The concept of coopetition, as explained by Dan, is a combination of cooperation and competition. It is a dynamic where participants in the Eden Fractal and fractally meetings compete to help the community more than each other while simultaneously collaborating to achieve common goals and create a welcoming environment. Coopetition involves friendly competition, which inspires people to push themselves harder and contribute more to the community. By competing in a cooperative manner, participants are encouraged to do more for the betterment of the entire community. The leveling system used in the meetings, which assigns respect tokens based on the Fibonacci sequence, provides an incentive for participants to continually increase their contributions. This system promotes a coopetitive environment where individuals strive to do more while working together towards a shared purpose. Dan emphasizes that the competition aspect of coopetition is not about personal gain or outdoing others, but rather about inspiring everyone to collaborate more effectively and contribute to the growth of the community. The ultimate goal of coopetition is to foster a collaborative culture where individuals can improve themselves, learn from one another, and work together to achieve something greater than themselves.

The Challenge of Competition, Coopetition, and Collaboration

Interviewer: I want to challenge you a little bit. When you are in a room, do you see like a competition between the different contributors into the room? Because you have a level of ranking, we speak about level six, five, four, three, two, one. So someone that is level one maybe has less respect than someone that is level at six. How do you do it? How do you see that? Because I know that's a tough question. We can see that as a competition in the room, we can see that like a coopetition, we can see that totally we are in collaboration, we want to collaborate.

I just want to hear you, Dan, as a hidden fractal at the base layer creator of Eden Fractal. Shout to everyone into this Eden fractal, the developers. You are my guest, so what is your opinion on those three facets: competition, coopetition, collaboration? When you are in, let's say, advocating your contribution with your peers into your home, how do you see that? The Interplay of Competition, Coopetition, and Collaboration

Dan: Yeah, it's all three. It's a competition, it's a coopetition, and it's a collaboration. I think that coopetition is the best way to describe this succinctly. Coopetition is one of my favorite words, it's a portmanteau, which means a combination of words, and it's a combination of collaboration and competition. Bring them together, you get coopetition. It's a beautiful dynamic. Basically, we are competing, we're competing to help the community more than each other, but we're also collaborating to: one, help the community, we're both having the same goal; and two, to cooperate gracefully in having a fun experience and providing a welcoming environment and so forth while we're having the competition.

There's a great tweet, I don't know exactly what he said, Lex Friedman was talking about how friendly competition is really healthy. It inspires people to do more, it inspires people to push themselves harder and to go out of their way to do more. When everybody is incentivized and inspired by this friendly competition to do more, focusing efforts to help the community, to help the optimism community, to help Eden Fractal, to help Eden, and to help each other as individuals and so forth grow and enjoy ourselves. When everybody's incentivized and encouraged to help each other more and compete over that, but we're all aiming for the same goal, that creates a beautiful competition where we're all competing at the same time but having a fun time while we're competing and doing it as a friendly competition. Then also collaborate at the same time for the same goal. That's basically it, it's coopetition where we're all aiming to help each other and help the community as much as possible at the end. Building a Collaborative Culture

Interviewer: Are you not thinking that you are building a collaborative culture in the optimism community by attending those hidden fractals?

Dan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the competition doesn't exist without the collaboration, and the competition aspect can be expressed as a way to further collaboration because it's incentivizing people, which is something you touched upon too in your previous question. I didn't quite respond to people receiving different amounts of respect for how highly their contributions are valued by the community.

It's true, if somebody joins the meeting and receives a level number one, then they'll receive significantly less respect tokens than somebody who receives a level two or level three or level five or level six. The higher the level, the more respect tokens are distributed by the community. It works with a Fibonacci algorithm whereby each successive level receives approximately one and a half or 1.6 times more tokens than the previous level. So if the level one receives five tokens, then level two receives eight tokens, level three receives something like 13 tokens, level four receives something like 21 tokens, and so forth. These token amounts might change too, but that's just kind of how the Fibonacci ratio works currently.

There is that dynamic where people are receiving different amounts of respect for how much they're doing, and that provides an incentive because it means no matter where you're at in that level ratio, whether you're level one, two, three, four, five, or six, there's always incentive to do more for the community.

