Requests For Collaboration

Hi! Not quite sure if I'm in the right place yet but I enjoyed going through the links above. I work for an architecture co-operative in Oxford and doing PhD research on citizen-led affordable housing models.

I landed here because I'm working with five councils in Oxfordshire (UK) to establish a £1-5m revolving equity fund for land purchase. Primarily for citizen-led housing but that's just the entry-point (rewilding, growing, energy).

In my job I help groups of people set up the legal, financial and people-organising basis for community land trusts including advice on withdrawable share offers. I'm just coming to the potential of scale through digital as I get involved in bigger schemes (e.g. I currently have the task of suggesting approaches to creative governance for a new Garden Village of over 2000 homes).

For the equity fund I'm trying to work out if we could use a form of citizen-governed distributed finance to sit alongside the co-operative organisations so a) we don't get slowed down by the structures that council officers/politicians sit within b) reduce cost and time-wastage of administering an equity fund manually and c) the value system for why projects get funded is discussed and decided at a neighbourhood or city scale.

This could be just the governance platform or it could be a token backed by stable land assets around Oxford.

I've been to courses and events on DAOs/DHOs/DiSCOs and my focus would still be on the human relationships - I don't yet know if incorporating ideas from blockchain/DLT projects will be a distraction to actually getting land projects funded. I'm used to running funding decisions on Loomio.

I've started forming a list of examples but nothing that fits exactly so far. Getting involved in the Seeds community has been useful and the Greenpoint Land Reserve has similar elements.

Distroid