One pattern I’ve noticed over the years is the decrease in working groups meeting up in the metaverse in order to discuss how to build an open and interoperable metaverse. This post dives into the potential implications of not eating your own dog food.
The term “dogfooding” is an IT slang for the use of one's own products. In some uses, it implies that developers or companies are using their own products to work out bugs, as in beta testing.
The last time I wrote a post like this was in 2019, mainly wondering “who is building the open Metaverse and why? What incentives do they have?” It was in 2019 we formed M3 and began to host regular online meetups in platforms like Mozilla Hubs and VRChat, inviting developers from various open source and VR/AR projects to present.
I was chatting with somebody from the corporate metaverse world, with whom opinions about VR I admire, for feedback on this post. Initially he said he didn't have much interest in the whole '3D Web Social' concept. He was never really into platforms like Second Life or WoW. However, something made it all click for him when he tried VRChat, specifically while being in VR with full body tracking. He told me how it changed his whole perspective from seeing it as "3D computer stuff on a screen" to suddenly the sense of presence had engaged the neural pathways to register other people as really "Other People” in a profoundly humanizing way. It made him realize the amazing potential that social VR / telepresence holds.
As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think about how impactful my past psychedelic and early social VR experiences were - both flipped switches in my brain, forever changing the trajectory of my life.
His story served as a motivational reminder of why I'm still deeply committed to this endeavor today – working tirelessly to ensure the development of a robust open technology framework for social VR. Today I’m finding myself still pondering the following questions:
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How significant is the practice of 'dogfooding' the metaverse for those who are actively constructing it?
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Have many already undergone a similar transformative shift in perspective?
- Is there a need to periodically rekindle that transformative experience?
Let me know what you think, can message me on x or discord @ dankvr.
- jin
Evolution of Online Collectives
One of the most famous authors on the Metaverse is Matthew Ball, a VC whose series of essays and new best selling book is widely read in the tech industry, even in crypto.
“At Coinbase, our thinking about the Metaverse has been heavily influenced by venture capitalist and writer Matthew Ball” - Brian Armstrong, CEO and Co-Founder, Coinbase
Matthew believes that a thriving Metaverse should emerge from a network of diverse platforms and technologies that prioritize interoperability. He also saw the need for “a mechanism which can offer developers greater profits than are available via closed platforms, and to users, a healthier and more respectful experience.”
In 2021 Matthew saw the innovation in self-organization and financing happening in DAOs as a potential vehicle for this aim and together with FWB tried to kickstart one by auctioning his essay. Within the announcement post for The Metaverse Essay, he highlighted the nature of the internet's creation, emphasizing how it evolved through collectives focused on open standards:
Throughout the 1960s to 1990s, the foundation of today’s internet was built through a variety of consortiums and informal working groups composed of government research labs, public universities, and independent technologists. These usually not-for-profit collectives typically focused on establishing open standards that would help them share information from one server to another (i.e., messages or files), and in doing so make it easier to collaborate on future technologies, projects, and ideas.
The landscape has changed since the early days, especially after the world has seen and capitalized on the immense commercial opportunities of the Internet. The types of people who helped build the internet as a public good, like independent technologists and not-for-profit collectives, are positioned at a disadvantage. Current working group structures are slow, rely on volunteers, and from my experience have been extremely difficult to field contributions and feedback on emerging open standards.
Over the past 15 years, the internet has transformed, influenced by multinational media conglomerates whose primary focus is on selling products, delivering ads, profiting from user data, and exerting control over the online experience. These giants tend to toggle between openness and closure based on financial interests, and will use their dynastic resources, reach, and influence to assert further control.
We need better mechanisms for self-organization and retroactive public goods funding in order to return to original ethos of the Internet when we’re building the next version of it. People aren’t going to leave their cushy jobs to work on interoperable open protocols for the metaverse until the incentives shift. The game has changed, and to ensure the new Internet remains a bastion of freedom we need more open source devs to realize how incentives rule the world just for us to get on a level playing field.
Untapped Potential
The auction for Matthew Ball’s essay on The Metaverse ended at 100 ETH bid by Polygon Labs, overcoming a collective of hopeful individuals who had pooled their funds but ultimately lost and had to redeem their funds.
Regrettably, the newly formed Metaverse Alliance DAO failed to gain traction and quietly faded into obscurity. The loss of momentum stemmed, as far as I can discern, from a lack of accountability or leadership. To me it feels like a big missed opportunity merely due to a skill issue.
It’s been a source of frustration, I mean here I am still writing about it almost 2 years later even though I had no role in the endeavor. I assume it’s because Matthew’s vision for the DAO was so noble, and the money raised was significant - more than the combined worth of multiple metaverse groups I’m most active in (M3 / OMI).
