Welcome

Eden Fractal believes that all communities and organizations should have the tools and methods to make the best possible decision-making. Fair, fast, and fun!

Our vision wasn’t always so clear. This vision emerged over the course of eighteen months of collaborative discussions, consensus building, and experimenting with fractal decision-making process.

This page provides an overview of why the Eden Fractal community created this vision and how we pioneered collective imagination along the way. You can explore the videos, show notes, and related posts below and join our weekly events to help achieve our bold vision!

Table of Contents

• Welcome
• Eden Fractal’s Vision
• Background
• Videos
• EF 38: Vision, Mission, and Agreement
• EF 77: Fractal Future
• EF 78: Collective Vision
• EF 79: Team Visionary
• EF 80: Upvote Game
• EF 81: Visionary Voyage
• Vision Games
• Recent Updates
• EF 38: Vision, Mission, and Agreement
• History
• Developing a Mission and Vision
• Why is a mission important?
• Why is a vision important?
• What is the relationship between a mission and vision?
• Eric’s Thoughts
• Clarifying the Mission and Vision
• How specific should the mission be?
• “The vision is destination and the mission is what you to do get there”
• How and why does the mission inspire newcomers?
• How would the world be different if we achieve our mission?
• Why most mission statements are worthless
• Topic Proposals
• A Broad Mission Statement
• Alternative Mission Statements
• Avoiding Decision Paralysis
• Timeline
• Values, Goals, and Visions
• T38: What is Our Vision?
• Relationship Between our Mission and Vision
• Visions and Suggestions
• Mutually Benefitting from Misaligned Goals
• Natural Alignment
• Emergent Missions
• Mutually Benefitting from Misaligned Goals
• What do you think?
• Related Posts
• Eden’s Mission
• Games

Eden Fractal’s Vision

Eden Fractal believes that all communities and organizations should have the tools and methods to make the best possible decision-making fair, fast, and fun.

Background

The Eden Fractal community collaborated to create it’s vision in six meetings and formed consensus on our vision in our 81st meeting. We were faced with an interesting challenge in collective coordination. How can a community of people with different visions define their shared vision?

You can watch the video of each meeting, see the new games, and explore show notes below to learn more about our vision.

Videos

We discussed and created our vision in the following 6 videos:

EF 38: Vision, Mission, and Agreement

What do you see in the future of Eden? We discuss our vision, mission, and a proposal to add a participant agreement to the community account! 🤓 🤝🏽

You can see the show notes and explore this related article to learn about the early formation of Eden Fractal’s vision.

EF 77: Fractal Future

How can communities establish a common vision? We debut a new type of Respect Game with a concise format to chart the course of Eden Fractal and enable communities to see together 👁️👁️

Week 77 Notes

EF 78: Collective Vision

How can organizations imagine? In our 18 month anniversary, brilliant visionaries play an idea respect game and choose to maximize productivity with efficient decision-making 👀 💫

Week 78 Notes

EF 79: Team Visionary

Who can benefit from Eden Fractal’s playful innovations? We pioneer an Idea Upvote game to refine our vision and enhance decision-making for all communities and organizations 🔮

Week 79 Notes

EF 80: Upvote Game

How can games optimize decision-making? In the 5th discussion about our vision, we experiment with a new governance game to upvote ideas with community consensus 🤓

Week 80 Notes

EF 81: Visionary Voyage

How can communities see together? We debut a new game called Vision Quest and form a consensus to enable the best possible decision-making fair, fast, and fun 🤝🏽 🎉

Vision Discussion Database

Vision Games

After a game-changing discussion in our 76th meeting, we decided to experiment with new types of consensus games. Between meeting 77 and 81, we invented and played three new kinds of games to determine our vision:

Vision Respect Game

Idea Upvote Game

Vision Quest

Recent Updates

The Eden community discussed our vision while playing cagendas in the 38th weekly meeting. You can watch Dan share a presentation about our vision at 1:15:33 and hear thoughtful insights from community members in the following half hour. The full show notes are available in the link below and select timestamps are curated below.

