We're PDX DAO, a Portland, Oregon Ethereum community and public goods DAO. Our goal is to build, engage and support Portland's raddest experiments in pluralism, decentralization, and economic democracy using the Ethereum toolkit.

A few months ago we published an introduction. It talks about why we see the city of Portland as a perfect place to stage the next chapter of the coordination metagame. In short, our city has long been at the intersection of many traditions of social justice, systems thinking, and regenerative and ethical technology (we’re green, we’re anti-corporate, we’re into open source, everyone knows it!). The piece also shares our origin story–in part an evolution of Portland Commons Technology Project and the longstanding EthPDX meetup group. From this history, we leveled up.

As an organization, we have three points of focus, representing three perspectives on Ethereum localism* we hope to see proliferated as adoption expands:

• Creating a vehicle to seed and support local experiments in Ethereum and web3 technology, especially for the public good, with an emphasis on monetary localism, the ownership economy, and novel cooperative enterprises.

• Initiating onboarding games to bring diverse communities of artists, makers, planners and designers into the crypto fold, along with their perspectives and knowledge-sets.

• Generating an opportunity for local Ethereans to build experience in the new economy by contributing to and participating in DAO work and governance.

Since the DAO was summoned in March of this year, we’ve staged a variety of successful community education events (an open salon on Ethereum fundamentals and a talk on wallet and password security), a PizzaDAOxPDXDAO party, and endless small meetings and discussions. These have led to the germination of a more ambitious event, a large forum on Ethereum localism (more below).

We’ve been fortunate to be connected with some amazing web3 folks and DAOs who are also passionate about localism. We’re confident that when cityDAOs across the world coordinate and experiment with web3 tools, we’ll be able to come together, compare results, and cross-pollinate to create the exponential utility only participatory design can make. A network of shared values and love for difference, among nodes that reinforce each other even as they flower out.

We’re using this market to build a solid foundation that’s prepared to grow when cultural interest in Ethereum returns. And we’re documenting the process as we go along—one of our goals is to produce a protocol that other cityDAOs can learn from and fork. See our progress on what we call ‘OOPs’ here.

The funding that comes from your support will allow us to expand the potential impact of our work. Immediately, we would use the funding to support our upcoming in-person gathering: A General Forum on Ethereum Localism. Longer-term, funding would support more community events, experimentalism and local onboarding.

We believe the time is right for an adoption of Ethereum localism—and that it’s up to us to do the locally integrated work to bring ethereum and web3 tools to ground level, where communities can implement, experiment, and iterate to their own sovereign ends.

Ethereum Localism Our thesis on Ethereum localism is as follows: if we build alliances with organizations and informal efforts that embody our core web3 values, we will onboard a fresh pool of contributors with exotic skill sets to which we’re underexposed, find new use cases for web3 tooling, and expand and refine our own sense of what our the web3 project is all in the same breath.

There is an underground of makers and experimentalists in every city (perhaps especially in Portland) that is analogous to the web3/post web world of hackers and builders. Their subcultures share a natural affinity for web3 principles, and can be “superjumped” by the modularity and composability our tools offer, while we have a lot to gain from their material sensibilities and instinctual sense of problem solving beyond the walls of bureaucratic or consumerist institutions.

In order to export and refine this view while also hearing the polyphony of other visions of ethereum localism, we’ve set up three days in October to host the General Forum (details here). There will be pre-conference tours of urbans farms and makerspaces, a Friday the 13th atmospheric excursion, and both talk and unconference style events during the weekend. Not to mention, free beer provided by Raid Brood! Check our twitter for more details.

Local Rounds Part of the goal for the forum is to gain resources and build conceptual clarity around our longer term ambition, a quarterly QF fundraising initiative we're calling Local Rounds. Each quarterly round would take a different sector of the urban commons as its object in 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. Protocols will build relationships with communities. Portlanders will be onboarded to web3. Crypto-natives will learn mind-bending things from communities. Participants will be rewarded with POAPs.

Round cycle (as currently envisioned) Round 1: Urban Farms and Community Gardens Round 2: Makerspaces, Hackerspaces, Art Collectives Round 3: Worker Coopertives, Platform Cooperatives & Experimental Enterprises Round 4: TBD

In each case, the community will be brought to bear for small events, teach-ins, tours and work parties on locations (local urban farms and gardens, for ex.) while community members will be invited to small talks and onboarding events put on by PDX DAO. The structure is designed so that the hackathon occurs only after builders have had time to be immersed in and hang out with the communities they’re building for. Products of the hackathon are, of course, only provocations meant to create a relationship and design path that can live on, in different cities and future projects.

Bridgespace Commons Part of the reason we've been successful in the past and are able to plan for the future with such ambition is the Bridgespace Commons, a large warehouse community space in SE Portland. Members of PDX DAO have been early contributors to the development of governance processes and the general operation of the space, and its been an invaluable resource in getting web3 people in the same room with a huge diversity of different local groups. It's in these encounters that we've discovered the fundamental values that so many urban groups and substrates share, and have pieced together the role Ethereum awareness and onboarding might have in a broader coalition adequate to addressing the metacrisis.