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I want to open this presentation with gratitude I'm personally grateful for the opportunity to be alive here in this moment when we have the opportunity to innovate
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and to push so many new edges as a species called forth by this deep knowing that profound changes not only possible but that we each have a role to play in making that change a reality
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so before I dive into talking about Civic Innovation and the role of web 3 and applying that systemic change I just want to pause for a moment and reflect on where we are as a species
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we're inside of a moment of transition a paradigm shift a turning point what Irving Laszlo called a chaos window what Zack Stein refers to as a time between worlds
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in this space in between as one world is ending and a new one is struggling to be born we have the unique privilege and responsibility of choice of choosing what reality do we want to
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create what reality do we want to leave behind to our future Generations so what I think we all have in common here if you're listening to this presentation
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is a felt sense that a more beautiful world is possible and that in and of itself is a miracle because there are so many people alive on planet Earth today who actually can't
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see a path forward out of the circumstances that we feel so entrenched and stuck in so we are incredibly lucky to feel as though we can change the world and I think that unites all of us who
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are tuning in here to me it seems like there's a rising self-preservation Instinct inside of the human species that's driving us to shift Our World Views and approaches to
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collaboration as we collectively face this exponential acceleration of multi-polar traps that are threatening the underlying foundations of Life on our planet
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what I think we have in common with everyone alive today including all of the non-human life on this planet is that we're here together in a moment of crisis
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our planet and our civilization are ill but as we recognize that illness it actually brings our awareness to remember what a truly Healthy Planet and civilization would be
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there's this Einstein quote that you may have heard before he says if I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes
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thinking about Solutions it feels like we are in those last five minutes as a species of this particular evolutionary eye of a needle this Choice point or phase change
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when we're stuck running an old civilizational operating system at the same time while that system is rapidly deteriorating the foundations upon which all civilizations are built and depend
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that's the Earth so we have this incredible opportunity but we also have this incredibly narrow window to make profound change and despite the solution focused energy
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in so many of our regenerative systems change web 3 communities it sometimes feels like that change isn't happening fast enough so the question I want to pose to you today is what is it going to take for us
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to adapt quickly enough to make it through this transition Point without fundamentally destroying the substrate upon which we depend our living systems and how do we make sure in that process
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of transition we're going in the right direction that we're not unconsciously reproducing the same dynamics that have gotten us into these set of crises thankfully we have luminaries like
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Jordan Hall Forest Landry Daniel schmachtenberger Nora Bateson bandana Shiva Joanna Macy these are people who have spent the last Decades of their lives diagnosing the problem
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which as Einstein suggests is 92 percent of the process of finding a solution because if we have a better understanding of the problem we're better equipped to build better solutions that address the root of those
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problems Daniel schmachenberger has described the root of the crises we face as The Meta crisis there's a lot of complex definitions and you could listen to hours of podcasts
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but the way I want to summarize it here is the following The Meta crisis is a set of interrelated crises whose common feature are their path reinforcing feedback
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loops so just to give you a really grounded example in the context of democracy especially here in the United States we often see the same dysfunctional behavioral patterns
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elected officials even the ones with good intentions go to office to make the change that we've elected them to make using the mechanism of redress and adaptation that's designed into the
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system of democracy but by the time they have the power to make that change they're often already so influenced or inhibited by the incentives of fundraising and corporate interests that they can't make the
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change we've elected them to make this is a feedback loop sometimes in the context of democracy this could be referred to as regulatory capture so you can see that these dysfunctional behavioral patterns actually prevent us
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from addressing the core dynamics of how our civilization functions at the root this is a coordination and adaptation failure as our circumstances have rapidly changed our Legacy systems haven't been
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able to catch up and adapt to evolve and address the scope and complexity of our current challenges like AI or climate change or exponential resource extraction and depletion
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markets and transnational corporations and governments are all failing to coordinate our response so what do we do I want to share with you this quote from
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Charles Darwin he says it's not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent that survives it's the one that's most adaptable to change
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so the meta solution to the meta crisis is increasing our capacity to adapt through coordination but we as humans sometimes have this tendency to try to mitigate a problem or
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numb ourselves out and dissociate from the problem or even attack and deconstruct the broken institutions that seem to be creating the problem but we can see that these approaches actually don't go deep enough to meet
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the challenges we face we need to go to the root drivers of our crises and improve our capacity to adapt accordingly one metaphor that is really helpful in
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that process is to see that the Earth is a body when we can see and feel the pain of our forest being destroyed seeing chemical spills