If you come to the meeting and you're just learning with the community, you don't know much, you haven't had much time to contribute because you're working another job or whatever, maybe you get ranked level one or level two in the first few meetings that you join or for however long. But it provides an opportunity because it's like, well, if I do a little bit more than what that other person is doing, if I can contribute just another hour this week, then maybe I can receive 1.5 times more respect or two or three times more respect or something like that.

So there's always the option and the incentive, that's part of the beauty of fractally and what we're doing with this Eden Fractal. It's always providing incentive for people to do more for the community, and by doing more with the community, you're helping to collaborate for the community, you're helping the community collaborate.

Adding Value by Collaborating

Dan: The title of this workshop, "Building Collaborative Culture," Eden Fractal is helping them because: one, it's incentivizing people to do more to collaborate and to add more in their collaborations to help the community; and then also, like there's an aspect which I mentioned before and that you mentioned too, it's collaborating beyond all the respect that's distributed on chain and so forth.

It's collaborating just to give people great experiences. Come to these meetings, have a fun time, you're kind of just playing a game really. You're playing a game where people get their contributions ranked one through six and people receive different tokens. But it's like when you play a game, you want to have fun together and you want to give each other a great experience and you want to provide a fun and welcoming environment.

So in addition to incentivizing people to collaborate more and do more to help the collaborative culture of the optimism community, it's also directly providing a welcoming environment where people can join every week to collaborate and enjoy each other's time. Then help build that culture over the long term, build these relationships, and learn from each other and learn the best way forward so that we can collaborate as best as a community, both incentivizing with our tools and then also just on a personal level, learning to show our respect for people and so forth. Yeah, and growing together, yeah, absolutely. You are improving yourself, you are growing, you are maybe pivoting sometimes, joining the line again, reaching your goals, and maybe more than you have imagined at the base layer. Because now you are collaborating, you are in collaboration mode with a coopetition mindset in a way, not competition, coopetition, but always with the aim at the end to build a collaborative culture, do something greater than yourself, and that's the beauty.

The Subjective Experiment

Interviewer: During this breakout room, yeah, it's very subjective because you are describing what you have made to help to grow the community or you share something, maybe yourself. You think, "Oh, that's a great contribution, I will be leveled five or six," and suddenly you see that no, you were leveled at maybe two or one. At this moment, maybe you think, "Oh, but the others are not seeing what I am doing, they are not paying attention to what I did during this last week or these last weeks."

That's just an experiment because in the room you have five, six people, and we are all expressing, manifesting what we do. We do a manifesto of what we have done. Sometimes you share links, sometimes you share your screen, sometimes you are just speaking, trying to do the best movie experience for the others to understand what you have done. So it's a very subjective process, very subjective.

But the good, I will say the beauty about this process, at the end all is on chain. All is on chain. The voting, the consensus is on chain. We are submitting the consensus on chain with the tool developed by Blood, an interface where we put the room number and then the account names of everyone, and we press a button, and that goes on chain for posterity. All is on chain, you cannot say after, "Aha, I was indeed leveled at five and you were leveled at three." So that's all provable on chain.

That's the technical part and the beauty of the blockchain. But if we leave that for a while, the technology, the blockchain, and all these aspects, there is this fun moment into the room. We are people sharing information and data, and at the end, we are taking our brain to vote. So that's very subjective, very subjective. You can be leveled two or one and indeed you could be able at six also, you deserve, but you were able to. So you have to put your ego a little bit beside and think, "That's just information, that's just data. I am here this week, I will come into two weeks again, I will share something absolutely great and I will advocate that great, and you will be levelled better."

It's all that you said, it's a game, it's a game with a fun component. It's not a game with a competition aspect with a race car. I don't see that like that myself. I see that very a fun moment of your time into your existence. Maybe tomorrow we have other things that come and we will be happy that we have share good moment and at least we have a growth.

The Sports Game Analogy

Dan: That's a link basically, and something that I just felt like was maybe helpful to mention here too because we were talking about the competitive aspect and the collaborative aspect and so forth. You mentioned, you shared some great points about that, so thank you Patrick. The way that I see it, and then I feel like is maybe a helpful analogy to make, is like a sports game. When you're playing football or soccer, depending on where you are in the world and what language you speak or whatever, or tennis or whatever, you're coming together and people are coming together to play a game. Those players are competing, they're aiming to win, they're aiming to score more goals and so forth so that their team gets the win and so forth.

