The article discusses the importance of creating participant agreements for the Eden Fractal community to set clear expectations, protect against liabilities, and enhance cooperation. It outlines recent discussions on the topic, proposes a simple on-chain agreement with terms regarding language and video sharing, and emphasizes a gradual approach to implementing more comprehensive agreements. Future steps include testing EOS account creation, clarifying technical aspects of the agreement, and encouraging community discussions to refine the agreement terms.
Intro
This article provides details, considerations, and recommendations for agreements among Eden Fractal participants. Please note that this page is in an early work in progress and will be updated soon. You can see an outline of contents below:
- Intro
- Why Should We Create an Agreement for Participants?
- Recent Progress
- EF 37: Participant Agreements and More!
- EF 38: Vision, Mission, and Agreement
- Proposal: Create Eden Fractal Participant Agreement
- Implementation Notes
- Next Steps
- Potential Future Clauses
- Additional Benefits
- Attributions
- Thanking the ƒractally Team
- Thanking the Eden Community
- Discussions During Eden Fractal Meetings
- EF 37: Participant Agreements and More!
- EF 38: Vision, Mission, and Agreement
- Suggested Terms for Eden Participant Agreement
- Consent to Record and Share Video Conference Calls
- Language
- Eden Fractal Software for Participant Agreements
- More Details and Modularity
- Genesis ƒractal Contributor Agreement
- UNA: Unincorporated Non-Profit Associations
- Joshua’s Notes about Eden, UNAs, and MIDAO
- Other Tools for Legal Cooperation
- Cooperative Entities
- Trusts
- Related Posts
- The Legal Status of DAOs
- EF 37: Participant Agreements and More!
- ECOS
- Thanks for reading!
Why Should We Create an Agreement for Participants?
Participant agreements can help set expectations clearly, protect the community from liabilities, and enable more effective cooperation. We believe this kind of agreement is essential for the community in the long term and are curious to hear everyone's thoughts.
Recent Progress
The Eden community discussed participant agreements during Eden Fractal meetings 37 and 38. You can see the show notes with more details about these discussions below, as well as the current proposal from Dan. You can watch Dan introduce this topic at 1:16:57 during meeting 37 and introduce the proposal at 1:44:00 during meeting 38.
EF 37: Participant Agreements and More!
After playing Eden+Fractal with talented newcomers, we dive into thoughtful discussions about requiring participant agreements and our next steps! 🪴
EF 38: Vision, Mission, and Agreement
What do you see in the future of Eden? We discuss our vision, two proposals for our mission, and a proposal to add a participant agreement to the community account! 🤝🏽
Proposal: Create Eden Fractal Participant Agreement
Vote yes for this proposal if you support the creation of an on-chain participant agreement as written in the following document: IPFS link. The proposal includes two simple terms of agreement regarding speaking english and sharing videos on social media. Note that this proposal’s scope is limited to simply adding this agreement to the eden.fractal EOS account with the ‘setagreement’ action. This proposal does not require or ask anyone to sign the agreement.
- Yes
- No
- Not sure
Implementation Notes
For now this proposal is just to use the ‘setagreement’ action with the following terms and not about requiring any signing. It makes sense to take this step by step. I believe that we’ll need to require participants to sign in the future, but we wouldn’t want to rush into it too quickly and there are several considerations and things to do first.
The next steps and considerations include:
- We don’t want to create a big barrier to entry where new participants who don’t have an EOS account can’t participate until they get an EOS account.
- Aaron Cox, the CEO of Greymass and creator of Anchor, reached out to me and gave me a bunch of free EOS account creation. This will make it much easier to welcome new participants and set them up with EOS accounts.
- These accounts can be easily set up with mobile and automatically make use of the secure enclave and account recovery certificate features in the Anchor app, which offers a high degree of security, convenience, and ease of use.
- After these are more thoroughly stress-tested, perhaps these accounts could enable new participants to set up their free EOS account and sign the agreement in minutes
- If anyone would like a code to invite a friend and help set up their account prior to the meeting, please feel free to reach out and I’ll be happy it to you.
- I’m assuming we either enter a JSON file or a link to an ipfs document to the ‘setagreement’ field in bloks, but I’m not sure.
- I’d like to ask a knowledgable developer like Vlad, Tadas, or James about this.
- At the end of Discussing Eden Fractal Stuff, Vlad said that he wasn’t willing / interested in including this on the web app.
- So either we’d need to speak with Vlad again and see if he’s willing to reconsider, sign in bloks (which is possible but far from ideal), or figure out another way to post an agreement that can be signed on a different site.
- I’ll create an agreement topic on telegram for further discussions about the agreement
- Are there any other terms that we should include here now?
Next Steps
- A successive proposal could require that people could only participate if they’ve signed most recently approved iteration
Potential Future Clauses
For example, here are few subjects that i think it will be helpful to add terms in the near future:
- Make it very clear that Eden Fractal as an entity/community can only express are opinions. What is a better way to phrase this?
- For example, respect points are opinions. Respect points are not assets, contracts, or anything in jurisdiction of legal systems. It’s just points in a game and opinions expressed by the community. Ccommunity members are free to change their opinion at any time
- Make property rights clear. The community does not own anything other than it’s opinion. Any related websites, content, etc are created and owned by individual community members, not the entirety of the community
- Make right of secession clear. Individuals can secede from the community and the community can secede from individuals if either party wishes to do so.
Additional Benefits
In addition this can help test the software and lead the way for other communities
As Noam mentioned to me this week, modular pieces that other communities can easily use.