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! 🤝🏽

Related timestamps:

1:15:33 Dan shares consortium screen, topic with most votes is what is vision of Eden Fractal? 'Agenda has 2 proposals for mission, one from Dan, one from Patrick. Encourages everyone to make proposal. Dan answers Noam’s question that respect points for voting are non exhaustible.Dan goes into the topic that he proposed , what is the vision of eden fractal. Spent time this week listening over previous meeting, inspired by Eric’s statement of vision. Curated some of what Eric said and James mart article. Shares screen about article that he wrote on mission and vision, dan sees how the vision can interact with the mission. Reads out bullet points of article, how the vision plays a huge part in the mission. Goes into more details about the article. Interested to hear what everyone thinks

1:23:23 Eric comments about key parts of the vision, when it’s easily understandable. The other thing it should be clear who your helping and solving. Mission is what do we need to do to get there. Curse of knowledge probably biggest danger, we assume people get it because we get it

1:26:17 Perry has his response to the vision, speaks on his interpretation of eos constitution. Thinks pieces are coming together. Chris Barnes is taking initiative to take on arbitration and Joshua Seymour us taking the idea of tying together communities. Also sees this here at Eden fractal, Lennie , Dan , Patrick all coming together as three states. Sees Judicial branch in dgov, Legislative branch in power of policy with what Joshua’s is creating and see it here an opportunity to create an estate of the press. Suggests we become the group that promotes and facilitates for the press. Pushing for Dnews to make simple step, connection between decision making body and media. How would it work, gives his ideas.

1:34:26 Dan jumps in , reminds everyone about telegram chat , move on to hear others comments on vision

1:35:29 Douglas gives his definition of vision, one vision is an idealized version of the world. Mission becomes what you hope to do to accomplish, then foundation which are core beliefs. What is the world we want to create, what is the common desire. How can we make it one sentence where it’s communicable

1:37:49 Eric thinks what Douglas said is right on, what to we have to do to get as far as we can to getting there. Doesn’t see the problem to solve that Perry has mentioned

1:39:08 Perry and Eric discuss Perry’s idea the problem need solving, is to keep a check on power. Eric thinks it needs to be more specific to this community

1:40:38 Dan reads out comments from chats. Vision idea can help inspire each other. Moving on to next topic , the Eden fractal participant agreement.

History

Developing a Mission and Vision

For the past few months the Eden Fractal community has been in the process of defining our community mission. We’ve been curating discussions, ideas, and proposals about this in a draft article at EdenCreators.com/mission. In week 37, several community members mentioned the priority of a mission again.

This week I had a conversation with Vlad about the mission of Eden Fractal. We published the conversation and many other exciting topics in a video called Discussing Eden Fractal Stuff. We spoke about a more general mission statement, which is included below. After our meeting, I started re-listening to Eden Fractal meetings #29 and #30 to gain a better sense o each community member’s thoughts about our mission. While listening to meeting #29, I was very inspired by Eric’s thoughts about visions and missions. I was also very inspired by everyone else’s thoughts, but particularly inspired by Eric’s suggestions to clarify the vision statement. I also re-read James Mart’s excellent article, Mutually Benefitting from Misaligned Goals.

This page intends to summarize ideas about our vision and mission, then inspire discussion amongst community members to create the most helpful mission and visions for the community. More will be added here soon…

Why is a mission important?

It's also important to note that the mission is also the objective of the game as well. Whenever we are voting level one through six or electing a delegate or making proposals, all of these decisions are guided by the mission. Specifically the ranking of one through six each week, the mission provides a sort of measuring stick by which to measure the contributions to the community and the communities mission….

Why is a vision important?

Everyone can benefit by aligning around and inspiring each other exciting visions for the community….

What is the relationship between a mission and vision?

The vision is destination and the mission is what you to do get there.

Eric’s Thoughts

CAC: To paraphrase Eric from Eden Fractal 29, a vision statement describes what impact the organization wants to have and to whom it is directed. While a mission statement describes how the group intends to make that impact happen.

Clarifying the Mission and Vision

Meeting 29: 1:20:28

I love vision and mission statements. For those that don't know, I did a lot of business consulting. It always gives me great pleasure when people get excited about how we've been able to work on visions and missions, but I think there are two parts that need to be clear. The first is why. The vision says what impact do we want to have to who and what's missing: what role do we provide to do that? The mission talks about how you're going to do it, For example, Apple’s is very simple. It says: we challenge the status quo in order to allow you to be personally creative. How do we do that? With elegantly designed devices. So that is the mission: we make eligible elegantly designed devices in order to achieve the vision. So I think it should be clear of the why: who do we want to impact and what role do we play? Then the other part is: oh here's what we do in order to make that happen. So that's my feedback- making those two items clear.