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witnessing our Public Health crises of chronic disease depression addiction and suicide seeing systemic poverty and scarcity when we know that we have enough resources on this planet to care for
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everyone we can see that the Earth itself is in pain and this pain is a symptom of the crisis of disconnection that we can all feel if we choose to and
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that we're all part of if we can imagine the Earth as a body and we can see our current approach is much like a disembodied brain that's cut off from the body and from the nervous system
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that's dissociating from the signals of pain these requests for resources this calling out to bring our awareness to what the right actions for healing would be and so when we're numbing or cutting
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ourselves off or attacking those sources of pain we're not actually able to address them at the root and when we can truly feel and listen as a society then we are compelled to create
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decentralized place-based institutions that can meaningfully turn the signal of that pain into an empowered response through adaptation cohesive as a species in creating a
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truly viable human civilization many people inside of our Legacy institutions want to make this change but they feel powerless to do it so if the bankers and the politicians
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are just as trapped within these Legacy systems as we are who is responsible for creating the new ones that are truly capable of listening feeling and responding to the pain of
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our planet and of our species truth is we are all responsible for the planet we call home we're all inherently stewards as participants in the places and on the
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planet that we share and when our systems of collective stewardship are insufficient to empower people to care for our home and for each other then we hold a sacred civic
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responsibility to innovate this is what maturing as a species is realizing that there's no external authority to look to to save us to me personally it feels like a kind of
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dignity and self-respect to pick up the mantle of stewardship and Care in this particular way and this Spirit of care and responsibility invokes a return
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to the original meaning of civics you might think of civics as roads and bridges paperwork and Municipal Town Halls but the original meaning of civics stems from an active service
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a choice to show up and care for the life of another for no reason other than a profound Devotion to the whole returning to that original meaning as an embodied practice in the context of our
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hyper-connected and globalized world Civics becomes the stewardship and innovation of our systems to me this is a kind of responsibility that we as a public get to take for the
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design and implementation of our systems creating our own decentralized institutions to meet the Public's needs because the meta crisis is a crisis of civics
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the systemic coordination and adaptation failures we Face require Civic Innovation to address those underlying feedback groups as Civic stewards we realize that it's
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up to us to work together to create the conditions in which all human beings are empowered to meet their own basic needs to make choices aligned with their unique perspectives and to share in the
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benefits of our thriving ecologies so as we undertake this massive process of redesigning our civilization in this way it's important for us to create a shared vision of the future that we want so
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that we can collaborate together and create it and that's why we use these three pillars of Civic innovation this triplicate of principles forms a kind of structural criteria
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a rubric for redesigning civilization and those are resilience vitality and choice resilience is the state and the capacity for adaptive self-organization
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sufficient to provide core life support function across changing World circumstances as things change over time do we have the Adaptive capacity to meet those
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changing circumstances without losing core life's life support function and so you can see the philosophy of decentralization is inherent to the philosophy of resilience centralized structures by their very
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nature are fragile and non-adaptive so we need decentralized local infrastructure that allows us to more easily meet our needs locally and adapt to change
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next we have vitality Vitality is life's capacity to create more life it's also the embodied state of thriving that emerges from all of the
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interconnected levels of well-being and quality of life for individuals communities and ecologies in the Indigenous quechua language there's a word called sumak kausai
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I am well because you are well with this indigenous wisdom implies is that unless our ecologies are thriving our communities can't thrive and unless our communities are thriving
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we as individuals can't thrive so we can see how interconnected all of our experiences of thriving are Vitality has to do with bioregionalism how do we Steward our air and our water
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and our soil how do we ensure that all of these different levels of well-being are accounted for in the design of our systems and the last pillar is choice
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is the state of fundamental respect for The Sovereign agency of all beings and it's also the capacity of those individual agents to express their agency and influence their circumstances
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this principle means that we're designing systems that support agency not constrict it or take it away these are systems of self-definition where I as an agent get to opt in and
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choose how I want to participate this is also the development of the capacity of individual agents to assert their will and influence their circumstances I'm incredibly inspired by Eleanor
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Ostrom and her work on the commons and ostrom's work really illustrates this principle of choice Choice Is Fundamental Because unless all people affected by a governance form around the commons are able to
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participate in the design and application of that governance we're going to miss something we're going to not include a particular voice and we're going to unconsciously reproduce the same dominance culture
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that has gotten us into the crises we face so with these principles as a foundation or a North star for the desired output of what we're innovating and what we're
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innovating towards now it's time to start thinking about how do we apply these principles into action and the fascinating and exciting thing for me about the emergence of web 3. is
