Thanks for the feedback @grin.
I re-wrote my original reply here to try to better map to the topics you commented on to continue the threads in sync… but as a side note, this is why I’m a fan of more calls to discuss these ideas, otherwise it feels like people just selectively choose what they want to comment on while completely ignoring other topics…
TL;DR
To summarize, I address these points in this comment:
0) My rationale for voting no: I want Savannah to lead the NAP, but i think a little more work could be done to improve the proposal and approach, details below with these guiding questions:
- A) How will we recruit a diverse pool of NAP participants?
- B) How can we use progressive decentralization as a tool to support program/community member engagement?
- C) Beyond the perception of community that Cabin hopes to figure out how to monetize, what impact does Cabin and the NAP aim to create?
I’d love to see these addressed and to have the chance to vote yes on a v2 proposals.
1) Responding to Grin’s Feedback on proposal structure: keep it simple, publish dependent proposals all at once, vs trying to pass them in silos sequentially, while working on proposals extensively in private spaces before sharing them to the public with little room for actual collaboration on them.
2) Responding to Grins Other Feedback: What’s Next? → I want to collaborate, not compete. I know that I have made mistakes around how I communicated feedback after quitting Cabin Labs, but I was deeply hurt by the lack of care shown towards the community I grew to love within Cabin, and would love to see Cabin restored to an inclusive home for everyone, not only one that caters to those in positions of relative privilege and power with the hope of monetizing the community one day as the ever elusive business model is pursued to the detriment of true community building.
3) What topics have I raised that continue to be ignored? Hint hint: diversity, equity, inclusion, decentralization & more
4) I wrap up with a request for a community call the 1st week of December to discuss these topics live. Hope to see folks there, and happy reading in the meantime 
i tried to keep it succinct, but these are quite juicy topics 
0) To address your first point about my rationale for voting:
As I articulated, I fully support @savkruger leading the NAP program. As far as I know, she is still employed by Cabin Labs, which has X left in its treasury to continue funding Savannah’s full-time job leading the program for the near future. In my best-case scenario, Savannah has a chance to update this proposal to address some of the topics I brought up before it passes a round-2 vote, especially to better address these questions:
A) How will we recruit a diverse pool of NAP participants?
Are there any strategies to reach out to marginalized groups? Or is the plan to continue focusing mostly on people with already significant privilege and affluence? I have repeatedly brought this up as a topic of concern with very little shared from Cabin leadership to address these concerns.
During the live NAP proposal call while bringing up these topics, @savkruger interrupted me, asking how it was relevant to her proposal… she seemed almost surprised when I then asked what her plans for fostering diversity within the context of this proposal were. We had a brief conversation the lack of diversity so far and branstormed some ideas (screenshot from the AI notes):
… but that didn’t result in any related updates to the proposal, and my request for follow up conversations on the topic was ignored by @jon, @grin & @savkruger.
Thankfully @Ktando resurfaced the topic in the Discord, with many other folks chimming in to show support for DEI that was great to see. Nonetheless, its disheartening to see a lack of willingness to discuss these issues and gaps from those currently employed by Cabin.
B) How can we use progressive decentralization as a tool to support program/community member engagement?
I would love to see more information shared about of how NAP program participants can go from: (0) Interested applicant > (1) Cohort Member > (2) Mentor > (3) Facilitator.
When I asked about decentralization earlier in this comment thread, this was the response:
Are @savkruger and @Shani the only two people in the Cabin community capable of facilitating mentor group? While I am grateful that such awesome people are leading these efforts so far, I believe that there are many other people who could also support in this role if resourced enough to do so, and that Savannah and Shani have just had the pleasure of meeting through the program and developing a relationship where Savannah now trusts Shani to run her own part of the NAP in Australia. Especially considering Cabin’s “global network city” aspirations, it feels important that we should look to onboard Mentors and Facilitators outside of one time zone and cultural context, so that people coming from different parts of the world can find someone they relate to for support and guidance, collectively leveling up what ever they are working on within the context of neighborhood building. This of course assumes that the goal is to onboard a diverse and global community to the NAP program, something that has not been articulated by @savkruger or the Cabin Labs team, and hence part of why I voted to reject this proposal as is. When I’ve brought this topic up before, the response was largely one of indifference, recognizing that its a gap, without any actions taken to continue the discussions.