How specific should the mission be?

Meeting 29: 2:00:46

When I teach mission and vision statements in my business classes and marketing classes, what we sometimes do is get another person or we imagine a new person sitting there and we give them the mission and vision statements. Either we really do it or imagine it. Does that person know what to do if your mission is ‘we empower business owners’? We go: okay bring somebody in and say oh you now work for us. We empower business owners. Do you know what to do? So how specific is it? Does it give them enough guidance that they would actually have a fairly clear idea what they could do? But not so specific that it tries to tell them exactly what to do? So that that's the model we use for specificity. If you brought a new person in there gave it to them, would they be able to do something at least along the right path?

Patrick makes emphatic, inspired, and quite funny reactions while Eric is speaking, then responds:

Beautiful! That's the collective results of repetitive brainstorming session that led us to come to the to the mission and the vision and the values. You need some other people this destroying your thought and to reconstruct and come to something beautiful so that's what we do into the brainstorming session…

“Since no statement can perfectly crystalize a mission, a community mission statement will attract people who have similar, but not identical visions. A mission statement that is overly broad is likely to attract people whose contributions reflect widely divergent goals. For example, consider a mission to simply, “protect human rights.” Such a broad vision could attract both those working to protect “the right to life” for the unborn, and those working to protect “the right to bodily autonomy” for pregnant women. The contributions of these diverse sub-goals would detract from each other. On the other hand, an esoteric mission statement is likely to only attract a small number of people, and the community will miss out on contributions that would otherwise realize mutual benefit.”

-James Mart, Mutually Benefitting from Misaligned Goals

“The vision is destination and the mission is what you to do get there”

Meeting 29: 2:11:35

There's always this big confusion of what is a vision and what is a mission. One way to look at it as a vision is the destination: here's where we want to end up. And a mission: some people may think of as here's what we need to do or here's what we're doing to get there. But how do you do it? It's a good idea to separate what we mean by mission and vision because they're not the same thing.

How and why does the mission inspire newcomers?

Eric:

I love mission statements. It's one of my favorite things: mission statements and branding. I always look at this as what it's trying to do. One: it's trying to attract people. So if I am a new person that doesn't know anything, what is the cause? Why do we want to do that? Why is it important? Why we why are we doing this? What difference are we trying to make in the world? It's not defined. Okay so let's say I just love Eden and EOS and I'm in there and so it says our mission is to foster collaboration and build personal connect connections... Love it! So how do I do that? What do you want me to do? Am I calling people up by phone? Am I telegramming them? It doesn't tell me what to do. If I'm new it just says go collaborate and build personal connections. Well okay… So I would say we need to add the ‘why’ in there. We're trying to make this change in the world by doing this and we should talk a little more clear on how we foster collaboration and build relationships.

Meeting 30: 1:22:04

How would the world be different if we achieve our mission?

Meeting 30: 1:49:53

Eric

I think the mission statement is valuable. It's good. But to me the thing that most does the most is: let's say we foster perfect collaboration and perfect connections… everything is great. What happens if we do that? How's the world different? What happens? I think we should mention what we're trying to do with that, so to me that's the first part. If we did this perfectly, how would the world be different?

Dan:

One of the things I like about Vlad’s proposal is that it's focused on the short term and with this process we can change our mission pretty often. Going back to what Gavriel was saying as well… currently the status quo is that we don't have a mission and when people ask us the mission we're like ‘oh well if this is as that and we kind of make up something. So we all have an idea in our heads but we don't have something set. I appreciate that desire to have a long-term mission and I think that we all do in different ways and it can be very helpful to define that,

Eric

Ok but let's make it short term short term. Perfect collaboration today. What we do today: we made the world a little better. What happens? What are we trying to do even in the short term? I don't think it's a short term long term issue, it's just saying you do things because an outcome. I mean let's say we had a social group and our group is to party. Okay… why? Is it to help singles connect with each other? Is it for people to get fun alternatives to life? Is it to help people explore different venues in San Diego? Why are we partying? If our goal is just to party… so for collaborating and building relationships… why are we doing that? I don't think this is hard, I'm not looking for a huge paragraph…

Gavriel:

I think Vlad had it in the three points..

Eric

Bring short-term value: I don't know what that means. What do you mean by value? Bear market is long, the more we stick together the higher the probability of survival. Okay survive what? I mean I like this, it’s good. It's not me saying it's a bad job. I'm extremely happy with this. But having done these things over and over again…. I'm happy with saying put it out there as it is and like Gavriel talked about improving it as it goes… but I think the first improvement is to say why are we doing this.

