Cormac
November 4, 2024
So far on our HabitatDAO journey we’ve conducted environmental monitoring initiatives at three locations in New York with the aim of helping communities take their environmental future into their own hands. You can read more about this work in our previous blog posts.
In this post, we’re going to take a look back at everything we’ve learned along the way to date and summarize our key reflections & findings. Our goal with this post is to take an honest look at our progress and evaluate how successful we’ve been at achieving the HabitatDAO mission.
Let’s quickly recap the HabitatDAO mission. When we started out, our goal was to bring people together around the collective goal of working together to collect and share data about what was happening in the air they were breathing, the water they were drinking, and anything else in their environment that mattered to them. Our aim was to explore how decentralized, community-driven decision making could underpin a new way for people to get involved in actively caring for the environment. You can read more about our goals and aspirations here.
The plan was that community members would carry out projects that produced real-world environmental findings, and that they would share these hyper-local findings to drive real change in their neighborhoods and beyond. All governance around project decisions would be handled in an equitable, decentralized manner.
Finding the right people was more difficult than we expected. Given the generous support from the Solana Foundation, we had the resources to run a number of compelling environmental monitoring initiatives with cool underlying tech and a novel way to engage people around environmental issues. On the surface, this should have been an easy sell. However, in practice, we quickly learned that the best people to run these initiatives are already extremely busy trying to save the planet and therefore difficult to engage in a tech-centric initiative, even with the promise of the resources we had to offer. Let’s take a step back and unpack this issue.
As we pointed out in our guide to open sourcing HabitatDAO, we recommend starting with established communities who have demonstrated a track record of caring for the environment in your chosen locations. We stand by this because it is indisputable that these people are doing great work already and are the type of people that should be involved in any efforts to expand and further democratize community-led environmental initiatives. Although it was more difficult than we expected, we found some people with impressive track records in grassroots environmental engagement to work with.
Despite the fact that the concept of our DAO and the work that environmental groups do are closely aligned, we found that there was tension between the online, tech-centric collaborative nature of the HabitatDAO initiative and the core work done by the majority of established, community-based environmental groups. This is because their work takes place in the real world, typically away from computers. They are not on Discord; they are planting trees. They are not following Crypto Twitter; they are removing trash from rivers. Even with the best intentions and strong alignment from the start, there’s an inherent tension between doing a tech-first project with people who naturally work in a very offline manner. This reality makes it challenging for a fledgling initiative to get the attention it needs to achieve early success.
A big impetus for starting this initiative is the rate at which related technologies have been evolving and improving in recent years. On the environmental monitoring side, sensors have become significantly cheaper and easier to use thanks to advances in microelectronics, mass production, and open-source tech. Low-cost sensors for air quality and many other environmental factors are now widely available to individuals and community groups. On the decentralized collaboration front, there’s a wealth of supporting tools springing up on top of programmable blockchains like Solana that make it easier to reward contribution, bestow voting rights, and conduct and track governance.
However, despite the increased accessibility, environmental sensors are not exactly plug and play. Setting them up in the first place requires knowledge of electronics, wireless networking, calibration, and so on. Once they are up and running you need to start worrying about data visualization and interpretation, and lots more. The latter aspects i.e., the software side, wasn’t a problem in our case since we were very well-resourced and capable of handling that side of things in collaboration with the grassroots orgs we worked with. Our main issues were simply helping the grassroots groups keep their environmental sensors online and collecting data. Whether it was a relatively complicated issue about how a host WiFi network was configured (the sensors live outdoors so often we’re borrowing internet connectivity from a nearby home or business), or even something simple such as power loss due to drained batteries, there were enough annoying technical issues to impede progress. When a project like this is the top priority for a given group of people, then these types of issues can be dealt with swiftly. However, when the project is not the top priority, these issues can start to pile up and become a nuisance. When issues don’t get resolved swiftly, you start to encounter periods of noticeable environmental data loss, and that starts to erode confidence in the project.
A lot of energy was spent getting to grips with the technology required to produce environmental data that people could collaborate around. This left less energy to dedicate to getting people who are very far from being crypto-native up to speed with DAOs, onchain voting, tokenomics, wallets, and everything in between.
While it is true that the pace of change in the environment is speeding up (global temperatures are increasing more rapidly, and the rate of extreme weather events is increasing in tandem), monitoring environmental conditions is still a relatively slow process. For example, to be able to make credible claims about an environmental factor like air quality and the underlying sources that are impacting it, you need to be able to understand the impact of seasonality i.e., you need to collect data for at least one year, preferably more. This is somewhat at odds with a 1-year grant cycle (which we were operating under), meaning that we were battling some essentially immovable realities to try to make faster progress.
In the space of a year, you can onboard a community and get them excited about the idea of working with emerging technologies and organizing models to monitor and take action on their environment. You can get their sensors deployed and train people to maintain the hardware as general maintenance issues arise. You can collect millions of data points and educate the community to interpret what they are seeing, and learn to compare new data against past data, to annotate unusual events and generally develop expertise in mapping what they are seeing on the screen to what they are experiencing in the real world. However, you cannot, by definition, can’t collect several years worth of data. This means you can’t produce strong conclusions about the effects of seasonality, and so you can’t rally people around findings, conduct robust advocacy campaigns, and ultimately affect significant change in the real world in such a relatively short timespan.
While that may sound somewhat negative and unfortunate, it shouldn’t be perceived as such. We achieved a huge amount in the space of a year, and given the resources to continue, we’re confident that HabitatDAO members could deliver meaningful results to the communities they care about. However, on reflection, we should have been more realistic about what we could achieve within the space of 1 year, and perhaps taken on less ambitious challenges as our starting projects.
All of the challenges outlined above amounted to some pretty strong headwinds as we attempted to engage the early HabitatDAO community in the projects we were undertaking. We had highly engaged, enthusiastic project leads who did an excellent job on their respective projects, but these members were cautious not to rush into evangelizing the projects to their wider community (who were busy doing other other important work IRL) before the data started to produce meaningful results. This was sensible, but it meant that we couldn’t progress with the pure DAO aspects of the project as efficiently as we’d like.
This ties back into the comments earlier about the online and offline nature of the work. Our DAO members are concerned with issues in the real world. Our DAO had no immediately obvious financialization aspect, so members were not incentivized to be online paying attention to a chat server, forum, or similar digital collaboration space. The primary concern of our members is the health of their environment, and what the data was telling us about that. While they were conceptually very interested in shared ownership of the collected data and playing a role in the shared governance of what happens with the data, in practice, this wasn’t as strong a motivating force as gaining greater insight into their environmental concerns.
Challenges aside, we accomplished much together. Here’s a recap of all we achieved:
We are deeply grateful to our generous grant sponsor, The Solana Foundation, for their invaluable support, which is helping us bring this project to life and explore new approaches to environmental engagement that we hope will make a lasting impact.
© 2024 HabitatDAO