Greetings Ethereans!
Our last newsletter was on Valentine’s Day, and a lot of lovely things (pirate things, renegade things) have happened since then, so let’s get into it.
First off, we want to thank everyone who donated in Gitcoin Grants Round 20. We received 159 distinct contributions ($3647 in direct donations!) – which is a lot, in fact capping out the matching percentage in the Open Civics funding pool. Congratulations to Open Civics for running a second amazing round, and funding + shedding light on a lot of inspiring projects.
We’re also pleased that we were able to onboard some regen friends to the QF process to participate in the Climate round, receiving 15 contributions. The matching funds will go to a youth oriented regenerative living immersion camp at Tryon Life Community Farm (which some of you will remember from last year’s GFEL pre-conference visit). Watch for Tryon Farm in future rounds!
Next, we are so excited to officially announce that the General Forum on Ethereum Localism (GFEL) 2024 is happening! In the spirit of Friday the 13th, we are staging it on September 13th-15th (with one pre-conference day to check out some of our town’s best extitutional outposts). Come out to Portland to discuss public goods crypto, the protocol underground, commons entrepreneurship and the DAO form, and the promises these all might hold for cities and bioregions.
In a less fortunate piece of news, Bridgespace Commons (which you will also remember as the main venue of GFEL 2023) has, as of last month, formally dissolved. As sad as we are, we’re happy that the decision was generated in a peaceful and democratic manner, in response to certain regulatory and safety realities, and we’re grateful for the events that were had and the connections generated. Our project of building commons infrastructure in Portland is a long and winding one, and though this particular vector may have moved underground for the moment, still, like the old mole, it burrows.
Parallel to that, in order to generate some new vectors, we conceived and successfully staged our first Imagination Circle. On May 9th we sparked a fire, invoked some Chaos Magick protocols of imaginative actualization, and got to work: we heard speculative fiction, ideas for web3 enabled urban infrastructure, imagined an ascendant open hardware urban counterculture and more. (Read the recap here.) It’s a ritual we will be continuing, and we recommend that you try it in your own town. It’s a great and low overhead way to get folks together and stimulate ideas. Take care, though - when the energy is right, the ideas might just become reality.
Ethereal Forest has been doing some imagining of our own, with blog posts like “We Are the Neotechnics” which looks to Vitalik’s d/acc and some epoch-carving done by Lewis Mumford to get a sense of how to think about a holistic and regenerative technological localism (hint: it’s neotechnical). Watch for future initiatives in the space meant to explore this vision further.
Also check out our Open Protocol Research Group’s iteratively revised “Introduction to Open Protocols”, a starting frame for our research work exploring informal protocols in town, how they thrive and propagate under attitudes of institutional ambivalence or resistance, and how they might learn from the strategies and structural patterns of the decentralized web’s open source protocols. Several interviews have been conducted, and some will be released on the blog as we keep stacking them.
Fun DAO, despite some hiccups, continues to move forward, and is in the process of implementing a Hats tree that will make its education process more robust while beginning to allow it to operate autonomously. Meanwhile, Portland’s ReFi DAO Local Node has just finished its incubation period. We're looking forward to what emerges when our community's regenerative culture locks in to this cosmolocal resource!
We have also recently become aware of an awesome local NFT-oriented art collective called Rose City Web3. Our hope is that, if we can catalyze one or two more projects to DAOify with our upcoming QF IRL (more on that in forthcoming posts), we might be in a position to formalize our truly decentralized PDX DAO network! (If you are unfamiliar with the PDX DAO vision, read about it in our post PDX DAO is DEAD!)
As our work continues, our preoccupation with "adoption" or onboarding becomes far subjugated to our widening vision of what technology, and technological adequacy is. Our city is full of venture commons, renegade technologists, mycelial foragers and soil hackers, propagators of the protocol underground. Why do we remain crypto nerds? Because p2p, open source crypto protocols provide a substrate for these commons technologies to thrive on, a means to self-propel beyond the permission of any authority. Our project is cosmolocal because that is what it will take to discover the permission to build systems without coercion. 🌱
Watch the wires for imminent announcements, including details of Local DAO Summer, documentation as we work-in-public through the logistics of QF IRL, and where to get your ticket for the General Forum on Ethereum Localism.
