NextMeta MetaView #32 -DAOs & Co-ops: 100 Years of Participatory Governance w/ Hugi
Hugi is an Icelandic entrepreneur & technologist involved in participatory political movements & decentralized organizations for over 15 years. He was a founding member of the Swedish Pirate Party, he helped build the participatory festival Borderland & currently works on open source platforms like Open Collective & Cobudget, empowering collaborative communities.
Hugi shares his early experience co-founding the Swedish Pirate Party, one of the first political movements organised as an online swarm. After that, he got involved with the Borderland festival. He saw it as an experimental sandbox for new coordination methods in decentralized decision-making.
Besides putting on the most decentralized festival for thousands of people, people of Borderland also built tools for doing so, one of which became Cobudget - an online tool for decentralized budgeting.
He hopes for more cross-pollination between DAOs & civil society organizations. DAOs can learn governance models from 100-years of experience. On the other hand, DAOs need to start interacting with & prove real-world impact before being taken seriously by the 99%. He suggests people build web3 solutions for civil society needs, as a bridge between the spaces.
“I realized that in a lot of these communities that are running open source software or DAOs, there's not a single person that has any experience from regular civil society organizations, because if they did, they would already have the blueprints in their heads of how this can look, because the blueprints are already there." - Hugi
Key Topics:
Origins of the Swedish Pirate Party & swarm organizing
Borderland festival as a decentralized sandbox
Self-organization and emergent leadership
Advice process for decentralized decision-making
Participatory budgeting with Cobudget
Learning from historic worker cooperatives
Real-world impact and adoption challenges
Bridging web3 and mainstream communities
Technocratic elitism in web3 spaces
Hybridizing DAOs and traditional nonprofits
Resources:
- Cobudget