Journey Into Fractally - #1: An Ongoing Blog About My Experience

I just had my first meeting with Fractally last Saturday!

I’m new to fractally so I wanted to share my perspective and journey here on Hive. For others who are new, this might be an opportunity for you to learn how fractally works along with me. If you’re a fractally veteran please comment on this post to share your perspectives, clarify anything I got wrong and answer any questions I have. Thanks!

What drew me to fractally?

I’ve been following @dan’s projects since the Bitshares days so I’ve always been impressed with the innovations he’s made in technology, economics and governance and also his integrity throughout the entire process. That’s mainly why we’re building our bitcashBank (bitcash.org) DeFi DAO project on EOS. EOS is great tech. Interestingly enough the inception of bitcashBank was from the Bitshares days. I’ve been mostly focused on bootstrapping and launching the startup and thought it would be a good idea to build a bitcashBank community fractal to be able to keep track of and reward contributors in our community. At the same time we can help fractal grow. @dphillippi encouraged me to join fractally a few months ago and mentioned he was building a fractally community for Alien Worlds. I also was looking around for good social media platforms on EOS to start generating content and came across the social media project Violet Gardens (violet.gardens) on Pomelo. I realized the founder @johnjwilliamson decommissioned that project and started working for the fractally team to help develop some of the same Violet Garden features on the fractally social media platform. Lastly, I had a zoom meeting with @lovejoy and he also mentioned I should check out fractally for my non-profit UBI project. It was time to get involved.

How did I learn more about Fractally?

The first thing I did to get familiar with fractally was to read the whitepaper here:
https://fractally.com/uploads/Fractally%20White%20Paper%201.0.pdf

The first section of the whitepaper describes DAOs as a human consensus system over pure information without any tangible assets, infrastructure or legal structure. The next sections describe Respect tokens, rewards for member contributions, and the many ways members can earn them including: 1) creating content 2) creating teams 3) providing liquidity for the token 4) recruiting others 5) and holding fractal tokens of other fractal communities as a form of sponsorship. The other sections of the whitepaper get into more details of each of the various components of earning Respect tokens as well as describe the process for the weekly meetings and how to come to consensus about the rank of each member’s contributions.

I later watched the following video describing the White Paper that highlighted the importance of the fractal platform for public goods projects:

Why Use Fractally for A Community?

The problem that fractally can potentially solve for our bitcashBank DAO is that our team community members may contribute in so many ways that may go unnoticed and unrewarded. Hence fractally can be a way to evaluate and reward community members for their contributions.

I asked Dan a question during the fractal meeting about how to integrate an existing stake-based token system into fractally and he mentioned the best way is to use token inflation in the project towards fractally community members. The great thing about our bitcashBank project is that we plan to have a non-fixed supply token issuance and can direct inflation to members. It may be difficult for existing token projects that have a more rigid fixed supply to use fractally with their own tokens, but I’m sure fractally can still complement those projects somehow as well. I did notice that on gofractally.com there are fractals pending for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hive and many other crypto network ecosystems. I’m excited to see how they progress.

Using Fractally for A Non-Profit Project Might Be Better Fit?

Questions:

Will the bitcashBank community be a good fit for fractal governance?
Is it good to mix a for-profit project like bitcashBank with something that seems to be built for public goods and mutual aid societies?

Another passion project I wanted to get started sooner than later is the Universal Gift Dividend Project (UGDP - ugdp.org) that will provide everyone in the world a very small monthly dividend token for life. I wanted to work on this for years, but finally spent time in the past few months working out a proof-of-concept and created a simple informational website just a couple weeks ago. UGDP seems like a perfect fit for fractally since it is a public good and may be able to gain some good support within the fractally community. UBI has been a popular topic for years in crypto and outside, but it seems more and more that governments are trying to implement a UBI program to gain more power. We’ll have to make sure our UGDP is a foundation for goodwill and used to empower people rather than use it as a tool to control people and make people dependent. Anyways I may eventually try to build two community fractals, but I’ll likely run with the UGDP fractal community first. @wildwex mentioned this project would be a good fit.