Why most mission statements are worthless

Meeting 30: 1:53:42

So where where is this coming from… those who know me know that I dig a lot deeper. There's a lot of stuff under there that I'm trying to simplify.

So if you go do lots of research you'll find that in volunteer organizations like ours… we're volunteers… the core things when you attract people… people are attracted to two things: cause and brand. How am I making the world better? So if you want more volunteers to perform more in any organization, it's I'm here because I'm attracted to the cause. I’m attracted to the change. I'm attracted to the problem we're solving. I'm attracted to the that

The second thing is the brand. Well, why you? Let's say I was attracted to this idea of making blockchain better. Why this organization? And that is when you go into some of the things that I think Vlad is very well articulating and that is why? Because this organization is this…

So it doesn't have to be 10 paragraphs, it can be sometimes it's a it's a word. I'm just saying we should think about that in there because it has a big impact on not only attracting people but it has a big impact in helping people understand what to do. Most mission statements and values are worthless because you tell somebody and they don't do anything differently. They say ok that sounds good and then it doesn't impact behavior. So to impact behavior it needs to say here's why this is important and give you some idea with what to do. Without telling you exactly what to do- that's bad because then why do you need somebody's talents? It says, where do I direct my talents? So that's the second part. So I think the why or who are we trying to help in what outcome and the question in doing that is well why it doesn't exist already? Is something too hard? Is it to unreachable? Is it unclear? Why isn't what we're trying to do already happening? Why do they need us?

That's an example of what we're trying to do. Organizations exist to solve a problem. And so what is the problem we're solving? EOS exists right? Why do they need us? You know, it exists whether we're here or not. And for me it's not just about EOS: it's how do we make governance better throughout the world? So why do they need us at all? That’s the real question. This isn't a negative thing. This is saying how do we take the great work that Vlad did and make it even better?

Gavriel: So Eric, was that to amend it to include to improve governance around the world? Would that satisfy your objection?

Eric: Sure. And I'm pretty open because I'm more here for the people here, so it's more importantly that we can agree on something. Like you said Gavriel we can change next week, but I think when you start writing things down and start making you clear of oh yeah this is why we're here so improved governance in the world or the prove government sufficiencies within whatever it is I think it's a great start what you're talking about is exactly what I'm talking about are those the words we want to use those are good words

Topic Proposals

A Broad Mission Statement

Vlad and i spoke about more general Mission statement on Discussing Eden Fractal Stuff. You can see the thoughts about why to broaden the mission statement in the show notes. The one that I suggested and that I'm planning to propose for is to promote collaboration, create public goods, and empower communities.

We had a great discussion about why a more general mission statement can be more attractive and helpful overall, and make it easier for people to align around a common vision like how James Mart wrote about immediately benefiting from misaligned goals.

“A mission statement that is overly broad is likely to attract people whose contributions reflect widely divergent goals. For example, consider a mission to simply, “protect human rights.” Such a broad vision could attract both those working to protect “the right to life” for the unborn, and those working to protect “the right to bodily autonomy” for pregnant women. The contributions of these diverse sub-goals would detract from each other.”

This is one of the reasons why I like including fostering collaboration, creating public goods, and empowering communities. It provides more specificity and direction during Eden+Fractal games than simply fostering collaboration, helping people cooperate, or making the best experiences possible.

Alternative Mission Statements

Vlad also suggested just focusing on a shorter statement for simply fostering collaboration. After the call, I also wrote several different variations with different phrases like helping communities cooperate, and making the best experience as possible. Patrick also just made a proposal…

Eden Fractal’s mission is to help people cooperate

That satisfied vlad’s desire for more simplicity

I like both versions

Perhaps one can be mission and one can be vision? idk just propose both as mission

Avoiding Decision Paralysis

One of the things that Vlad brought up during the call is that we should avoid decision paralysis. This is a great point. It's better to align around our common direction more effectively by choosing an imperfect mission statement, rather than trying to choose the perfect mission statement without making a decision. Then we can always change it in the coming weeks.

So I plan to keep it simple and propose what I posed during the discussion with Vlad. I've also share some of the other ideas in this article and would be open to approving alternate proposals with different focuses and welcome anybody else who wants to propose something differently. For now, I am planning to keep it simple and propose the mission to promote collaboration, create public goods, and empower communities.

