Adaptive Capacity,

Collective Intelligence,
Global Coordination
and Growth.

You who are reading this, may have joined us in the #takebacktheweb mission, or you may be browsing and searching something you have yet defined, but it is likely that you agree the world is at a critical turning point. With the advent of various technologies, the world is just as likely to become more united as it is to be divided. This creates a challenging future economically, socially, and environmentally.

Since 2018, Ethereum Community Fund (ECF Organisation) has been one of the first grant programs in the space as a cross-network community effort. We are missioned to be flexible, nimble and adaptive to the needs of the decentralisation communities. The grant program from 2018 saw the rise of such support programs all over our community, while we continued to research on better mechanisms to coordinate resources and support on different scales.

However, we have always been aware that there is something much more significant at the end of the road that our efforts and what we are building may be the key to achieving.

It is superficial and lazy to simply say it is about reclaiming what has been taken away by big tech and other institutions, or about privacy issues, freedom, and web3 decentralisation. These are indeed very tangible and immediate issues that we hope to address along the way. First Principles hold great significance in guiding the work, but they do not hold the power to explain everything and are not universally applicable laws. The work being done is more complex and goes beyond just technology, it addresses broader societal problems.

That’s why in the dawn of communication, we choose to begin with the source of light that guides our path forward.

Adaptive Capacity

Adaptive capacity refers to the ability of a system or organism to adjust to changing circumstances, such as environmental or social changes, by modifying its behavior or structure. The concept was introduced by E.P. Odum and colleagues in their seminal work on ecosystem ecology, where they discussed the importance of adaptive capacity for the resilience and sustainability of ecosystems.

It is no coincidence that enormous traction has picked up and accelerated since the existence of Bitcoin and its underlying technology, blockchain. The blockchain technology, with its decentralised and distributed systems, has addressed the core issue of trust in coordination. Meanwhile, the solutions our web3 communities have worked on an attempt to alleviate, transform, and revolutionise the concerns outlined in various papers regarding technologies and operations for the future:

1— Information
The free flow of communication and ideas, especially between and across different levels.

2— Knowledge
Higher levels of education in a society, as well as the availability of outlets for those who have educations to further their individual and societal well-being; (verified, applicable information).

3— Diversity
The presence and tolerance of novelty and diversity; the strength, variety, and overlap of human institutions.

4— Trust
Achieved through the existence of trust in society; lowering the cost of trust boosts association, coordination, and organisation’s performance, through web3 technologies such as decentralised and distributed systems with built-in consensus, immutable blockchains, and provable signatures, etc.

Principles

To empower, to enable, to build. We need to live by these principles in our own association and in the product and services we build with these principles.

1— Neutrality
The technologies the platform will be built with are indifferent to who is using it; the platform itself needs to work the best to ensure access by all users.

2— Permission-less global access
The platform itself should be indifferent to user groups; rather, the work should be at building frameworks to acknowledge different interactions and allow the community to decide collectively which ones are more valuable. (For aside of the above reasons, also, access to communicate information and to form knowledge to be exchanged and built upon)

3— Decentralisation (i.e DSaaS)
Resilience in the structure of the products being built, which naturally means eventual decentralisation on all levels of the product and its governance i.e. removal of central operator.

4— Continuity
The project can be continued and utilised and it should not dependent on any group or organisation.

5— Transparency
To earn legitimacy from community (i.e full-time team, community, contributing users).

6— Privacy
Integrating with clients of various types to accommodate users’ choices of privacy and anonymity preferences.

7— Merit-Based
An identity-irrelevant system that only factors in the actions and contributions of any given person.

(More in details: “Neutrality as Principle”)

Our Immediate Plan

We want to, and we need to be one of the answers to important problems- simply, fairly, and imperfectly.

ECF.network is initiated by Ethereum Community Fund as one of the extensions to fulfil its mission. It is a product (or a few products down the road) that will, with credible neutrality, become an aggregator of all necessary web3 components, serving as an interface to the solutions offered by the blockchain and web3 communities. While these solutions may seem too faraway, we are entitled to dream. As John Updike put, “Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”

We are launching the new platform of ECF.network as a community-curated and governed knowledge base of our collective book of history and a manual for finding and building accountable and impactful web3 projects and projects leveraging web3 technologies. It aims to be a necessary application of set of social mechanisms for legitimacy to assist decision-making in governance and coordination.

In the short-term
We will promote the usage of true decentralised applications in the space that improve people’s well-being, address real-world issues, and protect the participants in the community.

In the mid-term
We will coordinate resources around worthy, legitimate, and impactful causes, filtering out repeated inventions and malicious attempts in the name of innovation.

In the long-term
We will preserve the diversity of ideas that is necessary for humanity’s adaptive capacity, with an enhanced ability to coordinate among individuals across borders to more efficiently tackle challenges globally.

Some poetry before the end…

A Worker Reads History

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

— Bertolt Brecht

We hope there won’t be undiscovered talent and unacknowledged contributions. The ECF.network platform is the step we are taking to get closer to that.

Stay Tuned

Product launch and mechanism here.
Twitter here.