Federated Futures 2023 Recap & Key Takeaways
Thank you to everyone who attended and offered their visions of a more beautiful world. In the spirit of anchoring those visions into reality, here is a brief summary of both days of the event.
Federated Futurists,
As ETHDenver moves further from the ever-present now into the past, I‘ve been reflecting on what a truly exceptional group of humans came together for this event and what a bright and inspiring future lives in the space between all of our hearts and the devotional work we’re blessed to be able to do alongside one another.
As one of your hosts and collaborators, I am deeply honored to have convened such brilliant and heart-centered speakers, participants, facilitators, and volunteers. Thanks to our sponsors Lobby3, Shared Ground, and Mandelbot for making this gathering of incredible humans possible. Thank you to everyone who attended and offered their visions of a more beautiful world. In the spirit of anchoring those visions into reality, here is a brief summary of both days of the event.
Day 1
We kicked off our exploration of the future we want using the framing of OpenCivics’ core design patterns and pillars of civic innovation: Resilience, Vitality, and Choice. The conversations that emerged revealed just how interconnected and reinforcing these pillars are.
Resilience: Mitigating the Metacrisis with Resilient Civic Systems
Our conversation on resilience, featuring the brilliant Gary Sheng and Jessica Zartler, focused on the ‘hard and soft systems’ that encode our fundamental behaviors as well as the role of token engineering and currency design in helping communities liberate themselves by expressing and determining what they value. The theme of vitality was deeply present in this conversation as the underlying purpose of our foundational technologies and systems.
“One very big tool for liberation is the ability to create our own currency, the ability to express and determine what we value.” — Jessica Zartler
“Token engineering is an emerging field where we apply engineering methodologies and ethics to tokenization. We apply the same rigor that we use to test bridges: modeling, simulation, and testing. We don't drive over bridges without ever testing them, and we need to do the same for these new digital public infrastructures.” — Jessica Zartler
“The world is a result of hard systems and soft systems. Soft systems are culture and ideas. And hard systems, foundational technologies, harden the way that the world is. We want to create parallel structures that challenge powerful structures that are reinforcing certain pathological games, like the duopoly game, the rat race game. We have to call out the games in order to challenge them. These are endless downward spirals of hyper-capitalism, Moloch, multipolar traps, where everyone is incentivized to benefit in the short run, but harming the global commons in the long run. What is the opposite of a multipolar trap? What kind of technology makes it easy to create upward spirals? Races to the top? What are the technologies that allow people that aren't millionaires or billionaires to create very powerful grassroots movements that get major systemic change done?” — Gary Sheng
“In a world where we're entrained to see resources as fundamentally scarce, that we need to hoard what's ours, the philosophy of public goods opens us up to the the value that can be created when we open source something that enables other people to create more value.” — Benjamin Life
Vitality: Regenerative Economies & Bioregional Governance
Our conversation on vitality, featuring the interdisciplinary genius of Jordan Siegel, Gregory Landua, Azuraye Wycoff, Kristina Ryan, and Kēnya Francis, explored the complex interrelationship between indigeniety and place-based collective action, designing systems that support the rich aliveness and living embodiment of place, context and ritual, and developing the kinship required to heal and grow as a beloved community in service of the places we call home. As the conversation turned towards bioregional governance and economy, it became clear that upgrading our collective intelligence through resource mapping and expanding our capacity for collective choice-making through new forms of commons governance were some of the key opportunities and challenges that thinking bioregionally presents.
It's very easy to design a coordination platform that reifies colonial ways of knowing. As soon as you're creating maps, you're deciding how you think we should break up the world. As we think about bioregional governance, bioregional economies, we are creating new maps that are hopefully representative of old maps and old ways of being. — Tibet Sprague
“Indigenous literally means from place. It takes seven years for your body to completely regenerate every cell in your body. So if you were to eat food from a single place that was stewarded in a way that is in integrity with that place, and the people who are caring for the food, from a certain perspective, you might be able to reclaim your indigeneity and say I am from this place.” — Gregory Landua
Deprogramming ourselves is the biggest thing because we come in with so many ideas of how structures should be run. And a lot of it is actually just getting out of the way, and giving people the tools that they need to understand what it means to take on deeper responsibility to care for people, what integrity really means. — Azuraye Wycoff
What would nature do? In all scenarios we can see examples in nature that we could mimic. — Azuraye Wycoff
We are humans learning to build kinship, learning to build relationship, and that moves slowly at the pace of nature. Being rooted in a place, you can't go faster than nature. — Azuraye Wycoff
“Imagine that the content you were shown was the content most shown to connect you across a divide and create a bridge to mutual understanding. So the more you use the platform, the more common understanding and mutual interest was generated over a group of people. That is very possible.” — Tibet Sprague
“Redefining what this money looks like, it’s a store of energy. In regenerative economics, we're looking at this energy the same way that water moves through an ecosystem, creating the right channels, the laterals, the swales to make sure that that water gets to where it needs to go in the right quantities. We're creating an entire supply chain owned by little tiny entities, so instead of a single farmer having to do everything across the board, where they are insanely stressed out and barely being able to make a profit, and if they are making a profit, it's usually at the depletion and extraction of the land, if we can divvy it all up and actually create efficiencies by stacking all of these things, that actually allows us to create enough money where you're not extracting you can actually decrease the cost of food, you can make your routes way more efficient.” — Azuraye Wycoff
Choice: Evolutionary Governance with Decentralized Civics (DeCiv)
Our conversation on choice, featuring the thoughtful civic stewardship of John Richardson, Matt Harder, Spencer Cavanaugh, Sean Gomez, and Nanak Nihal, invoked the deeper questions around the ultimate purpose and potential of self-governance, moving beyond polarization toward and through real-world collective stewardship, and the fundamental building blocks of a truly upgraded digital democracy. This conversation closed out the first day by going to the root of one of the most complex and recursive challenges we face and provided a positive image of both the future of democracy as well as a design pathway to get us there.