Timeline

The podcast was just released 10 hours ago so i want to give every one time to listen and consider this idea of a broader mission statement. I was planning to wait until next week to propose but Patrick just made a mission proposal though so i’ll make one now too.

Values, Goals, and Visions

In writing ideas for the vision, I wonder if it may make sense to organize some of these bullet points into different categories. For example, is there a difference between a goal and a vision? Would it be helpful for the community to express opinions about things that we value?

T38: What is Our Vision?

Relationship Between our Mission and Vision

I’ve been thinking that we should use a broad, simple, and exciting mission statement that everyone can align with and rally around. In doing so, I’ve been listening to other community members and exploring many different potential focuses of the mission. In many cases, I think that these focuses can be offloaded from the mission and included in the community’s vision.

The mission should be broad, simple, and inspiring for many people. The vision can be larger and include more specifics. It can touch upon many themes.

Visions and Suggestions

Here is an early draft of some ideas that we may want to consider including in our mission. Please note that this is not currently refined into any particular order and may be greatly changed in the coming week.

• Helping people cooperate

• Making the best experiences possible

• Inspiring and empowering millions of communities to cooperate for all kinds of helpful purposes

• Providing independence, enabling everyone to do what they love and recieve the respect they deserve
• Enable communities to bond and cooperate in never before
• Solving meta crisises
• Overcoming coordination failures and multi-polar traps
• overcome moloch

• Help everyone in the world navigate an increasingly challenging future as the world faces an unprecedented period of exponential change and tumultuous circumstance

• Reducing existential risk
• In particular, coordinating for safe and enjoyable see experiences with emergent exponential technologies such as:
• artificial intelligence,
• biotechnology,
• solar flares,
• robotics,
• nuclear power fission.
• nano technology
• quantum computers
• For example, inspiring and empowering communities of artificial intelligence researchers and engineers to do it and provide oh hey pro social future with artificial intelligence whereby humanity makes the best experience possible. With alignment with the artificial intelligence and educating and then viewing the growth of the artificial intelligence with wisdom and kindness and prosocial values for all

• 1+1=3

• create inspiring videos, innovative tools, and fun experiences

• create amazing stories

• amplify beauty, foster laughter

• promote entrepreneurial, curious, and self reliant spirit

• preventing corruption and capture

• decentralizing social media and communication channels

• fractal democracy and cooperation

• Improve governance around the world

• helping web3

Mutually Benefitting from Misaligned Goals

“No visionary has a fully comprehensive description for what they think the future should look like, as there’s always some ambiguity in their goals. They also may not know the optimal set of steps to realize that vision. But if one wants to maximize the probability that one’s goals are realized, one ought to organize their efforts alongside other like-minded individuals.”

Natural Alignment

….the contributions of others toward their own personal missions can and should, to an extent, still be considered valuable contributions to one’s own goal.

Emergent Missions

Consensus on the mission in a fractal emerges from repeated rounds of reaching consensus on various contributions made in service of individual interests that ostensibly align with a shared goal. Just as each individual consensus round is an imperfect measurement of the value of each contribution, so too the total set of all measurements cannot be considered to converge on an accurate measurement of a single metric. Rather, many measurements establish an approximation correlated with the average opinion of the community, even as goals and membership change over time.

Ultimately, regardless of a mission statement, the mission accomplished by a community is the collective result of the community individuals pursuing their own missions. Therefore, even while the community mission statement doesn’t change, the actual mission itself is constantly shifting based on the current membership and their perspectives at a given moment in time. It is to be expected, therefore, that one should find oneself in the company of others whose goals are directionally misaligned with one’s own. Perhaps counterintuitively, the contributions of others toward their own personal missions can and should, to an extent, still be considered valuable contributions to one’s own goal.

Mutually Benefitting from Misaligned Goals

An excellent article from James Mart about how personal missions can align with community missions.

What do you think?

I’d like to hear what community members envision for the future of Eden Fractal. We’ve heard many inspiring thoughts about this throughout past meetings, but we’ve never focused specifically on the vision for a long period of time…

Thoughts?

Related Posts

Eden’s Mission

The Eden community is in the process of reaching consensus to define its mission. This article curates discussions and proposals related to Eden’s Mission during weekly fractal meetings.

Games

An introduction to some of our favorite games and a philosophical exploration of how games can create profound benefits for all!