underlying benefits that decentralized technologies provide.

Round Operation Insights

As round operators, we were impressed by just how easy Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol has made it to operate a grant round. Despite some technical glitches (most ended up being user error but took up time to discover where the issue was occurring), the technical implementation of the round was relatively seamless.

We learned that we definitely want to turn on rolling applications for future rounds to be able to accommodate last minute submissions and to help work with grantees to address technical hurdles that may delay them from completing the process.

We’ll also be conducting multiple live calls for grantees and donors in the next round to provide live, hands-on support for non-web3 natives navigating the application process and making donations.

We were also recurrently baffled by the native UTC timezone on the grant manager interface which caused us to open and close the round out of alignment with the deadlines for the other main GG19 rounds which we will be sure not to do in future rounds.

What’s Next for Grant Program

Based on this round’s success, it’s likely that OpenCivics will conduct another Grant Round to coincide with Gitcoin Grants 20 (#GG20) in about three months. We look forward to working with the DeCiv Fund and other partners to provide an expanded matching pool for our next round, allowing us to support more projects with larger sums of grant funding. Our fellow Round Operators (@reneedaos, @clinamenic) have been incredibly supportive to OpenCivics and will be offering mentorship and support to grantees between rounds to maximize the likelihood of their success.

As grantees begin to receive their matching funds, they’ll also begin to share updates on their milestones and goals between now and our next grant round. We’ll keep you updated so that you can see the impact your donations are having in the world.

Future Grant Rounds

We’re already starting to get inspired about the many potentials OpenCivics could explore in the domain of Quadratic Funding. Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol has made it incredibly easy to pool funds and accept donations for projects, all within their smart contract interface that works on almost every popular blockchain.

For now, we’re mainly focused on celebrating the win of our Genesis Round and will likely iterate only modestly for the next round, but these potential future rounds illustrate the potential growth and evolution of quadratic funding as a strategy for democratic philanthropy.

Conclusion

The OpenCivics Grants Program is an expression of our commitment to supporting projects within the network to thrive and create an impact together. To date, OpenCivics Stewards have been gifting their time to the development of the Consortium, choosing to focus on directing funds to projects within the Consortium instead of raising funds for administration costs and salaries. As we move out of the bootstrapping phase of network launch, we’ll begin to focus on legal formation and fundraising for the key facilitation and stewardship services that our 501c3 foundation will be providing to the network. We’re also beginning to organize our collaborative initiatives, focusing first on Collaborative Initiative (Collaborative Protocols) which will be developing the best practices for decentralized multi-stakeholder collaboration.

Having successfully launched the Consortium with nearly 100 new members in the last month and having completed our first successful grants round, OpenCivics is poised to enter the new year with our sights on the following key focuses:

• nurturing consortium membership and participation

• facilitating multi-stakeholder collaborations on key initiatives

• fundraising for operations, collaborative initiatives, and future grant rounds

• exploring the possibility of hosting an “Upgrading Democracy” summit in Q2 of 2024

Thank you for being part of this journey. Who knows, maybe you’ll be one of our grantees in the next round! We look forward to building with our members and expanding the impact of our work in the world through collaboration and trust.

In Us We Trust,

Benjamin & Patricia

OpenCivics Stewards

As ETHDenver moves further from the ever-present now into the past, I‘ve been reflecting on what a truly exceptional group of humans came together for this event and what a bright and inspiring future lives in the space between all of our hearts and the devotional work we’re blessed to be able to do alongside one another.

As one of your hosts and collaborators, I am deeply honored to have convened such brilliant and heart-centered speakers, participants, facilitators, and volunteers. Thanks to our sponsors Lobby3, Shared Ground, and Mandelbot for making this gathering of incredible humans possible. Thank you to everyone who attended and offered their visions of a more beautiful world. In the spirit of anchoring those visions into reality, here is a brief summary of both days of the event.