“We can innovate democracy. We can make expressing your preference, transparent, and easy. And we can make decisions this way.” — Matt Harder
“A healthy looking society is not one where you have just a government representative making a bunch of decisions for their residents. If they're not working collectively, they're not really going to have the sensemaking and the power to really work collectively. This is done in civic groups.” — Matt Harder
“There are some really core technologies in web3 that are going to make our mission, which is basically the realization of a digital democracy, much more achievable. Blockchain technology allows you to store votes in a in a trusted way.” — John Richardson
“Verified identity that feels safe and consent-based empowers people to be more participatory without feeling like they're losing something or giving up their data or giving up their freedom and their privacy.” — Timothy Archer
“Facebook processes seven petabytes of data a day. You can capture the information on a vote in under kilobyte, every four years. So in terms of information flow, our current voting system is very low bandwidth. And it's trying to keep up with Facebook's massive data processing machines. And so that lack of influence that people have every four years is very discouraging. I have my vote, and then the rest of the four years I can write my letters, but are they going to listen to me? I can participate in polls, but they can ignore the polls. So it's very discretionary, in the part of people in power, whether I actually have an influence or not. And people know that. If we want to have people engage in things, we have to give them power and there has to be connection between what they say they want and then what happens, unmoderated by the desires of a politician that particular day.” — John Richardson
“In thinking about what the public wants, we often enter the conversation with assumptions about how we determine what the public wants, there's a proposition that people are voting for or against. And we assume that's how you determine what people want. But there's so much power embedded in deciding what the question is and how to frame the proposition that people are voting for and against.” — John Richardson
“What do people want? People want fair outcomes. First of all, they don't want to be a loser, if there's going to be a winner. We want to have everyone relatively equally happy. And that is going to be the democratic mandate that a politician should be carrying forward: what is the consensus of all of these diverse groups in society?” — John Richardson
“Why we're here, why we're doing decentralized civics, it allows us to listen in new ways that we couldn't listen before.” — Sean Gonzalez
“Imagine a party where the policies are sourced from their membership. I don't know why we don't have that. Why wouldn't you want to be a part of that party? The duopoly have quite the fortress, but over time they won't be able to compete because they simply don't represent people.” — Matt Harder
“The conservative mindset and the progressive mindset a yin and a yang that always exist within human populations. And it's not good and bad. And it's important not to view it as good and bad because then a disagreement becomes a moral battle. And I'm definitely right. So why would I listen to you, if I know you're wrong? And being wrong is the same as being evil? We need a societal reframe. If somebody disagrees with me, it could be that they're coming from a different position that is actually just as valid as my position. It doesn't mean everybody's intellectually honest, but maybe they are and they just come from a different side of the spectrum. What we want in society is a synthesis of these tension points, rather than everybody to agree with me. Then we can start to listen to other sides.” — Matt Harder
“One by one, the building blocks of a digital electoral system are starting to come together. It's not ready yet, but they're starting to be there. And as soon as that congeals, we're going to see a new kind of political party arise that will compete with the existing political parties by using new ways of developing policies that engage large groups. If we can see new emergent political entities that can coordinate and have a shared policy agendas, you might see some cracks starting to appear in the duopoly system. Now, if there could be some political party that starts to gain some momentum, gets into government in a place of power, then the structures that maintain the two party state will start to crack. We can move very quickly from this 18th century model, into a 21st century model.” — John Richardson
For me personally, even with the incredible knowledge and wisdom shared on the microphone that day, the most beautiful quality of our first day was the space in between all the panels. Seeing the relationships form between speakers and participants, I was struck by the continuity of each person’s devotion to systemic transformation and creating a world that works for all.