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that it coincides with the collapse of our Legacy systems and I think we can we can see that those two things are very interconnected it's not a coincidence that web3 is emerging now in this particular time
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it's actually the blossoming and unfolding of a vision and a trajectory that was hoped for at the emergence of the first internet but hasn't been truly possible to implement until now
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so I want to offer you a brief overview of The evolutionary trajectory of web3 it's definitely not exhaustive but I think it illustrates the role that web3 is here to serve in the process of
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redesigning our systems so of course this story has to begin with the Bitcoin white paper which deserves immense recognition for opening up our sense of possibility
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this awareness that money arguably the core civilizational utility could be stewarded by a protocol and not by a centralized Institution
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that's corrupt and doesn't have the best interest of the public in its design then we have Occupy Wall Street this was a mass movement that had a systemic theory of change
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I think it was a moment of Awakening for us as a people to realize that instead of protesting for one particular social issue we needed to call out the failure of our entire Financial system as a whole
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and when you combine these two things I think we can start to see how the philosophy and the approach of decentralization help us go further to the root of the crises that we face
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then we have ethereum which as a virtual machine enables us to encode smart contracts to create governance to create forkable and composable infrastructure ethereum is a kind of backbone or a
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substrate for systemic innovation and then we have public goods thanks to our friends at gitcoin they really brought this awareness of the the unique form of value that public goods
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represent because they're non-enclosable and non-rivalous anyone can use them and the more that people use them the more benefit that we all can share and public goods aren't incentivized by
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our current markets but if we can use web 3 to incentivize people to create public goods they can actually create the highest return on impact then we have the emergence of nfts
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and well they were initially seen as a tool for artists and a tool for people trying to trade them to make money nfts are actually programmable Lego blocks that enable us to design new systems
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from scratch then between 2020 and 2021 we experienced a global pandemic a lot of people made some money in crypto a lot of people lost some money in crypto
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but in 2022 we saw the emergence of the impact Dao this was a structural Innovation that used the infrastructure of decentralized autonomous organizations and connected them to the ethos of the regenerative
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and systems change movements this was a new kind of organization where positive externalities were actually baked into their underlying intention their purpose-based organizations not
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driven by profit creating entirely new game Dynamics where multiple impact outs would actually invest in each other's success because they shared a sense of purpose
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this is a total departure from our traditional sense of Corporations and institutional structures so I don't know what the future of web3 holds but I want to propose in the
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context of this Arc a new unifying message for people working in this particular intersection I believe that a crucial evolutionary role of web3
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is deciv o when you take Civics our stewardship of systems Innovation our capacity to adapt and transform and use web 3 as a substrate
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for creating new protocols this is decentralized settings dciv is a distributed and open approach to Civic innovation it's a method that allows us to
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collaboratively build systems together and when we engage in that process we're creating Civic utilities these are core civilizational public goods and so we use dsib as a methodology for
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creating interoperable Civic utilities and when we put these parts together they are so much greater than the sum of their parts we're creating a Civic hyperstructure this is the fundamental coordination
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infrastructure that allows us to collectively actualize this could come in the form of a governance SDK an interoperable stack of social operating systems
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a web 3 Fork of the Taiwanese direct democracy democracy approach through citizen assemblies Civic hyperstructures are made up of Lego blocks of agentic systems of care
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that are composable and interoperable so in service of creating the relationships and the alignments needed to produce these interoperable public goods we hosted an event at East Denver
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called Federated futures and we convened it at an Interfaith climate resilience Hub called shared ground we brought people together from the regenerative movement leaders in
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democracy innovation people focused on hyper local systems to begin the process of federating our futures into collaborative initiatives that are stronger together than their component
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parts I like to use the example from our friends at Lobby three and their relationship with a team called holinim Lobby three realized that they needed an identity solution that would meet their
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requirements for civic Tech and so they started working with holonym to create an interoperable identity solution that could work with Lobby 3's d-vox platform a distributed petitioning tool
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that would create together an incredibly valuable Civic utility through their collaboration and interoperability where both projects actually needed each other to create the value that both of them wanted to create in the world
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and this kind of collaboration is the kind of collaboration that inspired us to create Federated futures as a space for these conversations between diverse stakeholders from web 3 and non-web 3 backgrounds to engage in
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the participatory design of our systems together so this is really what we're here to serve as open civics we're using the methodology of dsiv to
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scaffold the collaboration and to incentivize Civic Innovation that empowers communities to engage in the participatory design science of systemic adaptation
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and we realize that working together at this scale requires a kind of humility a way of being respectful and honoring of each other's role in serving each
