Gardens are secure digital economies run by the community members that make them valuable 🌻

Welcome to Gardens: let’s plant the seeds for the public economy

**Our new home for Gardens:  <https://gardens.1hive.org>**

Go ahead, put your farming experience to work, take a shovel and plant the seeds of the public economy.

Today we are introducing the Gardens platform, the economic engine for common goods to flourish. Each Garden gives its community powerful tools to experiment at the edges, create currency policies, allocate shared resources, and make decisions bottom-up. Everything while keeping the system [credibly neutral](https://nakamoto.com/credible-neutrality/), accountable, and [self-improving](https://forum.1hive.org/t/together-we-thrive/1278).

Important actions in the Garden are bound to the community’s mission, values, and rules. And they’re protected by a [dispute resolution protocol](https://forum.1hive.org/t/celeste-a-brief-primer/1483) in case bad actors want to abuse the system.

We are long into the [network effects](https://aragon.org/blog/thoughts-on-governance-and-network-effects-f40fda3e3f98) that the Gardens platform will provide for its communities. Even at this early stage, we started [seeing examples](https://forum.1hive.org/t/1m-in-shared-liquidity-for-bright-hny-on-honeyswap-split-between-1hive-and-bright-dao/4763) of [DAO2DAO collaboration](https://medium.com/primedao/exploring-dao2dao-collaboration-mechanisms-c37218a17a21) between Gardens, creating more resilient communities.

We released with support on xDai, Polygon, and Rinkeby (for testing). With plans to include Arbitrum or Optimism soon. You can access the platform at [gardens.1hive.org](https://gardens.1hive.org).


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## Why Use Gardens

![ 🟢](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/ldLRHEFnVU5vJ227yiZym.png?height=345&width=2160)

DAOs are a leap forward in human coordination progress. They resemble communities more than companies, and when digital communities have capital, it turns out they’re quite powerful.

The governance structures of early DAOs however don’t always take advantage of this. Influence in most DAOs unintentionally (or intentionally) gravitates to a select group of people that control its direction. For the Average Joe, their influence is limited to their number of votes.

Gardens however allow Average Joe in a community to *actually do stuff*, while still protecting the community from abuse. This “bottom-up” governance comes with efficiency costs, but for many DAOs the benefits are huge.

## Who Should Use Gardens

![ 🔸 💚 🔸](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/Ys-dPM0Hyt3-_NQo5J5LK.png?height=345&width=2160)

Centralized power is completely fine for many organizations. Even in the cryptocurrency space. If leadership is capable and benchmarks for success are clear (like users and revenue), centralized organizations are probably better than decentralized ones.

Many other organizations are better off with bottom-up governance, like:

1. **Those concerned about security and longevity.** Communities at risk of governments deciding they don’t like them, or communities that want to outlive their team of leaders.
2. **Organizations with passionate members.** Those intrinsically motivated to make that community better. This can be done by a centralized organization or company too, by dedicating a portion of their treasury to a Garden.
3. **Communities that build public goods**, where the value a community creates is subjective to those who share its wealth. In a pre-DAO world, these communities are charities, clubs, government agencies, activists, religions, or a neighbor who takes time out of her day to clean broken glass off the sidewalk.

## How To Create A Garden

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e2YKwzDPwE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e2YKwzDPwE)

### Common Pool

Each Garden has a Common Pool with tokens held collectively by the community and which are available for distribution via proposals.

During creation, the Common Pool can be configured to be a **[Gnosis Safe](https://gnosis-safe.io/)**, allowing communities to use Gardens while sti

Introducing Gardens: a framework for effective on-chain governance

[https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1391401785584234499](https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1391401785584234499)

*Thanks to Luke, Gabi, Barnabé, Jessica, and Aude for reading drafts of this. Special thanks goes to Burrratta, many of the best thoughts are adapted from his forum posts.*


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When governance power is determined purely by capital, decision making is centralised, and the rich get richer. Those who aren’t whales are poorly represented in governance decisions, and there is no way to hold important stakeholders accountable to the desires of the broader community, or the past expectations they have bought into.

On the flip side, attracting capital is critical to the success and sustainability of tokenised communities. Decisions backed by skin-in-the-game are key to ensuring that those who don’t have any interest in the long-term success of a community can’t unduly influence how resources are allocated, and/or which policies are enacted.

So how do we balance these opposing forces, and create a more effective and aligned community?

Enter *Gardens.*

Gardens is an initiative by [1Hive](https://about.1hive.org/docs/dao) to create a template for public communities to coordinate shared resources in a bottom-up fashion (essentially taking the best lessons learnt from the 1Hive community and allowing any DAO to implement them in a plug-and-play fashion).

A Garden has three main pillars:

1. A novel voting system (Conviction voting)
2. A decentralised social contract (Community Covenant)
3. A dispute resolution protocol (Celeste)

Taken together, they fulfil the promise of effective community-driven on-chain governance, not tomorrow, but today.

