The Ownership Economy

In this episode, Jahed and Martin talked with Jen Horonjeff, the Founder and CEO of Savvy Cooperative. Jen has a truly interesting background, having worked in academia after completing a doctorate in Environmental Medicine, subsequently working as a consumer representative with the Food and Drug Administration in the USA, and even as a scout for an early stage venture fund. Dr. Horonjeff took her experience as a life-long autoimmune disease patient and cancer survivor and channeled it into building Savvy, a cooperative owned and governed by its patient members. In this episode we get into the details of life as an entrepreneur and the challenges of starting and growing a multi-stakeholder digital platform. Hope you enjoy this episode. Here are the show notes: Healthcare co-op Savvy snags venture funding from Indie.vc | TechCrunch Cooperative Commons Manifesto Savvy patients help Amazon train Alexa to respond to those with speech impairment Savvy Cooperative helps Boehringer Ingelheim become more patient-centric, starting with inclusivity

In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Dr. Shaun Conway of IXO Protocol, to talk about the future of measuring, verifying, and delivering social impact with new mechanisms and designs enabled by blockchains. In the conversation, Dr. Conway leads us through his history working as a medical doctor, then transitioning to HIV / AIDS impact projects in his native South Africa, to working with the WHO, UNICEF, and other NGOs on policy measures. This experience led him to conceive of an impact marketplace long before the current ReFi space brought together off-chain impact with on-chain data. We cover the possibilities for better incentive design, governance structure, and real-life impact measurement through the IXO protocol. This episode will be particularly insightful for those working in NGOs, sustainability and social impact projects, and social impact entrepreneurs. Here are the show notes: Impact Alpha Bonds The Tokenized Impact Economy The Origins of IXO Risk Adjusted Bonding Curves Statistics: Are you Bayesian or Frequentist? Podcast with Chimple / IXO UBS Impact Bonds - Optimus Foundation Nature 2.0 - Ocean Protocol MIT Connection Science

Richard Bartlett, co-founder of Loomio and The Hum, discusses patterns for decentralized organizing. Topics include his experience with decentralized organizing from the punk scene and Occupy Wellington, practical advice on organizing in DAOs and cooperatives, and the challenges faced by decentralized organizations. The conversation also touches on culture, inequality, spirituality, welfare state differences, and the use of DAOs for scaling in networked digital societies.

In this episode, Martin and Jahed talk with Dr. Hamid Rashid, a former director-general for multilateral economic affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bangladesh, is Chief of Global Economic Monitoring at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. We take a bit of a detour from web3 and blockchain to discuss macroeconomics with Dr. Rashid. We dive into the functioning of the fed in the US, and how its policies impact economic opportunity and inequality in the US and abroad. We then use this framework to discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of the fed introducing a Central Bank Digital Currency.  Here are the show notes: Financial Times - Fed to begin ‘rapid’ balance sheet reduction as soon as May, says top official Positive Money - Basic Overview of Bank Reserves  A Return to Operating with Abundant Reserves Teaching the Linkage Between Banks and the Fed - RIP the Money Multiplier The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Central Bank Digital Currencies https://www.bbva.com/en/the-digital-euro-cryptocurrencies-and-stablecoins-the-future-of-money-is-up-for-debate/ Averting Catastrophic Debt Crises in Developing Countries Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Picketty

In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Joshua Tan, executive director of the Metagovernance Project and the DAOstar One, building standards and infrastructure for digital self-governance of communities. He also conducts applied research on collective intelligence and the governance of online communities. In the conversation, we cover institutional innovation in web3, modeling patterns for decentralization in digital communities, and what the worst DAO dystopias could have in store for us. Here are the show notes: Composing games into complex institutions Metagov Introducing the Agreement Engine. How to build contract systems for the… | by Joshua Tan | The Metagovernance Project | Medium Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Jeff Emmett, who is a prolific researcher at the Commons Stack, Token Engineering Commons, and BlockScience Labs, studying how to build community collaboration tools with blockchains. In the conversation, we cover how new forms of voting mechanisms can help communities make clearer, better decisions, measure and aggregate their own preferences, and execute and measure their impact, so they can ultimately achieve their goals. This episode will be of special interest to people working in impact assessment in NGOs, people building DAO governance tools, and communities looking for new, inclusive forms of democracy to experiment with locally. Here are the show notes: Impact Alpha Bonds Rewriting the story of human collaboration Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons Automating Ostrom for Effective DAO Management Conviction Voting What is the Byzantine Generals Problem? Seeing Like a State, by James C. Scott Jeff Emmett on Twitter Token Engineering Commons The Commons Stack