What did I need to do to join?

Once I knew enough and got excited to be part of fractally I did the following:

Signed up at: https://gofractally.com
Created an account on the Hive blockchain here: https://signup.hive.io/
Read and signed an agreement form by replying ‘I agree’ to this Hive post: https://hive.blog/fractally/@dan/genesis-fractal-contributor-agreement
Signed up to the weekly zoom meetings on: https://gofractally.com
Once you're signed into the website @jseymour will greet you and provide a lot of great information to learn more.

That's it and you'll be onboarded!

What are fractally teams?

Right now the main organization is the Genesis fractal. Anyone can create a team of 4-12 people to help contribute to the Genesis fractal and get matching Respect tokens for their team that is equal to what their team members are individually rewarded at the weekly meetings. The matching amount of tokens pool for the team is then split among team members however the team decides.

New Fractal Communities

As mentioned before there will be many fractal communities including one for Bitcoin, Ethereum Hive, Bitshares, WAX, Telos etc.

Will fractals meet and communicate with other fractals?
What about the distribution of Respect tokens within new fractals?

I’m still learning how new fractal communities work so I’ll save what I learn for a future post.

My First Meeting

The fractally Genesis Meeting standups are every Saturday at 16:00 pm UTC. I attended my first one on July 16th. There was a 30 minute pre-meeting at 15:30pm UTC. It was mainly Dan going over the new proposal to change the initial voting round into two rounds as well as other changes: https://hive.blog/fractally/@dan/fractally-white-paper-addendum-1

I was too new to be able to evaluate the proposed changes, but will have time to experience the difference when it is likely implemented in early August.

After some discussion we got into breakout rooms of 5-6 people. I was in a group with: @marconamaste, @shakhruz, @zeos, @dan1am

We all went around introducing ourselves and describing our contributions.
@shakhruz moderated the discussion and seemed to have a lot of experience.
@dan1am was the timekeeper
Mattias (@zeos) from Zeos on EOS went first and described how he promoted fractally in the Eden on EOS elections
@shakhruz translated a TAPOS blog to Russian as well as created a More Equal Animals video translation on youtube with 22 views.
Markus (@marconamaste) from the EOS Support team translated Chapter 3 of the audiobook into German and spread the word to a few people.
@dan1am didn’t have much time this week
I volunteered to be the lowest rank since I was new.

We started the ranking by coming to consensus on who we thought was the top contributor. We used the zoom chat and had a countdown so everyone could type in their top choice all at once. We didn’t have consensus or a majority in the first round so after some discussion we ran another round and Markus was selected as the top ranked. Then we voted again and Shakruz was selected next, then Mattias and then Dan. We had our rankings! It was pretty smooth and efficient.

One improvement: I tried to remember people’s contributions and jotted some notes, but it would have been nice to just be able to review a Hive post or read something about each person’s contributions because it was hard for me to keep track and taking notes makes it harder to listen. I selected Shakruz as the top ranked since he was the most specific with how many views he got on Youtube video for his Russian translation of More Equal Animals. I chose Markus next because I considered the effort of translating More Equal Animals into German.

We later discussed fractally in general. Mattias mentioned he was thinking deeply about how to integrate his Zeos community & existing token supply into fractally. Shakruz mentioned project ideas that were discussed by the community in the past including a Wikipedia to discuss and resolve ideas (eg. re: shape of the earth), UBI projects and how to make meetings fun.

So that was that. My first meeting. Fractally is an exciting project. It’s still being improved and iterated on, but overall I think this could be a game-changer so happy to contribute to the effort!

I’m going to blog about my contributions to fractally each week and will start a blog series for a Cliff Notes summary of More Equal Animals. Until next time!