In Is Cabin a business or a government?, I shared a possible set of steps to build from Clubs → Neighborhoods:
I also found myself re-reading this excellent primer from @priya at Fractal: How to Live Near Your Friends - by Priya - offscript
So, I have an open question for anyone interested in turning the area where they live into a Cabin neighborhood:
What type of support would you like to see from Cabin to turn your current neighborhood into a Cabin neighborhood?
I wish we could just skip to step seven! It’s very hard to connect with people. I put up an IRL meetup ad six months or more ago and got zero responses. Old cabin use to be an exciting place. Lots of action on Discord with voting/proposals, meetings. Lots of traffic coming and going. Then it died 
. Not sure what happened?
You can skip to step 7 — it’s what we’re doing at Neighborhood Zero. It’s just much harder that way. For many people, getting started building a neighborhood within/on top of an existing physical environment with infrastructure and people already living there is a lot more feasible.
Where do you want to host a meetup? Maybe we can try again now that we have better systems in place for Supper Clubs vs. 6 months ago (Supper Club Guide). We’ve seen hundreds of people getting together in dozens of places around the world over the past few months.
Many online communities, including Cabin, saw a huge surge of traffic during late 2021 and early 2022 during the height of the bull market. Most of those communities have died over the past year, but we are still alive and well. Our rate of voting/proposals recently has been high, as you can see in Snapshot. And we’ve activated this forum, which has seen great engagement over the past few months, to continue building the momentum. Cabin is a community that changes, grows, and evolves over time. Totally understand if it’s not the right fit for you anymore, but we will keep building for those who are excited to co-create with us.
While online and onchain communities in general have been facing headwinds over the past year, I feel incredibly optimistic about Cabin’s future and the growing network city/state ecosystem. Particularly since our leading talk at the Network State Conference, we have seen a significant uptick in inbound interest and excitement about Cabin. I think 2024 is going to be a big year for the network city/state movement, and we are leading the way.
Thanks for the new Supper Club information.
Super excited about what’s being shared here and would love to discuss with others too.
Here are some rough starting thoughts that come to mind to answer your question as someone who is building a fractal-type neighborhood here in Boulder and would love to explore how Cabin could play a role:
Send Aligned People
Cabin could serve as the “bat call”/start of the funnel for values-aligned people to join neighborhoods. I’m hosting a supper club soon and 5 people that I don’t know at all have signed up on the Luma. It’s so cool to me that Cabin’s digital marketing and community-building efforts are funneling potentially values-aligned folks into a dinner party at my apartment that kicks off the 7-step process you’ve outlined. If a prospect came to an event at a neighborhood and got to meet the people they could live next to, it feels like a lot warmer of a sell to me.
Peer-Learning Neighborhood Guild
Given there’s already a budding group of people like me who want to organize neighborhoods in the Cabin Universe, I would love to create a guild/learning group that meets regularly to share approaches + learnings as well as workshop challenges together. I have so much respect for everyone here so being able to experiment and build alongside each other sounds really supportive and momentum-building. I’m taking my own notes on what’s working and what’s not with the neighborhood I’m building and would love to share with folks.
As time goes on I could see more and more people wanting to start neighborhoods and Cabin could position itself as a network that supports neighborhood building of this sort. Having a guild someone could join, learning from others’ case studies, the ability to go check out other existing neighborhoods and get inspired, could be really valuable to prospective citizens.
Financial Support
Similarly to how supper clubs are subsidized by Cabin, there could be a way to financially support the work of building these neighborhoods. I wonder about the different points in time when money needed to flow for something like Fractal to exist.
(Edit: I’ve removed an assumption I made about Phil’s financial involvement w Fractal. He didn’t have any financial involvement in Fractal — they were self-funded in that the paid their own rent and grew organically. Thanks for the clarification @prigoose!)
Additionally, we could create a proposal that feels economically viable for Cabin wherein neighborhood builders are paid to run their local experiment and are rewarded when new Cabin citizens join as a result of their efforts (many different ways to shape this, want to see what works best).