While @jon shows pretty graphs of theoretical network/community building approaches like this:
… the true power dynamics at play look something much more like a traditional hierarchical structure:
Here is how @Jon holds the most power within the DAO currently: Jon is part of the original founding team, and is the only active contributor who has been here from the start. He knows most people in the community, and he holds the most tokens of any one individual (maybe even more than VCs? IDK as Jon doesn’t hold all his tokens in one wallet). Jon was the sole Cabin contributor at one point until he hired Grin to work within Cabin Labs. Jon then helped Grin create his own proposal, and continues to guide Grin’s efforts with Cabin Labs’ strategy. Jon hired me to help, and then Jon hired Savannah. I quit after not being onboard with Jon’s pivot for the organization, and Savannah continued on within the scope of Jon’s Cabin Lab’s mandate. No with Jon’s blessing, Savannah is trying to create her own proposal pod. While in theory all of these pods are independent, they are all relying on @jon’s Cabin Labs strategy as he changes the organization’s vision and approach to suit his perspective, and I presume that Jon would only vote for their proposals if he felt their strategy was aligned to what he wants to accomplish. For example, Jon voted against long-time contributor @jxn’s quite popular and iconic podcast, but then later on voted yes for a higher budget marketing proposal with a brand new person he met that was underqualified for the role. When that proposal thankfully failed a DAO vote, Jon hired the guy anyway to Cabin Labs before the guy ghosted the team and stopped working.
Within the NAP, similar hierarchy emerges as Savannah sponsors this proposal as the authoritarian pod leader, allocating an upfront budget to herself ($100K + 4K Cabin) and to Shani (?), with an ambiguous amount leftover that she’ll share at her own discretion with other contributors and Neighborhood Stewards ($20K & 16,500 CABIN - Shani’s compensation). This is a great start, but why not put some thought into some structure to help onboard more facilitators, or at least articulate this as a plan of the next year of the program? For example, @Dahveed’s Ideation Pod proposes a monthly Cadence for distributing CABIN rewards to participants with DAO members voting on the distribution based on updates from people involved. Why shouldn’t a similar approach be taken for distributing the 16,500 CABIN allocated to the NAP? Why hasn’t another approach been taken within Cabin Labs or @grin’s Tech Needs proposal to allocate their CABIN tokens?
To me this seems like a system where Grin, Jon and Savannah have direct control of how they give out CABIN governance tokens without any sense of transparency or community involvement in the process, beyond being able to retroactively see distributions after they happen. Meanwhile for community driven initiatives, like the Ideation Pod and Gatherer’s Guild, are held to much higher standards for how they are expected to allocate Cabin rewards, with many people volunteer significant hours without any fair sense of compensation unless the few people in power decide that they want to reward them for something. Take @Dahveed for example, he’s been volunteering a ton and only has 270 CABIN, shouldn’t he have earned more for all his free labor by now if the powers-at-be were fairly compensating people for their efforts?
Now for some hard truth that I haven’t shared… I have heard first hand from a handful of NAP program participants, that once they were no longer in the program, they felt like Savannah no longer had the time to maintain the same level of interaction as in the past, and therefor their feeling of belonging with Cabin dissipated as the connections tied to the paid accelerator course faded, and with them soon after choosing other things to fill their free time. This may be a hard truth to hear, as I know Savannah meals well and genuinely wants to support everyone she can… but it is un -sustainable and shallow to ask 2 people to effectively connect and maintain deep levels of connection with 100 people, and what happens year-2, 3, 4, or 5 as Cabin Labs marches on towards its arbitrary goal of 500 neighborhoods?
And beyond just nurturing those relationships between the 2-facilitators and 100 neighborhood stewards, how will Savannah and Shani continue to fairly distribute the 16,500 Cabin allocated to 100 neighborhood stewards? I think that before allocating this budget, some sort of a plan, or at least mention of the intent to create a plan would be great. Otherwise we risk more of what Cabin Labs’ has created, ambiguous personal preferences for how Cabin is distributed, without any action towards ways to fairly recognize contributions from community members beyond DAO votes and personal preferences.
