Public Goods, the Commons, and our Solarpunk Future—announcing our new Podcast!

Communities + Coordination Tech + Incentives = Better Possible Futures

I’m excited to announce that I’ve launched a podcast on the Ownership Economy with my friend Martin Smith, exploring how new coordination technologies are leading to innovations in distributed governance, and the broad-based wealth distribution that (sometimes) results.

In simpler terms, we’re interested in seeing what happens when you put governance tech in the hands of communities that are being governed, so that they can govern things themselves.

The bleeding edge of most of this stuff is currently taking place in what people are calling “web3”.

I’m personally interested in how experiments in governance are massively funding public goods by mapping needs to revealed preferences of large amounts of people, not just the preferences of billionaires who somehow continue to get richer while expanding their influence on IP and the heinous crimes that come along with it.

I’m interested in how projects like PopcornDAO can address the failures of ESG by radically expanding the agency of donors and tokenholders in measuring philanthropic impact, and using better governance tech to direct funds at organizations who actually deliver it.

We’ll be exploring topics like these and more, as we speak with politicians, legal minds, technologists, community managers and contributors, entrepreneurs, and more who are attempting to build a new world where tools for governing are in the hands of the governed.

In Episode 1, Nathan Schneider, Assistant Professor at UC Boulder and PI at the Metagovernance Project, walks us through his paper on the limitations on governance posed by cryptoeconomics (which Vitalik Buterin responded to), coops and what DAOs can learn from them, and digital community governance.

In Episode 2, Pia Mancini, founder and CEO of Open Collective, walks us through her journey from starting a digital political party in Argentina, to shifting her company’s governance from a traditional LLC with investors to a community- and user-owned platform using exit-to-community (also co-authored by Nathan!).

This year, we’ve already got episodes recorded with Kevin Owocki (founder and CEO of Gitcoin), Joshua Tan (executive director of the Metagovernance Project), Jordi Riulas (board member at EthicHub, a micro-loans platform for coffee cooperatives in the global south), and Jason Wiener (co-operative law expert).

Coming up later this year, we have commitments from Jeff Emmett and Griff Green from the CommonsStack, Scott Moore from Gitcoin, Abbey Titcomb from Radicle, Chase Chapman from Decentology, my former manager and absolute co-op hero Jen Horonjeff, my co-conspirator from PrimeDAO Luuk Weber, Mike Kisselgof from PopcornDAO, Julia Lipton from Awesome Ventures, and Gregory Landua, founder and CEO of Regen Network. We’ve also got quite a few surprises brewing with legal and political minds who you don’t want to miss.

If you’re not a podcast person, you can also subscribe to the YouTube channel here, and catch episode previews on our Twitter account.

Thanks as always!