tl;dr

Everywhere we look, increasing polarization and adherence to a hyper-competitive, zero-sum creed has contributed to a breakdown of human connection and compassion.

At Zuzalu Taiwan, we are experimenting with a city of true connections, fostering collaboration.

By adopting our two principled designs: (1) collective sense-making and (2) exploring human connections, we will adopt a relational identity system building on top of ZuPass for our residents to expand their trust in the network. The connections will be formed through expressions of gratitude, altruistic behaviors, and well-structured communication. The funds will be used for securing the venue and anchoring our scope immediately with more details below.

Overview

ZuTaiwan is a four-week pop-up city taking place in Taiwan in August this year. Zuzalu is a wonderful environment for experimenting with an innovative form of governance, and Taiwan is a hub for civic technology. Combining the two, we hope to explore the edge of trust, connections, and collaboration. One fundamental concept supporting our design is Plurality, a movement advocating for collaboration across differences. Throughout the four-week event, we will invite up to 200 individuals to join the network as residents in the city, where each individual can choose their unique level of commitment to the city.

Objectives

• To explore the edge of trust, connections, and collaboration, creating a plural city.
• To utilize tools that bridge differences and foster true communication.
• To explore Taiwan and its unique setup for plural development.
• To have fun and enjoy good company with one another.

Location

To build a ZuViliage, we would like our choice of location to be comfortable but not too busy. Some cities in Taiwan we have in mind are:

1. Tainan: Tainan is in the southern part of Taiwan, with nice warm weather and amazing food. What strikes people most about Tainan is its rich Han culture, with one of the most famous Confucian temples and a great cultural scene. Tainan has a growing number of coworking spaces.
2. Yilan: Not too far from the capital, Yilan is a city on the northeast coast of Taiwan, with incredible scenery and good access to the city. Life in Yilan is a lot slower, which makes it potentially suitable for a more experimental lifestyle. The core team will scout the venue in the following weeks.

Initial Planning

There will be two major principled designs in ZuTaiwan: (1) To make it an environment for collective sense-making, (2) to explore human connections with trust and gratitude. These two principled designs serve as the fundamentals of the whole ZuTaiwan, making it a real human experience.

Collective Sense-making

“A world is a container for entities and coherent-enough internal rules. When a system of entities and rules becomes alive, they become a world.” – LUDEN, The Case for Autonomous World.

We hope ZuTaiwan to be a shared experience co-created by the community, in which the community can together explore, define, and adopt its own agenda. The agenda will include, but is not limited to: the topic we discuss, the way we live, our shared values, and more. As the host, our job is to create a safe environment for our residents to fully indulge themselves in the world they are building. We will adopt tools that facilitate but do not constrain the above-mentioned process.

The tool we use will be built on top of ZuPass (zero knowledge) to empower plural voting for different decisions made in the city. By collecting the anonymized metadata of the relational identities between each resident, we will progressively build an anti-collusion decision-making mechanism for the city.

Explore Human Connections

“There are two ancient concepts in the Chinese Culture, Cai & De, which means talent/skills & virtue. Cai is the competency of an individual. Some people are good at coding, some good at sales, and some at community management; De is how you treat people, with integrity or with flexibility, gentle or decisive. Each project/community has its own need for Cai and De. ” – Beatrice Liao at DAO Taipei

A purely quantified reputation system ignores the interactions of a human network and could be biased toward relationship building. In ZuTaiwan, we hope to explore the essence of a relationship that’s not merely reduced to numbers but presents the rich expression of a person’s work and its impact on others.

Inspired by da0-Shoutout and BLH, we want gratitude and appreciation to be at the core of the community, documenting the flow of altruistic behaviors. We hope to integrate this design into ZuPass and the above-mentioned plural voting system. The gratitude/appreciation each individual receives will be documented in their own data vault and serve as the factual relationships of their identity.

Use of fund

The scale of our initiative will be determined by the amount of funding we get in total. Here’s a breakdown of what we can do with different levels of resources:

250k

• Free Housing for 30 people
• Free Food for 30 people for 1 month
• Free coworking space *1
• Accommodation discount for 200 people (10% - 20% off)
• Occasional events and party fees will be partially covered (5-8 events)
• A core team of 5 people compensation for 6 months (2,000 per month)
• Community managers of 10 people's compensation for 2 months (1,200 per month)

350k

• All of above
• extra 50k for developing the relational identity system
• extra 50k to measure people’s well-being with wearable devices

500k

• All of above
• 2 extra coworking spaces
• More discount for accommodation (30% off)
• 10-15 events fee covered
• better compensation for the core team (2,500 per month) and community managers (1,500 per month)
• Data analysis for well-being (key to longevity) (50 - 70k)

Core Team

• Vivian Chen, Organizer at da0; Organizer of Plurality Taipei
• Noah Yeh, Organizer at da0
• Nicole Sun, Core team at Zuzalu Montenegro
• Jonathan Kung, da0
• Gimmy Chang, Organizer at FAB DAO
• Jiahe Lin, Organizer at da0
• Rich
• Jacky Wang, Organizer at BuZhiDAO; Organizer of Taipei Blockchain Week

Advisors

• Glen Weyl
• Puja Ohlhaver
• Scott Moore
• Vitalik Buterin