Work and the Open Internet

At the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, a popular topic was the “future of work.” As work and life begin to return to a post-pandemic new normal in some regions of the world, it’s top of mind for many again. 

Most of the conversations seem to focus on the where of work. Continue full-time remote? Hybrid? Itching to get back to the office daily?

Those questions are part of the picture, but they miss the more interesting and impactful questions about the very nature of employment that we’ll soon face. As an open source + public goods + crypto enthusiast, focusing on the difference between Zoom vs in-person meetings at the margin seems somewhat trivial compared to creating opportunity for individuals to enjoy true autonomy in their work (and life).

There’s the provocative idea of the “Pseudonymous Economy” advocated by Balaji Srinivasan. Opolis is pioneering with their digital employment collective. Gitcoin has been diligently, successfully building a movement dedicated to funding/building the open web for years (see the Community section below for their latest huge milestone).

At the Geo Web, we’ve successfully been using small, but regular SourceCred distributions to reward open source contributions for a couple months now. We only have bigger plans for permissionless “employment” from here.

Making the transition to full-time sovereign worker currently takes some combination of entrepreneurial spirit, technical ability, and luck. Uncertainty can be difficult, but autonomy and the knock-on benefits that go with it are beautiful. I’m heartened by the progress in lowering the barriers to making the leap. In the end, I firmly believe that the shared abundance created by digital public goods will forever change what “work” is.

On to the updates…

Technical

• Added default storage of content for Geo Web land parcels through Textile Buckets (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/cadastre/pull/40) 
• Added carousel functionality for AR media gallery and other clean up on the Spatial Browser (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/browser/pull/12)
• More new developer and concept docs to help onboard those interested in the Geo Web (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/docs/pull/6) 

Community

• The awesome team over at Gitcoin launched their governance token (GTC) yesterday. It was the talk of my corner of Crypto Twitter because of their execution of the airdrop, onboarding experience, and the governance mechanisms ready at launch. If you’ve previously donated to the Geo Web Grant or completed other actions on the Gitcoin platform, you should have some GRT available to claim. Gitcoin has been instrumental in helping get the Geo Web project off the ground. With their commitment to decentralization and digital public goods, I believe Gitcoin will go down as one of the most impactful platforms/organizations of the next era of the open web.
• Snap announced the next generation of their Spectacles (AR glasses). Spectacles aren’t available or ready for consumer use yet, but are a glimpse into what is coming. Snap should be mentioned along with Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft as the behemoths in the coming AR land grab. Snap doesn’t have the market cap or budget as the others, but is clearly committed to augmented reality. They’re executing at a high level building consumer awareness and a strong developer ecosystem. It’s time for open, public goods AR projects to step up.

On Deck

• We’re in the final stages of Ceramic mainnet onboarding. Once this is complete, we’ll likely reset the testnet land registry to clear out Ceramic links that may have been broken during the development iterations.
• Exploring the best implementation alternatives for Filecoin archive functionality.
• Keep cranking out developer docs.