Hello Creatives Community,
I would like to apologize for such a late report. NEARCON, travel, a bit of illness and a lot of personal and chosen family life events within the last months have kept me from engaging on the the forum. I am slowly moving back into the space with ease to give my input on the changes that have been happening.
The beginning of September was finally my time to step down from the moderators position here in the Creatives DAO. The 7 months of moderation work have been a constantly morphing experience that has presented me with so many new experiences and lessons. I cannot say that this role was an easy one to fill, but, in many ways it was rewarding. I have already given an in depth experience review back in July but I will expand a bit further here.
The beginning of the role came with a huge learning curve for me as things felt quite elusive and unclear. Eventually I learned that there is no black and white, right or wrong way to show up in this space. The best way to show up was to show up as myself and lean into my strengths. This realization truly gave me a better understanding of the beauty and opportunity Web3 and decentralization have to potentially offer us the chance to redefine work and do what is most natural to us. I found that my unique worldview brought some pretty insightful and useful tools to this journey, and I hope, to this community.
As for August, my final month, I took a step back from being so strongly involved with moderation in order to encourage the newer round of moderators to get comfortable without us, therefore I completed:
- Attendance 2 out of the 4 weekly community meetings
- Participation in internal meetings to review proposals
- Participation in meeting with original moderators to review the Creatives DAO operations
- Reviewal of incoming proposals
- Communication with community around proposal submission
Some of the public highlights of my role overall have been:
- Conflict Resolution which took a great deal of time and energy to decipher
- Creating a tag for the Creatives Evolution topic thread for the community to easily converse.
- Putting together our first Q1 Report
- Communicating shifts, asks, and difficult transitions to the community in a empathetic way with the hope of sparking productive conversations that lead to gentle transition through some Updates and Pausing Transitions
My biggest reflections from this experience have been:
Art & Culture in a Highly Financialized Space
As I witness this creative community expand, shift, and evolve over the last year I see the recurring difficulty of defining and valuing creativity. When resources are abundant, experimentations rise, swirl and make lives of their own, birthing new projects, new DAOs, and new communities. When tides are low the restraints of definition fall down onto the hands of the artist asking that old, dehumanizing question, “why are you valuable?”. Rivalry and devaluation slyly enter, only to be silently seeded into the hearts of the makers and fruited as violence that comes from a self policed people.
How do creatives exist in such a highly financialized space? How do we measure, quantify and box the “un-boxable”? This sacred relationship, so interwoven with our personhood, feels immeasurable. Yet, everyday we are asked to measure it and generation after generation a foreign eye does this measuring. With these new tools, I would suggest that we take the opportunity to decide, for ourselves and together, what is valuable.
What this will take, I suppose, will be real collaboration and clear communication. Bridge building between worlds and open hearts ready to listen, ready to change.
Collaboration > Competition
I have been meditating deeply on the practice of collaboration over competition, engaging in many conversations and drawing from my past community work, both on and offline. I have come to the knowing that collaboration is a holistic, harmonious, and efficient way to work together in integrity. From what I have seen, many folks enjoy the idea of collaboration but hold an inherent belief that competitive environments are necessary to creating high quality projects in any space.
I disagree.
“Inside of this system of thinking and acting, we have already witnessed 2 years of the cryptocurrency industry attempting to make changes, yet because they have not changed the basic assumptions of competition, scarcity, and value, they are plagued with the same problems as the previous system.” - Voice Of Humanity White paper
Competition: Separation & Scarcity
The foundations of competition are built on the inherent belief systems of separation and scarcity. Separation creates a culture of “us” verses “them” which enforces the illusion that we are not interconnected. Scarcity mindsets prolong the illusion that there is not enough for everyone. Both of these lead to ladder climbing, tearing others down to get to the top, resource hoarding, metrics valued higher than humans, homogeny, lack of diversity, and gatekeeping, which tend to lead to bullying, dictatorships and overall unsafe ecosystems.
Collaboration: Connectivity, Trust & Reciprocity
At a minimum, the foundations of collaboration are built on connectivity, trust, and reciprocity. Ubuntu (which I have learned from my DAO partner Asya), means “I am, because we are”. Connectivity creates a culture of togetherness and extends our individual or bubbled communities into larger circles of shared vision and interconnectedness. Trust, often built on real bonds or through consistent action, strengthens connectivity and can create safety within communities when used as an evaluation tool to tell when relationships are aligned. Reciprocity creates cultures of gift giving, mutual action and respect making space for us to transition out of scarcity into more abundant understandings that, when we come together, we actually do have enough - often plenty.
Collaboration makes room for meaningful engagement and relationships, information and resource sharing, creativity, vulnerability and community evolution. Learning how to collaborate in harmony with one another rather than compete and extract is learning how to face and solve the issues we are facing in our world.
How do we build an inclusive and collaborative ecosystem? We work together. As I stated during the “How DAOs Get Work Done” Panel at @NEARCON, if we wish to do decentralized collaboration well, we must consult and work with the experts in collaboration which are Nature and Indigenous People Everywhere. This means making the effort to step outside of our silos, outside of our comfort zones, having the courage to question ourselves, finding unlikely partnerships, bridging the gaps, inviting divergent perspectives to the table, investing in relationships, centering balance and wellness of the whole.
May we build beyond the hype… beyond the productiveness of our work and be graced with deeper growth that gifts us a livable world.