1. Are there additional dependencies outside this proposal for its success?
I’d say that the success of NAP is dependent on 1) solid marketing direction and execution coming from our new marketing teammate, Kaela. 2) @grin continuing to build out the tech infrastructure on the cabin.city website so people can find each others’ neighborhoods, reach out to neighborhood stewards, and for our network at large to self-organize community. Eventually I’d love to integrate more of the steps folks take to build their neighborhoods into the site itself. Grin’s currently working on an exciting project to build out an asynchronous version of the program that anyone can play. He’ll share more on this soon.
2. What does it mean to be an “active” neighborhood in Cabin’s network?
We’re defining an active neighborhood as:
listed on cabin.city
people in the area there feel that they’re part of a “neighborhood” - they have “neighborhood consciousness” (pretty subjective I know, but that’s the case)
A Neighborhood gathering is happening at least 1x / quarter
there’s a relationship w Cabin
there’s at least 1 steward championing the neighborhood + for folks to reach out to to move, visit, etc
How do we continue to engage alumni? The main ways are:
We host a monthly call called “Celebrating Wins” that folks who have gone through NAP or who are curious to take NAP are welcome to attend. This call seeks to achieve 2 functions: 1) An ongoing accountability checkin for alumni. We invite past alumni to share an update on their progress + key lessons learned on the call. Grin has said “I really want to make progress so I have something good to report on the next CW call!” for example. 2) Inspire folks curious to take NAP with the stories and progress of alumni and encourage them to take the program. Many folks who missed the application deadline for NAP2 are chomping at the bit to build in their neighborhoods so this call also serves as a place for them to get a taste of the NAP network and share the progress they’re making pre-program.
Alumni continue to participate in the telegram we created for the program - sharing wins, lessons learned, asking questions, etc.
When we have topic-based mentor calls, I make a point to invite alumni + current NAP participants so alumni can have touch points to deepen their knowledge and re-engage with the program on topics that matter to them.
Many alumni are invited to become mentors and transition to playing a service role in the network (sharing what they’ve learned on calls, in the telegram, and supporting those who come after them)
All in all, I just have a 1:1 conversation with each steward about what they need post-program and find ways to give them that + have somewhat regular checkins every few months. I’m not totally satisfied with the long-term journey alumni are on and it’s actively something we’re working on improving.
3. Are there any examples of “viable revenue opportunities” that are being actively pursued by NAP participants?
A few nascent projects are being explored, but nothing that I’m confident pitching the DAO about yet. Most revenue stream explorations are being done by Grin and Jon + soon Dahveed with his Ideation Pod.
4. What is the plan to decentralize the NAP program?
I don’t have a strong plan laid out to decentralize right now, nor do I need more facilitators right now. We’re still in the early stages. I’m really excited that Kaela (our new marketing teammate) is here to take a chunk of work off of my plate and help me redesign the program to be a lot simpler to run in the future. We hired Shani to facilitate the Australian cohort as you mentioned. I think the $20K budget to bring on support as needed is more than sufficient for now and only want to spend it when it feels necessary. I want to keep things as simple and lean as possible from there.
5. How will progress be shared and opportunity for community input created throughout the year?
I’m still discerning how often I want to update the DAO. My current thinking is that every week I take an hour on a Friday afternoon and do a retrospective with myself on how things are going. It would be as much for me as for updating the DAO. I like the idea of potentially having a discord channel where updates go. But all in all the most important thing for me is to protect my time and energy and spend the majority of my working hours running this program successfully.
6. How will the facilitator & contributor budget be used?
It will be used to pay other facilitators like Shani Graham for co-facilitating alongside me. It will likely also be used to spread some of my work to other folks so I can spend my time on the most important things. I’m at capacity right now as it is.