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Day 1

We kicked off our exploration of the future we want using the framing of OpenCivics’ core design patterns and pillars of civic innovation: Resilience, Vitality, and Choice. The conversations that emerged revealed just how interconnected and reinforcing these pillars are.

Resilience: Mitigating the Metacrisis with Resilient Civic Systems

Our conversation on resilience, featuring the brilliant Gary Sheng and Jessica Zartler, focused on the ‘hard and soft systems’ that encode our fundamental behaviors as well as the role of token engineering and currency design in helping communities liberate themselves by expressing and determining what they value. The theme of vitality was deeply present in this conversation as the underlying purpose of our foundational technologies and systems.

Vitality: Regenerative Economies & Bioregional Governance

Our conversation on vitality, featuring the interdisciplinary genius of Jordan Siegel, Gregory Landua, Azuraye Wycoff, Kristina Ryan, and Kēnya Francis, explored the complex interrelationship between indigeniety and place-based collective action, designing systems that support the rich aliveness and living embodiment of place, context and ritual, and developing the kinship required to heal and grow as a beloved community in service of the places we call home. As the conversation turned towards bioregional governance and economy, it became clear that upgrading our collective intelligence through resource mapping and expanding our capacity for collective choice-making through new forms of commons governance were some of the key opportunities and challenges that thinking bioregionally presents.

Choice: Evolutionary Governance with Decentralized Civics (DeCiv)

Our conversation on choice, featuring the thoughtful civic stewardship of John Richardson, Matt Harder, Spencer Cavanaugh, Sean Gomez, and Nanak Nihal, invoked the deeper questions around the ultimate purpose and potential of self-governance, moving beyond polarization toward and through real-world collective stewardship, and the fundamental building blocks of a truly upgraded digital democracy. This conversation closed out the first day by going to the root of one of the most complex and recursive challenges we face and provided a positive image of both the future of democracy as well as a design pathway to get us there.

“Verified identity that feels safe and consent-based empowers people to be more participatory without feeling like they're losing something or giving up their data or giving up their freedom and their privacy.” — Timothy Archer

“Facebook processes seven petabytes of data a day. You can capture the information on a vote in under kilobyte, every four years. So in terms of information flow, our current voting system is very low bandwidth. And it's trying to keep up with Facebook's massive data processing machines. And so that lack of influence that people have every four years is very discouraging. I have my vote, and then the rest of the four years I can write my letters, but are they going to listen to me? I can participate in polls, but they can ignore the polls. So it's very discretionary, in the part of people in power, whether I actually have an influence or not. And people know that. If we want to have people engage in things, we have to give them power and there has to be connection between what they say they want and then what happens, unmoderated by the desires of a politician that particular day.” — John Richardson

“Why we're here, why we're doing decentralized civics, it allows us to listen in new ways that we couldn't listen before.” — Sean Gonzalez

For me personally, even with the incredible knowledge and wisdom shared on the microphone that day, the most beautiful quality of our first day was the space in between all the panels. Seeing the relationships form between speakers and participants, I was struck by the continuity of each person’s devotion to systemic transformation and creating a world that works for all.

Despite the unique areas of focus of our speakers, each coming from nuanced disciplines that require extensive domain-specific knowledge, there was a common thread and allyship that seemed to emanate from a deep understanding of the nature of our current crises and a sincere choice to work at the deepest levels to create not just a slightly less disfunctional world but a radically more beautiful one. Woven together through the story of our collective future, our panelists are creating a whole system upgrade that is inspiring, life-affirming, and foundational to the OpenCivics’ theory of change.

I look forward to seeing what this community of innovators creates as we continue to develop the governance and coordination infrastructure to provide scaffolding for future collaborations.

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Day 2

Transitioning from a day of deep conversations intended to spark the imagination of our participants, we moved into a day of collaboration and collective visioning. Day 2 began with a group meditation that guided participants into a future reality in which The Great Turning toward a more beautiful world had been completed and our world had been completely transformed. Participants brought the visions, sparks of inspiration, and designs from their individual imagination into a process of collective back-casting, a futuring exercise in which participants describe the world they see in their imagination of their own preferred future and tell a story about how we moved from where we are now into that potential reality.

