Re:Permissioning the City

Keywords: citizen permissioning, creating conditions for emergence, decentralised ownership, citizen-led governance, permission infrastructure and architecture

SUMMARY Re:Permissioning the City is a community-led system for governing and negotiating the use of urban spaces. Envisioned as a set of tools that integrate community designed protocols, a database of available spaces in the city, a layered permissions architecture, and a user-friendly interface to navigate the booking, using, and managing of spaces, this digital platform will radically transform the way citizens and institutions engage with urban spaces.

UNLOCKING SPATIAL ASSETS IN THE CITY In many post-industrial Asian cities, the problem of urban decline and vacancy is rising, due to significant population and economic/industrial decline. We focus on a city in South Korea called Daegu, one of the most important former industrial hubs. In Daegu, the old city center in particular is facing a critical transition, with many commercial and mixed-use properties left vacant for years. Having worked with the City administration since 2021, we found that there was a vibrant cultural scene and a community of young people actively wanting to utilize these spaces. However, due to rigid, centralized governance and restrictive regulation that do not reflect the needs and desires of local communities, many spaces were left underutilized, creating missed opportunities for community engagement and economic regeneration. Our project seeks to transform these spaces into civic assets by implementing a flexible, community-driven governance (permissions) model that encourages citizen participation and fosters a sense of collective stewardship — ultimately empowering communities to transform these spaces into valuable public goods.

PROTOTYPING PHASE

We were fortunate enough to receive a government grant that spans 6 months in 2024. While the project concept has been in development since 2021 (first grant received through the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge - allowing us to experiment with chatbots as an interface), this is the first time that we are able to fully fund the development of the digital platform. In the next 5 months, we are planning an intense prototyping and testing phase which culminates in an on-site testing in one or two spaces in Daegu, in partnership with the City administration. The final output would not be a release ready product, rather an evolved version of a prototype that helps validate our design questions and technical requirements.

Through this prototyping phase, we hope to focus on:

• Validating functional components of open permission systems: Identities/Credentials, Privileges/Rights, Prosocial responsibilities/incentives
• Co-creating scenarios of layered permissions: Self-permission (identifying/pledging), Social permission (vouching/commenting), State-permission (granting/stewarding)
• Prototyping negotiation mechanisms and their infrastructural requirements
  • (data) registry e.g. relationships, spaces, and actors.
  • (value) tokens/credits e.g. combinations of values, such as care, presence, maintenance, contributing to the privilege/right.
  • (mediation) commenting and incorporating feedback e.g. dealing with conflicts and disagreements.
  • (feedback) feedback loops e.g. parametric, positive, and negative feedback.
  • other social technologies e.g. wearable sensors (NFC), IoT sensor feedback and analysis, zero-knowledge tech, p2p insurance, etc.

DISCOVERY QUESTIONS

• How could we design this negotiation space to be more transparent and encourage collective benefits/common goods rather than individual interests/hoarding assets?
• How can we reimagine the negotiation space from a one-to-one relationship, organized around centralized decision-makers, to a many-to-many dynamic within a decentralized system, involving multiple stakeholders?
• What would the policy space look like when designing such a distributed permission space?
• How would we communicate impacts and values that require long-term evaluation?

POTENTIAL OF WEB3

We believe that this concept of an open permissions system aligns with core ideas within the web3 community, especially the intention towards decentralized governance, transparency, and commoning practices. Recently, we have been developing small adjacent prototypes utilizing web3 technologies which can be integrated and developed further through this opportunity, these include:

• Fiz: wearable wallets for accessing urban and rural communities: A membership wearable using web3 NFC chips which allow you to own, access and show off your member-owned neighbourhood garden, co-living community, music venue and more.
• Frin: a protocol for freeing infrastructure: Modular money framework for community currencies and value-sharing powered by bonding curves.

BUDGET & ACTIVITIES The government grant we have secured is worth around US$230,000, however this is a highly regulated budget that can only be used towards certain costs e.g. employee salaries of the Korean entity. Furthermore, we had to match this funding with US$58,000 in co-financing, which requires us to fundraise externally to cover this amount. The aim of this Gitcoin fundraising effort is to secure funding that can go towards engaging our international team members, from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and parts of Europe, and to create more intersections with the larger (Asian) Web3 community by hosting workshops and events in Korea. This additional support from the Gitcoin and web3 community will enable us to introduce web3 possibilities into Korean public systems, fostering collaboration between public, private, and civic tech sectors.

Depending on the amount of funding, we intend to use the budget towards:

• Hosting a multi-day workshop/hackathon in Daegu or Seoul, around the end of November 2024, inviting our internal international colleagues as well as members of the web3 and larger (civic) tech community in Asia. This will consist of hands-on prototyping exploring for instance, how web3 technologies can be applied in our digital identity/credential system, and the possibility of adopting web3 tokenomics in incentivizing civic activity and stewardship. In addition to hacking, there will be public facilitated discussions on topics related to open permissions architecture, decentralized urban governance, and cross-learning between different Asian urban contexts and potential for scaling/adapting this open source technology in different cities.
• Advisory/consultation sessions with the Civic Tech Studio of Dark Matter Labs (cost that cannot be covered through the government grant), as well as other advisory support from individual experts.
• Covering our software and hardware costs, most of which constitute the US$58,000 co-financing requirement for the project (currently this is paid fully by our organization).