Wait, it’s all coordination? Always has been.

I took last week off from the blog to immerse myself in the MCON conference held in Denver. If you weren’t there, you can catch replays of the talks here. 

The talks were interesting, funny, inspiring, and to the uninitiated, probably insane. As great as the talks were, the vibes of being there and having side conversations were even better. This post isn’t intended to rub it in if you couldn’t attend, but instead to perpetuate the vibes that I felt there into the world.

The conference was ostensibly focused on DAOs—tooling, building, culture, etc, but DAOs are just one wrapper for human coordination. So really the whole conference was all about new, interesting, and better ways to foster coordination. In the memespeak of Kevin Owocki, “Wait, it’s all coordination?... Always has been.”

In the 90s, there were a lot of techno-utopian visions for the future. Those “in the know” saw the world changing potential of the internet and the web. It’s hard not to be optimistic about the future when you see nearly limitless opportunities to explore, learn, and create. 

Well humans are humans. We adjust to previously unimaginable wealth, knowledge, and comfort. The awe-inspiring becomes ho-hum. At some point the previously inexhaustible landscape ahead starts to look a little crowded. The deviators start outnumbering the cooperators. In turn, Web 2.0 has become about capturing more of the pie rather than ever faster growth of the pie.

Today at the cusp of Web 3.0, there’s obviously plenty of optimism. The opportunities seem limitless. It’s easy to choose cooperation over competition. Sounds an awful lot like the early 90s. Are we just setting ourselves up for an inevitable let down?

Well, I believe, “This time it’s different.” 

Kind of. 

It is different this time because we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. The foundational technology that we’re building on (strong encryption, blockchains, crypto economics, and so much more) really can create more durable ways to promote coordination and to be inclusive of more minds around the world. We’ve unlocked new levels of coordination. The results are going to be mind-blowing.

We’re at the beginning of a technology driven S-curve even bigger than the last one. But it still is an S-curve. There will inevitably be bumps in the road, but I don’t think we’re in for multi-decade setbacks or delays. 

We aren’t going to completely overcome human nature with Web 3.0 and create a utopia. But with thoughtful, selfless leaders like I encountered at MCON and the leverage of today’s technology, we won’t just “enforce” coordination in this era, but inspire it. 

So, our job as early pioneers of this era is not just to build the right technological primitives (super important), but set the vibes for this new era. If we do both, we’ll extend the potential of this cycle to even higher heights. 

After last week, I believe more strongly now than ever that we can do just that.

Technical

• Cody is getting close to a full NFT:DID integration. The testnet version already has Geo Web land parcels “owning” their respective Ceramic streams. Also instead of needing to link a “root Stream ID” from the parcel license, we can actually utilize an implicitly linked IDX profile for the parcel. This simplifies the digital land registry (one less field) and will hopefully allow more standardization and sharing of content schemas. One other impact is that this creates an easy way to allocate free decentralized storage per parcel. Super exciting!
• We had been using the public preload nodes to provide persistence and a smooth IPFS pinning/publishing experience from the Cadastre, but there were a few too many interruptions and performance issues. We spun up our own nodes to improve things for the time being (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/ceramic-nodes/pull/2) 
• Vishal has been working on Cadastre improvements--we should see map search(!) and user profiles soon!

Community

• It’s looking like we’re going to have another PR for our Gitcoin grant round! It’s pretty mind blowing to get this level of grassroots support. The round ends tomorrow at 9/23 at 6PM MDT, so there’s still time to contribute.
• I hacked together our Geo Web logo and previous POAPs we’ve given out, but if you or a friend are a designer/artist and are interested in doing some freelance design work for us, hit me (Graven) up in Discord. We have ETH :). 

On Deck

Check out the Geo Web Garden. We’re constantly pushing status updates, writing, specs, and meeting notes there. Of note is our Roadmap to Mainnet doc. It’s not final, final, but we feel good about this outline. There’s still a decent amount of work to be done and we’re always open to new contributors…