I also like Matai’s idea of Cabin financially supporting clubs in proportion to the number of cabin members involved in said club. I could see a similar dynamic w citizens in a Cabin Neighborhood. X members = $Y to support the neighborhood. Money could be spent on various things:
I think there’s a lot to be experimented with and figured out here (and I’m really looking forward to all of it).
Questions I Want to Explore Together
How can this be a mutually beneficial endeavor? I want to explore what sort of symbiotic relationships between Cabin and these neighborhoods could exist. Something where there’s enough freedom for the neighborhood and their existence supports Cabin’s financial goals and deeper mission. I think starting to gather the neighborhood guild could support answering this question and meeting regularly could help us experiment and shift when needed.
How might the Cabin Membership Offering shift with the advent of neighborhoods? I don’t know the answer to this question without a fair bit of speculation. This feels like something that can only be figured out by running experiments and talking to people. I’d love to run a customer listening campaign to engage and hear from a few different groups:
What is valuable to the people in these different groups? What will they actually say yes to and become citizens if offered? That will inform what shifts might occur to align membership with this budding direction for our larger community.
Thanks for reading and excited to hear y’all’s thoughts!
Savannah
PS: This presentation by Pryia and Phil provides some great distinctions between the different shapes that could come together to create these Cabin neighborhoods we’re imagining. Super valuable resource for anyone interested in learning more if you’re not familiar.
I fully resonate here. It’s what brought me to Cabin in the first place. I’m in the mountains in Transylvania and have tried to organise events like a cooking workshop with a local
coworking but this didn’t go anywhere. I think we should attract the people who believe in the foundations of Cabin towards the neighbourhoods where we can start doing local things ourselves. Surely at some point locals will engage as well. I believe the real power of Cabin is to bring likeminded souls together in the neighbourhoods. I have a hosting role available and offer really affordable rates at Cobana as this is a project I believe in and not something to generate cash. I believe we are on a point that we need to reinvent what society really means, what democracy really means. This requires exchanging knowledge and organising debates that can take place in neighbourhoods. We should empower the local so neighbourhoods can exist independently while uniting global citizens through slow travel with remote working. This ultimately brings global knowledge to the local which is in my mind the answer to all our troubles.
Loving these discussions and am excited to help support next steps!
I realize that a lot of the points below are things to discuss and explore on a longer time frame, so wanted to focus in on an approach for launching local clubs as a more immediate next step to prioritize alongside @savkruger’s awesome idea for the the Peer-Learning Neighborhood Guild, ahead of other more exploratory recommendations discussed below.
I recently shared this introductory post about my background for anyone curious is learning about me and how I got involved in Cabin. tl;dr, been a community member for 1+ years deep in the web3 coliving space, and recently join Cabin as a full time contributor on the Cabin Labs pod .
As an attempted summary that builds on the replies above while diving into some other areas, I think we can:
Develop a shared an understanding of current state to better explore how we can sustainably foster more community engagement. To dive into details here I’ve posted separate threads to share more about my background via a personal introduction, and my perspective on Cabin’s current state in the forum.
Reinforce the Gatherers Guild to support IRL and Online activations. We have upcoming Cabin Community Events on the calendar, but how can we help more meaningful connections and experiences occur? I dive into some ideas to help and have started DAO proposal drafts that we can evolve to support Supper and Local Clubs.
Launch the Peer-Learning Neighborhood Guild @savkruger introduces so well in her post above. Here’s a Telegram group chat we can invite interested folks to as we plan next steps as a start. Will also include an invite into this weeks newsletter.
Empower the Creators Guild to create more content relevant to Cabin’s story by highlight efforts from across the network. From my perception, so many awesome people are doing cool things across the network, yet content is only shared / featured from a small percentage. How can we encourage more story telling around individual and collective projects to educate, inspire and connect with others?
Explore how to financially support these efforts, working to seed projects within Cabin Labs as an incubator, with DAO proposals for separate $USDC funding and/or ₡abin governance token requests, and by exploring ways to diversify Cabin’s incoming revenue streams to avoid relying solely on membership growth to drive financials.