## Conviction voting (to allocate funds)

[https://twitter.com/Square1_pod/status/1386714507460837378](https://twitter.com/Square1_pod/status/1386714507460837378)

*Conviction voting is the heart of a Garden.* It allows folks to signal their preferences continuously rather than forcing them to “make a decision.” From the perspective of a community member, the UX is simplified to just showing up and supporting things you care about.

To quote a passage from [Jeff Emmett’s wonderful introductory post](https://medium.com/giveth/conviction-voting-a-novel-continuous-decision-making-alternative-to-governance-aa746cfb9475):

> **Conviction Voting offers a novel decision making process that funds proposals based on the aggregated preference of community members, expressed continuously.**
>
> In other words, voters are always asserting their preference for which proposals they would like to see approved, rather than casting votes in a single time-boxed session.
>
> A member can change their preference at any time, but the longer they keep their preference for the same proposal, the “stronger” their conviction gets.
>
> This added conviction gives long standing community members with consistent preferences more influence than short term participants merely trying to influence a vote.
>
> **Conviction Voting sidesteps sybil attacks, provides collusion resistance, and mitigates many of the attack vectors of time-boxed voting mechanisms**.

Under conviction voting, **the majority doesn’t need to achieve consensus on everything.** As such, we get real [proportional representation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Advantages_and_disadvantages). Community members can propose and support things they care about without fear that a whale will vote them down. In fact, there is no down voting. **People with large stakes and strong opinions can’t suppress the community.[1](#footnote-1)**

**Proposals simply need enough support to pass – the fewer funds they ask for, the less support required.** This means there’s a real sense in which everyone has a voice. The only thing token holders have to think about is whether or not they support something. *That’s it.*

Under this framework, **many divergent initiatives can be proposed and run in parallel**. This allows the DAO to ex

DAOs and the pitfalls of progressive decentralisation

*Social image credit: Wikimedia / donatas1205 / Billion Photos / vgeny Karandaev / The Atlantic*

[https://twitter.com/AFDudley0/status/1377039852571553795?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw](https://twitter.com/AFDudley0/status/1377039852571553795?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

[https://twitter.com/Fiskantes/status/1349112029618049031?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw](https://twitter.com/Fiskantes/status/1349112029618049031?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

[https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1373937960526127107?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw](https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1373937960526127107?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

[https://twitter.com/VladZamfir/status/1007880467411095552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw](https://twitter.com/VladZamfir/status/1007880467411095552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1380172326071898118?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1380172326071898118?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)


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These days I don’t seem to be able to go a day without coming across the phrase *progressive decentralisation* – an idea which seems to have become an axiom of sorts for aspiring community founders and DAO creators.

Although it can mean different things to different people, in this post I will focus on the strategy as outlined in the oft-cited [Progressive decentralization: A Playbook for Building Crypto Applications](https://a16z.com/2020/01/09/progressive-decentralization-crypto-product-management/).

In particular, I will explain why I believe the playbook’s emphasis on product/market fit over community is misguided, and make the case for why a DAO might be better off focusing on community first and foremost (under this approach, product/market fit can be pursued in parallel, but a strong and loyal community should, as a general principle, be the driving force).

Finally, I will share my thoughts on what it takes to create a fiercely loyal community, and introduce a DAO that I deeply admire – one that captures the very essence of this philosophy.

Let’s start by going through the playbook together.

## Progressive decentralisation (a critique)

The starting paragraph reads:

> Crypto founders have a unique challenge in front of them. In addition to building a product that people want, they also need to consider how that product can successfully run in a decentralized manner — that is, as a protocol owned and operated by a community of users.

Notice that the emphasis here is very much on building a product that people want; community is a secondary objective. This emphasis is mirrored a little further down:

> The earliest stage of building a crypto application requires all the ingredients of a normal startup: a great team, lean development, tight execution, and quick learning. **During this phase, the only thing that matters is product/market fit.**

It’s also reflected in the ordering of “The Three Components of Crypto Success”:

> 1. Product/market fit
> 2. Community participation
> 3. Sufficient decentralization (community ownership)

My thesis is that some DAOs may be better off with the following permutation:

> 1. **Fiercely loyal community**
> 2. Sufficient decentralisation (community ownership)
> 3. Product/market fit

Where the distinction between 1 and 2 is blurry at best, and 3 emerges organically from the community itself (where the community, in a sense, plays the role of both customer and co-designer).


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Why do I believe this?

To elaborate a little here, I see a relationship between the rising march of DAOs and the increasing complexity of the world. In particular, **the increasing gap between the complexity of the demands placed upon collective human systems and the ability of any one individual to fully understand them** – I think that deep-down, many of us intuitively feel this is true, even if we would be hard pressed to articulate it in this way.

My thoughts on this matter have been greatly influenced by the writings of the complexity theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam, who explores the relationship between complexity and human organisati