Attributions
Thanking the ƒractally Team
First, we’d like to express immense gratitude to Daniel Larimer, Gregory Wexler, and the entire ƒractally team for all the pioneering work in fractal cooperation and consensus building. This article features some of their work into UNAs, the legal structure of DAOs, and much more. We’d also like to thank Thomas for the great artwork below that helps represent how we can all better cooperate with fractal consensus games and clearly communicated agreements. You can see the original usage of this artwork in James Mart’s excellent article, Bringing Off-Chain Governance On-Chain.
Thanking the Eden Community
I’d also like to express immense gratitude for all of the pioneers in the Eden community (or as Brandon Lovejoy likes to quip, Space Monkeys) for all of the deep thinking and inspiration about how to cooperate better and synergize the web3 work with legacy systems. This article includes many ideas shared by Eden On EOS Delegates and Eden Fractal community members as we learn to engineer better societies for all. More will be added soon. The following space monkey artwork is created by Lars, an amazing writer and illustrator in the EOS community. You can see context and the artful zine here.
Discussions During Eden Fractal Meetings
EF 37: Participant Agreements and More!
Dan shared a presentation about participants and the majority of the cagendas game during this meeting focused on ideas about an Eden Fractal Participant Agreement.
EF 38: Vision, Mission, and Agreement
What do you see in the future of Eden? We discuss our vision, two proposals for our mission, and a proposal to add a participant agreement to the community account! 🤝🏽
Suggested Terms for Eden Participant Agreement
The following terms are copy and pasted from the Genesis Fractal’s Contributor Agreement and draft UNA agreement. You can learn more about these below. I suggest that we start by agreeing to some variation of these simple terms and add more terms as the community sees fit. Two versions are included with slight variations.
Consent to Record and Share Video Conference Calls
Each Member agrees to appear on camera and hereby gives consent for the meetings to be recorded (through Zoom or other alternatives) by any other Party. Each Member agrees to allow the recordings to be published by any means (including sharing on social media platforms) and acknowledge that all content and communication will be made public. Further, each Member understands that posts to the Blockchain are beyond the power of any Party to remove.
Version 2: Video Recording and Sharing on Social Media
All parties agree to appear on camera and to allow the meetings (Zoom video conference or alternatives) to be recorded by any other Party and shared on social media. You further acknowledge that all content and communication may be public and understand that all posts to blockchains are beyond the power of any Party to take down.
Language
Each participant acknowledges that they can read, write, speak and understand the English language and that they agree to speak English at all times when participating on a video call.
Eden Fractal Software for Participant Agreements
When James Mart built the first Eden Fractal software in June 2022, he included a feature to enable communities to form agreements stored securely on the EOS blockchain. You can see James’ notes about three actions related to agreements in the screenshot below and learn more by exploring the repository on Github. These features are currently available on the eden.fractal EOS account, but have not yet been used.
More Details and Modularity
The agreement could start with simple terms to ensure that everyone speaks English, consents that videos are shared publicly, and understands the timing of events. In the future we could gradually propose more terms with an iterative approach as the community sees fit. The Eden Fractal Software for agreements includes actions called ‘setagreement’, sign, and unsign. The ‘setagreement’ action updates the Eden Fractal membership agreement that all community members are required to sign to participate. It also increments a version number.
This version number enables communities to modularize agreements with an iterative approach. This may help us approve simple sentences or paragraphs without needing to get consensus all at once on a long document. For example, we could start very simple with just an agreement to share videos on social media and speak english. Then more proposals may be made for other terms, clauses, or agreements in the future as the community sees fit.
Genesis ƒractal Contributor Agreement
The first fractal contributor agreement was published for the Genesis ƒractal in May of 2022. There was a requirement to sign this agreement in order to participate in the Genesis ƒractal events. You can see a preview of the Genesis Fractal Contributor Agreement and read tje full agreement here.
UNA: Unincorporated Non-Profit Associations
Throughout Q2 and Q3 of 2022, the ƒractally team worked closely with legal experts to create an agreement with much more comprehensive legal protection and structure than the ƒractal contributor agreement. This UNA agreement may help protect communities from legal liability and help people to peacefully cooperate with innovative consensus processes. It is also designed with learnings from The Legal Standing of DAOs and UNAs (unincorporated non-profit associations). In addition to the Genesis ƒractal, other communities can adopt this kind of agreement to help empower, protect, cooperate, and clearly communicate with their members.
You can see a preview of the 13 page document below and read the full agreement in google drive here or in this PDF document.
Joshua’s Notes about Eden, UNAs, and MIDAO
Shortly after being elected as Chief Delegate in the fifth Eden On EOS Election, Joshua started a new bylaw topic and shared thoughts about empowering the Eden community with a UNA and tools from an organization called MIDAO. You can see Joshua’s post and learn more about MIDAO below.
Other Tools for Legal Cooperation
Cooperative Entities
Joshua shared messages about this in fractally chat… More details coming soon!
Trusts
The first Eden on EOS CDs, Chuck, and CAC have shared many insightful thoughts about trusts…. more details coming soon!
Related Posts
The Legal Status of DAOs
A dee[;u thoughtful post by the ƒractally team that explores the legal standing of DAOs and provides insight on how to structure cooperative systems to minimize liability for its members.
EF 37: Participant Agreements and More!
After playing Eden+Fractal with newcomers, we dive into Dan’s, Pascal’s, and Perry’s topics about participant agreements and our next steps. This majority of the cagendas game during this meeting focused on ideas about an Eden Fractal Participant Agreement.
ECOS
We are developing a cooperating system and cooperating manual called ECOS, or Eden Creators OS. This is an early draft article that provides some details about ECOS and various modules, including membership agreements.
Thanks for reading!
This article is written by Dan Singjoy. Please note that it’s an early work in progress and will be updated soon. Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments.