But in a way, everybody's collaborating because everybody's just there to host this great experience. Especially when you go to a big football stadium, people are cheering, you're having a great time and stuff like that, and everyone's having fun playing the game. So it's like we're all collaborating, and in so many more ways, we're collaborating on a much deeper level because we're all sharing how we're collaborating and we're all doing it specifically for the collaborative culture and so forth.

Yeah, I feel like that's a helpful analogy. In addition to that analogy, when you go to a soccer game, it's not like you go to a soccer game and then you play and then the referee blows the whistle and then it's over, everybody just walks home. People are excited because you just played this fun game, you have things to say about it. People are excited because they want to talk about the plans for the next game, how they're going to strategize and so forth, or they want to just go out to the local pub and just talk about it or whatever.

So often, after time, after we have the consensus rounds, we are hyped up bad or fun, we have ideas that popped up or different discussion topics. Yeah, a lot of times people, I'm always there for a while afterwards and a lot of times we'll have discussion for an hour or two afterwards. Interviewer: You know what's the difference with a sport game and the fractally or the hidden fractal meeting? What is the difference, the big difference? When you are the spectators seeing the game, you have a fun moment, whatever the team will win, you have a fun moment. At the end, there are some disappointment of the game for the people that have not been able to win this match, to win this play, tennis or basketball or soccer. They always have a winner and a loser. Here in the hidden fractal and the fractally, there is no one winning, no one is losing. All the people are winning. And more than that, everyone will learn something by participating, everyone will learn something, will grow after that. You grow in a soccer match, when you have lose the match, you have the team that has to lose the match, you are depressed maybe during two weeks. Here in the hidden fractal, no depress, or in the fractally events the same. But to say that, it's because we have experience, we are doing that repeatedly. That's not obvious at the beginning. You say, "Okay, I go into the fractal event meeting and maybe I will be leveled less than someone else. So maybe next week I don't come again because I was not recognized for my effort." But indeed, you have a lot of respect because you can be level one, level two, and indeed it's very an experiment, it's very an experiment. So I would say we cannot just compare with a race car or a soccer match or with a basketball or tennis, because at the end of this game, there are always a winner, a loser. And also for the spectators, they are thundering the match. When the match is finished, you have half of the spectators that are depressed and the others that are just happy. You understand? So even yes, there's no losers at all who participate in fractally or Eden Fractal. In fact, everybody wins. Everybody Is Winning Hertaut: Everybody receives respect, and that respect means a lot. It's also a respect being there, especially now early in the community's growth. People joining and people receiving level one, that's a great deal of respect for me, both on chain. I believe that the community will grow and respect that greatly for participating early. Then just on a personal level, an ephemeral level, I greatly respect and greatly appreciate everybody who's joining. So everybody who's joining Eden Fractal meetings and fractally meetings is winning, but also at the same time, everybody receives respect. But also at the same time, push back a little bit about the sports, because I think that everybody who plays in a sport is winning, because sports are fun and they're an opportunity for us to grow. Sometimes people get disappointed if they don't win or their team doesn't win, but at the end of the day, they still played a fun game together. They still played a sport, they still ran around on the field and they got to kick around the ball and stuff. That's fun. Everybody who plays the sport is winning, even if you don't win the match. It's also an opportunity to grow. When you're younger, you might get really upset and cry after you lose for two weeks or something like that. But then you can realize, as you get older, it's an opportunity. One, you can learn to play better and it can push you to improve and so forth, it can push you to practice more. And two, if you're going into it gracefully and going into it with the mindset to have a fun experience and share an experience, then if you lose the soccer game or a football game one day, it's not that big of a deal because people are still enjoying it. It's like learning how to grow and cooperate gracefully to share a fun experience while you're playing a game. So I totally agree, it's more clear that everybody's winning in Eden Fractal and fractally meetings. Everybody's getting respect and I greatly respect everybody who's participating, greatly appreciate it. But at the same time, sports are also a similar opportunity where even though teams technically lose, everybody's winning because they're playing a fun game together and it's an opportunity to learn how to cooperate better as well. Interviewer: That was my little touch to challenging you here and I love to hear your answer. As always, you put some color into the answer. Yes, there is no true, there is no force, there is no winner, there is no loser. There are just people collaborating, joining, co-peating, co-peating for the better, for the betterment of our ecosystem.

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