September before last, I started chasing a dream. And I have been running my little heart out ever since. It’s been an extraordinary blessing and an unbelievable challenge. It’s a dream I’ve been dreaming for some time now.
This dream is a dream of place. What my experience of being in a place has activated in me. Keokea. Maui. Santa Barbara. Durham. Mill Valley. San Francisco. Westport. Los Angeles. Also, it’s a dream of the people I have met in my 33 years inhabiting these places. If you are reading this, perhaps you are one of those people.
Since arriving to New Zealand in the Fall of 2017, I’ve been fully immersed in this dream. Over the last year and a half, I have been living and working in a town called Westport, in the Buller District on the South Island, an area known to Māori as Kawatiri.
My study in Westport was on systems for advancing resilience: individual, social, and environmental. Programs and platforms that advance socio-cultural, environmental, and economic abundance. I got to explore some super future stuff, like how blockchain and crypto-currency might be used as generative tools… tools for resilience. And also what personal and planetary resilience looks like in a future of machine intelligence and increasing planetary volatility.
I have been incredibly fortunate to have received so much support in pursuing this dream. I am infinitely grateful to the multitudes of incredible individuals and organizations that walked with me on this journey. You know who you are. I am especially grateful to the Department of Internal Affairs and Epic Westport for being the first taking a chance on this dream, and ever more thankful to Clay Thompson, Steven Moe and the Barnes-Dellaca tribe for getting right down in the trenches with me. And Cody. Love you, little man.
During my time in New Zealand, I was exposed to a way of kindness and grace unlike anything I have known before. I am deeply grateful for the experience. I am sharing a summary of this study in the hopes that it will continue to build and evolve.
Kawatiri Pono Initiative — KPI
My work over the year I spent in Westport took a varied course, albeit always pointed at the same general objective: find ways to increase relationships of abundance between people and planet. It began with concept development of a youth resilience program that used experiential inquiry and media-based storytelling as a vector for engagement in community based innovation initiatives.
It pretty quickly evolved into focusing full-time on the technology / financial institutional / systems architecture that would underpin the programmatic side of the ‘resilience operating system’ and the community investment system we’ve been referring to as Common Cents Collective.
Common Cents Collective Blockchain Pilot
In August 2018 I began working full time on developing a system that enables people and communities lacking in financial capital but abundant in skills and resources to build wealth through new venture creation. This project represents the culmination of my time in Westport. The system utilizes something called blockchain technology to encourage participation in, and growth of, local economies through the facilitation of local projects by local people.
The technology innovation here is achieved by ‘asset backing’ the croyptocurrency through the completion and documentnation of investments of time, expertise and materials for tokens that are equity-based — meaning that they represent a share of ownership in the businesses that issue them — and locally liquid, which means they can be spent with local shops within a specific geography.
The request that was submitted to the New Zealand FMA (Financial Market Authority; Securities and Exchange Commission equivalent in the United States) was to conduct an 8-week pilot project involving the refurbishment, rental, and sale of a recreational camper van. The objective of this pilot was to demonstrate the capacity for a digital token to facilitate utilization of untapped reserves of non-monetary capital (labor and materials) for local initiatives that yield positive economic, environmental, and socio-cultural outcomes for its stakeholders.
The project was based on the hypothesis that blockchain technology has not yet been fully harnessed to actualize its full potential. The project proposed to the FMA involved conducting a pilot to test if the theory of it benefiting a geographically boundeed community (land based community) would work in practice.
The pilot was designed to operate as follows:
Ledger Rationale
The ledger is first and foremost essential for accurate disbursement of profits at project conclusion, to both contributors (individuals that contribute time + materials to the project) as well as to participants or supporters(local shops and individuals that transact with the tokens) .Here’s some further rationale underpinning the use of a blockchain ledger for and digital tokens for this type of currency system:
Value—legitimate value, because these tokens are asset backed by value (labor and materials). A vast majority of existing cryptocurrencies are not substantiated by any value other than a vision communicated in a white paper. Whether that white paper inspires individuals to invest millions — hundreds of millions — to these nascent blockchain companies promising to become unicorns some day has no asset or tangible value underpinning that claim. The proposed system involves an imbedded process of asset backing value creation with contributions to an initiative, guaranteeing real underlying value of some amount even should the initiative fail to generate returns above and beyond that value.
Immutability — The blockchain ledger is a selectively transparent and self-govern-able (together, somewhat “immutable”, or less hackable) system for a particular community supporting a particular initiative to account for value created and equity earned on an initiative.
Transactability— The tokenization of value created and documented on the ledger enables that value to be embodied in a digital token and transacted. This means it can be exchanged for goods and services within the local community of businesses and individuals that support the project.
Liquidity — Another way of saying this is that, by creating tokens, the value that was created by working on the project is made “liquid”. They also provide immediate liquidity (token utility) so the tokens can be spent as soon as they are earned within a bounded geography (as it is a local token system), which tokens uniquely enable relative to standard equity ownership compensation arrangements (stock options).
Accessibility— So tokenization enables immediate liquidity on the value that was created, a critical facet in enabling this system to serve its target market — communities lacking in financial capital — to engage in this system (people that are living hand-to-mouth need to be able to spend their tokens today, not three months from now)
Transparency — Tokens also provide a way for tracking the flow of exchanges through the local economy that these projects enable (as an injection of new capital into the local economy), furnishing a powerful indicator of the local economic stimulus this new token enables.
Impact — Further on, the token system will also enable a verifiable ledger for carbon tracking on the projects, which will move toward building carbon accounting into this new token economy.
Here are some reference materials:
