Description
Dan’s First Draft
Good points, thank you for sharing. I don’t think that we need to do anything and everything to get more people here right now. The quality of participation matters greatly and we need people to meaningfully contribute in order to achieve our mission. If many people joining at a different event time without contributing much and they earn the same amount of respect as people who are working hard, then it could demotivate those who are working hard, negatively affect our culture, and ultimately be counterproductive towards our mission.
That being said, I agree that having more people participate is essential for our ecosystem and believe that there is potential for multiple meeting times that balances the tradeoffs to be very beneficial, though it will take some experimentation and design work to find the best solutions . I’m grateful that you are doing these kinds of experiments with the ZAO Fractal and
Everyone is welcome to join Eden Fractal community events. If they are not available to meet when Eden Fractal meets, then they can join ZAO Fractal events, which already has a structure in place to allow for people to meet at any time if there are at least four participants.
This provides opportunity to play Respect Games and onboard into the wider fractal ecosystem, while maintaining the conservative approach and connection to the philosophical roots of Eden Fractal. I think that this is well aligned with what we discussed on Thursday, where ZAO Fractal can play a special role in onboarding people to the fractal ecosystem, while Eden Fractal is focused more on the research and development that will help support more participants in the longer term.
I’m planning to organize a more coordinated campaign to increase participation in Eden Fractal after more of the foundations are in place. Right now we have a relatively small group that is very proficient, knowledgable, and capable of achieving the next steps in our mission. This is sufficient for now so long as we can effectively coordinate ourselves. We have everything we need to lay the groundwork and foundation for much more sustainable growth over the long-term.
By the way, I found the project where I’ve been curating tasks and thoughts related to this topic of multiple meeting times. You can see it here if you are interested. I’d be curious to hear any other thoughts about this.
Thoughts?
As I mentioned on Thursday, I think that it makes sense for Eden Fractal to continue with one event time and focus on other priorities
Related notes:
No access
2.3 Terms That Will Actively Resonate
These are words this audience already uses and thinks in. Using them signals that you are inside the conversation rather than arriving at it.
"Mechanism design." This is the single highest-value term you can adopt. It reframes fractal governance from a community practice into a technical discipline. Vitalik's post explicitly names "adversarial governance mechanism design theory" — using that vocabulary is an invitation he just extended.
"Collusion resistance." Extremely strong, and newly salient. It reframes the randomized reshuffling and the non-plutocratic weighting as security properties rather than fairness properties. This is the biggest available upgrade to how Eden Fractal describes itself.
"Coordination problem" / "coordination mechanism." Universal in this field. Better than "governance" as an opener because it names the problem rather than the solution category.
"Legitimacy." Increasingly central in AI governance discourse, and precisely what fractal processes produce that expert panels and corporate boards do not. Vitalik uses it in the specific technical sense of common knowledge, which is worth adopting.
"Capture resistance." Directly names the failure mode everyone in this field worries about.
Zaal and Tadas’ Follow Up Messages
Dan’s follow up message
Thank you Zaal and Tadas for sharing the insightful thoughts about organizing multiple weekly meetings for fractal communities. Your messages inspired me to find and further organize the the project where I’ve been curating resources about this topic and start drafting a response. I haven’t had time to refine the response and share it yet, but you can see the project with related resources and my draft response here if you are interested. l look forward to hearing more of your thoughts and discussing this further when the time is right.