Our commitment to open source
Open source fosters a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and mutual respect. It gives builders around the world access to tools and resources that drive research and social and technological advancements collectively.
We champion a culture of radical openness as we believe transparency advances projects and productivity ethically and inclusively. We actively practice the philosophy of open source by building in public.
Our 4 pillars
These four pillars present our approach to funding, governance, and public goods management.
Cultural
frameworks
With economic systems exceeding social and planetary boundaries by favoring financial profit over other forms of wealth, impact-focused communities mobilize to do their part to restore ecosystem well-being. A holistic governance approach underpins functionality and sustainability. They bring the impetus to form, but require the framework to raise funds, make decisions, and govern in a way that secures long-term success by building on researched methods.
DAOs are complex, adaptive systems that require a well designed structure that is flexible to contributors’ needs and allows them to exercise their collective and individual autonomy.
Our cultural frameworks bring solutions based on applied research into those communities, taking into consideration their unique challenges, needs, and desires.
Economics
co-design
"There is no reason to believe that bureaucrats and politicians, no matter how well-meaning, are better at solving problems than the people on the spot, who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right." - Elinor Ostrom
Those who are most impacted are best suited to solve problems. Co-designing an economy encourages inclusion, representation and participation. All voices are heard, which allows for flexibility, innovation and democratic solutions. It also promotes transparency, collective ownership, individual responsibility, and coordinated problem-solving.
We use a simple and effective 3-step process to guide communities through collectively proposing and openly voting on solutions: educate, propose, vote.
Research
The new frontier of web3 demands reimagining societal structures. We bring our research into real-world application. Applied research allows us to learn from existing disciplines in order to iterate our tools and frameworks for collective governance and economic design. For these tools and frameworks to be useful, we constantly have to experiment with them.
We’re building on a primitive landscape, supporting impact communities to organize and develop their mission. For example, the Augmented Bonding Curve fills the need for a regenerative revenue source for growing projects. We iterate equally on our cultural frameworks, designed to create a community’s social layer that aligns values and goals.
Our applied research innovates on the forefront of governance by integrating the work of Ostrom alongside other commons scholars, as well as leading technologies sourced from token engineering and web3 communities. This research-led approach allows deployment of replicable templates for communities to apply these novel tools to their unique contexts.
Library of tools
We provide a library of modular, interoperable tools to enable communities to fund their projects and create regenerative token economies that support their mission. We curate this library for communities to integrate key principles of a commons including shared values, resource accessibility and collective governance.
Our research has led to the development of fundamental tools for launching and managing a CommonsDAO including the Augmented Bonding Curve and Conviction Voting. We also curate a list of complementary tools for decentralized community management.
This library supports the creation of a regenerative commons culture that includes a sustainable treasury, a polycentric governance model, a culture of giving and gratitude, and community intelligence.
YouTube spotlights
