Power, Innovation, and Community Governance

In the digital networked age, people’s attention often overlooks local problems in favour of global ones, which don’t necessarily impact them in their daily lives, or over which they don’t have a say due to the skewed Pareto distribution of power in modern day societies. Puja Ohlhaver, in her recent research paper ‘Community currencies’, proposes a dual-currency model that prices attention and influence in each community, with the ultimate goal of creating a Gaussian distribution of power, either locally, or globally through the dynamic interaction of multiple local communities. This model allows community members to stake their currency to earn non-transferable governance rights, creating a substrate for decentralised societal coordination that favours social innovation.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Puja’s background
• Web3 research
• ‘Community currencies’
• Pareto vs. Gaussian distributions
• Global vs. local power distributions
• The community currencies model
• Meritocracy vs. influence
• Quadratic funding
• Governance, bribery and the crisis of legitimacy
• Experimenting with community currencies

Episode links:

• Puja Ohlhaver on X
• 'Community Currencies' Research Paper
• 'Decentralized Society' Research Paper

Sponsors:

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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.