Montanoso 2024
Montanoso social club and taking a more capital-light approach to building Montanoso
Progress on Montanoso as a village has somewhat stalled. It’s hard to convince people to move out to a village without some major draw. Plus there’s no homes and building spec housing is expensive and risky.
Building a small village is still the long-term goal, but we’ll need to shift strategies in the short term to make progress. Any new model must be capital-light and help bootstrap Montanoso as a destination. Over time the perks will accumulate and entice people to live at Montanoso full or part time.
A New Strategy
Montanoso will become a location-oriented social club and benevolent society.
As a social club Montanoso will provide benefits and perks for its members. Membership is centered around shared values and common interests. It will include people interested in crypto, food, regenerative agriculture, architecture, villages, and other things. Members will be able to network with and support each other.
As a benevolent society Montanoso will have a community treasury that can invest in member’s projects and public goods. These investments are expected to be aligned with the community’s values and related to the common interests. Many projects will be related somehow to the physical Montanoso location and its environs.
The Network State
Much of the discourse has revolved around The Network State concept put forward by Balaji about global decentralized societies. While useful for starting the conversation, it’s not necessarily relevant to all crypto societies.
Balaji proposes network states focused on one shared belief. That is too restrictive. Real communities are plural and have many shared and divergent values.
We are not a chat room, in-person relating is essential. Montanoso is focused on bringing people together at the physical Montanoso location outside Austin.
It’s difficult to maintain trust in a global, distributed nation. Instead of trying to align incentives in a disparate community, we’ll form alliances with friendly and aligned communities such as Cabin and Wagon Box. The terms of the alliances will vary by community and depend on the level of trust and type of relationship.
Structure
Montanoso will maintain a community treasury to support its mission and there will be three different roles within the community: members, trustees, and the monarch.
Members are selected to be part of the social club. They are trusted community members and are granted access via a membership NFT. Membership is free and provides access to perks. In order to maintain cohesion, members who violate norms may be banished.
Trustees hold voting rights in the community. Tokens are provided to operators, renters, and supporters. They are entrusted with ensuring the success and continuation of the community. Trustees can vote on governance issues such as values, rules, zoning, and rent discounts. Votes are proportional to their share count.
The monarch is executor, arbiter, and has veto powers. Effective organizations need a strong executive. The Montanoso executive is selected through Liquid Monarchy. The monarch is responsible for running the project on a day to day basis and handling everything not managed through a smart contract.
The community treasure is used to fund public goods and community investment. Montanoso is Georgist: the treasury is funded through donations and land rents rather than membership dues.
Governance
Crypto makes it easy to experiment with governance. These are the initial components of Montanoso’s governance which will grow and evolve over time as Montanoso changes scope and scales. Early governance will be handled by the monarch until these software procedures are written and launched.
Liquid Monarchy
Liquid monarchy determines the ruling monarch. Trustees can self-nominate or delegate their tokens to someone they trust. The member with the most transitive nominations is the monarch.
Quadratic Goods Funding
The community treasury will be dispersed using quadratic goods funding. Funding rounds can be initiated by holders of the social club membership NFT. Anyone can contribute to the round but only holders of the membership NFT will be considered when calculating the treasury match. This is a perk of membership and avoids sybil attacks.
Leasing
Land and space at Montanoso will be available to rent by members of the social club. Rent is continuously streamed to the community treasury through a smart contract. Discounts can be applied to the rent and are determined by the trustees. Trustees allocate their rent discount to leases. Discounts are proportional to the number of tokens allocated and there’s a maximum allowed discount per lease.
Meta-governance
Description of the rules, values, policies, and governance are stored in a git repository. Members can propose changes to the repository which are voted on by the trustees.