I believe in our capacity to do better, and since the foundational principles and ideals haven’t changed I feel like there still is a chance at glory. There are fewer distractions in the bear market, and we’ve yet to unlock the untapped potential of aligning 3D and DAO people to work on solving interop challenges together - LFG!²
Recursive Self-Improvement
“A DAO is an organization that builds a DAO”. - rafa
Early Internet pioneers, in their quest to simplify collaboration, resemble today's DAOs, which continually refine the tools for consensus building and coordination—a philosophy akin to Kaizen 改善, emphasizing continuous self-improvement, with every challenge viewed as an opportunity for growth.
The iterative process becomes recursive. While producing merch in MetaFactory for hundreds of projects and artists in the crypto space, we actively embrace and adopt the latest DAO tooling. The best ones are made by the people that are trying to solve their own problems in decentralized coordination space. Tools like coordinape and dework.xyz are a couple invaluable examples that come to mind.
As someone super active in traditional W3C style metaverse working groups and DAOs alike, I’ve witnessed the advantages and disadvantages offered by each approach. Overall though, I think they are highly complimentary. DAOs offer novel collaboration and coordination mechanisms for working groups.¹
Use the Metaverse to Build the Metaverse
Early Internet users harnessed its capabilities for collaboration. Similarly, DAO builders employed DAOs to construct new DAOs. Given this precedent, it raises a legitimate concern as to why metaverse working groups, tasked with shaping the future of metaverse technology, have not fully embraced the metaverse within the process?
During the early days of Oculus, 2014 → 2020, there was an innovative VR web browser project born out of the University of Toronto called JanusVR (now JanusXR). The team held all of their meetings in Janus. In the first 5-10 minutes we would set up areas by drag and dropping 2D and 3D media of our latest WIP into the world, then go around to show and tell. Meanwhile on the server the meetings would be recorded as ghost files, so that later we can replay the entirety of the meeting- voice, movement, collaborative building, the HTML underneath.
We had such powerful capabilities back then, almost nothing has come close since then besides perhaps hyperfy which sometimes feels like a multiplayer 3D whiteboard.
My intent has been to set an example of dogfooding within other metaverse organizations such the Metaverse Standards Forum, which has recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. However, I must admit that my experience thus far has been more challenging than I initially envisioned, even with fresh baked cookies at my side.
If you check the Metaverse Standards Forum YouTube channel, you’d see that I was the only speaker that presented with a vtuber avatar. I was also zipping around a world I built that was intended to be a place to host discussions between related groups, with past meeting notes recycled into posters on the walls. Not to delve too deeply into it, the main point is that this was but an anomaly because every event that followed seems to have taken place on either Zoom or a physical conference.
The prevalent use of conventional tools such as Zoom for the majority of group discussions concerns me. Shouldn't this deviation from the very technology we aspire to advance give us reason for reflection?
I don’t intend to be pessimistic, but I’m starting to reflect upon the opportunity cost associated with the considerable effort I’m investing into certain endeavors. Perhaps my contemplation arises from feeling powerless to shift culture once they’re already entrenched in corporate methodologies. I guess there’s reason I never got a “normal job”, the artist in me suffers.
Short-term Efficiency vs Long-term Cultural Impact
M3 ported our HQ across many worlds—can the same be said for your organization, or does it solely inhabit the flatlands of traditional communication channels?
By moving our organization's mission and purpose into various virtual worlds, we achieve a dual purpose. First and foremost it gives us perspective to walk a mile in the shoes of a user, the very type of person we should be fighting for. We not only convey our commitment to addressing interop challenges but also engage directly with users on those platforms, encouraging their feedback and insights, further fostering a two-way dialogue that is conducive towards building bridges.
In pursuit of short-term efficiency from conventional methods, we must also consider the potential implications:
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Misalignment between our objectives and methods
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Pass chances to conduct real-time experimentation
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Skipping opportunities to engage with others
The disconnect between our objectives and methods risks leaving us out of touch from the evolving landscape. We miss out on opportunities for real-time testing during our meetings and fail to engage with builders on their preferred platforms, which could provide us with valuable feedback.
Exploring new platforms as content creators offers fresh insights into the challenges, particularly when importing content from other sources. This aligns with the core mission of metaverse interop groups addressing these very issues. I left some tips and tricks on how to utilize some strategies I’ve gained as an experienced virtual event producer and host at the very end of this post.³
Build the Metaverse in the Metaverse with DAOs
“you get the society that your IT stack enables” - punk6529
What if building the metaverse can be a fun game itself? Right now billions people all around the world are playing The Great Online Game. They’re leveling up on YouTube, learning useful skills that are practical in the real world, writing posts, collaborating on research, leading discussions, and earning rewards that transcend online and offline.
