header image
avatar

rafa

rafa

Craft Lore. Build Community. Building Digital Public Utilities and Folklore.Institute Farcaster: @rafa
Subscribe to rafa
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.

notes on 200% onchain

Publisher
rafa
March 23
Last year, \[redacted] and I built a proposal for a large L2 organization. We put together a vision and key questions on what it would take to build a DAO. It was expansive and successful. A side-effect of this process, and the design exercise since then, is that it has forced me to articulate the crucial parts of building Networked Enterprises: organizations that have oozified into a web of interdependent partnerships with mutual ownership and accountability.

Chat

Publisher
rafa
December 12
Recently I saw a social media post that claimed: “chat” might be legitimately be the first dedicated 4th person pronoun. This has triggered a series of realisations, one of which highlights a design flaw in modern business productivity software.

Digital Public Utilities (DRAFT)

Publisher
rafa
December 03
Digital Public Utilities are neutral and decentralized services, often in the form of an autonomous protocol, that preserve the rights and freedoms of online communities.

Seeds of Cultural Production

Publisher
rafa
October 12
What would it look like to design a generative brand? Instead of a logo and approved assets, can we design a language that can compose a web of attuned media? In this case we wouldn’t be selecting a font but a family of fonts. In the same way, we could select a group of artists or artistic movements. Finally we can select or create UNICODE iconography. This makes the brand live within the broad standards space of online media, instead of separate to it. Not a signal, but a meme.

Transcendent Homes

Publisher
rafa
October 12
I whisper to myself: “There is no spoon.” I hold the utensil in my hand and its concept in my mind. The spoon is normal: silver, metal, unremarkable. I bought this one at IKEA, a store known for the universal nature of their products. Their motto echoes in my mind: “Democratic Design”. Or maybe the spoon is part of a wedding gift? The memory slips along the surface of its mundanity.

Content Liquidity and Protocol Lock

Publisher
rafa
May 26
Creators are now “Content Liquidity Providers”, in a similar manner way capital providers provide liquidity to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.

Field Notes 1: Online Formations

Publisher
rafa
May 24
Welcome to the first public update from the Summer of Protocols program. Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading about how people gather online, trying to tease out a clear definition of a Swarm. No such luck so far, but hopefully getting closer.

Seeing Protocols

Publisher
rafa
May 10
If you've been following my work, particularly on Twitter, you might have recognized a recurring theme: I explore community dynamics, with a unique emphasis on online coordination, and more recently, onchain activities. This summer, I’ve had the privilege to join the Summer of Protocols and fully focus on this research. The program is sponsored by the Ethereum Foundation and led by Venkatesh Rao, the author of Ribbonfarm. If you haven’t read about the program, I’d recommend you take a look at the Pilot Study that was published this March.