Pending projects

Neighborhood Shares

Can short-stay rental hosts bring new life to their neighborhoods?

Yes – via Neighborhood Shares. AirBnb and VRBO hosts can reverse blight and decay by agreeing to a layered sharing of their earnings.

Neighborhood Shares can start with microgrants to local residents or civic groups. These can fast-track new murals and public art, popup music events, or cleanup/fixups in their areas. Small steps of this kind begin a turnaround.

Yet small acts on their own seldom sustain improvements. Moreover, they can stoke anxieties among long-time residents, who may fear gentrification or displacement in cases where lasting changes do take hold.

A durable pathway to shared success can emerge.

Hosts of short-stay properties can commit increased Neighborhood Share funding for local volunteers and self-help groups in pace with their uploads of video clips to Youtube or Tiktok. Dozens of “proof of work” highlights can confirm progress in making neighborhoods more safe, convivial, and vibrant.

A steady stream of new clips can lead to more short-stay visitors in Neighborhood Share areas, boosting revenues for AirBnb hosts that participate as donors. Their growing revenues in turn then flow back on a pre-set basis to reward active residents and self-help groups.

The highest levels of Neighborhood Shares flow in cases where public authorities agree to policy reforms that lift property values, in ways that ensure all current residents will benefit from the appreciation.

To this end, localities can convey idle public properties – including vacant school buildings and now-derelict sites – to new Endowment Zone community land trusts. Recipient land trusts are obliged to distribute dividends from ground lease earnings to neighborhood residents.

Direct dividends rise in step with moves by local authorities to introduce market-friendly policy reforms, such as streamlined licensing and approvals for ventures.

The size of dividends can soar further as Endowment Zones improve conditions by providing AI-enabled solutions for residents and visitors alike.

The result can be a grassroots transformation with rising dividends for all, in neighborhoods open to world-class new personalized learning opportunities, tailored coaching and support for small and new ventures, and user-sensitive health and wellness innovations.

Students as (co)owners of new learning ventures

Waves of fast-changing technologies now threaten to overwhelm many established schools, even as millions of young people are preparing to fulfill their promise.

Can a new system of education engage young talent in peer learning and teaching? What rewards are in reach for students that launch learning ventures to surpass today’s faltering, factory-era classrooms?

Student-owned learning ventures may be the answer. They can be a replicable way to outcompete traditional learning models.

Past and present examples confirm this potential:

• The Lancaster system for peer learning

  In the early 1800s, U.S. literacy stood at 80 percent prior to adoption of public school systems. In poor areas, much of the credit was due to a reward-based system for peer learning created by a Scottish immigrant, Joseph Lancaster. Today, similar peer learning incentives can motivate students to share proficiencies, with rewards linked to improved outcomes in using AI and applying entrepreneurial skills.

• Microsociety Schools

  Hundreds of schools in North America have adopted a system where students spend half of their day building and running “Microsocieties” - creating constitutions, setting up dispute resolution “courts”, launching currencies, and running startup enterprises. Such initiatives can be extended into virtual realms, and become springboards for curating and scaling student-run business ventures.

• Alpha Schools
  This chain of fast-growing schools connects students each day with two hours of intense work with a highly-personalized AI tutor. After this, they are free to build any projects and ventures that they love in a supportive peer culture. Spectacular skill gains have ensued, and the model is now spreading world-wide.

Such innovations can be accelerated by new student-owned (or co-owned) learning ventures, including home school incubated “learning pods,” microschools, and virtual charter schools. Their offerings can include:

• students as resource creators (with AI help) of curated tutorials and eLearning content;

• students as royalty-earners for short- and long-form resources accepted into their venture’s curriculum; and

• students as originators of personal “moonshot” projects and new business opportunities (either as solopreneurs or with friends).

Alongside their development of valued peer learning skills, student-owned schools also can spearhead projects to improve their communities. For example, schools might organize prizes and contests inviting ideas on how an idle site might be transformed (see a sample here of a student-painted mural at a vacant lot in Sao Paulo). Winners could receive a small prize – or even a small share in site value appreciation – in cases where the envisaged project becomes real.

Open source projects

Node Zero – a new approach to harnessing agentic AIs

Can we create an “everything is a plug-in” framework for current and future AIs?

Here is a first draft for a high-level framework that lets users swap-in AIs without lock-in.

Deep geometries for value exchange

As intelligence spreads, a universal geometry of meaning can help sovereign individuals map opportunities for interaction.

This project builds on the heart-head-hands geometries set out in “Creating Value That Endures.”

The geometries include a fractal pattern for stories and quests, applicable at small and large scales.

They also define a new 3D form for sentient beings to easily show and share what they value within their empathic self, as well as within narrower kinds of self-interest.

An open source app built on these geometries can help to speed understandings and interchange across knowledge domains.

“Flex-redemption” currencies for a gift economy

Can personal currencies speed the rise of a demonetized society?

This project aims to build an open source platform for personally-issued gift currencies. These would be gift cards redeemable for (issuer-designated) units of volunteer time, resources, or guaranteed-outcome solutions.

A key innovation of the platform would be support for issuance of tradable gift cards with multiple redemption options. Choice of the redemption option would be for the recipient to decide.

This would make the individually-issued gift cards more valuable (and tradable) than promissory notes locked into a single redemption option. (See an example of a personally-issued flexible redemption note here.)

Vibrant gift economies could scale with blockchain based record-keeping of issuance, trading, redemption, and guarantor terms.

Your ideas, improvements and support are welcome!