7. Shouldn’t more ₡ABIN tokens be allocated towards the NAP?
I’m actually planning to increase the amount of CABIN allocated in this proposal. I want to give CABIN to every new neighborhood steward that joins our community at Cabin and is creating a neighborhood. I want to have CABIN set aside for mentors, alumni, and anyone else who helps make NAP a success. And thanks for saying I should get more CABIN for doing this work. I’ll be updating this proposal in the next day or two and leaving a comment explaining my update.
Thanks for these detailed responses @savkruger. The active neighborhood definition is cool too see, and I’m excited for the future of the program. You’ve got my vote
Ok gang, I just made some edits to this proposal and want to call em out and explain each:
I’m breaking out the goal of “creating 75 net new neighborhoods” and the goal of “sustaining 100 total neighborhoods” into two defined goals. I got some feedback that this wording would more explicitly articulate the goals I have. This change is not a decrease in the outcome I’m committing to creating, but a more explicit way of wording it. We currently have 30 neighborhoods listed on the Cabin site with more to be added from the NAP2 cohort. My role involves not only helping many new people create neighborhoods, but also creating the support mechanisms to sustain and retain those neighborhoods. Teasing out the language to reflect “75 net new neighborhoods” starts the clock from the moment this proposal is passed and makes the outcomes that I’m generating with this proposal more measurable.
In response to feedback from @Matai and others, I’m increasing the amount of ₡ABIN I’ll be distributing to the community involved in making NAP happen to 16500 ₡ABIN. That’s a big number so let’s break it down. I’m budgeting the following:
₡12000 to neighborhood stewards
₡2500 to facilitators
₡1500 to mentors
₡500 to additional contributors
TOTAL: 16,500 ₡ABIN
Remember that this is ₡ABIN distributed to a large group of people representing 100 neighborhoods + many more folks contributing to NAP as a whole.
Now, I know it’s not best practice to make changes to proposals so close to posting to snapshot (I’ll be posting today). And yet, given the nature of these two shifts, I feel in integrity moving forward:
Separating the language of “100 total neighborhoods” and “75 net new neighborhoods” is a shift to more precise language without changing the underlying OKRs of the proposal. Nothing about the work I’m doing changes, but my goals are made more explicit to the DAO community.
Adding additional ₡ABIN to be distributed is in response to uncontested requests from members of the DAO.
I’m going to post my proposal to snapshot now. Thanks for all your thoughts, feedback, and support, everybody. Let’s see what happens!
Grin has been working hard to make voting and DAO participation more accessible and created a way to vote on the Cabin site with and without an external crypto wallet. If you have CABIN associated with you cabin profile, you can vote on all proposals without a formal external wallet. Check it out!
This is a new beta shift so if you run into any challenges pls ping @grin so we can improve this flow! You can ofc vote via snapshot and see how others voted here: Snapshot
Overtime we’ll be adding more features to this so it’s a fully fleshed out experience.
In a world where CABIN pursues the NAP, Savannah is the obvious choice to lead and run the program
But should the NAP itself be pursued?
A close analysis of the proposal reveals that it is default dead, a large cost center, and takes resources and energy away from larger potential opportunities
Weighing these together I voted 25% Yes / 75% No on the proposal
Proposal Economics: The ROI is simply not there
On face, this proposal does not make economic sense.
If we take the directly allocated cost ($120,000) and divide by the goal # of net new neighborhoods (75), we find a Neighborhood Acquisition Cost of $1,600. In contrast, the maximum revenue per neighborhood is $400.
So why are we spending $1,600 to acquire $400 of revenue? That is upside down.
It’s worse when you consider that potentially half or fewer of neighborhoods will actually pay that cost due to scholarships.
Net net, even the simplistic direct allocated cost vs. total potential revenue results in a net loss to CABIN of $90,000 ($120,000 proposal cost - $30,000 projected revenue).
If we apply other costs not called out in the proposal, like the allocation of time and energy of the DAO to the program itself, the cost picture becomes far worse.
