Thanks for taking the time to engage with so many people from the community while putting together these insightful posts @nickinparadise
I resonate with a lot of the questions and concerns you bring up, especially “Who does Cabin exist to serve?”
In @savkruger’ NAP proposal, @jon wrote:
To me, this clearly shows that under Jon’s leadership of Cabin Lab’s strategic guidance, the focus is first and foremost on seeking profitability opportunities from “network scale”, and is in fact not focused on supporting neighborhood stewards or other community members.
This is demonstrated by @jon deciding mid-2024 to
- End the Supper Club program funding for Cabin Citizens, while allocating a $100K budget to hire a marketing lead for the NAP, without a plan for long term engagement beyond the 10 week course
- Removing Outposts from the City Directory to focus solely on curating a network of “neighborhoods”
- Pivot away from the crypto community that rallied around Cabin to enable it to successfully fundraise funds in the first place
- Stopping support for previous initiatives that attracted hundreds of people to Cabin without a DAO vote through the Burn The Ships pivot
While I am a fan of the community building going on within the NAP, the pretenses of community building which the team uses to recruit new paid cohort members are in fact part of a broader scheme to extract value from the community without equitably sharing in the benefits, or fairly valuing community members who show up to particpate (more details in my Cabin Labs retrospective reply and responses on the NAP Accelerator proposal).
How is the current approach extractive?
Simple math, in 2025, 16K CABIN governance tokens were allocated by @savkruger’s NAP proposal to reward 100 Neighborhood Stewards, while 50K CABIN tokens will reward @jon & @grin, when they have yet to even put forward proposals for how they want to work for the DAO next year.
(screenshot from the Cabin Discord #challenges-and-solutions channel)
~$200K has been allocated to two people for 2024 to lead (@savkruger) and market (@Kaela ) the NAP, while $0 has been allocated towards any sort of financial support for neighborhood stewards, with the exception of 5 scholarships offered for the upcoming cohort that starts in Feb. 2025.
(screenshot from the Cabin Discord #general cahnnel)
If the current Cabin team were serious about having Cabin’s first purpose be to support neighborhood stewards in building community, they would choose to allocate more resources towards helping them “do the thing” while also building the greater DAO alongside them, with more opportunities to earn an equitable amount of Cabin governance tokens along the way.
Instead they choose to fund personal salaries while claiming its the best thing for community building and Cabin.
From my perspective, under @jon’s leadership the purpose of the DAO has been to serve those in power who hold the Cabin token to suit their agendas, and it just so happens that he holds and earns the most. I think Jon means well, but the cultural roots of extractive capitalism run deep.
DAOs present an opportunity to create new community centric economic models that foster mutual aid and collective decision making. As Cabin DAO’s voting and community engagement history shows, that has not been the case here.
Even the VCs who funded Cabin’s multi-million dollar treasury have been left out to dry, with most seemingly writing off the investment and shirking their voting responsability, allowing Jon to run the show as he sees fit with only one proposal passing that Jon didn’t support.
For reference, I’ll end with these screenshots to bring back up conversation from the Cabin Discord general chat.
From my perspective, the focus should be on supporting a thriving community while sustaining a treasury that can support the manifestation of the community’s vision, recognizing that mutually beneficial paths forward for investors, contributors, and anyone who wants to be a part of Cabin are possible.
For these resons I am very excited about @nickinparadise’s proposal to establish a Cabin Community Council to help steer the future of Cabin while continuing these discussions with everyone who shows up to participate 