Network Society Forum

Who Is This Forum For?

In recent years, new movements have emerged including:
The network state movement

The startup societies movement
The coordi-nations movement
The regen movement
The Zuzalu and pop up village movement

And beyond.

There is yet to exist a dedicated yet open discourse space for long-form writing for individuals and groups within and between these movements… until now.

This forum exists to collaboratively evolve ideas, craft hypotheses and plans, and share the results of testing them out. We test our ideas through experimental communities, technologies, governmental connections, and new polities that offer alternative ways to participate in governance that we and future generations may opt into. 

If you believe that we can create better systems of governance and socio-economic-political structures and you wish to participate in making this happen, then this is the place for you.

Note that every post on the forum should be relevant to network societies. Though AI exists as a category, for example, every post in the AI category should be about AI for network societies. 

What Are the Values of this Forum?

Openness - While hate speech will not be tolerated, strange ideas are welcomed.

Kindness - Everybody wants to interact with those who are kind. Be someone others want to interact with. Offer critique when it is helpful and whenever possible use a “criticism sandwich” of stating something positive (“I see you’ve put a lot of thought into this…”) and then a suggestion (“This part seems unclear. Perhaps if you added this in…”) and concluding with a positive comment (“Thanks for sharing!”)

Collaboration - Do not expect ideas to be great off the bat. Expect to be a part of collaborating with others to evolve ideas to a more helpful state. Ask clarifying questions and help others develop their ideas rather than shutting them down. Support other projects through helpful connections. Transmit “yes, and…” energy. 

Pragmatism - Do not stop at ideas. Ideas here are meant to inform action. If you are here, then you are connected with a movement of people intending to change the world. Find ways to join in projects and meet others. 

The Origins of This Forum

Noah Chon Lee and Andrew J Starr each added $250 into a crowdfunded prize for someone to build an MVP for the forum.

Michael Jola-Moses in Nigeria and Michael Cherneski in the USA each reached out to work on this and when Noah connected them they decided to build the MVP together. Reneedaos helped us understand Orbis and then Ceramic supported a prize for building the forum on OrbisDB.

Michael Jola-Moses and Noah are now the contact points for this project.

Issues in Social Media

- The Censorship Issue

- The Proof of Personhood Issue

- The Proof of Identity/Impersonation Issue

How We Address Censorship

While we may hide posts from the front-end, all profiles and posts use a publicly viewable web3 database here: https://cerscan.com/mainnet/stream/kjzl6hvfrbw6caxcbssw5puzfwtnmu41glxvnorlezmcirmcd1m26e2axwj0fqe. Thus, it is impossible to fully censor someone. We intend to make a “hidden” posts section on the front-end where someone may choose to see the things that admins have hidden due to not fitting the ethics of the forum. 

The code for this website is here and is welcome for forking: https://github.com/The-Network-Society-Forum/forum 

The admins are Noah Chon Lee and Michael Jola-Moses who are capable of hiding users and hiding posts and we have control over the front-end. We both prefer to exercise this power as little as possible.

Help Us Improve!

There is a meta channel for ideas about the forum itself and we welcome ideas on how to improve and collaborations with contributors to open-source software.

Our development roadmap may be seen here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nZGmTRf2ZB9x6h_FHepSUyg85_ezgozzHHhMMyJXXxY/edit?usp=sharing 

Let’s make this a great space for sharing articles on network societies!

Definitions

Network society - A society of interconnected self-governing communities leveraging digital networks and evolving through opt-in experiments in governance and culture

Startup society - Any new, experimental community, with innovations in legal, physical, social or digital infrastructure

Special economic zone (SEZ) - A jurisdiction within a country which has different regulations. There are physically delineated SEZs and there are also digital SEZs. These are also known as free zones, special administrative regions, ZEDEs, etc.

Charter city - A city granted special jurisdiction to create a new governance system and enact policy reforms

Startup city - A charter city that combines both industrial and residential aspects, making it a rapidly adapting hub for innovation

Pop up village - A temporary Dunbar number sized gathering where residents co-live with a co-created schedule and co-work on meaningful projects while experimenting with new lifestyles and social structures

Dunbarian Civilization - A civilization of opt-in Dunbar sized communities who organize into iterative co-created experiments

Network state - A highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states

Coordi-nation - A voluntary interwoven network of communities with aligned values and a shared identity. They mutualize resources to redistribute them within the network and to engage in collective action through participatory governance and interdependence between nodes

Ecovillage - An intentional, traditional or urban community that is consciously designed through locally owned participatory processes in all four dimensions of sustainability (social, culture, ecology and economy) to regenerate social and natural environments

Seasteading - The concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, in international waters outside the territory claimed by any government

Intentional community - A group of people who have chosen to live together and share resources on the basis of common values