Crypto as a coordination mechanism
The network state could soon move from a concept stage to mainstream adoption, given the increasing options for token ownership designs, treasury management, tokenizations, availability of privacy-preserving identity verification, new funding mechanisms, and Web3 native community management tools. Network state represents the idea that you start with an online community, one that’s economically prosperous, engaged, and has shared values—and then manifests it into the physical world. While network state is one of the starting points and intersections of crypto and shared communities, the concept has been advanced in other similarly aligned communities and movements like startup societies, coordi-nations, the regen movement, the pop-up village movement, etc.
Introducing The Network Society Forum
In this context, The Network Society Forum seeks to incubate a discourse for long-form content around network states and similar communities, that allows individuals and groups to intervene in the concepts and promote progressive discussion. It provides an open space for the collaborative development of ideas, hypotheses, and strategic plans. To set this in place, Network Society has launched a writing competition on better systems of governance and socio-economic-political structures with a prize pool of $500.
Problem with forums and social Media based discourse
Today's online forums like Discourse, popular among DAOs for governance discussions, face significant limitations. These platforms often require heavy moderation, lack seamless integration with Web3 tools, and do not support account interoperability across different DAOs. Users must create unique accounts for each forum, increasing the risk of sybil attacks, spam proposals, manipulation of votes, among others. Ease of access to bad actors or bots can significantly damage the purpose of the discourse community.
What makes the Network society forum web3 aligned
The forum’s key integrations with Holonym for Proof of personhood, Silk wallet for UX friendly profile management, and Ceramic for decentralized data storage makes the forum resistant to sybil attack, enabling private identity proofs, censorship resistance, and facilitates transparent peer to peer evaluation and discussion.
Post articles here: nsforum.net
Full announcement post: nsforum.net/post/kjzl6cwe1…
Integrations: @ceramicnetwork @silkysignon @0xHolonym
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Private proof of personhood
Holonym’s NFC Passport Verification enables private proof-of-personhood using zero knowledge proof generation tailored for client device performance, using meta data from ePassports. Users tap with their phones on the passport and it privately proves the NFC data. This method ensures complete privacy and zero user data exposure. For the writing competition, Holonym’s ZK NFC will be used to upvote submissions, based on which prize pool will be allocated. This ensures one person one vote, and transparency in allocation.
Silk - web2 style profile with web3 security
While Holonym helps with identity verification, Silk is the part of Holonym’s modular stack for key and data custody facilitates easier onboarding via email sign up, and instant wallet recovery through ZK identity proofs. Silk is a self custodial web account that doubles as a wallet, and serves as a profile for Network Society’s forum. Silk creates an easier UX to onboard users, with the same interface being used for identity verification makes the whole process seamless. While the onerous process of wallet creation, and dealing with seed phrase itself is a barrier to entry, Silk’s easier access makes it better suited for individuals to participate in the writing context and participate in the forum with no friction.
Censorship resistance
Ceramic wraps up the whole functionality by hosting the forum on a decentralized storage network, leveraging verifiable event streams, combining blockchain-like qualities with the efficiency of traditional databases. While the forum may hide posts from the front-end that does not adhere to community guidelines, all profiles and posts use a publicly viewable web3 database that no centralized authority controls, making it censorship resistant. The forum also intends to make a “hidden post” section that can be viewed by all.
Participate in the Writing Competition
As part of its mission to foster impactful discourse, The Network Society Forum invites all visionaries and thinkers to engage with the platform and participate in a writing competition this May. With a $500 prize pool for the most upvoted articles, the competition aims to encourage high-quality contributions that explore innovative ideas in governance and digital community building.
