Urban Planning as a Community Design Framework

Transcript

all right um my name is alex zhang um i'm a contributor and founding team member and the uh de facto mayor over at friends with benefits which is a thank you which is a social token and a cultural meets crypto dao um over the last few uh months a lot of people have been asking me for just different community design frameworks or how do you build an online community how do you build a dow like how do you really think about the structure and the framework um to allow for sort of organic community development uh to occur and as a resident non-crypto person who joined

the crypto space seven eight months ago but from a background of community designing and urban planning and thinking about the way that cities and city design inform how people come together and interact i thought the perfect sort of 10-minute presentation or walk-through on urban planning as a community design framework would be interesting for some of the folks here where hopefully many of you guys have uh dow projects or individuals who contribute to different teams or protocols that you're on and i hope that i can be of slight service to thinking about how you guys both manage your teams and your communities but also allow for your communities to sort of really build organic organic activities

and organic sort of accomplishments um and so i'll start with sort of sharing i guess a little bit of background on myself which i think is helpful framing uh for this presentation and some of the work that i spend my time on i've been a community builder and a designer for the last seven years i've run radio stations i've run co-working spaces uh the last company and community that i was at was called summit series which was a global community company of about 20 000 members all around the world and i became obsessed with how humans came together to work on shared goals to accomplish really really big things and that sort of venn diagram with people from different backgrounds when they come when they sort of overlap what are the things that they're able to sort

of accomplish and work on together some of those accomplishments um you know from the from from some of those initiatives were gathering a community of 20 000 people to crowdfund and purchase a ski resort called powder mountain in utah where i spent the last five six years living helping build think about the art thinking about the architecture of that that ski town and how our community would sort of populate it so now friends with benefits which is a global community of about 2 000 active members from all over the world who hold a certain number of fwb which is a liquid token that gets them access into a whole suite of different cultural experiences that the community creates so everything from a token gate to discord all the way

to token gated parties and experiences and events to content the the primary ethos is sort of how can we build the ultimate cultural membership as a dao where every contributor of that experience is able to create the content own the content and sort of distribute the content was the experiment that was sort of started um over a year ago and so my hope here is to just kind of share some of these like basic frameworks for community development um that have been really instrumental to like all these different parts of of my journey and specifically how friends with benefits started as like a token gated discord into now um this really one of the leading sort of social tokens and endow experiments uh in the space and and more importantly how these basic

frameworks just last uh how these basic frameworks can be connected to an urban planning um sort of modality or representation because ultimately i think a lot of these dows and a lot of these digital spaces that we're building really look like internet cities right and really creating something that's grassroots and bottoms up as opposed to let's say web 2 corporations where you have a founding team establishing explicit visions that everyone has to follow as the most exciting companies or the most exciting communities really really feel grassroots with metrics that can be really tied back to how sort of cities or nations are planned right things like gdp or per capita income or sovereign wealth fund metrics like citizen health

like these different sort of frameworks that can be employed when managing your digital community but really makes sense when you compare it and contrast it to uh city development so the first framework that was super helpful for me um right when i joined friends with benefits and um was really thinking about okay there's this giant discord there's like 300 members who are like super active and chatting in all these different spaces what's next how do we build together what do we create on top of this sort of community to really allow for it to be focused and one of the the sort of key learnings that evolved was this framework of community building is is gardening not

architecture and so what i mean by that is community building is less about precisely measuring strategies and deploying strategies more so identifying where there's natural sort of pockets or sort of convergences of interesting individuals who are collaborating in whatever unique capacity and then nurturing those individuals or those subsets with resources time attention distribution you know whatever it might be but really thinking about it as how do you see where natural things are growing and how do you identify those individual pockets and and sort of contribute resources to the organic growth of those structures and so