Looking at the total costs paints a more bleak picture:
Current team is funded through Cabin Labs $400,000 / year
Let’s allocate 50% of this to the NAP to account for % of time, resources, energy spent on the only active revenue workstream
Technical spending is $200,000 / year
Let’s also allocate 50% of this to the NAP to account for the technical needs of the program. eg. certain features and time will be allocated to respond to the user needs of the NAP
NAP directly costs $120,000
Total cost impact to CABIN: $420,000
To break even at this cost, we would need ~1,000 paying neighborhoods in Y1 (at zero marginal cost). There is an argument that in the later years, we could serve much higher numbers of neighborhoods (like 500-10,000) at a lower acquisition cost due to the infrastructure being built now, but I don’t see a ton of evidence or analysis behind that.
Low Business Model Quality
Online info-products have high churn, high acquisition costs, and require an intense investment in 1.) course quality and 2.) marketing. Building these from scratch (since most of the CABIN’s existing user base has not been educated around these offerings nor are the target market) makes little sense given the low upside potential
One-Off Revenue - the fee paid for NAP participants occurs one-time, does not have on-going revenue streams or vetted up-sell / cross-sell opportunities
Risk of Disintermediation - once established, neighborhoods do not have a reason to keep paying fees to CABIN, and only 1 person in the neighborhood needs to pay CABIN for the whole block to receive the benefits, so there are no network effects either
Factors that would change my leaning:
Evidence or data to support a large TAM for neighborhood-building-centric online courses. My back of the napkin market sizing here is puny (sub-$10m market).
A clear plan for ongoing revenue growth beyond the one-time fee
A clearer answer to the fundamental “Why pursue the NAP?” question. Put another way, why do we have conviction that the path forward for CABIN is a $400, one-off online course / info product?
Conviction in the ability to pursue other growth levers that can only be unlocked post-NAP success.
Does having a large batch of post-NAP neighborhoods unlock some kind of real estate development opportunity, referral fee network, or ongoing neighborhood treasury taxes? And if so, how confident are we in our ability to seize these opportunities quickly and cheaply?
Thanks for the analysis and questions, Dan. I don’t think anyone views the neighborhood accelerator itself as the primary business model for Cabin. Ideally it is break even at scale, but I agree with you that an online course is probably not going to return a lot of cash to the treasury over time. That isn’t the goal of the accelerator.
The goal of the accelerator is to grow the network of neighborhoods. It is by far the most successful way we’ve been able to do that so far. Social networks—whether they are traditional web2 platforms like Facebook and Twitter, or network cities like Cabin—require significant scale before they are useful, and typically require scale before they can operate a financially sustainable business model. The accelerator is about helping us achieve that network scale first and foremost.
Cabin’s mission is to build a network city. No one has ever done that before, so no one knows the playbook for growing a global network of neighborhoods or how to build a business model for it. We have been iterating towards answers to these questions. We now have some clarity on a path to grow the network. Now we need to figure out a business model.
I think some of the most compelling options here include partnerships with local municipalities and/or special economic zones, real estate brokerage, and third spaces. We are experimenting with all of these paths, and now that the neighborhood network is growing, I am spending more time on the business model question. If you or anyone else has thoughts or ideas about how we can more effectively, efficiently, and cheaply grow the network and/or how we can experiment with a business model for it, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
When we talk about a neighborhood being a part of Cabin, we’re really just talking about a person who is a part of Cabin, right? Like going to visit Savnnah or Grin’s neighborhood means you’re visiting them, not really access to anyone or anything else in the neighborhood? How should we think about utility for people in Cabin if more neighborhoods are added? What are the benefits for each neighborhood or cabin member which each additional neighborhood that comes onto Cabin? I might have missed where this is articulated elsewhere, if so, my bad, and please point me in the right direction. I wanted to ask this on the call, but it went in other directions and then the call ended.
The best networks start out as “small world” networks—where small, mostly autonomous micro-networks start to form a larger network, initially via a single node in the micro-networks connecting into the larger meta-network. Here’s an example of what that network topology looks like:
This type of network minimizes the distance (measured in edges) between any two nodes. It also creates a leaderful organizational structure, where many leaders can simultaneously have local autonomy and also coordinate effectively. It’s how Cabin contributor pods are organized, and it’s how Cabin neighborhoods are organized.
