report

Glossary

With contributions by all interviewees.

Real Game Play was coined by the OMSK Social Club in 2017. The practice focuses on creating transitional states that can be perceived as either fiction and/or reality, allowing participants to engage with the gaming experience on a deeper level. Players can “bleed” into their characters through this approach, integrating personal elements into their character development and the overall setting. Real Game Play represents an innovative and immersive form of interactive storytelling. It challenges conventional notions of role-playing and blurs the lines between reality and fiction, encouraging participants to explore complex themes and ideas in a unique and transformative manner.

Liquidity Pools and their corollary, automated market makers, are key innovations coming from the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) ecosystem. They are designed to incentivize users to stake, i.e. to lock funding in a digital asset pool governed by smart contracts, in exchange for a reward. By integrating liquidity pools with DAO frameworks, communities can democratically manage pooled assets, aligning incentives for contributors while fostering decentralized decision-making.

Mutualism is a socioeconomic model that emphasises cooperation, mutual aid, and collective support over competition and individualism, articulated by Sara Horowitz. Horowitz, S. Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up, New York: Random House, 2021. Mutualism involves people working collaboratively through cooperatives, unions, and community organisations to address shared needs. It advocates for decentralised, transparent, and sustainable systems prioritising community self-determination and long-term benefits. Leadership and resources are structured to serve future generations, fostering resilience and equity within interconnected social and economic frameworks.

Communal debt is not a credit or a debit, it is not a financial value. Rather, it is a shared understanding between certain community members that they need each other and support each other in different ways to exist and survive in this world. Communal debt is a shared asset that lives within the community through different sectors and across different generations. It is a recognition of interdependency and trust, a system to pay forward dependency and to strengthen a society’s ability to go through hardships and stay prosperent against all odds.

Commons are often defined as any shared resource that is tended to or maintained by a community and is used subject to agreements or rules established by the same community. Public libraries and Community Supported Agriculture are examples of commons. As such, commons are living systems informed by the cultural, human, and environmental realities of their participants, as well as the environments where commoning takes place. For a deeper dive, see Bollier, D., and S. Helfrich. Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, Gabriola Island, CA: New Society Publishers, 2019.

Egregores became the talk of the DAO town in the summer of 2021. An egregore is an esoteric notion describing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people driven by a common goal. It is the group spirit that stems from decentralised collective intelligence. The whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In Ancient Greece, egregores were summoned to watch over city states, but the concept spans many other religious and spiritual traditions as well, including Islam, Buddhism and the Hermeticists. Some consider Satoshi Nakamoto, Dogecoin, and some other cryptocurrenties egregores. de Filippi, P., M. Mannan, W. Reijers. ‘The Rise of Blockchain Egregores,’ in Defining Web3: A Guide to the New Cultural Economy, Volume 89, Leeds: Emerald Publishing, 2014. NFT collections around egregores have been launched, and it is possible that egregores themselves have become crypto memes.