it was this interesting framing where it was a lot of like if if if i were to ask you sort of hey like recreate a flower right you wouldn't molecule by molecule reconstruct and build that that organic structure you would you would water a seed you would give it sort of different sets of resources soil sunlight and then that flower that would eventually grow would look distinctly different from every single similar flower that you repeated that same habit but ultimately would still be categorized as that same object i think that's incredibly important because so many major protocols are like how do we create a community like friends with benefits how do we create a community like party data how do we create a community club and it's ultimately like every single uh community will be distinctly different but it's about and it's not about trying to replicate

it it's more about trying to replicate the conditions that allow for those individual humans to converge and create and build things together uh and so it's sort of that mixture of both sort of shared context and belonging and serendipity and all of those like almost like variables if you think about it scientifically that then lead to a perfect combination that then allow for your let's say structure to blossom so a lot more interesting and dynamic than traditional um let's say planning but more organic like ordering uh the second component is really um designing for serendipity which is something that i've thought a lot about

in both um organizing massive conferences like like like festivals like this all the way to thinking about when we purchased this ski resort town a lot of the infrastructure wasn't quite built yet we didn't have sewage or power or water or roads or sidewalks or any sort of communal infrastructure and a lot of the i think north star framing when thinking about building your online community or building your you know your your dow is how do you design for organic serendipity where the the strength of your community will really be defined by the one-on-one connections that your community members form and so what does that mean i think that's about designing for the right avenues or the right um channels to allow for people who have

shared interests and passions and roles and responsibilities to sort of collide right it's no different than you know steve jobs commissioning inpa to design his office where he sort of centered the bathrooms in the middle of the of the office structure to allow for different employees across different disciplines to essentially cross paths bump into each other and sort of amplify those water cooler moments i think it's incredibly important to think about those same structures in a digital context as well as a physical context a great model to study is how parks are often designed right i went down a really deep park rabbit hole years ago and thinking about like what leads to really good architecture or constructions of

uh public infrastructure specifically like parks and a lot of it if you think about the best parks in the world central park or some of the parks across europe and in in france in italy a lot of them are designed with sort of these main core focal points that allow for people to congregate and gather and view sort of public activity together i think the the biggest reason for that is to allow for serendipity you you run into people that you actually recognize the shop owner from down the street or a friend who might be going on a walk in that park as well and i think that creates an intense sense of shared space and belonging that is incredibly important for any type of online community or physical community that you're trying to build and so the second framework is really asking yourself as a community

builder how do you design for serendipity how do you create the infrastructure or the channels or the opportunities for different members to collide and to spark individual relationships where you know that's ultimately where the semi-autonomy or the autonomous you know abbreviation and dow comes from i believe is eventually having enough one-to-one connections that if you as the leader are able to step away for a period of time there's enough trust and integrity and relationships built between your contributors or your community members that they're able to operate um at least for now semi-autonomously the third pillar is um fractals or or or what i like to sort of refer to in more

of an urban context is neighborhoods so fractals are sort of these self-generative repetitions that you know upon macro view or micro view appear the exact same because they're they're they're symmetrical and um neighborhoods i think about in these internet cities we're building right these dials that we're creating or these networks of thousands and thousands of contributors to me it's about the success of a dao is really going to come down to the sort of interdependence and the interconnectedness between sub organizations within your larger dao framework that to me start to look like neighborhoods and so these cities and these organizations in my opinion become incredibly resilient or or you know as seen to love says anti-fragile when these individual parts that make up the

whole are semi-autonomous right or begin to define their own sets of culture or their own sets of norms and their own governing structures on the local level so in a city analogy you hang out in bushwick or you hang out in the upper east side two dollar different sets of values two totally different sort of you know entry points economic statuses but it's the harmony of all these different neighborhoods that create an amazing city like new york no different than at fwb we have like crazy nft trading channels we've got trading crypto channels we have like lifestyle channels where like skin care is one of our most popping neighborhoods and the value of that to me is this sort of fusing of all these individual neighborhoods where some people are like

