Ethereal Forest is Building PDX DAO as a Public Good

As noted in our previous application, the goal of Ethereal Forest is to generate the conditions for a participatory city DAO with pluralistic inputs from diverse elements in the city - a federated “DAO of DAOs” to be known as PDX DAO. For reasons outlined in that document - in particular, lack of adoption, technological capacity and understanding of the more radical aspects of the web3 use case - the work of generating these conditions is a fairly ambitious task that requires multiple approaches. We outlined the four following strategies for completing this task as follows:

Research: Investigating and identifying the areas of greatest potential for creative implementation of the blockchain, p2p, and open protocol toolkit for substantive benefit to the city, with an eye toward the thriving of extra-institutional p2p-style systems.

Curating Tools: Developing in tangent with that community-oriented research a library of blockchain and p2p tools and implementation strategies that will aid non-coercive coordination institutions in the city. This means using our research experience to find specific implementation opportunities, and connecting with builders and protocols that want the benefit of practically oriented public trials to better understand and improve their own projects.

Engaging Community: Further building our relationships and networks with the artists, makers, organizers, producers and builders who make up the city, with the eventual goal of scaling horizontally into many on-chain organizations that will take equal footing with Ethereal Forest in the participatory structure of PDX DAO.

Interregional and Global Collaboration: Making available our research and processes to projects and protocols that may benefit from the strategic contingency of the local; developing institutions of ILLness (Intercity Localist Library) and OOPs (Observed Operating Protocols) in order to protocolize and share our knowledge sets.

Progress

An element of Ethereal Forest has formalized a Research plan and begun early work for our Open Protocol Research Group, an investigation into informal social protocols that animate artistic and mutual aid substrates of cities, how they differ from the traditional array of resource-legible institutions, and how DAOs and other p2p tools can be used to help them “bootstrap” mutual legibility between them and exotic resource gathering systems. Our goal is to explore how Portland’s informal systems are expanding the Overton Window of institutional possibility, and how the crypto world can aid those systems, but this process begins with a series of interviews with members of the same communities in town that we hope will become the substrate for PDX DAO. Read the OPRG proposal].

A further effort has been developed by some of the same members to explore and consolidate the rich field of public goods funding to make them accessible and legible to impact publics, some of whom overlap with the publics explored by OPRG. This effort, called Hyperactive Public Goods Ecosystem Support Machine (ESM), is beyond the strict scope of Ethereal Forest, but attests to the creative directions and collaborations that Ethereal Forest has instigated in the months since our 2023 GFEL conference. Given its project of curation and education for laypeople that are passionate about decentralization, direct democracy and impact but aren’t interested in technical knowledge, we see the ESM as a natural extension of our project of Curating Tools and Engaging Community.

Fun DAO

Over the course of the past year and a half, members of Ethereal Forest have helped steward the longstanding monthly ETHPDX meetup, where new folks interested in crypto (ranging from veterans to total novices) show up on a continual basis. The feedback we were hearing from many newcomers was that they wanted to participate in DAO activities, even though many of them didn’t yet have a self-custody wallet or any knowledge of L2s or voting mechanisms. With Fun DAO, we took this as a great opportunity to forward our goal of Curating Tools and Engaging Community while also generating Research and feedback that could enrich the builder ecosystem.

Fun DAO operates under simple guidelines: each month, we decide on an outing using a different DAO voting tool. If there are issues reaching quorum, onboarding new members, or if the vote fails for other reasons, we use that as an opportunity to explain bugs and pitfalls around voting processes. When it does succeed, we get to build community while also providing in-depth onboarding not only to DAOs but to new resources for democratic consensus building (often even our crypto veterans are using the tools for the first time). Our outings have included an art gallery and an arcade space, and we’ve used tools including Jokerace, Pairwise and Snapshot. We are actively instigating the building of DAOHaus and Optimism composable Conviction Voting tool, bringing global consequence to our local coordination efforts. Read about Fun DAO on the Ethereal Forest blog.

Corollary to Fun DAO is our Local Onboarding Hours, which fall each month on the Tuesday following ETHPDX. In it we offer guidance generating a self-custody wallet, onboarding to L2s like Optimism and Arbitrum and broad context around the Ethereum thesis and the mechanisms of legitimacy in the network (a common question is how proof of stake works).

While Fun DAO was generated within our own Ethereum and DAO oriented community as we build it out, we’ve also spent a great deal of energy engaging non-crypto native communities on their own terms. Foremost of this is Portland’s regenerative agriculture scene. We developed connections with this world in the context of our warehouse community space and have built enough trust over the last year to successfully onboard community members to the value of DAOs and legibility within the broader decentralized web ecosystem.

Ethereal Forest has also helped instantiate Portland’s ReFi DAO Local Node, providing the PDX DAO network with another channel of Interregional Collaboration on the regenerative cultural front. This element of PDX DAO has and will continue to be a powerful area of Community Engagement. Also on the regenerative front, we have provided resources to local permaculture educators to onboard them to GG20's Climate Solutions Community Round.

Finally, as an expression of our task of evangelizing the localist use case and the power of the urban center as a laboratory for analogue anticapture technologies that can compose with and aid the web3 toolkit, Ethereal Forest gathered and delivered Inverted City, a collaborative journal of Ethereum localism with contributors from across the space. Read The Inverted City here.

Our other efforts at Interregional and Global Collaboration include the (not insubstantial) feat of building our website, newsletter, blog and Ministry of Propaganda efforts. With this infrastructure in place, we expect to make even more progress on every aspect of our cosmolocal project as the Spring moves forward.

These include:

• early planning to coordinate Local DAO Summer - a global, multi-week series of talks and conversations around the question of local use cases for DAOs. This will be a frantically collaborative effort - join the planning conversation (telegram invite) here if you’re interested.

• QFIRL, a community experiment in quadratic funding to be focused this round on local elements of the regenerative agriculture and environmental advocacy scenes. This experiment will seek to bridge the gap between web3 literacy and quadratic funding as a participatory tool, so that a local community can decide for itself how funding is allocated. (Note that this project was set aside during the winter while we completed the projects mentioned above, but is now ripe for execution).

• WTF is a DAO, a series of workshops and events engaging different facets of the Portland community - primarily, the community organizing scene and the above regenerative ag and climate advocacy communities - to show them the value of DAOs as a tool for resource allocation, direct democracy and economic solidarity.

• OPRG continued research in the form of interviews, frameworks and public facing reflections on the urban open protocol thesis, especially as it relates to DAOs as a political economic and civic force.

• The General Forum on Ethereum Localism 2024 is planned for the weekend of September 13th (Friday the 13th). We hope to continue and escalate the conversation established in October of last year around bioregionalism, urbanism, CoFi and MycoFi, cosmolocalism and decentralized governance of both the material and immaterial commons.