Activating Mission-Driven Communities with Web 3.0
An introduction to the Neighbourhoods framework
Data and agency
The records kept about people by governments and allied bureaucratic agencies exist to facilitate large-scale coordination of various jurisdictions and geographies. Land and title registries, birth and death records, bankruptcies, default records, and others are data points that are stored and accessed for the purpose of administering rights and restrictions to individuals and groups.
These official records are tedious to create, maintain, and administer. The administrative burden of deciding what to store and how usually means that the records that are kept contain information that reduces people to the lowest common denominator: ‘criminal or not’, ‘debtor or not’, ‘owner or not’, ‘alive or dead’, ‘vehicle operator or not’, etc.
Importantly, they do not fully represent the reputations people have in their local communities. Such records have almost nothing to do with what these communities do together and why.
Digital technologies and Web 3.0 advances
Meanwhile, popular use of digital technologies have created an explosion of communication and non-governmental record-keeping; for fun, for commerce, and other ways of browsing, interacting, and coordinating in networked groups. Web 3.0 and peer-to-peer technologies explicitly aim to lower the cost of record-keeping and to allow self and group-specific custodianship of all of this information, and the software that generates it.
This means that communication and record-keeping can be preserved, creatively used on- and off-line, modified, and deleted without the limitations or permission of anyone cloud-based service provider — think Google, Meta, Miro, or even smaller companies that create excellent tools but whose lifespans as companies are ultimately unpredictable.
Internal coordination power
Old school, non-web based apps put files directly on peoples’ computers for exactly these reasons. Web3 technologies offer the close collaboration groups need to thrive, plus the resilience, control, and offline use possible with traditional apps.
Neighbourhoods’ framework for social coordination offers the best of older and newer digital technologies.
Imagine a community that wants to reduce their carbon footprint. Collaboration software enables them to put data about the daily life of members into calculators that create a group output. Some of this data may even be fed in from smart devices in communal living and recreation spaces or from shared vehicles.
Coordination tools allow them to use a shared calendar to see when the meeting room or the vehicle is available for use or to reserve in the first place! These tasks include but go so far beyond any specific collaboration or social media platform.
The Neighbourhoods framework enables coherence and simplified access to tools that, when linked together, help communities fulfill their purpose.
Groups can articulate important resources that they coordinate around and create custom ways of interacting with them. Groups can also construct simple algorithms that define visibility, amplify specific behaviors, and reflect norms and values of the community itself.
Agency from external powers
With existing, cloud-based tools, many groups can cobble together these functionalities by using multiple platforms with multiple accounts. Sometimes data from these platforms are formatted in incompatible ways, making integration difficult, clunky, or impossible altogether.
How could this purpose-driven community get a clear, full picture of how they are doing? Current collaboration software doesn’t support acting on integrated data — for example, rewarding specific members working extra hard toward this goal, or celebrating milestones toward it.
It also doesn’t permit the collating and sharing of such data in trustworthy ways. These are important uses if the community is seeking external recognition, like subsidies, grants, credit, or modeling their innovative ways of change-making for others. Another benefit of Web 3.0 is its use of verifiable credentials and other, sophisticated means of ensuring the validity of data according to community rules and principles.
The Neighbourhoods Bazaar
Neighborhoods aims to consolidate these benefits, easing the way communities interact internally and with the outside world, as well as how they organize and act upon the data they generate. Such advances in control empower communities to draw insights, express their preferences, and prioritize actions based on their unique values. In order to deliver these, and to facilitate broad adoption of the framework, we are also building the Neighbourhoods Bazaar.
The Bazaar is a hub where communities access multiple forms of support: bootstrapping tools, specialized applications and add-ons, cloud-based mobile support, and educational and cultural resources. We intend to evolve the Bazaar into a neighbourhood unto itself, where communities band together to fund non-generic features and crowd-pool to build the custom applications that arise from shared insights.
How can I partner with Neighbourhoods?
Neighbourhoods allows groups to validate and record information and surface insights with greater reliability and nuance. This opens up a rich spectrum of context-specific information that groups can use for coordination, group reputation, governance, and even innovative funding mechanisms.
The projects that we are currently piloting will be categorized into three groups:
- Local on-the-ground communities, such as the GCF funded project in Sri Lanka
- ‘Bridge’ protocols, that help translate contributions made on the ground, into metrics comprehended by global capital (more on these kinds of projects soon!)
- And global capital, oriented towards supporting communitarian responses
Groups interested in formalizing their governance and culture, and coordinating at scale are encouraged to reach out to learn more about partnership opportunities.
Want to explore how your community could use Neighbourhoods?
To learn more about how to become an early pilot project, email us at engage@neighbourhoods.network.
Enjoy this article and want to go deeper?
Check out Sid’s talk organised by the Edmund Hilary Fellowship ‘Catalysing Communitarian Responses to Combat World Crises’:
