A PROTOTYPE FOR REGENERATIVE CO-LIVING
November 29th, 2022

We live in interesting times. Exponential technology brought us unparalleled comfort and well-being while at the same time creating devastating externalities that threaten all life on earth. The current economic model, prioritising profit over common good and nature, has been an engine of social disparities, environmental destruction and economic instabilities. Faced with ecological collapse, climate change and spiking inequalities, many people experience eco-anxiety and powerlessness as they don't know how to tackle this civilizational meta-crisis.

Do you often wonder what you can do as an individual to change this self-terminating trajectory? At TDF, we're crafting a way forward. Keep on reading.

What is Traditional Dream Factory (TDF)?

Located in the Alentejo region in Portugal, 1h30 away from Lisbon and 30 min from the beach, TDF is the first physical location of OASA, a network of co-owned regenerative villages. At TDF, we believe that changing the way we live and organise is the most impactful way to regenerate ourselves and our planet. Using whole system thinking, we are designing for win-win-win eco-cooperation enhancing the quality of life of our members, our neighbours and our environment. We are coalescing a vibrant community of social entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts and movers & shakers from the regenerative movement to pioneer a new model for regenerative co-living that creates positive loops in all interactions between stakeholders including the local community, nature, all life on earth and future generations. TDF is a living lab where we are implementing innovative organisational models to counter extractive, profit-maximising practices while fostering thriving relationships and ecosystems. By exploring the inner and outer system changes needed in our organisations, our thoughts and our behaviours, we prepare ourselves for the new regenerative paradigm. We are fighting Financialization and the process of enclosure (turning relationships into paid services and nature into commodities) by fostering new ways of collaborating and a culture of gifting. We believe that technology is a double-edged sword that can also offer us tremendous opportunities for societal transformation and we’re tapping the potential of ReFi and the internet of value (web3) to do so. TDF is the first DAO-governed regenerative village in Europe. We're at the frontier of new ways of organising, and there are not many blueprints to follow yet but how exciting it is to blaze the trail! The primary ecological imperative of TDF is to improve water retention, water reuse, rainwater harvesting, as well as reforesting and adding more diversity to the land. We are working in cooperation with multiple agroforestry experts, running experiments on what forestry systems can be used to improve the soils, provide improved water absorption capabilities, and creating a food forest that sustains both human & ecosystem needs. We already reforested 1.5ha of the TDF land through one native reforestation project done in partnership with Primal Gathering and Reflorestar Portugal, and a food forest. You can see some of the areas of focus and key metrics currently being worked on on the TDF Impact Map. We're currently in the process of raising capital to finance the next stage of renovations. In the approved architecture plans are 14 suites, 4 studios, a house, a coworking garden, a cafe, a makerspace, an industrial kitchen, a greenhouse, a natural pool and more.

The TDF ethos

We embrace diversity as we recognize that our differences are the keys to harnessing the power of collective intelligence. We value inclusion, acceptance and compassion. Everyone has equal access to opportunities and resources, and can contribute fully to the creation and nourishment of our community as long as they adhere to the TDF values and vision. We deepen into the ethics of our interdependency while respecting everyone's constantly fluctuating needs for personal space and needs for interaction. We invite curiosity, creativity and playfulness. We acknowledge the limitations of siloed thinking, always striving to employ systematic thought to see problems from all different angles. We empower our members; co-creating our dream together means we are constantly tackling new tasks and facing new problems to solve, which keeps us on our toes and challenges us to grow. We foster a gifting culture where valuables, skills and experiences are not traded or sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards, thus creating experiences of abundance and gratitude. Being part of a project we believe in gives us meaning as we walk the path of our collective Ikigai. To learn more about TDF culture, head over to the Pink Paper.

