Author: Mike Manfredi, ƒractally team member

Personal Mission: Build Beautiful Things

Note: These are my thoughts and views, not necessarily those of the ƒractally team.

Summary

In the wake of a successful launch and the continuing evolution of the EdenOnEOS community, I describe how some of the ƒractally team’s thinking evolved from Eden to ƒractally and announce the successful handoff of EdenOnEOS to community members.

While EdenOnEOS could be considered “version 1” of ƒractal democracy, we’re proud of it and the community that made (and continues to make) it possible. At ƒractally, as we continue to innovate the ideas and tools, we will no longer be actively guiding the project. As a consequence, please take note that the content on the Eden wiki and at EdenOnEOS.org represents the EdenOnEOS community’s continuing evolution, independent of us. We are grateful for their dedication to ƒractal democracy and its demonstration in an operational and productive community.

Background

More Equal Animals distinguished the specific needs of a system of independent, volitional self-governance–Fractal Democracy. The ideas were first instantiated in the EdenOnEOS community, where a tournament-style playoff determined which members of the community were granted budgets to spend over the following months. While EdenOnEOS has seen success, we explore here the additional opportunities we at ƒractally saw to take the ideas of fractal democracy to new levels.

Independence

Independence is embodied in the freedom to “say no” or walk away from a negotiation. It requires a level of self-reliance that minimizes major dependencies on others. In this case, “others” can refer to many different entities: individuals, companies, governments, etc. See More Equal Animals chapter “Independence by Design” for a more in-depth discussion.

We at ƒractally built into EdenOnEOS as much independence as we could. The community has its own treasury and elects its own leaders who allocate its treasury. However, independence is a spectrum and for us at ƒractally, it is an ongoing pursuit.

Eden as “ƒractal Governance v1”

Devoted to the ideas of self-governance, and to the capacity of blockchain to empower it, an online community gathered and launched EdenOnEOS. Thanks goes to many people for making EdenOnEOS a success. The EOS Network Foundation (ENF) funded the initial development of the platform and seeded the Eden treasury (approximately 264,000 EOS). Following, hundreds of people participated in both pre-launch trial elections as well as the fully-launched platform. Those included EOS community members and readers inspired by More Equal Animals. Finally, special acknowledgement goes to the first Chiefs (highest-elected representatives in the Eden system) who operated in the significant ambiguity inherent in a fledgling community, a bleeding-edge software system, and a profoundly innovative governance process.

Here are some stats and accomplishments to summarizes Eden’s short history to date:

• Community size: over 400
• Participants in recent election: over 100
• Many new connections and strategic relationships created through the playoff process
• Current Treasury Balance: ~181,835.8138 EOS
• EOS allocated by Eden delegates since launch: ~112,000 EOS
• EOS Support trained in running an election
• All Eden infrastructure handed off to community members (Edenia)
• 3 official elections held
• Countless projects funded on Pomelo

Eden was built with many features designed to increase the independence of the community. Its treasury is only able to be allocated by its contract, which eliminates the need to trust a human treasurer to allocate funds. The treasury is also distributed to delegates’ budgets over time, which gives the community some stability by ensuring a single treasury-funding event is not spent in a short period of time, but rather over a long, decaying schedule. Lastly, Eden runs on a public blockchain, making it strongly censorship resistant and allowing it to operate in the open, transparently.

ƒractally’s Next Steps

Eden was the prototype for ƒractal governance, and we have learned many valuable lessons from Eden’s short history. While EdenOnEOS is a success in many ways, we at ƒractally saw some interesting opportunities to better fulfill the principles outlined in More Equal Animals. So we set out to envision the next generation of ƒractal governance. You can find that vision of “ƒractal governance v2” in the ƒractally White Paper. We are now working toward realizing that vision.

What opportunities did we see that motivated the ƒractally white paper and our current efforts? Despite our best efforts at building the tools for a truly independent, self-sovereign community, Eden still has the following external dependencies:

• The Eden web portal runs on a server ƒractally continues to control
• Eden is dependent on Zoom for its video meeting technology
• Significant knowledge is often needed to update the smart contract that runs Eden
• Updating the contract still relies on ƒractally signing the update
• While Eden received about 264,000 EOS from the ENF to seed its treasury, it is dependent on outside sources of funding going forward.
• EdenOnEOS is reliant on the EOS blockchain and its block producers for basic operation.
  • The EOS chain has current and future apps and stakeholders that will have a say in determining the future of the network.
  • Eden is reliant on the token price and inflation rate remaining reasonable and is subject to the EOS token price.

Towards a More Independent, Self-sovereign Community

Future Promises vs. Past Contributions

In the Eden model of ƒractal governance, one election determines a few people who receive power over sizable budgets for months at a time. While some members of the community are well known and have a reputation, most are not well known. This leaves most members making a decision within an hour on who deserves their trust and who will spend community funds effectively.