Set up dedicated community calls to discuss next steps live while building off discussions in the forum and elsewhere. We could start with weekly calls, aligning on the agenda and supporting other breakout meetings as needed. Proposing we meet next Wednesday Feb 7th at 12pm PST as a starter.
More detailed responses that tie into the above #s follow.
This part was quite lengthy so I wrote about my background here and a perspective on Cabin’s current state here. In summary I pose the following questions and proposed recommendations:
More details on ways to activate follow.
Current Cabin Community Events consist of:
I think we could improve the experiences with other contributors helping to coordinate and execute these events. Right now it feels like I am taking the lead across all of these categories, but its been hard for me to focus on details of gatherings beyond ETH Denver, while having other events on the runway, along with most other Communications, Social Media, and Community Engagement projects on my plate.
I would love to think about how we could establish a Gatherers Guild to share more of the responsibilities, along with support planning for launching:
A. Supper Clubs as its own funded proposal as its runway within Cabin Labs is limited by the overall budget. I plan to work on a proposal that:
B. Local Clubs first as a seed project with Cabin Labs to continue helping people explore:
As we refine the program within Cabin Labs we’ll explore what additional DAO proposal(s) would help further establish the program, prioritizing first working with local community leaders to co-design the program from the ground up.
In essence we’ve already started this process by having discussions with Supper Club hosts about how they could evolve into more areas of community collaboration
I am eager to support all of what @savkruger outlined in her awesome reply above, so will try to avoid restating those areas to explore, and am happy to help:
Some random thoughts for consideration related to how people interact with places across our network city:
A. In the real world outside of Cabin lore, I think Neighborhoods can be multi-property community spaces with varying levels of privacy and access across them. As we evolve the app and lore, I’d suggest we accommodate Neighborhoods defining themselves at the meta level (e.g. Neighborhood wide Code of Conduct), while also being able to create unique directory listings for any given property. In database relational terms: One neighborhood can have multiple City Directory listings. I currently live at one property 20minutes away from another, but our communities share space weekly. We’d love to list ourselves as one neighborhood with 2 unique properties and more to come if all goes well.
B. I think we should be more transparent in our communications around what access to City Directory listings that Citizens get. Some people have assumed that members access to stay at listings is included with membership. We should be explicit that each listing can establish its own visitation and overnight policies, and that what Citizens get is access to communicate with caretakers for the properties.
C. I think we need to expand the 7-nights free Citizen benefit to allow Citizens to choose their participating home Neighborhood. Currently Citizens get 7-nights free at Neighborhood Zero outside of Austin, TX a year, but this perk is not easily accessible to a global audience. Negotiating access and figuring out the logistics to accommodate Citizens having 7-nights free at their participating home Neighborhood from the Cabin City directory would be awesome. Cabin could choose to allocate part of that members subscription fee to support the home neighborhood, helping the neighborhood cover expenses for they stay and improve the property overtime. That being said, if a Neighborhood says their expenses for 7-nights free are > $420, Cabin is now operating at a loss for the member… that leads well into my next point.
D. I think we should to do more to support people living and staying at Cabin City Directory listings, both caretakers and residents. I’ve seen some awesome handbooks created for some neighborhoods, but not all have them, and I’m not sure to what extent they are used beyond initial onboarding. Tangible support is manifest with the example of helping to find a Gatherer for Integrating Cobana in the Cabin network, but what else can we do, and how should we prioritize it amongst the backlog of other roadmap and newly proposed initiatives?
Look forward to diving into these discussions more.
In 1996, Bill Gates predicted the emergence of the Creator Economy in his article “Content is King”. While I’d prefer a less patriarchal framing, say maybe “Content is the Key” 
… content today is the driving force behind most consumer behavior, influencing what we spend our time doing and how we spend our resources. While tons of new content modalities have emerged, a lot of it boils down to the importance of storytelling, opportunities for education, and moments of entertainment.
