Every year, Eagle Street Rooftop Farm (https://rooftopfarms.org/) in Brooklyn, New York offers ~10 seasonal volunteering opportunities to grow plants and host harvest events to learn more about urban and rooftop farming. The farm also sells products like hot sauce and flower bouquets.

Annie, the organizer, puts up a list of opportunities and a calendar of events for the 2023 growing season and accepts applications from local residents. Without Web3 tools, Annie sets up a website to describe the opportunity and Google form to accept application. Interested volunteers email Annie for questions and show up at start of season. At the start of the season, Annie hosts a series of educational workshops to share more about the rooftop garden, tools to use, what to grow for the season, and assigns volunteers to daily tasks required for the season. Volunteers show up at their assigned days, care for the farm, and comment/reflect on work done via pen and paper. Throughout the growing season, Annie also hosts hot sauce making sessions and tree walks around the city. Annie dedicates her work to promote environmental awareness and ensures that the program runs on-time and well.

Sometimes work by Annie and volunteers is captured (i.e., making of hot sauce), and it can be exchanged for value. Other times it is not captured or made tangible. When it is not, it is more difficult to exchange for value.

So consider an alternative workflow enabled by Web3 tools to capture these values. Annie mints an exhaustive list of daily tasks and events for the 2023 growing season as an NFT on Mirror, creates a Twitter/Telegram to accept inquiries and applications. Accepted volunteers show up at the farm for educational workshops, carry out the daily tasks, and journal work done and happenings on Mirror to raise awareness for the rooftop farm. The team also document harvest results and money raised from farm tours and selling products.

Annie still has to promote her farm, share her wisdom, and champion all of the community events, but her knowledge and her own unique way of educating volunteers on rooftop farming is now a digital asset that she may sell to anyone in the world. The volunteers too, through Mirror, transmuted their time and effort into digital assets from working the farm. As season progresses, more rooftop farming data and reflections accumulate onchain and seasonal data for the farm emerges. Annie has exchanged her knowledge for volunteers' time and effort, and vice versa, for a successful season that benefit the community around it.

These NFTs represent assets that the farming team owned and exchanged throughout the 2023 season. The work is now captured and recorded, and it needs to be valued for exchange. However, without a mutually agreed upon price discovery mechanism, transaction costs involved in exchanging any asset is high and the likelihood to commit to an exchange is low.

Impact Markets is an approach to coordinate and capture activity assets in tokens, build autonomous markets around these tokens, and enable community governance around the assets. It is a collection of smart contracts designed to facilitate community coordination for service delivery and community building.

Practically, Impact Markets:

• open sources impact activities
• observes and validates impact commitments via physical touchpoints
• transforms commitments into tradable assets
• enables trading of commitments in autonomous markets
• funnels trading fees to ImpactDAOs and manages 50/50 governance between impact producer and their patrons

Experimenting with Impact Markets

You may find the first iteration of Impact Markets at https://arm0ry.g0v.tw/playground.

If you are a local community and is interested in trying out Impact Markets, please reach out.

Arm0ry

Arm0ry is a builder community at g0v.