DAOnload: Redefining cities with Kift

After reading A pattern language A few years ago I began to think differently about our cities and the interests they served. In particular, I was influenced by references to how small villages are more responsive to people’s needs. You usually went everywhere together and the community created the infrastructure to support itself.

Today, we are physically more separated from each other, even before the COVID pandemic. Instead of walking with someone, which puts you within a foot or two of the other person, we are now separated by twenty feet and encased in steel frames with motors that propel us from our homes to work.

Mind you, I’m a believer in scale big ideas, especially those that can affect our society for the better, but some aspects of scale are harmful. Alan Watts brought some of these ideas to light in The Geometry of Our Cities. Right angles are effective in the design of cities, but do not match the geometry of people.

In the spirit of these thoughts, I connected with another amazing group of web3 minds aiming to change the way the world works. Kift is a geographically distributed community organized as a DAO with wildly ambitious goals.

I met two of their founders to discuss the concept and their mission. Matthew Blacklock and Cam Lindsay have a rich background in technology and social good, and they are changing the way society is organized both physically and digitally.

Tell me about Kift and how it came together.

CL: Cities are broken and building a new city is not the answer. Building a geo-distributed city that harnesses people’s desire for adventure and mobility and accommodates the changing realities of the climate crisis and supply chains. It is about shared space and shared values.

We like to live mobile. We like to be able to eat together. We like to go on adventures. We value nature. We value sustainability. We really focus on ensuring that fairness and diversity are present in our society.

There are all these different ways these values ​​align to create this greater whole, even though we are scattered. Some are in Discovery Bay in Seattle, some are in Lake Port in San Francisco, some are in Joshua Tree and others are going down to Baja. Our society, our city is geodistributed via digital realms, which allows this beautiful event when we overlap to co-exist.

It’s a shared sense of mission because we realize how much of city life isn’t actually made for people or our thriving communities. It is designed for hyper-efficiency in consumption and the possibility for things to be close together, which they no longer need to be.

MB: I would like to emphasize the focus on community. Whether you’re on-site or off-site, the impact of people coming together to share in a collective experience is the biggest thing that resonates. We promote this community culture through our on-site virtual morning and group check-ins, daily communal dining, fun engagement through discord, special event planning and all the opportunities for connection that happen naturally in the community.

What aspects of DAOs are important to you when building Kift?

CL: We see it as the digitally native version of a city council. We wanted to let our members know that we are serious about building a geo-distributed city that solves many problems that traditional cities no longer address. By having a member create a proposal and evaluate the proposal, they can contribute in ways that feel best to them.

How will DAO create value over time?

CL: We are thinking about this in stages. So right now the DAO does not own any properties. It is the container for governing and organizing our community of people. Members pay Kift, Inc., which is a company that received private funding and has gone a traditional route due to the cost of starting a movement like this.

We sold our first batch of NFTs that give people membership DAO with voting rights and the ability to make proposals. The idea would be that the DAO then creates revenue streams from our treasury. We are looking to buy a small property that we can host our members on site and expand on. It will be a small beta test to understand how we buy and develop properties as a community.

DAO owns the property and Kift, Inc leases it from DAO. Then we can set up storage units because the members need to store things. Instead of going to public storage or one of the billion dollar companies, the money would go into the DAO treasury.

As a community, we build out these resources that can be used for food. We are starting a small garden and eventually looking to buy a farm. As we start to bring more regenerative practices to our sites, there’s this really cool development.

Yes, we have to be connected to society very consciously, but ultimately we want to self-cultivate as much as possible in our society. So the goal is for DAO to start by acquiring our first property to help our treasury get more value.

How do you build the value exchange mechanic between your members and the DAO?

MB: When I first came to Kift, it started as an organic approach with people raising their hands and offering to help. We then established the concept of pods with different work streams focused on governance and law, technology and design, digital and IRL communities, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.

We were surprised by how many people volunteered to take on leadership and support roles, from building out an online booking site and membership portal to planning events, outlining the governance process for DAO decisions and more. DAO members are encouraged to participate to continue cocreate and elevate the amazing experience that we provide our community members.

Over time, we will roll out more web3 recognition programs and funding opportunities through our Kift approach to enhancement proposals that were just ratified by the DAO through an NFT holder vote.

Tell me about Kiftable NFT and how it works with membership and the DAO treasury.

CL: We sold just over 250 with 80% of the proceeds going to the DAO fund. You can think of it as citizenship of our city. What allows the community to continue to grow is membership fees. If you have an NFT, you can participate in management and make proposals. You also get a 50% discount on membership, which gives you groceries and on-site access to all our properties.

How many locations are there for members to use?

CL: We have four right now and DAO is looking to acquire another by the end of the year. We are also looking to source partner properties that Kift members can access.

What is the most challenging problem you have had to solve for Kift?

CL: Communication. It’s amazing how important and it’s amazing how difficult it is to make sure you communicate enough. You have to post messages in so many different places at so many different times. We must remember that for a large part of our society this is not their everyday life.

This is just something they want to check in from time to time. It is important to be realistic about expectations for members and participation. It is a work in progress. It’s hard, but it’s the good kind of hard.

What advice would you give to someone thinking about starting a DAO?

MB: I would encourage them to observe and participate in other DAOs to learn from their efforts and connect with other like-minded people. web3 in general is super cooperative. Dive in, learn to swim, and try to innovate and create.

CL: Focus on having a community first and knowing who it is. There are so many other ways to have a really successful community without making it a DAO. Really make sure you need a DAO to do that.

And you know you need a DAO when you organize groups of people very far apart who all have a specific mission that needs assets and resources to support that mission. Even that can be done without a DAO, it just gets more useful and useful.

What do you want the world to know about Kift?

CL: If you feel like there’s more to this life than living in our cardboard boxes or studio apartments with no one else or a solid community, we’re cooking up some things here at Kift that might just be the medicine you need.

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Metaverse methodologist, connector and creator