Returning land to the commons

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Aldo Leopold

Once upon a time, land belonged to everyone. During the agricultural revolution, nomadic populations of hunters and gatherers started to settle on specific lands to farm them. They were passed from generations to generations without formal agreements until the Roman Empire officially instituted land ownership. Fast forward to nowadays, it is clear that capitalism and the enclosure of scarce physical resources for private financial gain is leading to ever-increasing centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Just as in the game monopoly (which by the way was invented as a critique of capitalism), the more the game is played, the more public and private entities are dispossessed of their wealth or land, which get funneled to the top. This is a finite game and if we want to survive as a species, we need to turn it into an infinite Game. In an effort to transfer value from the capitalist market modality to the common modality, the TDF land is permanently owned by OASA, a non-for-profit association working on conserving land and regenerating eco-systems. The TDF land is thus protected and becomes a commons since it can never be resold at a speculative price. But what is a commons you may ask? Author David Bollier describes a Commons as a “shared resource, co-governed by its user community according to the community’s rules and norms”. The word comes from latin “munus”, which means both “duty” and “gift”. This description compels us to take care of our gift and acknowledge our role as responsible regenerators, not dominators nor destructors, of nature. Just like slavery abolition activists were buying slaves to set them free during the American civil war, our strategy to transition back to the commons is to buy lands and put them into land regeneration & conservation trusts. We are designing a blueprint for a new regenerative civilization and architecturing ways to move away from ownership and towards stewardship.

Decentralised stewardship

Tokenization (the process of fractionalizing real property into tokens stored on a decentralised database), offers us a way to give access to the TDF facilities to our members according to their investment (financial or sweat equity). The $TDF is an ERC-20 token deployed on the Celo network. We chose to use Celo to be on an Ethereum compatible chain (which enables easier integration with the rest of the ecosystem) while choosing a layer 1 which is aligned with our ecological ambitions (Celo aims to hold natural assets in its reserves). The TDF token represents the “right of use” of the TDF property for one night at operating cost every year (the utility of the token renews yearly forever). $TDF can be bought or earned in different funding rounds at different prices and token holders can become members and gain decision making power after going through the onboarding process. To become a member you need to spend at least 14 days at TDF and be vouched by other members. Tokens can be used by members to redeem nightly accommodation at TDF directly through the platform developed by Closer and is available on https://traditionaldreamfactory.com.

A new way of organising and making decision together

The blockchain revolution brought us an important piece in the evolution of coordination; DAOs, Decentralised Autonomous Organizations, which can be described as some sort of open digital automated cooperatives. They represent an important improvement in how people can collaborate democratically, and can be defined as “organisations represented by rules encoded as a computer program that are transparent, controlled by the organisation members and not influenced by a central government”. DAOs are the new kids on the block and have an expanded set of abilities compared to their coop ancestors: Since they run immutably on the blockchain, they are decentralised and transparent in nature, which means they are immune to corruption and censorship because they cannot be tempered with. Smarts contracts allow for streamlined processes since voting proposals execute autonomously without any human intervention. DAOs eradicate the need to include a trusted third party to make sure agreements are carried out, they can even eliminate key positions such as managers by implementing transparent rules instead. DAOs promote engagement in the communities because people can see the real world effect of their decisions. Our governance model harnesses the power of collective intelligence through Sociocracy 3.0, an innovative decentralised decision-making social technology that works well with a DAO. There's no boss at TDF, we are organised in autonomous circles that take decisions on a consensus basis. All our members are part of the DAO and get to vote on which directions to steer the ship. Finances and rewards are completely transparent, we decide on how much others should earn together. Our favoured modus operandi is do-ocracy. Any member should feel empowered to take action, building out their own and the community's dreams. A member can describe their desired action in a proposal which will be submitted on the platform. After a resting period, which is proportional to the scope of the impact & its permanence is initiated (on average around 1-2 weeks), the proposal is automatically approved unless there are open concerns. We encourage everyone to be proactive and experiment, even if they make mistakes (mistakes are OK! If it’s safe enough to try, go for it!). We trust that everyone will do their best to contribute to the common good of the project.  TDF social design is crafted as we build and iterated as we learn.

A fair decision-making model

In the classical pyramidal structures running this world, decisions are taken from top to bottom. Isn't it curious to have a person who's completely removed from what's happening on the ground, making the biggest decisions in an organisation? That's why at TDF, in an effort to avoid reproducing the classical power dynamics of the current socio-economic system, the decision making power is attributed according to how much time a member spends on the project (Proof of Presence), not how much he or she invested. It stems from the assumption that the longer a member stays, the higher the level of guardianship, care, and work they put into the project. The voting weight is calculated by cumulating all nights spent, but the weight of each night decays over time so that more recent stays have higher voting influence than older ones. In the future, we're thinking about reshuffling our model to include some form of Proof of Sweat which will also factor in the contribution representative of the total amount of work provided by a member.