I’m further shocked that even though “Decentralization” is in the name of Cabin DAO, action steps towards decentralization are deemed not feasible, not necessary, nor a near-term priority.
In comparison, I believe the peer-and-mentor-support-groups that could emerge from a more intentionally decentralized model would create far more impact, connection and a sense of belonging than the current hierarchical top-down-approach, and I really hope the goals are beyond what @jon has articulated around accumulating a number of neighborhoods to then pursue business model goals:
This brings us to the next topic of IMPACT.
C) Beyond the perception of community that Cabin hopes to figure out how to monetize, what impact does Cabin and the NAP aim to create?
Here’s what the Cabin Labs 2025 Roadmap says:
These words sound great, and @jon even gave us a shout out for 5-acre 20+ person eco-village we live at with intergenerational chosen family from 80+ to <2 years old, not to mention our surrounding neighborhood of resilient community builders, many of whom withstood the test of wild fires raging through Ojai in 2017. However, what Jon doesn’t mention, is the frequency of times which he told me he sees no way for Cabin to monetize off our self-resilient community, and therefore doesn’t things its worth investing any of Cabin’s efforts in our community other than through new business idea proposals I might volunteer to work on, and that he sees more potential in dense urban centers with more people and less connected community. Alas I digress and I could go one, but I wrote a whole post in the Cabin Labs’ 1st year retrospective about @jon’s willingness to abandon community members that he deemed not monetizable already.
So how does this relate to this proposal? I think Savannah is focused on impact, and am in strong support of her leading the program. Here’s what she articulated in this proposal:
and further insight from the NAP 1 & 2 reflections post:
These sound better than the rather superficial “Live Near Friends, It Takes A Village, and Touch Grass” values that @jon wrote as the defining Cabin obvious truths… however, I see a few concerns that I’d love to see address before voting in favor of the proposal.
What does it mean to “DO THE THING”?
Can we be any more detailed here? The phrase “doing the thing” can also sometimes come across as a superficial trope because it often oversimplifies or generalizes an action, event, or decision. This oversimplification can strip the activity of its deeper meaning, nuance, or context, reducing it to a vague, meme-like expression of productivity, trend-following, or goal achievement. Why?
- Lack of Specificity:
“Doing the thing” doesn’t convey what the action truly entails or its significance. It’s an abstract placeholder that glosses over the complexities of effort, thought, or intent involved. - Trend-Driven Association:
It can signal that the action is being performed because it’s popular or expected, not because it aligns with authentic desires or goals. This can create a sense of superficiality, where the act is more about appearances than substance. - Cliché Language:
Overuse of vague phrases like this can make meaningful actions feel trivialized, as if they’re part of a checklist or trend rather than being deeply considered or impactful. - Avoidance of Depth:
The phrase can serve as a way to dodge deeper conversations about the “why” behind the action, making it sound as if the action itself is enough to deserve attention or validation without needing to explore its purpose or implications.
Now to address your follow up point @grin:
I deeply appreciate the passion and effort @savkruger and others have poured into the NAP)over the past year. The early successes in building connections and resilience in diverse neighborhoods across the globe are truly commendable.
However, I have some concerns about the depth and equity of the program’s impact that I feel are important to raise as we plan for the future.
While creating neighborhood identities, block parties, and HOA style networks are valuable, these outcomes feel somewhat superficial when compared to the urgent needs faced by communities grappling with issues like post-disaster recovery, sacrificial industrial zones, food insecurity, income inequality, systemic injustice, gentrification and other things that I’m sure none of us would deem as the “neighborhoods we want to grow up in”.
Cabin’s 2024 budget of >$600K represents a significant allocation of Cabin’s limited resources, and I worry that these resources are being allocated to primarily support affluent people already privileged to live pretty great lives compared to the almost half of US citizens who report living pay check to pay check, without even mentioning the millions if not billions of people in communities around the world who have been disenfranchised by colonial conquest and racial injustice, still lacking access to safe housing, clean water, and consistent food. I’m sorry to rain on yall’s parade… but wouldn’t it be awesome if Cabin with $2.5M in its shared community treasury prioritized deeper community impact in regions that need the help most? To understand more about what’s possible, please google “solidarity economics”:
As a a fun fact, the legally binding Cabin DAO Charter states this: “As a nonprofit unincorporated association, it is not anticipated there will be tax returns or profits.”
