Can we create a news & info cooperative that brings out the best in our local community?
A local news DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) might help us do just that. Want to help create one?
How can we disentangle the public square from Facebook? How can we create a new one that is owned and maintained by our community?
How can we keep people informed about what’s going on and empower them to participate in local government and community efforts without relying on corporate social media algorithms, emotionally reactive clickbait, and failing ad-driven business models?
These questions have interested me for some time.
Creating collaborative infrastructure that can meet these challenges well is at the core of what is needed for local communities to make positive progress in this era of immense change, fraying institutions, and tremendous inequity, where we’re also experiencing emergence of incredible possibility and even a fresh openness to decolonized ways of approaching things.
After considerable reading, research, and experimentation, I have come to strongly believe that a private entrepreneurial venture cannot sustainably achieve these goals without deeply compromising them. An open organization that allows for ownership and involvement by all who contribute is essential.
We need to build community info-commons. To do that we need an information system that works in an increasingly decentralized way. A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization—an org designed to become independent from centralized authority as it matures.
This is not an original concept. It is, rather, a contribution to an existing conversation.
There’s a long and endless list of people whose ideas and work the thoughts here build upon: the work of folks in journalism like Jennifer Brandel and Hearken, Brick House Cooperative (led by Maria Bustillos), Simon Galperin’s InfoDistricts Coop, and Eleanor Cummins’ Have2Pass; the writing of adrienne maree brown, Victor Pickard, Jane Jacobs, Franklin Obeng-Odoom, Dee Hock, and Peter Block; those who are pushing for new approaches to business like Zebras Unite and the Exit To Community movement; folks in open standards, open source, and crypto communities like the XSF, Ethereum and DeFi (decentralized finance) DAOs like PieDAO and IndexCoop. It’s been thrilling to see my past collaborators / friends / inspirations Amber Case and Julien Genestoux thinking deeply and working in this space as well.
This is not an academic exercise. For the past few years, a small set of us have been doing real work trying to figure out these questions in our local community in the Tri-Cities, and have participated in several projects designed with this approach in mind—some with greater levels of success than others. We’ve learned enough in the process that I believe the time has come for more serious and public discussion.
I’m going to begin the discussion by attempting to articulate some of the things that I have observed and learned, and some of the different concepts that I have discussed with others. We’re going to be doing some more experimentation in this domain and I’ll be continuing the conversation here.
There are primarily two sets of people who may have interest in following along.
Folks from the Tri-Cities who want to help develop the information infrastructure of our community’s future.
People in other communities thinking about how to create sustainable and collaborative models for local journalism.
You can subscribe here to join the conversation. If this is of interest to you, I can’t wait to hear what you’re thinking. I’d love to hear your vision and ideas in the comments or by email.
In the meantime, tell your friends!