Exploring the Open Metaverse with Vincent Boon
Can the Metaverse create a path to a better Internet?
Community pioneer Vincent Boon returns to the Cohere podcast to discuss his latest project with Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas - the OpenMeta DAO.
The OpenMeta DAO is gathering a community to ensure the future of the metaverse is human-centered, fair, and interoperable. Both the overall mission of the OpenMeta DAO, as well as the OpenMeta DAO itself are fascinating.
In this episode, Vincent discusses the connection between online communities and the metaverse, the basics of DAOs, how the OpenMeta DAO operates, and what the future holds for community leaders in the Metaverse.
In this episode, we discuss discuss a range of questions with Vincent, including:
What should community professionals / practitioners be aware of before entering the metaverse?
What prior / existing community experience and expertise has helped you navigate what is required to support the metaverse?
Can algorithms help with decision making (DAOs) and consensus?
How should we think about trust (or lack thereof) in a decentralized community experience?
Key Quotes:
“I think hopefully this is where a lot of the world is going. Where people are in much more control of their own destinies and are able to not just collaborate and help out, but can actually become part of the project and get rewarded for their input, which I think is quite exciting.
That’s what led me to Web3.”
On the Maturity of DAOs
“Obviously, DAOs are still in their infancy of where we're going. So it's really fun to be working on it. Because it's very explorative. You're really kind of like doing things from scratch and figuring out how you do these things as you go along.”
The Misunderstanding of Community in Web3
“It's kind of like a utopia that's been described in a variety of different DAOs, but then when you get to the actual mechanics of it, it is ‘How do you actually make this work’? None of the people that have been working on this have got, or none that I have found out so far, any actual experience in how to manage large groups of people, large communities. And so how do you get them involved? And I think in web3, generally there is this strange idea that communities will just magically appear and you turn the tap on and all of a sudden you've got communities full of people willing to participate and put in hours and all of that kind of stuff, which in my reality, in all of the time that I've been managing communities, has never happened. It’s a hard slog.”
It is Still Early
“People just need to relax a bit and understand that this is a very nascent space. No one's figured it out yet. We've just come out with the idea of how blockchains work and NFTs work and we now are working on sole bound tokens. There is just so much new stuff and what we've seen now is just people playing around with this new technology and asking, ‘Does this work right?’”
“It is just genuinely such an awesome space, but it is right at the start of itself. Yeah. A lot of things are not working yet or not working well yet, or aren't well thought out yet. There's always going to be people who are going to be really looking to make a lot of money and rather than actually thinking about how it all fits into an ecosystem, but that's with any kind of new technology.”
Resources from this episode:
Open Meta DAO