So given that, why does the current leadership of Cabin act like the most important focus is business models? This culture that is largely driven by @jon as the sole remaining original founder, who wants to fulfill his vision of building Cabin as a start-up, something he’s been writing about since 2021:
Posts like this were what got me really excited about Cabin early on. It wasn’t until i saw beneath the veil of what really happened: a bunch of people came together to try to build a DAO, while Jon funneled a bunch of money from the DAO into his private property for 2-years via a rental contract, now chalking it all up as a failed experiment after choosing to no longer live there. As he chose to start a family in a more urban area, he decided to pivot the DAO without a vote towards a new vision that suits his next ambitious goals around monetizing family friendly neighborhoods under the guise of equitable community building. I know Jon has good intent, but while he claims the DAO is a community driven project, he has by far experienced the biggest positive impact as his lifestyle has been heavily subsidized by the DAO while he pursues his own personal agenda with less than 5% of eligible votes supporting his decisions.
Back to the NAP Impact that’s been reported so far… to be frank, with few exceptions like the epic work Shani, Shirah and @camlindsay are doing (and were before Cabin), the Celebrating Wins and reflection updates focus primarily on feel-good stories and aesthetically pleasing traditions like neighborhood drinks and meetups. It feels like a far stretch to say that these efforts so far have been truly empowering residents of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to build long-term, equitable community wealth and wellbeing. Granted I’ve only had a limited exposure to the NAP, as the group chats are private, with limited updates shared publicly, so I could be wrong and apologies to anyone who feels i may be downplaying your accomplishments. I value the effort everyone is putting in, but how can we as a community come together to leverage Cabin’s platform to catalyze lasting social impact??
I recognize the power of starting with small, hyper-local experiments. And many of NAP’s core principles around long-term trust building, co-creation, and peer-mentor-relations are sound. But I fear we may be defaulting into a comfortable “building neighborhood community” trope, without grappling with the messy complexities of justice and equity.
My request would be to critically re-examine NAP’s theory of change and impact to consider how we can orient the curriculum, recruitment, and resources to better prioritize social impact alongside neighborly connection. Some ideas:
- Hire someone who isn’t an affluent Caucasian to lead diversity and inclusion efforts, expanding to multiple local reps as the global city grows within different cultural and place-based context
- Proactively recruit diverse stewards from underserved or marginalized communities
- Provide training and resources around equitable development, community land trusts, participatory budgeting, etc.
- Partner with local organizations embedded in frontline communities to amplify and complement existing efforts
- Develop metrics around community assets, power building, and structural change, not just events and engagement
- Explore alternative business models that create community-controlled revenue streams to sustain and scale impact
I say all this not to diminish the amazing work the NAP has achieved so so far, but to encourage us to dream bigger about what an authentically equitable and impactful global network of resilient communities could look like – beyond just the low-hanging fruit of friendly connection.
Summarizing My Voting Rationale
I would love to discuss these reflections further and brainstorm how we can build on NAP’s early momentum while more intentionally maximizing impact for those who have been systematically excluded from community wealth and power. And before I vote yes on this proposal requesting an additional $120K + 20K CABIN in funding, I would love to see it articulate:
- more of a sense of impact goals within this proposal beyond growing to a certain number of neighborhoods in the Cabin City Directory
- a plan to focus on diversity, equity, inclusion and decentralization as key to manifest the true sense of regenerative community building that I believe we are all here to participate in
… especially since these topics are not addressed at all through the other active contributor pods: Cabin Labs’ or the Tech Needs proposals.
My vote against the proposal was to draw attention to these topics that were otherwise deemed not worthwhile addressing at this stage by the authors of the proposal and Cabin leadership. If these topics were addressed in the proposal, even with notes that they would be something in the focus on the scope of the proposal, I would have voted yes, despite all of my critique directed towards @jon’s leadership approach and authoritarian decision making.
(continued in the next comment)