DAO member David Ehrlichman has a nice graphic showing how impact networks grow over time:
Initially, you need a hub (like the accelerator program) to bring together spokes (neighborhoods) into a small world network. Then, you can start to create denser connections among the neighborhoods, beyond the initial spokes.
In other words: yes, a neighborhood starts with a single individual bootstrapping their local neighborhood network. Our job is to help this person build their local network, and then find ways to weave more local participants into the larger network city. This is what we intend to do with the RPG @grin started writing about here: Cabin RPG
Thanks- helpful context for me, and I imagine others too.
Are there others ideas beyond Cabin RPG that you want to test to see if Cabin is able to weave local participants into the network city? Would be helpful to understand if there any early learnings or conversations you’ve been having in neighborhoods or with Stewards in the NAP.
yes, I think this question will ultimately dovetail with the business model question, in that the business model will likely be a clear touchpoint for more deeply weaving the network. Participatory budgeting with local municipalities, third spaces, real estate referrals, neighborhood treasuries, retroPGF funding…these could all be meaningful ways for people in neighborhoods to participate in ways that touch Cabin more directly.
The way we will navigate these opportunities is by continuing to onboard new neighborhoods and understand their needs for these potential products. Ultimately, a difficult to measure but useful metric @grin suggested that I like is Cabin’s population, defined as people who identify as living in Cabin’s network city.
I will try to write up a longer forum post on all of this soon. If you or others have thoughts and ideas to contribute about this, I’d love to see your own forum posts about them! Ideally some of these ideas can start to form into proposals as well.
I’d love to share more ideas. I think it’s difficult from where I sit to opine too much on NAP because I don’t know what stewards are doing in the program, which makes it challenging to propose ideas on how they can expand beyond themselves in their neighborhoods to bring people into Cabin’s network city. Any additional info to read up on what’s happening in the accelerator more tangibly, maybe even some of the materials would be great.
After reflecting on recent developments and @jon’s comments in the NAP proposal thread where he frames:
I feel compelled to share why I can no longer support this proposal as Cabin’s strategy is focusing on a perception of growth over depth of community engagement and impact.
While I deeply respect @savkruger’s commitment to community building and have seen firsthand the positive impact she’s had, I believe the NAP risks perpetuating extractive business practices under Cabin Labs’ current strategic approach that continues to consolidate power and narrow the scope of what’s possible, and therefore have voted to reject this proposal as is.
I hope that @savkruger can still be empowered to lead the NAP, and that with time some of these concerns can be addressed and a revised proposal put forward alongside @jon & @grin’s upcoming 2025 proposals so that the DAO can evaluate the collective set of efforts.
My primary concerns are:
1. GROWTH IS PRIORITIZED MORE THAN IMPACT
As articulated, the NAP’s success metrics and Cabin Labs’ overall strategy seem to prioritize rapid network growth over meaningful community impact. The focus on “achieving network scale first and foremost” is misaligned with building resilient, values-aligned neighborhoods. The DAO should prioritize the depth of relationships and community health rather than number of neighborhoods.
2. Pods are passing proposals in silos
The DAO is being asked to commit significant funding to the NAP without adequate context on the dependencies and roadmaps of adjacent pods like Cabin Labs and Technical Needs that are crucial to the NAP’s success. Evaluating the NAP in a silo risks over-allocating resources without the necessary supporting infrastructure and contributor capacity.
3. The distribution of resources is hierarchical and not equitable
Even with the updated allocation of 16,500 CABIN for neighborhood stewards and 4,000 CABIN for Savannah, the proposed budget still reflects a concerning imbalance in how the DAO is valuing and compensating different types of labor. Jon and Grin receive >50,000 CABIN per year, while the entire NAP program is only allocated 20,500 CABIN total. The budget should reflect the DAO’s belief in the importance of this work.