oh yo i only hang out in the lifestyle challenge or i only hang out in the uh you know the nft trading channels which to me are no different than saying oh yeah you know williamsburg's my neighborhood i don't ever venture that side of the park but it's about creating the public infrastructure where these neighborhoods are able to sort of intersect so why is that important because in these communities especially at the size in which a lot of these dials are scaling the decision making just becomes increasingly more slow and the parent level dao organization just can't possibly make the most informed decisions for its constituents unless they're you know sort of at the ground level at the local level in that specific fractal or in that specific neighborhood and so i think more dows need to be thinking about how to design

scalable both wide but also in depth governing structures and funding mechanisms to allow for these individual neighborhoods to sort of form where great cities are really hundreds of different subcultures with sort of sort of amorphous boundaries that become interesting mosaics that allow for the most dynamic communities to flourish and then the final sort of framework um in terms of operating a community or thinking about how governance or decision making is made is this notion of sort of representative democracy as opposed to direct democracy and so this was an interesting learning that you know i think dao's at this stage you know aren't a thousand people making a

thousand decisions or even a thousand people making one decision but really a thousand people electing a small group of individuals to make decisions on behalf of the group with the right sort of transparency mechanisms and re-election mechanisms and the frameworks to really delegate sort of compounding understanding knowledge information into a small group of individuals who then represent those specific say neighborhoods or that specific city uh i think that's incredibly important because we see that right now we have this challenge in dallas where everyone wants to contribute to like dozens and dozens of different dows and so you end up either getting incredibly homogeneous styles where everyone's sort of doing similar things and you don't and you lack specificity and expertise where individuals can really develop

something custom to their native say population or this or their city sort of constituents and so this framework of really thinking about how do you elect um sort of representative democratic structures through you know voting mechanisms through any sort of consensus alignment into trusted individuals where they're able to be held accountable by a community and not by say in trad structures a board of directors or they're in or or just pure individualism but really allowing a community to hold a group of elected uh representatives responsible and then empowering them with their decision making so at fwb even though right now a lot of our

decision making is centralized to an extent where there's a group of about 40 contributors who are making decisions that have all been elected into those various roles what we know is we can count on our community of 2000 to promote and distribute and evangelize and use our products that we create for our community and to keep us sort of in in a state of equilibrium in terms of ensuring that we're designing for our community as opposed to designing for say a small subset of individuals based on different sets of incentives and so those sort of core frameworks of representative democracy this concept of fractionalization through neighborhood design as well as designing for serendipity are sort of major umbrellas that have been really useful for me when thinking

about how to harness what feels like you know thousands and thousands of different online pseudonyms and avatars but turning them into an actual thriving and growing community that's able to focus on shared and agreed upon goals and accomplish rather spectacular things thank you [Applause] we've got a couple of minutes for questions um hey uh yeah we really love the talk um and i love the whole metaphor of like fw as

a city but i was wondering maybe you can just uh tell us a bit about where you think the metaphor ends like like what are actually the clear differences in like a digital city and like a physical city where you think actually there is a real difference there's a differentiation point um just to repeat or summarize your question the biggest differences between digital cities and sort of physical cities yeah yes so like where does the metaphor end and where does it stop being like useful actually because there are differences between the two yeah um i think there's tons of things that are wrong with physical cities right so i don't think it's a direct um let's say representation of explicitly how you should design your online community i think it's more

extracting urban design or urban or critical theory around cities and then remixing that or recontextualizing that for your online space i think if you design too literally um you know you'll fall into a lot of the same let's say like even socioeconomic traps that cities have created or limitations that that are bound by sort of the physicality of some of these cities but i would say the biggest extraction is just pulling different theories that are the most resonant to how groups of people sort of organically and generate from the ground up and then everything that falls outside of that box up to your discretion on how you evaluate that hey alex

can you hear me okay um i thought your point about um like dows being like multiple flowers that reegar on the same patterns is really interesting um in the context of this space because i've noticed that most of the prominent dows are as they get big they're so sort of self-referential um and like they become incredibly complex interesting organizations in themselves but they're basically like islands that um you know mostly just talk to themselves rather than talking to each other and i'm very curious in a sort of urban planning metaphor context what you'd think about like dao's interacting on common standards and starting to make like repeatable governance structures so that like daos

