Spotlight curates ideas and experiments worth collecting. Every two weeks, the Forefront community curates a new capsule in an effort to highlight great work and support creators publishing onchain.
CAPSULE 001: In our first capsule, we’ve curated some of the “bedrock ideas” that outline the philosophy of Forefront’s community, our mission, and our interests. These ideas span from mechanics of a tokenized community’s evolution to the importance of blockchains in the next stage of the internet, and much more.
These are ideas and experiments worth collecting. Collect to support creators publishing onchain.
Scaling Trust in DAOs: Trustware vs. Socialware
Trust is critical to every social institution, but it manifests itself in different ways. This piece from the Metropolis team clearly laid out the foundations for conversations around “trustware” and “socialware,” their implications for DAOs, and how various levels of each can impact the development of a community and its protocols. This has become the canonical essay for understanding trust in tokenized communities.
The Sequence
“The trifecta of Product, Protocol, and Community forms the cornerstone of every organizational map today, as it navigates survival and growth.” In this piece, Rafa outlines the various potential orders of this trifecta and their impact on an organization’s development. The piece is a culmination of much of Rafa’s other work about community development and organizational design, much of which was published with Forefront, and is a critical read for any community leader.
Making “The Blockchain” the Next Place You Need to Be
For crypto to cross over into the mainstream, the blockchain needs to be the “information-place” that people need to be. This shift in mental models has been absolutely massive in our own community’s understanding of DAOs and crypto’s potential more broadly. As consumer crypto products continue to take hold, we will see them follow a similar pattern, with this philosophy from JD and JG underlying it.
Onchain
Speaking of being onchain, this is the NFT that officially coined the (unhyphenated) term. “Onchain” has become a call to action, a philosophy for all builders in the ecosystem to embrace. This is the collectible that marks the moment.
Games Over Governance: Recentering DAOs on Coordination
Governance can be boring, but games are fun. This piece from 0xJustice explores DAOs through the context of game design, going deep on how communities can better engage members and achieve their goals by coordinating through games. The processes might be the same, but the framing is critical to engaging more members and being more realistic about how we’ll onboard the masses.
Tokenized Communities
Forefront coined “tokenized communities” as a means of differentiating between protocol-centric organizations and communities that are focused on collectively allocating capital toward community projects to proliferate a meme or mission. This piece kicked off that narrative, and has been the cornerstone of how we understand the space, product development, and community design.
An Exploration of Internet-Native Organizations
What is a DAO? What is a digital community? Why does all of this matter? Scott Moore and Maxwell Kanter re-rooted us in the basics with this piece, elegantly discussing the origins of community, internet-native communities, and the future history of DAOs.
Spotlight curates ideas and experiments worth collecting. Every two weeks, the Forefront community curates a new capsule in an effort to highlight great work and support creators publishing onchain.
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