Since GG18, PDX DAO has had some major successes, particularly in the form of the General Forum on Ethereum Localism, which brought together organizers and builders from diverse areas of the decentralized web to open up a discourse on the meme “Ethereum Localism.” (Big thanks to those donations from GG18 which helped make the event possible!)

In retrospect, part of the success may have been due to the fact that Ethereum Localism was a new meme, and no one knew what the hell it meant. This was a devilish virtue - the unsettled nature of the phrase and the many interpretations that were brought to bear upon it didn’t prevent the group from identifying the clear throughlines, core beliefs beneath pluralistic improvisations that mirrored in structure the many headed unity of the cosmolocal hypothesis.

(For a taste of the heterogenous conversation in action listen to audio from three days of speakers and panels at pdxdao.xyz/localism. The “Regenerative Financial Systems” panel was featured as an episode of Greenpill podcast)

We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of genuinely novel idea exchange that occurred - notably around mutual credit, alternative local currencies and the role of p2p tools in the community stack - and hope that process continues as people reflect and iterate around the meme. In the meantime we’ve developed some novel frames ourselves, reflecting problems and potential solutions that became clear during the manic seven days of pre and post conference conversations. We’ve also run into some opportunities. Quick review:

Ethereal Forest First of the moves to reflect the thought-production of the conference is the new clarity on what a city DAO is and might be. We strongly feel that a city DAO should be built and run in a manner that has meaningful participatory inputs from a diverse set of groups in a given city.

To this end, PDX DAO’s core work group is relabelling to Ethereal Forest, as we build out the connections and seed other work groups and DAOs that will participate in the genesis of a democratically governed PDX DAO, a city DAO infrastructure as a public good.

As we steward the emergence of this “more adequate” PDX DAO over the next 6-12 months, we have these focuses:

• Research: Investigating and identifying the greatest areas of 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.

In short, we have taken the position that a very substantial trial in community engagement and the development of a public substrate open to the web3 use case is necessary before we can build a PDX DAO we would stand behind.

Ethereal Forest was generated to do the work of locating that substrate, finding the active projects in decentralization, financial pluralism and systems thinking, the experimental coalitions and informal collectives that would benefit most from the p2p and web3 toolkit, as well as the greater collective potential a PDX DAO could provide. Read more here!

Borthwick House Due to an unforeseen circumstance, the final throwdown of our Forum required a last minute location change. One of our community members generously offered up his house for the evening, and for several of the spontaneous, prolific post-conference dinners that occurred in the days that followed.

It was a happy coincidence that has opened up into a beautiful opportunity for a mutually beneficial relationship, serving both our community and the DAO. Beginning in December, the Borthwick House will serve as an Ethereal Forest commons. We look forward to using the space to host co-working hours, dinners, workshops, meetings, and lodging - two open bedrooms will allow us to lodge out-of-town visitors. There will absolutely be a food garden, and sunny-weather backyard yoga. We’re so excited to see what network effects this house will help manifest and support, and will be sharing more around our plans and offerings soon.

QF IRL In GG18, we stated our intention to establish “a quarterly QF fundraising initiative” that would identify different sectors of the urban commons as a fundraising theme to initiate “a month-long cycle of awareness, inter-education (between builders and designers and the communities we’re engaging), participatory solutions design, and fundraising, ending in a hackathon.”

Thanks to the Gitcoin team, Grants Stack and a live platform demo from Owocki, we have all the tools we need in order to launch this project. But we have similar concerns now as those above, that such an undertaking would require a lot more deliberate and creative community engagement in order to meet the description of “local.”

The problem is this: the task of onboarding non crypto-native organizations with the promise of funding is far easier than the task of large scale onboarding of those who may have a stake in their work. Crypto people using QF to gain participatory input in crypto-native projects works beautifully. Crypto natives effecting the flow of resources to local initiatives in a specific community makes far less sense in the democratic frame QF was built for. We can call this design horizon the problem of participatory design in QF.

QF IRL is our concept of an in real life event where community organizations and community members can gather to meet and learn about orgs, learn about the QF process and how it can be used to bring mulitscale participatory economy to public goods, and donate their cash and weight to the organization of their choice.

We expect to bring a diverse community together to think critically about public goods, what organizations are bringing value to their community and why that value should be funded, what new models might exist for organizing and supplying resources in ways that reflect community values, and what web3 might have to do with bridging those gaps.

Seeding DAOs As our aspirations are for a PDX DAO ecosystem and its eventual on-chain embodiment to be a DAO of DAOs, we’re taking it as our task as a community to bootstrap a multiplicity of experimental projects that can take their place in the participatory process.

This doesn’t simply mean setting nonprofits up with a crypto wallet - we hope to take an active stance in our research to identify the systems, mechanisms, informal associations & coalitions that quietly work without reference to firms, nonprofits, government entities (though in some cases they might be composed of them). It’s those nontraditional bodies that will most understand and organically benefit from the DAO use case, and it’s their emergence as new types of entities under the new facilities of the web3 toolkit that will make PDX DAO a substantive project for the city.

There is much work to be done on this front, but the vision of several organizations within the PDX DAO ecosystem is already shaping up: Ethereal Forest, EthPDX (for community and onboarding as well as awareness around the larger participatory project of PDX DAO), a Regenerative Food Systems project being seeded by our friends in the local permaculture and urban gardening scene, and the the Open Protocol Research Group. The latter will undertake the project of exploring some of the nontraditional bodies mentioned above, with a specific emphasis on zine cultures, repair and reuse protocols and the many diverse orgs using some form of the “community library” model, with the hope of identifying spontaneous systems that may be afforded new opportunities by making use of noncoercive, decentralized technologies, by becoming friends of the Outside.