have an easy way to interact with other dows not just with itself as it gets more complex within does that make sense like like a standard for um for daz to interact on an ecosystem level yeah i think sorry it was kind of hard to hear from back here but i think that first part um was was resonant in that i think what's really exciting about this new um some of the new tools and technologies that have really developed um and and make the ability for competitiveness between dials to be lubricated is really like the new sort of the uprising of nfts and token and token design where for the first time you're able to see parallel economies and frameworks run together as opposed

to being competitive by nature like a lot of how social media was dominated in web 2 where it was all fighting over data and usage in terms of those individual users and locking into them into those specific platforms i think in web 3 frameworks or let's say digital city frameworks there's reasons why these cities are able to actually cooperate together under larger frameworks let's say federal level and state level and municipal level and i think there's so much to explore around two token models or token swap models that allow for other dows who come to fwb and say they want to build a similar product it allows us to actually engage in a conversation like hey what does it look like to invest in you guys as a dow and sort of swap tokens so our incentives are aligned or to even create a new token in

fwb to sort of provide the liquidity in the formation of a new entity so that we're now all both socially aligned and financially aligned which i think in a traditional structure of say doing like equity swaps gets incredibly messy because it's like how is that governance controlled how does that look like an extrapolate over many years when in a token world and because of just the inherent sort of transparency that web 3 sort of calls for makes it a lot easier and for sort of a positive some abundance framework as opposed to an inherently zero-sum competitive framework any more questions for alex john up here

yeah i think it's amazing that you guys have like been able to scale the number of people contributing to the dow and you that that fractals analogy is really nice how did you today what's the process and how did you start dealing with like abundant desire to contribute when maybe not every desi like not every idea is worth building a team around and also like it's hard to add a bunch of new contributors at once so what's the process for making sense of like thousands of people all raising their hand and being like oh i have an idea i have an idea i want to do this thing how do you then eventually end up with like effective teams that are building stuff for fwb yeah 100 i think any um anyone who's leading a lot of these

really sort of like top-notch dows um you know just lost from seed club or or john palmer asked that question from party dow everyone we're all i assume in the same challenge where there's an over abundance of people who want to contribute but like not enough clear explicit opportunities which end up becoming kind of like wastes of resources to an extent where you want to utilize them you can't it's that sort of delicate balance of like how much you delegate that's like too much and then it becomes a problem i think there's there's two things i think one on the uh fractal analogy i think the key to scaling contributors and dows is this cascading nested subdom infrastructure that allows for you to actually deploy resources governance and decision making into smaller groups that then can fit into a sort of a quadrant

that i've just designed on a napkin or whatever of like for me i use when i lead teams you know there's a matrix of like important non-important and then reversible and irreversible so if something falls into a category of um reversible and non-important i'm almost like very easily like delegate go give it a shot and like call me in two weeks if it blows up and then you can easily see how if it's let's take the other extreme if it's irreversible um and it's and it's important then to me that's like okay let's get all the different you know key thinkers in a room and let's really think through this and and give it time and then i think it's being generous with giving people opportunities as long as they fall into those different categories um and so ultimately i think

with with sort of an importance framework and then in a reversibility framework plus establishing sub net sub dials and sub networks to allow for that experimentation to occur like right now fwb is reaching a point where every single our activity on the discord is like far surpassing what's even manageable and we're experimenting in probably the next month with launching sort of two major sub-dials which will have a token swap infrastructure and allow for the nft channel to essentially become its own nft dow all using the same fwb token but creating their own new market to with its own new priorities and initiatives such as buying assets syndicating and allowing for group you know peer-review investing mechanisms

you know educating and helping artists launch their first nfts all of that there's no way i would be able to design the perfect infrastructure for that but like the 200 contributors inside of the fwb nft channel who have been active in nfts for the last like six months to a year are way more equipped than i am it's just my role to sort of pass on the framework to allow for that neighborhood to become established