A Permissionless & Programmatic Economy

We often look to the early development of the World Wide Web for inspiration and lessons that can be applied to the Geo Web. After all, our project name is quite literal. We’re trying to build the open “web” for the geographic/spatial world. 

One of the biggest takeaways from the evolution of the WWW is the power of being permissionless. There were “walled garden” approaches and rivals to the open architecture that had significant investment and early advantages afforded by integration and control. But, the open web won out by tapping into the creativity and energy of the whole world rather than limiting creation to a closed group or corporation.

Permissionlessness turned out not simply to be a protocol/product decision, but one that changed the world economy. The WWW is the force it is today because anyone can use it to make a living—to be rewarded for the value they create without a gatekeeper. 

The link between value contributed and received on the web isn’t explicit though. Eliminating friction & opacity between contribution/reward is one of the most exciting opportunities afforded by blockchain and Web3. At the Geo Web, we believe programmatic money will supercharge the Internet’s permissionless economy.

So as we build out the Geo Web, we hope there’s plenty of value created on the Geo Web that isn’t initially accounted for in the network’s protocols and governance (that’s a sign of healthy growth and innovation). But our North Star for the usage of SALSA funds will be to continually create better, permissionless, and programmatic ways for builders, creatives, and users to be rewarded for the value that they add to the network. 

Our initial ideas to create a permissionless, programmatic Geo Web economy include integrating SourceCred for core protocol contributions, “sales commissions” for onboarding new land owners, and content royalties for popular Geo Web anchored content/applications. If we pull it off, we think the Geo Web can embody the promise of the Web3 economy. We hope you’ll join us on the journey.

On to the updates...

Technical

• Added a Help tab with answers to FAQs to the Cadastre to improve the initial user experience.
• Pushed fixes for display fields (transaction subtotal, expiration date) for parcels in Auction mode. 

Community

• We created a Geo Web Discord server to start building our community. If you’re like me, you’ve joined a bunch of other Discord servers of your favorite projects, but it’s overwhelming to keep up with them all. With our small crew, the Geo Web channels won’t be too intimidating/overwhelming for quite a while, so now is the perfect time to join us!
• ETHDenver 2021 is a virtual conference and hackathon being held February 5 to 12th. Cody and I met at ETHDenver 2020, so we highly recommend that you apply for this year’s iteration! Even though things might not quite be the same as getting together in-person for a weekend, there’s going to be great opportunities to learn, meet people, and BUIDL. We’re brainstorming different BUIDL-a-thon ideas, but are leaning toward permissionless & programmatic SALSA fee distribution based on SourceCred (see intro above) or experimenting with some other DAO/governance infrastructure. If you're interested in joining our team or have other ideas, hit us up on Disord!

On Deck

• Design & architecture of our initial content linking scheme