4. Lots of $ is being spent with little visible impact
Cabin’s combined weekly burn rate across Cabin Labs, Technical Needs, and the NAP is approximately $11,500. At this pace, over $600,000 per year will be spent without a clear plan for sustainable revenue or meaningful impact. Before committing to such a high burn rate, the DAO should see evidence that these investments are resulting in thriving and highly engaged communities beyond 1-person.
5. Cabin Labs is focused on extractive business models
Cabin Labs’ overall strategy seems overly dependent on extractive business models that position Cabin as a middleman between neighborhoods and existing systems rather than empowering neighborhoods to build regenerative economies. The DAO should be wary of perpetuating power imbalances via centralized value capture.
6. There is little focus on decentralization
There is a lack of clear mechanisms for the NAP to decentralize stewardship, spin out self-sustaining neighborhoods, or equitably distribute power to edges of the network. The DAO should consider how to avoid calcifying power hierarchies in favor of rich mesh networks.
7. Diversity and Inclusion is an afterthought
The NAP proposal and broader Cabin Labs strategy lacks any concrete plan or commitment to fostering diversity, inclusion and deeper opportunities for engagement across neighborhoods. For the NAP to build truly regenerative communities, it must have robust strategies for cultivating participation from a wide range of identities and backgrounds.
8. Local impact should be prioritized
The framing of “Cabin’s population” as a core metric raises concerning parallels to the enclosure of the commons. Historically, state and corporate powers have enclosed shared community resources to extract and concentrate value, displacing residents in the process. By aiming to subsume neighborhoods into a “Cabin network city” identity, we risk replicating this pattern of appropriation rather than empowering neighborhoods to steward their own resources and culture while participating in a broader global network of mutual support and entrepreneurship.
What Next?
I believe the DAO would benefit from critically re-evaluating Cabin’s overall strategic direction before doubling down on an accelerator program that, while well-intentioned, may be operating from an old paradigm playbook. Here are some suggestions for the DAO to co-create an alternative path forward that is fundamentally community-centric, non-extractive, and designed for autonomy:
Allocate more funding to emerging pods and efforts that aim to take a more community centric approach like the Ideation Pod, Gatherer’s Guild to encourage a greater diversity of experiments and more opportunities for collaboration.
Create a compensated working group to collaborate on a strategic plan that concretely defines Cabin’s target operating model, transition plan, and mechanisms for distributing power, rather than siloed and year-long proposals which entrench systems of hierarchy and control.
Launch a process to surface and synthesize perspectives from the wider community on Cabin’s future direction, rather than relying on purely-opt-in engagement on the forum or discord. In the age of LLMs, why doesn’t Cabin have a chat bot?
Refine the DAO’s vision and onboarding process to establish a shared culture that prioritizes diversity, transparency, inclusion, and accountability, serving as a foundation for all pods and community initiatives.
I’m excited about Cabin’s potential, but I believe we need to build with intention towards the future we want, not simply scale what seems to be working in the near term. I look forward to further discussion from the community on how we can realign ourselves with the regenerative culture and systems we originally came together to create
Thanks for laying out your reasoning Matai. This is exactly how good decisions are made. It’s far easier to vote without explaining yourself, so I can tell from your effort here that you care deeply this.
I must admit I’m surprised to see you go 100% Reject. That says to me you see absolutely nothing of value in this proposal. I thought I had some sense of what you valued, but now I’m left wondering what (if any) version of the NAP would you support at all?
A few thoughts:
Impact
Three of your eight concerns mention lack of impact or pursuing growth over impact. I’m really confused by this. @savkruger has done a great job documented the impact the NAP has had:
You can also look at the Celebrating Wins chat, the discord, or ask the NAP participants directly.
If this is not your idea of impact, then what are you looking for?
That said, I do agree with you that focusing solely on growth is a mistake, and I’m sure Savannah does too. We would much rather have a few dozen amazing neighborhoods than hundreds of lackluster ones.
