Why and how a network city might solve the biggest problem in the world

> The biggest problem in the world is not global warming, war or poverty, but how we organise among ourselves to make good decisions and carry them out — Alex Pentland, MIT professor

Introduction

A network city is a community that starts online and, then, buys enough land to become a city. All land doesn’t need to be together. It can be an archipelago, a network. 

For example, CityDAO has already started buying land in Wyoming, US. In that state, DAOs can own companies and companies can own land. DAOs are decentralized autonomous organisations. By the way, CityDAO is not alone.

Why

A thriving network city would collaborate with many DAOs. If this ecosystem tested and proved new governance innovations, these could become standard in the 21st century.

How

DAOs accelerate governance innovation. As an example, let's look at two situations where these innovations can be applied.

Solve Prisoner’s Dilemmas

Vitalik explains (and again) that DAOs could make a verifiable public commitment to cooperate with other DAOs with a similar mechanism in Prisoner’s Dilemmas.

A network city could make Vitalik’s idea a reality.

New voting mechanisms

In my last article, I described many new voting mechanisms. Here we have an image of three of them used in combination:

In the article, I also described how DAOs could give their members the freedom to use and build any other third-party voting mechanisms.

Next

Once DAOs prove governance innovations like these, traditional organisations, cities and states may follow.

For example, a traditionally-managed company could involve its stakeholders in frequent decisions. For example, every month they could oversee their corporate social responsibility budget. 

Also, a traditional city or country could introduce a Swiss-like referendum system. There, if citizens gather enough signatures on any new law, it is voted on referendum. Yet, citizens now could use advanced voting mechanisms like the ones described above.

At the same time, more and more native DAOs and network cities would be created.

Summary

A network city — and its ecosystem of DAOs — could battle test governance innovations. Then, these may become the blueprint for 21st-century organisations, cities and countries. And together, we would tackle all our problems.

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This is my answer to CityDAO’s contest “What major problem could potentially be resolved with a network city and how?". If you liked this article, please like or RT my tweet to increase its visibility. Thanks!