ƒractally, by contrast, compensates members for contributions that have already been made. Member contributions are presented, and a decision on how to compensate those efforts is made by the group. The process does not rely on longer-term commitments based on promises. Even if the community finds out after the fact that the member misrepresented their contribution, only one week of compensation was misallocated.

One subtle aspect of this shift is that Eden, being based on a forward-looking vote, is only ever evaluating the likelihood the member’s promises will be fulfilled. Misrepresentation will still likely cost them their reputation or their membership altogether, but likely only after a large infraction and community action to evict them. ƒractally, by contrast, is always looking at the past to do the evaluation. So it increases the likelihood that past contributions will be inspected, verified, and questioned, in no small part because new money is always at stake in the next week’s meeting, incentivizing the others in the meeting to verify claims and ensure they’re getting what they deserve.

Meeting Frequency

In Eden, one election determines a hierarchical power structure that persists until a subsequent election (a few months). One of the important mindset shifts in ƒractally is to eliminate the concept of a discrete election that selects long-standing community representatives, and instead have weekly meetings that make up a single continuous election. This allows the most highly-compensated and empowered community members to smoothly adapt to ever-changing community values. Furthermore, it allows the community to avoid sudden and drastic changes to leadership.

Community Sovereignty

Our personal lives are influenced continuously by background contexts: the jurisdictions we are subject to, the culture we are a part of, the industry we work in, etc. Eden similarly is subject to the elements of its background context. Eden uses the EOS token as its currency, relies on the EOS blockchain as its infrastructure, is dependent on outside sources of fundings (and influenced by the perspective of those providing the funding), and is influenced by the goals and culture of the EOS community. Each Eden community will be subject to the majority of these background influences.

As we have considered these issues and maintained our focus on independent, self-sovereign communities, we have concluded that a new blockchain with a new token that the ƒractal itself emits provides a far more independent environment. A new chain also comes with a culture dedicated to the goals of the new chain, in this case ƒractal governance and self-sovereign communities. The members of such a ƒractal get to make their own destiny.

Power vs. Money

Key to ƒractal governance and the ideas in More Equal Animals is the idea that we need to distribute power in a historically unprecedented way. Historically, power has ended up being distributed by a pareto distribution correlated with the distribution of money. ƒractal democracy seeks to protect people's right to delegate their power by enabling them to temporarily delegate their power each week, rather than permanently giving up power to an unaccountable election process.

In Eden, we employed political playoffs to select leaders, granting power to those selected by members, in a face-to-face setting. We carry forward a very similar process into ƒractally, with significant modifications. First, where Eden had meetings to promote someone to the next round in the playoffs, ƒractally has meetings, where everyone’s contribution to the ƒractal is evaluated on a weekly basis. This rewards each members’ contributions. The weekly meetings, though, only reward contributions up to a particular moment in time; they don’t directly empower any kind of leadership to make the community-wide decisions that communities often need to make.

ƒractally grants special, community-level powers to the Council. Members of the Council are not enthroned for an extended period of time and granted special powers and budgets during that time. They are part of the Council each week only if their team continues to rank at the top of the ƒractal membership and they continue acting to the satisfaction of the team they lead. A Council member acting contrary to the ƒractal’s desires can be immediately replaced by their team.

Holding Assets

Ownership of assets is a big challenge for DAOs. Historically, some type of traditional company structure has been created to allow the DAO, as a whole, to own assets. Companies are legal entities that can take actions as if they were natural persons, e.g., owning things. Eden and ƒractally, being DAOs, face the same challenge. However, solving this problem by forming a company makes the DAO dependent on the government that granted the company charter. Does it make sense for a global DAO to be subject to a particular local jurisdiction at a single place in the world? Do all members need to agree to be subject to that particular jurisdiction?

ƒractally takes a very unique, powerful, and very simple approach to the problem of asset ownership. To maintain the goal of DAOs being fully self-sovereign, we needed to find a way to free a DAO of this dependence on a jurisdiction. ƒractal members individually hold assets and are free to utilize them to advance the shared mission. If they effectively represent the shared mission, they will be compensated with the ƒractal’s ℝespect; if not they are likely to lose ℝespect. No legal entity is needed to do so, freeing ƒractals from one more source of dependence.

Gratitude

Eden is a remarkable first attempt at embodying the principles of Fractal Democracy. As the members of Eden pave their path to the future, we will pave another very related path toward the vision that brought all of us together. We look forward to continued collaboration with a growing community toward the goal of independent, fractal governance. Together, we will fulfill on the vision of Life, Liberty, Property, and Justice for All.