But growth over impact is not what’s going on here. To me it seems clear that the NAP is already having a very positive impact, and it’s now time to offer that to more people. Growth and depth go hand in hand for the NAP. The fact is that we cannot know in advance which neighborhoods will flourish. No matter how hard Savannah tries, she does not have direct control over outcomes — she can only guide and support stewards in their own work. And even with their best intentions, it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes life gets in the way. So to have more thriving neighborhoods, we need more neighborhoods total.
Passing proposals in silos
I share this concern too. Savannah’s work is somewhat intertwined with mine and @jon’s. I sometimes think a single proposal that encapsulates all our work would be a better way of understanding and funding it.
On the other hand, one of your concerns is decentralization and power hierarchies. Cabin Labs already takes up too much of the space in Cabin (relatively speaking). From that perspective, doing multiple individual proposals is better. It creates the norm that not all work is done through Cabin Labs, makes it easier for others to contribute to the DAO, and allows for more dissenting opinions.
Would love to hear your suggestion on what alternate proposal-making structure would best balance these concerns.
What’s next
I love seeing the What’s Next section. It’s easy to reject others’ ideas and much harder to offer a different vision. I firmly believe that the best way to criticize is to propose a concrete alternative. Thanks for taking the time to do that.
This feels like the start of a proposal. But the devil is in the details, and I would love to see your fully fleshed-out version of it. Right now I’m left wondering how this would look in practice. Most of all, I’m curious what metrics you think are most important and how you’d measure impact.
A competing proposal would be a big help to our collective decisionmaking process. Right now Cabin is basically deciding between the Cabin Labs vision or no vision at all, and “A or not A” is the worst way to choose. Picking between “A or B” would help us make a much better decision.
Appreciate seeing this back and forth here. I’d like to note, Grin, that I posted a proposal draft (which Matai mentioned in his post) that outlines an alternate vision for Cabin, one that can still interface with the NAP with its successes. (Maybe this isn’t clear enough in the Gatherer’s Guild Proposal draft?)
I’d love to hear your thoughts. And Jon’s and Savannah’s too.
Love the proposal updates, particularly the fact that you incorporated feedback from the community and increased the ₡ABIN and USDC in the proposal for neighborhood stewards, facilitators, mentors, and contributors.
In particular, I want to call out that the ₡ABIN allocated in this proposal and the plan to distribute it across ~100 neighborhoods means that this proposal alone will distribute ~10x the amount of voting power as all other currently approved token emissions for the next year combined (!)
This is because we use quadratic voting, which means that tokens distributed to new participants or people without much ₡ABIN carries much more relative weight than tokens distributed to people who already have a lot. I am excited that this proposal will have such a strong impact on distributing voting power to a wide range of people who are Doing The Thing and building neighborhoods in their local areas.
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:
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?
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:
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.
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.
1) Back to Grin’s other Feedback: Proposal structure
@grin its quite simple, if there are dependent proposals, the DAO should have the chance to vote on them all at once.
Have you and @jon not yet drafted proposals for 2025, or are you working on them in secret, waiting for this proposal to pass before introducing the next one to vote on? … Why not try to have the interconnected proposals all clearly visible for people to better understand the dependencies and opportunities for collaboration?
2) Grins Other Feedback: What’s Next?
I want to collaborate, competition isn’t productive, and we can do better than the patriarchal and individualistic culture that we’ve been brought up in. We were all on the same team earlier this year, until I quit because @jon decided to abandon existing community members as he felt the need to follow the traditional start-up playbook to just pick one thing to focus on. Almost all of our ETH Denver brainstorming call was recorded for reference, I watched it to jog my memory. During the call, Jon repeatedly asked what we want to build looking forward. He was not concerned with what the community wanted. It was all about what we three wanted to do, and why people would pay us for it. I’m all for @jon to continue his business model experiments while @savkruger leads the NAP, and I’m open to the RPG game ideas, but I think we need ot address the key gaps in culture that I have repeatedly spoken up about.
