Over the past few weeks, a group of independent online creators have been living at a cabin retreat outside of Austin, TX and asking ourselves:
What could our community do with a year of time and space to create?
We want to bring more people out to the cabins to help answer the question, so we're starting a creator residency program.
It's an experiment in universal creator income, tech stacks for decentralized cities, and the physical manifestation of DAOs.
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CROWDFUND
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This is a crowdfund for one year of cumulative time living and building at Creator Cabins in the Texas Hill Country. We're situated on 28 acres of land about 45 minutes from downtown Austin, and we just built a new cabin designed as a collaborative co-living and working space for independent online creators. Our cabins are the first nodes in what we hope will one day be a decentralized city:
The land & cabins are our hardware. Now we're starting to experiment with on-chain governance software. We will set up CabinDAO to manage this crowdfund. All contributors will be awarded $CABIN tokens, which can be used to vote for creator residency proposals. While the DAO will ultimately govern the use of the funds, here's a rough sketch of how we are thinking about structuring the program:
CabinDAO
We want to crowdfund 12 months' worth of time at the cabins. This would allow $CABIN holders to vote and fund 12 creators to come for a one-month stay each. The new cabin has four bedrooms, so we would run three cohorts of four creators each.
The DAO will set up an open application process, perhaps similar to $WRITE RACE). Winners will be invited to Creator Cabins outside of Austin, TX to work on their projects——or ride the waves of synchronicity & decide to collaborate.
At the end of the month, we will help each creator mint an NFT representing their work at the residency. Our intention is for the CabinDAO community (IRL in Texas, and globally on Discord) to help creators best use emergent web3 patterns to collaborate and share their work.
While the first use-case for this DAO is creator residencies, we hope to learn from this experiment and continue to find ways to sustainably fund independent online creators and develop DAO-based governance models for physical spaces. CabinDAO community adds a node to an interdependent network of the new Creator Economy. The edges of CabinDAO are permeable and open to all forms of contribution. We're especially excited about mutually beneficial web3 native collaborations with other DAOs working toward similar visions.
This project came together over the course of a two-week stay at Creator Cabins by members of creator.coop. We didn't go into our stay intending to make this——the plan emerged from two weeks of co-working, co-living, and co-creating at the cabins.
Everyone came into their time at the cabins with projects they wanted to finish, but late-night conversations around the fire got us all inspired to think about opening the space up to the whole community, regardless of financial means. We hope the residency program can help inspire more collaborative, community-oriented projects like this one.
FAQs
How do I contribute?
Using Mirror's widget embedded in this post, you can send ETH to CabinDAO's crowdfund. All contributors will be awarded $CABIN tokens and invited to our Discord community to begin putting together the plan to fund residencies. Contributions are capped at 1 ETH to maximize participation and ensure balanced governance.
Who is eligible for a residency?
Anyone creating independently and sharing their work online. We take a broad view of the term “creator”: digital artists, musicians, landscape sculptors, video producers, indie hackers, home builders, painters, photographers, podcasters, open-source developers, map makers, online course builders. If you’re building something that you hope to share back with the world, then you probably fit the bill. We expect projects that help push the boundaries of web3 and/or contribute to the ongoing sustainability of the DAO will be more likely to win, but that will be up to $CABIN holders to decide.
How do I apply for a residency?
Once the crowdfund is complete, the DAO will run an open process for selecting applicants. If you're interested in being notified about that process, opt-in here.
How will the money be spent?
All money raised by the DAO will be used to fund residencies at Creator Cabins. We are budgeting 1/3rd of an ETH per creator-week, so 16 ETH can fund 3 cohorts (12 creators for 4 weeks each the cabins).
How will the DAO sustain itself?
At the end of each residency, we will help creators mint an NFT representing their work. The NFTs could be held and curated by the CabinDAO treasury or sold back to the community with a split of the proceeds going to the artist and the DAO.
We hope this structure can help produce value for the community and creator residents while contributing to the long-term sustainability of this model. This is a patronage project designed to provide the gift of time and space to our community. Contributors to the DAO should not expect any financial return.
What happens with the other 50% of $CABIN?
CabinDAO will retain 50% of $CABIN tokens to give to artists upon completion of their residencies, collaborators, other communally beneficial DAOs, future supporters of the residency program, and whoever else CabinDAO decides to grant them to.
Is this co-ownership in the cabins?
No. CabinDAO is a separate entity, managing the endowment of our creative residency program. This is our first experiment with web3 governance, and we hope to use the lessons from this project to progressively decentralize other aspects of this project in the future.
Why IRL?
This project never would have happened without the open-ended space to explore and collaborate IRL. It emerged from late-night conversations at the cabin where we are hosting this residency.
After a year of pandemic, we had forgotten some of the magical energy of open-ended living and working with other people. You don't need to schedule a Zoom call with an agenda and a hard stop after 30 minutes. As you're drinking your morning coffee, you can end up down a rabbit hole, swapping book recommendations, productivity tools, and podcast episodes. The result: great conversations, deepened friendships, and exciting new ideas.
Acknowledgements
We're deeply grateful for the thoughts, ideas, support, feedback, encouragement, and advice we've received from the community over the past few weeks.
Thanks to @patrickxrivera, @thattallguy, XXX, for talking through the initial idea and helping set up the right structure for this project.
Thanks to @p_millerd and @kadlac for being the first people to contribute funds when this was still just an idea.
Thanks to @brianwlackey for the beautiful photography in this post.