At the conclusion of Day 2 we had three incredible collective narratives that described the qualities and design criteria of each of our pillars, told from the perspective of the future we all collectively desire. Each group had its own unique self-organized process that ranged from performance art, sequential storylines, and trees of questions leading to ever-deeper lines of inquiry. Below is a ChatGPT summary of the long-form transcript of each group’s presentation.

Resilience

This conversation revolved around the creation of a regenerative and decentralized world. The speakers discuss the need for a shared vision and community building, followed by cartography and resource mapping, and education and healing, leading to the creation of tools for platform building. The goal is to create a global network where people can identify their needs and be rewarded for meeting their needs and helping others do the same, while taking care of the earth. The scalability of this process is also emphasized. Further inquiries could include the feasibility and implementation of this model, potential challenges and roadblocks, and the role of technology in achieving these goals.

Vitality

The conversation explored the concept of vitality, which is about bridging the gap between intention and expression. The speakers emphasize the importance of meeting breakdowns with empathy and connection, rather than reactivity and judgment. They also note that vitality is a system that requires individual pieces to be vital, with cultural intelligence being necessary to react to caretaking situations. The speakers discuss the current reality of anti-social and transactional contexts and the need for pro-social modalities that are encouraged and fluid. Finally, they focus on how vitality can be a constant in life and in community. Key insights include the importance of assuming the impact of one's actions on others, the need for attentiveness and connection, and the circularity of relationships. Further inquiries could include how to cultivate cultural intelligence and pro-social modalities in communities and how to sustain vitality as a constant in life.

Choice

The conversation explored the cycles of culture, technology, and systems and how choices are embedded with desires, information and values. The discussion focused on the importance of simultaneously working on the new story of why we are here, self-leadership curriculum, clear values, bias detection skills, and increasing mindfulness. There was also emphasis on experimenting and playing games as communities in opt-in communities of practice, and sovereign and experimental jurisdictions. The technology side included bridging systems technology for cohesion, AI-assisted governance wizards, and algorithmic depolarization. The group realized that culture informs the range of choices perceived as possible, and to make true choices, individuals need to be aware of the culture they are in and take collective responsibility. Changing the way money works is as big as any of these other kinds of governmental upgrades, and all of these need to be combined to have a positive impact. There was also an emphasis on the importance of feedback, transparency, and learning from failures. Further inquiries can explore how to change money and governance technology as protocols, and the underlying protocol of cultural change.

The Future of Federated Futures

This event was the first experiment of what we hope will be an ongoing series of events that bridge diverse communities and support the application of systemic web3 solutions in service of vitality, resilience, and choice. We learned from this event that building bridges takes time, commitment, and presence. We’re looking forward to returning to Shared Ground as Community Members first, building the trust required to support the collective actualization of that community with tools and resources.

We’re also looking forward to experimenting with different scales and scopes of events that bring more government officials and community stakeholders together with innovators to apply new solutions at the municipal and bioregional scales.

We’d love to work with our friends, collaborators, and partners to bring this kind of programming and participatory design process facilitation into more web3 and activist spaces around the world.

Thank you for being part of that journey. We’re excited to see where we go together from here.

To stay connected, share your projects, and keep the conversation going, be sure to join the Federated Futures Telegram group and subscribe to our e-mail list.

If you benefited from the event in any way, here are some ways you can give back to the folks whose collective efforts made it happen.

• Subscribe to OpenCivics on Substack, Twitter and Instagram

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• Donate to Shared Ground

• Hire True To Essence Photography for your next event or for an incredible ritual photography session for your next headshot!

• Work with Donna from FED to offer farm-to-table, nutritious and delicious meals at your next event!

• Check out Mystery.Works to get involved in local organizing in Boulder (hint: the password is the name of our family connection to one another)

In Us We Trust,

Benjamin Life
OpenCivics Steward