CityDAO's New Narrow Mission?

Discussion takeaways:

  • Empowering citizens to work on projects as teams is working pretty well

  • CityDAO needs a common sense of purpose, proposals are too varied and firehose

  • Minimize sending funds outside the CityDAO ecosystem

Proposed new mission:

CityDAO builds blockchain primitives for the cities of the future.

Example Projects:

  • Collectively governed land and properties

  • Individually owned land represented as NFTs

  • Experiments in mechanism design (i.e. Harberger Taxes)

  • Programmable land and property

  • NFT-based ownership primitives

  • Enabling DAOs to own land collectively

Outside projects

Projects should stay within the CityDAO ecosystem or have significant synergy and benefits to the DAO if they are run externally.

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Thank you for the summary!

I like the direction this is going - especially the part about keeping projects in the CityDAO ecosystem.

I like that “build” and “cities” are in the mission statement. I don’t like “primitives” because that seems buzz-wordy. Also, can we describe “cities of the future.” The cities of the future could be anything. What do we want them to be like?

Here are a couple of ideas:
“Build a [descriptor] city from the blockchain up.”

“Build the blockchain infrastructure for more [descriptor] cities.”

Descriptor ideas:
-Equitable
-Accessible
-Decentralized

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Generally I like it, are there any actions to be implemented from this on new or existing projects?

I like it. The key is to define or elaborate on what primitive means (not a common word in everyday language). In computer science, it has a rather precise meaning as the smallest unit of code that can do a task (or close to that, correct me if I am wrong). In a social context, it means the base layer used to organize society. I think it has a natural contextual meaning as Web3 is built on code literally, but the goal is to build coordination mechanisms.

In a way, you can think of it by what it replaces. What is a blockchain primative in a city? Well, something that replaces a non-blockchain primitive. If we are putting the land on chain, that is a blockchain primitive. It is a basic building block of a city that would differ from land in land registries ect… and so on. The use of Quadratic Funding would be a primitive, as it replaces traditional methods to funding public goods that do not utilize the blockchain. I suppose you can get minute-- if you set traffic lights to go on and off based on blockchain data (no idea how or why), then it would be a blockchain primitive.

For each project, define how cities are currently doing it, and how the project would further a different primitive or building block. Build something that will replace (and ideally do a better job) of things currently in cities. We aren’t so much building cities, in any literal sense, as building the primitives or foundations for blockchain cities.

We are putting together building blocks to build cities of the future. The word primitive is a bit tech-sounding, but I think it works. If that makes sense. how I would interpret it .

Build a 2023 City Seed with blockchain based governance, gathering, and voting - which will have drastically shorter feedback loops, is resilient (solar+batteries+servers), rewarding (token data sales), and accessible (friendly ui/ux/civility).

2 Likes