Incentivisation model

Since our organisational structure is non-hierarchical and non-coercive, our members feel a sense of agency and are generally intrinsically motivated. But of course we are also tracking and recording all contributions in the DAO. The gamification of interactions is important, as game theoretic incentives allow to build inner structures encouraging positive participation by rewarding members. 20 % of $TDF’s first minting round is reserved for sweat equity distribution.

Exploring new modes of production

We love experimenting with new ways of doing things, of producing, of organising... For instance, we recently co-wrote “How to build a regenerative village” that is published by our own Tree House DAO, the first web3 publishing organisation. We produced it collectively in a Commons-Based Peer Production fashion. CBPP is a term coined by Yochai Benkler which describes a radically new way to design and manufacture products and distribute value. In CBPP, people work through a P2P —“peer to peer”, “people to people” relational dynamic, freely collaborating and co-creating value in the form of shared resources (in our case, a global digital common). Creating something together as a community and getting feedback and ideas from your peers is not only super fun and rewarding, but it's also a great way to boost our collective capacity for innovation. Since it's a digital common, this book will be downloadable for free of course, but we will also give people the option to buy the physical version. In order to redistribute the profits from the sale of the book, we used coordinape to attribute each other points according to how much we felt others contributed to the book and the profits will be distributed accordingly.

A model for nomad regenerators

We see a future where you can have roots in multiple regenerative villages, where love and community stays with you no matter where you go, where networked communities steward the resources of our common home, mother earth. Welcome to OASA! OASA is a non-profit Association established in Switzerland (one of the few suitable jurisdictions for DAO Legal Wrappers). Its mission is to have a global network of 12 DAO-operated regenerative villages with approximately 300 members and 100 000 hectares of land to regenerate by 2050. OASA's land bases are natural resource-based commons and our goal is to transition ownership into stewardship, one regenerative village at a time. To be part of the network, land-based projects must abide by its Principles of Regeneration and Land Stewardship, which ensure that soils, native vegetation, water bodies and other resources of the land based projects are maintained in their healthiest forms. It also ensures that the communities are governed on the basis of rules that are just. All other decisions, as long as they align with this agreement, are within the sovereignty of each regenerative village. Each project within OASA Network issues their own token and is governed by their respective DAO. OASA is using the power of web3 to secure the health of our ecosystems through projects such as open forest protocol. We are championing a “Conserve to Live '' model where the more you support the regeneration of the planet, the more perks you get as a member of one of our spaces. We see our network as the first step towards an abundant future. By purchasing tokens in DAOs connected to OASA, not only you finance the regeneration of nature but you also ensure a resilient and anti-fragile future for yourself as you can have several home-bases with vibrant regenerated ecosystems, local organic food production and a supportive community wherever you go.

Open-sourcing our findings and scaling

A partner project of the Oasa network, Closer is a digital operating system developed for sovereign communities that includes on-boarding process, booking system, event platform, proposals and more. Closer is developing the protocols and mechanisms to give utility to Oasa Tokens, amongst others by building Proof of Presence. Our objective is to open source our ideas, technology and legal templates onto Closer to encourage other communities to replicate and scale our model. Closer has received support from Regen Network and Climate Collective, and we want to thank these two for supporting our ecosystem. Co-designing technology will allow villages to come to life more easily and efficiently so we can move together towards regenerative living as a common planetary goal.

Towards game B

The larger commons-oriented networks of communities grow, the greater the likelihood that this new way of living and organising can become the new attractor for our civilization. Through developing synergies for collaborations at larger scales and levels of complexity, we can become a networked state gaining more and more influence, thus allowing us to offer an alternative to the current economic system. We dream of a civilization embracing sacred economics*,*where natural assets are recognized as the value backing the economy, where resources are produced in the network while creating true ecological benefits, where citizens spend no currency on living amenities since they benefit from the abundance of resources in their commons, where they can use their time focusing on what truly matters to them. We are working passionately on bringing about a regenaissance for the good of all.

Feeling inspired?

Find out more by reading Oasa's white paper

We will be launching our public Token sale soon, hop onto our Telegram group to stay up to date.

Written by Charlotte Fradet - founder of Unity Coliving & contributor to TDF DAO.

We have put a lot of thought and resources into our regenerative stack, however we acknowledge that there is always room for improvement. We believe in collaboration and welcome feedback in this iterative process of creating new organisational models.

A few collectible tokens are available in pre-purchase in support of the creation of our Natural pool in 2023 (0.55$TDF goes to the artist for every sale, 22$TDF go to you):

 
 
 
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