Without content that shares what the Cabin experience is like, we would rely on word of mouth and first hand experiences at gatherings to introduce new people to our communities way of being. Part of my job over the past 3-months has been to lead sharing content across Cabin’s socials, and its been challenging to effectively:
Supper Clubs have been our most effective way of sharing more about life amongst our network city, but group pics and testimonials from hosts and participants only go so far.
@jxn’s Campfire Podcast trailers have been some of our best performing content, offering more in depth dives into ways people are imagining new ways of living, but there is still a gap in sharing what the actual Cabin experience is like, and how people can tap in to co-create the community spaces online and IRL that we want to frequent.
To address this I’d propose we explore establishing a Creators Guild that focuses on encouraging and empowering content creators across the network to help better share the multitude of stories that compose the Cabin experience.
Well Cabin already is, through:
… but is there an appetite to do more? I think clearly so, and luckily we have Cabin labs to help incubate ideas, the DAO proposal process to fund initiatives, and an amazing community of people who are eager to get engaged.
And while more funding sounds great, we don’t have access to an infinite well… so what can we do about that? I think we should diversify Cabin’s revenue channels. The current goal is for Cabin to be self-sustaining from a yearly membership model. Given the reach, diversity of backgrounds and creativity our audience, I think Cabin can explore other revenue streams that will help meet its basic operating needs to put less pressure on membership growth requirements. Some of those ideas include:
Woah, that felt like a lot to write down, and I’m sure there’s more to cover and things to revise. Would love to hear what other people think. Please share your thoughts in the comments.
and lets jump on a call next Wednesday Feb. 7th at 12pm PST for anyone who’s interested in talking more about these points (click here to add it to your calendar). If interested folks can’t make that time, we can adjust and/or set up additional sessions.
Onwards 
That’s awesome Matai, would love to engage and discuss this agenda. Just one request, as some of us are in Europe; any chance to make it 10 or 11 PST?
Also, as I am not working this month so would be available to travel and participate in a Cabin project somewhere in the network.
Thank you for these thorough, organized thoughts, @Matai. Really excited to explore all of this with you and others.
Current State of Cabin: I read through your perspective on Cabin’s current state and really appreciated the context it provided. My thoughts are on that post there.
Gatherers Guild: I’m hearing your ask for help with gathering/community stewardship and am 100% down to get involved in the Gatherers Guild and take things off of your plate (where it feels good to you) – especially as we consider building out these new ideas and proposals. I’d love to discuss what areas of work you thrive in, where your genius comes to play, and where you need support so I and others can mobilize with you.
Yes to all your thoughts on Supper Clubs and Local Clubs. As we build our Local Clubs, I’d love to integrate some optional customer listening into the design. I’d love to see hosts asking attendees what they’re excited to build, what support they would want from Cabin, thoughts about membership, etc. Those hosts then take some simple notes and share them out to the Gatherers Guild so we can have rich feedback loops with the extended community. (Obviously wouldn’t want this to be the entire event or make it overly formal – just an optional lightly facilitated layer that could be woven into the intentions of the host and the group.)
Peer-Learning Neighborhood Guild: I’m obviously stoked about this. Thank you for making the telegram and being willing to support this happening w calls and tools. Excited to sync w you on this more.
A: 
B:
C: I’ve wondered about this too. I could see each listing having a cap on how many free nights they’re willing to offer a month for it to still make financial sense. I could also see outposts offering x days free when someone makes a booking for y days.
D:
Content + Creators Guild: Makes total sense. I’ll make a point to take video and photos at the Boulder Supper Clubs, write down any key moments worth bringing into storytelling efforts.
Financially Supporting All This: Lots of good ideas.
Dedicated Community Calls: Loved our call today and excited to attend more. My biggest desire for these is to build out the roadmap (I know Jon’s on this in a big way) to vet and then include your and other’s ideas so we have a sense of where to put energy first. I’m such a yes to all of this, but want to put it all in an order of tasks so we can make it happen.
Hi Savannah!
Phil actually helped out with a co-living house I started in San Francisco a few years ago. For Fractal in Brooklyn, we’ve never taken funding (although we might eventually). In part that’s because we wanted to create a model that anyone could use themselves, and didn’t want money to be a barrier.