Despite the unique areas of focus of our speakers, each coming from nuanced disciplines that require extensive domain-specific knowledge, there was a common thread and allyship that seemed to emanate from a deep understanding of the nature of our current crises and a sincere choice to work at the deepest levels to create not just a slightly less disfunctional world but a radically more beautiful one. Woven together through the story of our collective future, our panelists are creating a whole system upgrade that is inspiring, life-affirming, and foundational to the OpenCivics’ theory of change.
I look forward to seeing what this community of innovators creates as we continue to develop the governance and coordination infrastructure to provide scaffolding for future collaborations.
Day 2
Transitioning from a day of deep conversations intended to spark the imagination of our participants, we moved into a day of collaboration and collective visioning. Day 2 began with a group meditation that guided participants into a future reality in which The Great Turning toward a more beautiful world had been completed and our world had been completely transformed. Participants brought the visions, sparks of inspiration, and designs from their individual imagination into a process of collective back-casting, a futuring exercise in which participants describe the world they see in their imagination of their own preferred future and tell a story about how we moved from where we are now into that potential reality.
At the conclusion of Day 2 we had three incredible collective narratives that described the qualities and design criteria of each of our pillars, told from the perspective of the future we all collectively desire. Each group had its own unique self-organized process that ranged from performance art, sequential storylines, and trees of questions leading to ever-deeper lines of inquiry. Below is a ChatGPT summary of the long-form transcript of each group’s presentation.
Resilience
This conversation revolved around the creation of a regenerative and decentralized world. The speakers discuss the need for a shared vision and community building, followed by cartography and resource mapping, and education and healing, leading to the creation of tools for platform building. The goal is to create a global network where people can identify their needs and be rewarded for meeting their needs and helping others do the same, while taking care of the earth. The scalability of this process is also emphasized. Further inquiries could include the feasibility and implementation of this model, potential challenges and roadblocks, and the role of technology in achieving these goals.
Vitality
The conversation explored the concept of vitality, which is about bridging the gap between intention and expression. The speakers emphasize the importance of meeting breakdowns with empathy and connection, rather than reactivity and judgment. They also note that vitality is a system that requires individual pieces to be vital, with cultural intelligence being necessary to react to caretaking situations. The speakers discuss the current reality of anti-social and transactional contexts and the need for pro-social modalities that are encouraged and fluid. Finally, they focus on how vitality can be a constant in life and in community. Key insights include the importance of assuming the impact of one's actions on others, the need for attentiveness and connection, and the circularity of relationships. Further inquiries could include how to cultivate cultural intelligence and pro-social modalities in communities and how to sustain vitality as a constant in life.
Choice
The conversation explored the cycles of culture, technology, and systems and how choices are embedded with desires, information and values. The discussion focused on the importance of simultaneously working on the new story of why we are here, self-leadership curriculum, clear values, bias detection skills, and increasing mindfulness. There was also emphasis on experimenting and playing games as communities in opt-in communities of practice, and sovereign and experimental jurisdictions. The technology side included bridging systems technology for cohesion, AI-assisted governance wizards, and algorithmic depolarization. The group realized that culture informs the range of choices perceived as possible, and to make true choices, individuals need to be aware of the culture they are in and take collective responsibility. Changing the way money works is as big as any of these other kinds of governmental upgrades, and all of these need to be combined to have a positive impact. There was also an emphasis on the importance of feedback, transparency, and learning from failures. Further inquiries can explore how to change money and governance technology as protocols, and the underlying protocol of cultural change.
The Future of Federated Futures
This event was the first experiment of what we hope will be an ongoing series of events that bridge diverse communities and support the application of systemic web3 solutions in service of vitality, resilience, and choice. We learned from this event that building bridges takes time, commitment, and presence. We’re looking forward to returning to Shared Ground as Community Members first, building the trust required to support the collective actualization of that community with tools and resources.
We’re also looking forward to experimenting with different scales and scopes of events that bring more government officials and community stakeholders together with innovators to apply new solutions at the municipal and bioregional scales.
We’d love to work with our friends, collaborators, and partners to bring this kind of programming and participatory design process facilitation into more web3 and activist spaces around the world.
Thank you for being part of that journey. We’re excited to see where we go together from here.
To stay connected, share your projects, and keep the conversation going, be sure to join the Federated Futures Telegram group and subscribe to our e-mail list.
If you benefited from the event in any way, here are some ways you can give back to the folks whose collective efforts made it happen.
Work with Donna from FED to offer farm-to-table, nutritious and delicious meals at your next event!
Check out Mystery.Works to get involved in local organizing in Boulder (hint: the password is the name of our family connection to one another)
In Us We Trust,
Benjamin Life
OpenCivics Steward