From this view, DAOs are then like MMORPG guilds in this game where you can squad up with friends, combine resources, and go on multiplayer missions across the Internet.
New location and Time
Inspired by DAOtown by perchy, we built a 3D world using blender and hyperfy.io to host the next M3 event to bring together metaverse and DAO people into a shared space. This world isn’t just for show, the 3D art functions as additional context for websites related to DAO tools being represented as objects, for example:
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Dework, web3 project management software, becomes an actual bounty board
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Snapshot, used for voting for majority of DAOs, is a 3D ballot box
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NPCs become an interface for knowledge bases (WIP)
In a new medium, skeumorphism builds a bridge to literacy, but ultimately gives way to distilled, abstract forms. - gfodor
We’re also working on a UEFN version too. The metaverse is bigger than any 1 platform, and by building upon open file formats and additional platforms like Sketchfab we aim to make the process of porting our content easy.
By the way if people want to call crypto the wild west, fine by me. Surviving in the converging frontiers of cipherspace and cyberspace takes some grit. It’s time to get our hands dirty and learn (or unlearn) to use these new tools and methods to give our working groups a much needed buff in order to build an open future.
about the author
I’ve been obsessively building in the metaverse space for the last decade; VR since 2013, NFTs since 2017, contributing to DAOs since 2020. I want to build The Street from Snow Crash as a way to sow disparate virtual world platforms together, similar to how connecting together universities and research labs eventually became the internet.
I believe that economic incentives aligned with open protocols can drive us towards the end goal. This approach is reminiscent of the ancient Silk Road trade routes that, for over 1500 years, interconnected various societies, forging lasting bonds. I also recognize that cryptocurrency serves as a more accessible means of exchange, particularly among pseudonymous users who constitute a significant portion of the native population within virtual worlds.
On the ground level I’ve been working on how to make the building process itself more fun and sustainable, finding ways to attract and reward the 1% of people who build.
This series aims to give readers a firsthand POV of a devout builder having been in the trenches for the last 10 years, and still striving to build a metaverse worth living in. I hope to shed some light in these transmissions on the challenges we confront, share the solutions we uncover, and illuminate the promising opportunities that lie ahead.
Recently M3 hosted an in-world Demo Day where speakers gave presentations on a variety of metaverse topics, via sharing assets on stage / screen sharing / world hopping to an audience of 40 avatars. To get a taste of the next one, check this recap:
The next event we’re planning to host will be Friday 9/22. I hope to see you there.
Footnotes
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Some might argue that introducing financial incentives could corrupt the purity of motivations within these groups. However, it's crucial to weigh the potential advantages against the drawbacks. I've observed numerous working groups lose momentum due to waning interest, overextended volunteers, and burnout. Presently, some are challenged with finding developers to implement a work-in-progress open standard for testing and feedback. In these situations, the question arises: Why invest the effort? They're confronted with pressing issues, family responsibilities, and the essential task of nurturing their communities.
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LFG: Lets Form Group
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Tips and Tricks for Metaverse Working Groups
As to not make this post all about problems, here are a few actionable solutions that I suggest other groups consider to elevate our engagement in the metaverse, drawing from my 4 years of experience as a virtual event producer and host for M3:
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Virtual Field Trips and World Hops: Incorporate virtual field trips or explorations between regular meetings. This immersive approach enables members to gain a deeper understanding of various metaverse environments.
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Avatar Personalization and VTubing: Encourage members to create and personalize their own avatars, and experiment with using them as VTubers.
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Leverage Whiteboard Art: Explore the potential of exporting art panels from whiteboard applications to image formats (jpg/png) for use in 3D scenes.
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Elevate Virtual Event Production: Elevate the production quality of virtual events by dedicating time to practice and refine these skills. A polished virtual event enhances the overall experience and engagement of participants.
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Meet Creators Where They Are: Rather than expecting creators to come to your preferred platform, actively engage with them on their chosen platforms. This hands-on approach not only demonstrates commitment but also facilitates meaningful collaboration
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Multi-Platform Experimentation and Documentation: Undertake the challenge of building the same content or experience across multiple metaverse platforms and meticulously document the process. This not only broadens your understanding but also contributes to the shared knowledge of interoperability and as a case study.
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Utilize Platforms like Sketchfab: Create a presence on platforms like Sketchfab and upload 3D models there, which can serve as a valuable hub for collaboration.
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