Fractal began when we signed a 3 bedroom apartment with a friend of ours. We would have had to do this anyways because we needed a place to live. After that, friends signed leases in our building. They also would have needed to pay rent anyways, they could have just paid it in a different building or neighborhood. So in that sense our startup costs were zero. The main costs were that Andrew and I were on a self-funded sabbatical, so we had a lot of free time to experiment with community!
That said, I do think these projects would pop up more often if Cabin had a model to pay people for their work, because it can be a lot of work.
Priya
EDIT - and not just pay people for their work, but all the ideas you listed would be great too. Having a guest room that’s bookable by citizens but maybe underwritten by Cabin in some way. Or paying for food - I’m reminded of OneTable, which funds Shabbat dinners: About OneTable | Shabbat - A Way to Better Fridays. Or funding the startup costs of a third space. Overall great ideas
Thanks for the clarity! I’ll go find where I spoke to that and edit it for other peoples’ better understanding. (Done)
I’m really excited to see you in this forum. We are seeking to build off of the beauty that you and Andrew and so many others have created. I feel so deeply inspired by the possibility of creating something similar to Fractal. Thank you for the years and the hard times and the continued experiments you put into Fractal because it’s now more possible for me and my friends and this network to create ourselves.
I watched your conversation on Youtube (https://youtu.be/-suuZQkbJjo?si=Dhsdp9YVyBFWp_vd). Very interesting!
Lots of thoughts, but most top of mind for me is:
I liked Matai’s idea of Cabin being a fiscal sponsor. Fractal has thought about pursuing fiscal sponsorship several times, and I think we really should for legal reasons and to be able to qualify for grants we’ve applied for (but haven’t heard back from; if we do we will definitely incorporate in some way).
The main reason we haven’t is that none of the fiscal sponsors seem like they are “for us.” We don’t really relate to any of them. The two main ones we’ve considered are:
Having started a startup before, I just really really don’t want to deal with taxes or bureaucracy, especially for a community project that will always have a very lean “staff” and doesn’t look like a traditional organization. Our friend Daniel used a fiscal sponsor for Maximum New York and has had a great experience with them. I think I’d be happy to pay a percent of our income (Hack Club charges 7%) if I trusted that all that stuff would be handled. Currently we operate in a legal gray area I think…there’s definitely some money exchanged via Venmo but we’re just a group of friends paying friends. This gets more complicated as we take on bigger projects and more money is exchanged.
Anyways, that’s just us and I don’t know what the wider need for that would be or how that would fit into Cabin’s goals. But as someone running a similar model to what y’all are trying to experiment with, this is the #1 thing I’d be willing to pay for.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I’m in the midst of applying for a number of small grants through the City of Boulder and the Boulder chapter of the Community Foundation. These grants can be given o me as an individual w/o a nonprofit, but if Cabin as an unincorporated nonprofit could enable funding to come in from institutions who support the kind of public goods work we’re doing locally that would be amazing. Gitcoin comes to mind as well as a public goods funding source.
Then I start to think about larger grants from more national foundations that we could apply to if we pitched being a network of neighborhoods…
Thanks for this idea!
I also thought of One Table when first hearing about Supper Club )). Collabed with them a lot back in Philly.
So many great ideas!
Right away, I’m down for Creators Guild.
Also, thinking of the bigger question of how Cabin can support its neighborhoods more (which is already a lot), I can see Supper Club as a relatively easy first step, but the rest are harder because of not just the costs but the logistics of finding and putting under contract various spaces.
With Cabin being a network that will only grow, maybe there is a way to use both the expertise of individual members and the collective power of the community to help with things like leases, forming non-profits, designing spaces and activities in a way that doesn’t cause problems with the neighbors (unless this is a guerrilla tactic to get empty apartments for your friends ;)), etc.
Btw, the fact that Cabin exists and is spreading awareness of itself is super helpful. I couldn’t help but to tell a friend today about Cabin because of the local neighborhood building she is doing. Cabin is encouraging. It’s an example of what can be. A reminder that no neighborhood builder is alone.