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other's projects Civics is sacred to us because it's actually the process of making a society that works for everyone and it requires us to Federate many different Endeavors in order to create
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the impact through public goods at scale that we all know we need it's not going to be one project or one ecosystem that gets us out of the meta crisis it's going to be the spirit of collaboration and interoperability that
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moves us forward so that's why we created open Civics as an open network and a Consortium this isn't another centralized institution it's actually a process of
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networking a Consortium of innovators as an open network anyone who aligns with our pledge can support the network as a witness or a supporter getting inspired to apply these projects and protocols in the places that they
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call home and then at the center of the network is a Consortium High trust group of innovators who are stewarding the network by raising funds participating in collaborative initiatives and sharing their
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intellectual property through high trust and deeply aligned relationships and in order to create that trust we are proposing a collaborative protocol which allows us to bypass the need to
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create a new Institution we use this protocol to create clearly defined Pathways so that collaboration can occur while retaining the agency of all members of the network
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so this protocol starts with a proposal process where collaborative initiatives can be proposed and providing scaffolding and rails for this Collective determination of shared objectives
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what future system equilibrium we're actually all going towards together what budget is necessary for all of the projects to thrive and how we're going to create interoperable deliverables
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this protocol is the minimum viable infrastructure to enable synergistic collaboration between innovators and their projects so I just want to give you a few grounded examples of the first three that we're bringing forward
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the first is citizen assemblies citizen assemblies are an incredibly powerful tool that allows us to sidestep the institutional corruption in our democracies by empowering Everyday People to work in small groups linked to
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an online platform that allows us to gather collective intelligence and work with the entire population alongside domain experts who can bring education and help to write laws and
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policy that actually represent the will of the people so this collaborative initiative requires components from the non-biased sharing of peer-reviewed science argumentation and sentiment analysis
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decision making science platforms onboarding and Outreach with influencers and thought leaders Partnerships with existing elected officials and experts in deliberative social
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process as well as facilitators so working together this collaborative initial initiative is intended to support the creation of a fourth branch of government at state county and federal scales within the
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next five to ten years we're also working on a collaborative initiative around bioregional governance thinking in terms of bioregions is incredibly important to help us focus on the scope and scale of regeneration
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needed to preserve life for future Generations we see a future in which an interoperable Federated network of bioregional congresses creates a framework for this scale of
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coordinated regenerative actions to achieve this we need to develop a technical social and ecological framework for these new governance bodies which will require expertise from ecological land stewardship groups
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indigenous wisdom carriers technology platform developers as well as governance and social process experts linking these groups together in a collaborative initiative our goal is to create a framework for a bottom-up
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planetary governance framework whose primary directive is ecological stewardship and lastly we have an initiative around creating a governance toolkit or SDK
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because we found in being in this space for some number of years that decentralized governance and self-organization are actually still very nascent when compared with the advanced apparatuses of centralized power and economy
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and emerging standards for these decentralized organizations are often still siled onto particular blockchain smart contracts which limits our ability to Port our decision-making and coordination infrastructure across communities
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so this initiative is focused on creating an interoperable machine readable AI assisted governance toolkit which is a public good that could exponentially expand the competitive
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advantage of all the decentralized purpose-based organizations so they can more easily Federate and coordinate across chains and across ecosystems this toolkit would require expertise from social process facilitators smart
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contract writers platform Builders and would result first in a Wiki of governance tools and then an AI assisted governance bot that could support communities in self-organizing locally and globally
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so you can see all of these initiatives are not trying to fight the system the pattern amongst all of them is that we're creating a new Basin of Attraction a new system equilibrium for a parallel
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society that uses Innovation interoperability and collaboration to get us there by linking innovators with domain expertise into a unified Network
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we're invoking a new kind of Apollo project where instead of trying to get to the moon our moonshot is actually an earth shot we're looking for the solutions that will create a truly viable human
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civilization that doesn't destroy itself So In This Moment of choice this moment Between Worlds open Civics is an invitation a call for you as a Civic innovator to
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work together to do what none of us can do on our own are we going to keep working in silos and wild Gardens competing with each other for funding not seeing the bigger picture that unites all of us together
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what I hope you'll take away from this presentation is an invitation to think about how do we Federate how does your sense of the future align with the felt sense of the future of other innovators
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and what's that connective tissue what's the interoperability the composability that we can design into what we're working on so that it can Federate and integrate and interoperate with other tools and other processes that we
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desperately need as we transition from a fragile centralized extractive civilization into a resilient participatory and regenerative one
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