During the NAP proposal call when I brought up the gaps around diversity and asked to have a all, @grin@jon and @savkruger all remained silent. I understand that these topics may be uncomfortable for yall to discuss, especially when your salaries are involved, but please trust me that we can have this discussions in an open and friendly way as we seek to build not only regenerative, but also restorative systems that foster belonging and impact.
@Ktando & I have both spoken up in the discord this week to try to resume these discussions and were met with silence. I’d really appreciate the chance for a community call to continue these discussions live.
Unfortunately at this point I don’t expect @jon to be open to a call as he continues to hold this perspective:
But I’d love to jump on a call with anyone else interested, and its been heart warming to see past community members chimming in on discord to show their support for more open discussions about “doing the thing” like this
3) What parts of my message did Grin not respond to?
As this thread turns into essays, I just want to summarize my original points from the earlier message @Grin responded to, with ones in bold net yet being addressed: 1. Growth is prioritized more than impact
2. Pods are passing proposals in silos 3. The distribution of resources is hierarchical and not equitable
4. Lots of $ is being spent with little visible impact 5. Cabin Labs is focused on extractive business models 6. There is little focus on decentralization 7. Diversity and Inclusion is an afterthought
8. Local impact should be prioritized
Phew is it hard to keep all this in sync on these posts haha…
4) Lets have more calls
I’d love for us all to jump on an open community call to continue these discussions live, as when i write long passages and am fully or partially ignored on the forum and in Discord, it doesn’t quite feel like the productive discourse that I’ve been encouraged to seek out here
I know these are hard discussion topics for folks not used to grappling with the realities of privilege and power, but I hope we can continue to engage in a productive way.
Some guiding questions I’d suggest as agenda items:
How can Cabin foster diversity within the NAP program and broader community?
Do we agree that Cabin should only support @jon’s definition of “neighborhoods”, or would we be open to more inclusive opportunities for who can be a part of Cabin’s “network city” and city directory?
How can we improve the process so more people can engage to help Cabin “do the thing”, is the NAP the only way? How can we kickstart other community driven initiatives like @Dahveed & @Kat’s Ideation Pod and @eileen’s Gatherer’s Guild?
What is “the thing” we are all trying to do, and how can we talk about it in a way that excites others to join us? (see my above section on impact for a primer)
I’ll follow up with folks in Discord to plan a time for this call.
@jon I’m glad to see the increased CABIN allocation in the NAP proposal based on community feedback. However, I have some concerns about how you’re framing the impact…
Also how much CABIN will you and @grin be requesting in your 2025 proposals? Leaving this out doesn’t show the full picture.
I’m also concerned with the lack of context you choose to acknowledge here. Highlighting the NAP distribution without acknowledging the power dynamic of your role, or Cabin Labs control over the DAO’s public facing communications and website, obscures the real power dynamics at play. We can’t have an honest discussion about governance if we continue to ignore these imbalances.
Few more questions that seem worthwhile addressing:
How will ongoing support and resources be allocated equitably? Selectively focusing on the positive spin sidesteps important questions.
How will the program expand to connect multiple people in a neighborhood to Cabin, beyond the 1-1 relationship that we mostly see now (especially excluding couples)?
How many neighborhoods fit the new definition of active? Is there any effort to track this?
I want to see the NAP and our neighborhood stewards succeed, and I hope we can have more transparent and open conversations about the path forward.
Lastly and as usual, this question was completely ignored but I’ll ask it again for fun: Presuming @jon, @grin and @savkruger are all working full time, why should Jon & Grin continue to earn 5x more Cabin than Savannah, even though she is doing the bulk of the actual community building?
Capital Allocation is how you back up aspirational words, with actual tangible actions.
As Gitcoin’s founder Owoki said: What if we could solve coordination failures with better capital allocation? What if we could create better, more sovereign, collective action?
i tried to keep it succinct, but these are quite juicy topics 
