NooNAO

Toward Wise Emergent Coordination for a Less Bad Future

Networked Adaptive Organisms (NAOs)

Network Cooperatives, Bioregional Mycelia, Portable Communities, Social Brains

Everyone talks about global brains and mycelial networked societies. Let's grow some!

The metacrisis is not something we can 'fix'. But how we navigate it is up to us. How can humanity thread a path through to the best possible future?

Coordination failure is the heart of much of the metacrisis. Think arms races, capitalism, nation states, plastics, overfishing, the tragedy of the commons. Narrow self-interest makes optimal collective benefit unreachable.

So can we go up a level in emergent complex coordination? Are we capable of collective wisdom?

Well, networks have a unique capacity for that. Think neurons and synapses, mycelial networks, etc.

“The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what can happen.” - Kevin Kelly

We all talk about networks, but most of what we know about each other is out of the reach of software. Our approach is to change that, to facilitate the formation of large-scale software-accessible networks of trust and respect, and the use thereof for new forms of emergent coordination.

We can't expect all of humanity to miraculously go up a level in time to avoid catastrophe. That won't happen. But the Regenerative Movement, manifested as global-scale fractal respect networks, can become a superorganism capable of the kinds of coordination we desperately need, and invent a better future.

That is, of course, a tall order.

What NAO?.

Per Gall's Law, our approach is to facilitate "simple systems that work" to allow for growing and co-evolving the complex systems we need.

We propose Networked Adaptive Organisms. Think of them as DAOs whose populations are Trust Networks, with an innate capacity for "extreme decisioning" capable of otherwise impossible sensemaking, coordination, and action.

In particular, we aim to manifest a working implementation of a self-owning and self-governing social graph as a platform cooperative, able to capture collective value at scale, and to allocate that value emergently, as a fractal commons.

The concept of the Global Brain has been around since at least de Chardin and Vernadsky's Noosphere, Otlet's Mundaneum, Bush's Memex, Engelbart's Dynamic Knowledge Repository, and Rheingold's Smart Mobs.

Our current closest facsimiles are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, where the synapses are pitifully inadequate 1 bit connections (friend, connection, follow) and the neural pathways are controlled by corporate algorithms whose only imperative is profit.

We have what we need to go way beyond that. We can and must dramatically improve on our collective capacity for a social brain, and use and govern it emergently.

Prototypes

Explore some initial implementations:

• People Discovery on NAO.is
• Best of Now — a group social bookmarking app.
• GreenCheck — proof of personhood via three-friend authentication
• WhoKnows — People stigmergy, marking allies with domain expertise, especially place-based regeneration (aka bioregional)
• Private labeling e.g. Climate Swarm, or Emerge Network gathering](https://emerge.noo.network/) in Austin 2022

Core concepts

Tech For Good Stack

Here's our tech stack for making this vision a reality. Be sure to watch the short Overview video.

Graph database

Graph databases are a relatively new approach optimized for representing networks. They provide lots of tools and capabilities that make using networks much more intuitive and natural than relational databases. We use ArangoDB.

Neurons, identity, proof of personhood

In the social brain analogy, humans are neurons and their relationships are synapses. For an individual human to participate, they need a consistent identifier and the ability to attest that such identifier is unique for them, their proof of humanity.

Our GreenCheck is an MVP to that end. It uses three-friend authentication for the attestation, because our friends know us best.

Human curation and digitization

We all have deep and valuable knowledge about each other and our domains of expertise. As long as this remains in our heads, it's not accessible to software.

GreenCheck allows praising of others to capture our respect for them across multiple dimensions, a relationship edge labeled with a simple floating-point vector from praiser to praisee.

Such a vector makes a dramatically richer synapse than the 1-bit connections of Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. And we can be in control of what algorithms use it.

Let's make it easy and fun to inform our shared network with high-fidelity representations of our respect relationships.

Trust Networks by Invitation

One thing that's both easy and quick: Grow highly accountable social graphs by invitation, where links between A and B are such high-fidelity representations of what A thinks of B.

Those links can be used in many ways, particularly as delegations or proxies by domain, a critical component of collective alignment / consensus / decisioning / action.

Network analytics also provide many possible tools, such as domain-specific authoritativeness (aka mojo) based on one's network centrality in domain-specific subnetwork.

Because of the invitation requirement, every participant has a chain of accountability to whom they are responsible.

Trust Networks are analogous to cryptographic webs of trust, and they provide a powerful substrate for innovation.

Extreme decisioning

Such Trust Networks have an innate capacity for new forms of collective decision-making. That derives from:

• Continuous representation using the delegation/proxy links

• Weighting of influence based on authoritativeness

What we mean by "extreme":

• Real-time — because everyone is represented until they participate.

• Any scale

• Any domain

• Trusted process — because it's transparent, composable, and measurably optimal

• Agile, fractal, emergent

See our 2005 LANL whitepaper: Smartocracy: Social Networks for Collective Decision-Making) and its prior art from two of the co-authors, Societal-Scale Decision-Making Using Social Networks. These predated the term Liquid Democracy by five years.

Portable Communities

Portable communities are a huge unmet need and opportunity

To quote Richard Bartlett, co-founder of Loomio:

I spent a decade and a million bucks to conclude the only really critical gap in collective organising software is to synchronise group membership across multiple platforms.

How can online communities be persistent, composable, and application-independent?

We are working on an alliance for a Portable Communities Protocol which we think is critical infrastructure for the global federation envisioned.

Collective Ownership and Governance

The combination of new decisioning and DAOs makes it simple for such Trust Networks to own and govern themselves, as network cooperatives.

Web3 and DWeb

Such a vision must eventually be embedded in the Decentralized Web and the massive changes in human organization and coordination empowered by DAOs and tokenomics. Our strategy is to design and build without dependence on those but mirroring with and migrating to them as they become more widely accessible. Our sense is that the NAO has potential to be among the utilities driving mainstream adoption of Web3.

NooNet:

NooNAO is an initiative of NooNet, a fiscally-sponsored project of Planetwork, a 501(c )3. Donations are tax-deductible.

Contact

Email Brad DeGraf and/or Charles Blass

Stoa Sensemaking