In the digital networked age, people’s attention often overlooks local problems in favour of global ones, which don’t necessarily impact them in their daily lives, or over which they don’t have a say due to the skewed Pareto distribution of power in modern day societies. Puja Ohlhaver, in her recent research paper ‘Community currencies’, proposes a dual-currency model that prices attention and influence in each community, with the ultimate goal of creating a Gaussian distribution of power, either locally, or globally through the dynamic interaction of multiple local communities. This model allows community members to stake their currency to earn non-transferable governance rights, creating a substrate for decentralised societal coordination that favours social innovation.

Topics covered in this episode:

Puja’s background
Web3 research
‘Community currencies’
Pareto vs. Gaussian distributions
Global vs. local power distributions
The community currencies model
Meritocracy vs. influence
Quadratic funding
Governance, bribery and the crisis of legitimacy
Experimenting with community currencies

Episode links:

Sponsors:

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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

Puja Ohlhaver: Why Community Currencies Are Crucial for Governance in DeSoc

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