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with James Young from Abridged, the developers of the popular Collab.land software that many digital communities are using to engage, grow, and coordinate their members. In the conversation, James traces his arc from software engineer on Farmville in the early days of Zynga and how those experiences with Web 2.0 companies shaped his focus on the promise of user-owned digital communities, eventually settling on tools that help communities own their own data and experiences. This episode provides a peek at the future of work enabled by data economies in web3 and will be useful to founders and entrepreneurs who want insights into how the unique interactions enabled by web3 wallets can create new trails of data and economic value both for users and platforms. Here are the show notes: James talks on decentralizing collabland James on Twitter The DAO and the DAO Hack MolochDAO explainer Episode 2 of this podcast on exit to community with Pia Mancini Episode 1 of this podcast on exit to community with Nathan Schneider What is Collab.land? 

In this episode, Martin and Jahed chat with Mark Beylin, co-founder and CEO of Myco, where communities can bootstrap themselves with labor, co-own the business they launch, and not be beholden to the platform economics of the last wave of the internet. In the conversation, we cover how communities can use Myco’s unique LLC structure to protect themselves from liability while they extend ownership and upside to the people who contribute to it, how governance in these communities works, and how to build communities that last for decades by taking a long term, dilutive view of stakeholder ownership. Founders, entrepreneurs, and DAO contributors will get a peak at how an ostensibly web3 community is building front-end products that do not require any of the clunky UX that we’ve become accustomed to in web3, and can learn from the myco blueprint on how they might form tokenized digital communities. Here are the show notes: The Myco Blueprint Dilutive DAOs: Building a Community in Perpetuity The Crypto-Social (R)evolution Join a Myco community

In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Jason Prado, Director of Platform at the Driver’s Cooperative, to chat about the history of worker-owned cooperatives, the failure modes of the gig economy, and the challenges of building a cooperative in the current funding ecosystem. In the conversation, they cover the market competitiveness of the cooperative form, access to financing options that are uniquely available to cooperatives (and barriers to accessing them), and what governance innovations in web3, such as DAOs, might indicate for worker-owned initiatives in the future. Here are the show notes: DAOs are interesting, likely, and terrifying by Jason Prado The DAO of decentralization: Can co-ops thrive on the blockchain?  What Co-ops and DAOs Can Learn From Each Other https://gnosisguild.mirror.xyz/t4F5rItMw4-mlpLZf5JQhElbDfQ2JRVKAzEpanyxW1Q The Drivers Cooperative is helping drivers escape the gig economy. But it needs to overcome major obstacles before it can compete with Uber and Lyft.

In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Kevin Owocki, co-founder and CEO of Gitcoin, a community developing digital public goods that has put $52 million in the open source ecosystem's hands since its founding. In the conversation, Kevin covers how Gitcoin's mission came to be, why its important to fund public goods, and the bleeding edge of democratic governance innovations Gitcoin is spurring on with quadratic funding and quadratic voting with Gitcoin Grants. This episode provides a unique view behind the scenes of a thriving, well-funded community experimenting with new democratic methods that politicians, technologists, and founders seeking to expand the agency of their community can borrow from. Here are the show notes: Elastic and AWS open source battle The crusade against Open Source abuse Grounding decentralised technologies in cooperative principles: What can “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations” (DAOs) and platform cooperatives learn from each other? A comparative analysis of the platforms for decentralized autonomous organizations in the Ethereum blockchain Gitcoin Grants Case Study