GM to my regular subscribers, this week I am writing something completely different than my usual work. Before diving in, please make sure to sign into Paragraph and add your wallets for the 2nd year of content celebration POAP created my Mightymoss.eth. Snapshot will be taken end of this week. More details below.
Intro
This post is taking part in the Nouns x Kiwi writing contest. As a recent Nouner (#1244) I've been going deeper and deeper into the Noun world and how to build decentralized communities from the ground up. Nouns⌐◨-◨ means many things to many people, this is my interpretation of what it means to be a Noun.
Why ⌐◨-◨?
The Nounish spirit, to me, isn't just a philosophy - it's deeply personal and tied to my own journey of transformation. On June 15, 2012, I experienced firsthand what aspirational optimism truly means. As an undocumented student waking up hungover after my college graduation, drowning in missed calls and texts, I had no idea that day would change everything.
My path echoed what being Nounish represents - embracing uncertainty while maintaining hope. Like many Noun builders, I faced systemic barriers that seemed insurmountable. My dream school wanted me but couldn't fund me. Banks wouldn't lend to me. Every quarter at my school was a hustle to stay enrolled. This experience taught me what the Nouns community now preaches - that sometimes the traditional systems and markets fail to serve everyone, and we need innovative solutions.
When Obama announced DACA that graduation day, it was my first taste of what institutional innovation could mean for real people. This drew me to crypto and eventually to Nouns - communities that understand that sometimes the most impactful solutions seem unlikely or even weird at first glance. Just as DACA created new possibilities for people like me, Nouns creates new models for collective action and public goods funding that traditional systems overlook.
The Nounish values resonate so deeply with me because I've lived them: Aspirational Optimism in the face of impossible odds, a Public Goods Mindset that recognizes we must build systems that serve everyone, Embracing Weirdness by finding unconventional paths forward, prioritizing Community Over Self-Interest, and constant Innovation and Experimentation. My journey from undocumented student to being part of the Nouns community shows why these aren't just abstract principles - they're powerful tools for transformation.
In Nouns, I see a community that understands what I learned that pivotal June morning - that the most meaningful changes often start with believing in possibility, even when the path forward isn't clear. That's what being Nounish means to me.
Why Decentralized Communities?
In early 2021, I thought DAOs would change the way organizations ran. However, since they didn't have that revolutionary change, I bought into the media narrative that DAOs were inefficient and shouldn't be run like companies. I thought they were dumb, silly, and ineffective. For a long time, I wrote them off.
Throughout most of 2024, I've been diving deeper into the Noun's community, specifically the Yellow Collective and the Purple DAO on Fartcaster. Initially, I got involved because I felt like I needed to give it a fair shake before writing it off completely. I needed to dive in headfirst and see where I came out on the other side. This meant picking up a Yellow Collective, Purple DAO piece, and trying to participate in their governance and goals.
Slowly but surely, my point of view on DAOs has been changing. I've noticed that DAOs come in all shapes and sizes. Most people think of them as having a flat structure with a one-for-one vote. However, I've come to learn that some DAOs have structures similar to real-life organizations. As a US based person, it would be like the Senate and the House of Reps. The House of Reps would have every single token holder with a one-to-one representation, but then there would also be a council or group of people more deeply involved on a consistent basis. They're the ones getting on calls all the time, doing the heavy lifting in terms of research, and really thinking about the culture of the DAO, in this case, Nouns, and their ideals and state of mind.
Nouns specifically, anyone could submit a prop. You don't need to own a noun to submit a prop; anyone could submit it and get funding, which is a beautiful thing that I don't think gets highlighted enough. So, I would say it's really changed how I view all this. I've come to learn that you can build an identity or culture in a decentralized way. I myself am trying to build my own community as well, and I'm learning to be more like DAOs, which are unique in the way they operate and offer a different way of operating compared to traditional companies or brands.
So, if you think about Supreme, streetwear culture, the people purchasing could have some sway to a certain extent of who Supreme does collaborations with, but for the most part, it comes down to one person or a group of people, and they're in charge. That's fine, too. But with something like Nouns we can make a lot of decisions together from the bottom up. Obviously, the expertise of someone in the fashion industry would be extremely relevant in the direction we want to go but it does not stop the collective from being heard. Or if we wanted to write a book, someone with experience writing a book, is extremely relevant, but we all have a say.
And again, you could split it; the DAO doesn't have to make every single decision. Not every decision needs to be made through writing a prop and getting it voted on; you could just run a quick poll for 24 hours or various other methods. I think people just need to open up their minds a little bit, and they can see that you can run a DAO in a multitude of ways. I've been trying to take that and apply it to my own thinking as well.
As someone who hosts a podcast or writes a newsletter, I have a sense of who I want to be speaking to and who I think people would like. But some of the stuff that has worked well for me, even before doing this in a proper DAO structure, was asking my paid premium subscribers who they would love to see featured on the newsletter or podcast. Some of those episodes have been some of the most highly engaged episodes I've had. So there's something to take from that. I feel like I can curate my own list, but I can also have a community contest where anyone could submit and then we vote, and there are prizes.
To me, that's what builds culture and community, on top of a bunch of other stuff. But for onchain organization specifically, taking advantage of this different way of approaching governance can be used to your advantage. I would say that Nouns has really changed how I think about decentralized communities. It's really surprised me, just how successful they are.
I think we still have a little bit more work to do in terms of the maturity of operations. I think it's a little nuts that, we could hand over $100,000 worth of USD and not really have anything to show for it on the other side. That seems like a great opportunity for something like streaming the money could come in handy or milestones. But maybe that might be too much, maybe we're okay with kind of the risk. The beauty in DAO's is we can ask the collective how we feel. Or we just got to do better vetting of people. I don't know.
Overall, a lot of it has been really eye-opening to me. I'm incorporating a lot more DAO like thinking in my life, more bottom-up opportunities with my content. As we get closer to the end of 2024, I'm happy that so far at the end of this journey of joining many DAOs (VRBS, Purple, Yellow, Lil Nouns, Grounds, Nouns) that my opinion has shifted to a positive one. I'm learning from everybody and I can apply those to my own work is invigorating.
Fin
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