Fund research work for PDX DAO on Open Protocols of the City.

PDX DAO is looking for funding to support a research project on open protocols of the city.

Tl;Dr: Our first eight months as a locally situated organization have opened our eyes to the symmetries and resonances between web3 protocols and the open social protocols that proliferate material and logistical knowledge sets in the city. We intend to research these open protocols in order to investigate and learn from these symmetries, the joint values for crypto and city communities they may gesture to, and the opportunity for selective implementation of web3 technology to aid the propagation of these permissionless and censorship resistant open knowledge sets.

PDX DAO has been engaged in an imaginative project since its conception, trying to understand what it means to translate web3 and Ethereum values - conceived in the context of the distributed web - to the city - local, geographically concentrated, and offline.

Of course, the city is a furnace for decentralization in the sense of distributed power. While deals of extraction are made in (increasingly empty) office buildings, Starbucks and Target are forced out on the ground floor and a maker, artist, agricultural and organizational underground thrives, honing organically grown tools for fighting the metacrisis.

When we approached this distributed power early on, we saw it through the lens of organizations, small businesses or nonprofits. But as we built out our urban network and our own sense of the value of web3 deepened, we began to think of it in a very different way, from the perspective of open protocols.

In their "The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols," Rao, Beiko, et al define protocols as “a stratum of codified behavior that allows for the construction or emergence of complex coordinated behaviors at adjacent loci.” Open social protocols are freely propagated codes for solving material and logistical problems outside of institutional permissions.

PDX DAO is already familiar with the following open protocols being made use of in Portland:

• mutual aid protocols
• regenerative agriculture protocols
• open hardware protocols
• street medicine protocols
• street art protocols
• protocols of self-assembly
• protocols of regulatory flight and civil disobedience

In all of these cases, a given organization may bear some responsibility for production or propagation of these codes, but the real action happens at the level of the distributed, shifting dynamic of the protocol.

To understand the successes of the city, it makes sense to consider the resonances and symmetries that exist between these open social protocols and the web protocols we are iterating on in the web3 space.

In fact, we think the web3 stake in the success and propagation of these open social protocols of the city is three fold: they represent not only a symmetry of structure and method (especially with regard to strategies of permissionlessness and censorship resistance), but an exemplification of the values of consent, voluntarism and freedom to exit as they enable an open, politically multivalent substrate of public goods. Finally, we believe that the success and viability of open protocols in scaling to address the needs of the climate crisis and replacing archaic institutions that generated it ultimately depends upon adoption of the web3 toolkit.

This is a hypothesis and research horizon, and there is work to be done to confirm and explore our intuitions.

Questions we are asking: What are the propagation structures of these open protocols? Do threshold shifts (where significant and abrupt revisions are made to the protocol, as in protest protocols during the George Floyd protests) tend to be emergent, or generated from a central entity? Are protocol cultures in the city typically politically multivalent?

How can organizations like PDX DAO address and build relationships with these protocols, headless and leaderless as they are? What opportunities are there to promote permissionless and censorship resistance using web3 tooling? Are there pressure points where these tools may have asymmetrical benefit?

How can web3 tools be used to encourage open protocolization of heretofore closed knowledge sets? Are there opportunities for the use of tokens and augmented bonding curves to give organizations or companies with closed knowledge sets a mechanism to remain financially viable while opening and protocolizing their IP? Finally, what are the implications of using web3 funding mechanisms to generate value flows centered around open protocols as non-institutional, commons pool resources?

If funded, this research project will result in a public study. Partners in this research initiative are welcome.