The Family Fork Support for moms, dads, and families in web3

Thanks for coming. I'm Sky and this panel is going to be about family DAO and family nouns and uh the combination of family and web 3 and and crypto and why we're all here. And so there's a weird echo. It's also really loud around, but we'll we'll uh figure this out. Um I'm going to start with uh Lisa, David, and Britt.

We're going to they're going to give you a little bit about about themselves. First of all, who here is in a family? Raise your hand. is part of a family. Right.

Right. We got we got a lot of kids here too. Who here likes web 3. Right. So the combination of family and web 3 is a very very new thing.

Um you know the corporate world has uh like an existing structure for how they deal with families and and um having children and uh social nets and things. But web 3 is this brand new world. A lot of it consists of dows uh new organizations and structures. And so far it seems like family has been a little bit forgotten about. So what we've done over the last 6 months probably since an idea originated kind of during Dowo Palace this last summer uh we've found people in the space that really care about the family aspect um and want to make it better and bring good ideas and new ideas and new experiments to the web 3 space and make it better than the traditional world for families in in our space which is like our home.

And so we have Lisa. I will start with she can say a little bit about herself, how she fits into family and what uh and what how she maybe first heard about family da. Yeah, great. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having us here.

Even just having this conversation I think is a step in the right bold beautiful direction. Uh my name is Lisa Woken. I'm a researcher at Talent Dow and also a general DAO educator in the ecosystem, but I'm also a mom of a beautiful six-year-old named Miriam who's the light of my life and a husband who works in the web 3 space and designed the beer can for Raid Brew. And so I'm super just thrilled to have a family that crosses with the intersection of web 3. And the moment I found out about this project of Family Dow, one, I felt like it was starting to have a conversation that I didn't hear happening anywhere else in web 3.

And two, it just really was an incredible group of people really committed to finding ways to fund and support projects in the space that have this collective mission of advancing families. And I just think that's a beautiful thing to be a part of. Hello everybody, my name is David. Um, I am a father to two little girls and I got introduced into this space through my wife. So, we are a traveling crypto family.

We've done a few events together including going to uh Colombia and yeah, I'm excited to just be here and talk to you guys about families. Hi, my name is Britney. Um, I am head of business development for a security company in blockchain called Harpy. I'm also the mom of the two little mini hackers sitting in the front and wife of David over here. Um, and I I got into this space because I was traveling as a hacker with women's organizations that were working on expanding access to women in this space.

Um, and I was one of the moms there and I was like, "This is great, but other people here are moms and we all figured out how to leave our kids behind, but how do we do this better? How do we make it more conducive to our day-to-day life?" Um, and I was approached by uh, Crypto Witch who was talking about Family Dow. Uh, roped in Hubby over here. He's been a really big part of it and so grateful to have met all these wonderful people.

Great. So, those are some intros. Uh, we're going to get a little deeper into family nouns, which is a mechanism that Family Dow is using. But before that, uh, starting with Lisa, we're going to say like what do you, we're going to ask what do you think, uh, web 3 and the crypto world and the Dow world is getting kind of right or wrong about uh, families. Um, so, interestingly enough, I just wrapped up um, doing a study with a fellow researcher, Poncho, um, interviewing 23 uh, leaders across the DAO ecosystem on on what's working, what's not, how are we leading in the space.

And one of the big things that came from that was the realization of how important social support is to people's journeys into the space, their evolution and development within it. And I think especially when it comes to families, knowing that if you were to close your eyes and think about who the most important person in the world is to you, that is your family. and realizing that like somebody else could close their eyes and the most important person in the world to them is you. That's pretty incredible. And I think it's that sort of connectivity that draws a lot of people into web 3.

It's the cross-pollination. It's the connective tissue and the social support that matters so much as a web 3 family. And I think the those values of cross-pollination and that connectivity as a web 3 family, we're doing really really well. What maybe we could afford to do better is merging those two worlds of the people when we close our eyes and think about those most important people. It's not always the people that we get to bring with us to the web 3 conferences or or web 3 events.

And so merging those two worlds together, I think is the next best step. Yeah. Anyone else have any additional comments on what you think is either working well or poorly? you know, whether it's events, bring children, um you know, anything related to family at in our space. Yeah, absolutely.

Um I I think if you're talking about what's happening positively in the space and working like this is a great example like ETH Denver having consistently offered child care to families is just phenomenal. Um I' I'd love to see that as a standard across the spectrum. Um, before I say like what maybe we're not doing really well, um, I think it's really important to note that this is not specific necessarily to web 3. Um, because I only joined web 3 in like the last year and a half or so, but I came from like a traditional consumer electronics background. And I'm stubborn.

I had no interest in picking between being a mom and a present mom and and being a career woman because I wanted to do both. Um, and even there I was having to really shake the paradigm. I was bringing nursing children to tech events that were dominated by men and had absolutely no infrastructure for me to be able to nurse. I was watching other women in my industry actually get kicked out of education trainings because the insurance in the events didn't cover children. And so I think it's really important to say that like this is important in web 3 and I really hope that we do this to lead the rest of industries because this is something everywhere.

Um and and we we do have really great things. we are bringing in women and I think as we bring in a more diverse skill set into web 3 continuing to support that and and like that's why we're doing family dow right um so that we can fill those gaps awesome so so family DAO you can learn about at familydow.love love. That's a site that is this community of people that care about this that are coming together that want to do lots of experimentation in the space. And so the one thing you you need in the space is also usually money or funding.

So you can try some of these experiments. You actually don't need a lot of money. And so um inspired by a handful of other projects, we we look and looked at and you were using the nouns mechanism. So for for those that are not aware, nouns dow is this mechanism that started where one noun was sold today. All the money goes into a treasury and the treasury is controlled by the people that hold these nouns.

Nouns are these little NFT figurines that the head is a noun. That has spurred an entire uh ecosystem of forks and uh projects related to nouns. Um, there's public nouns, there's little nouns, there's NARS DAO, which is like supporting professional athletes. And so we have this awesome group of people that care about families. And so we wanted a mechanism to bring in some funds in a in an awesome way to start the DAO.

And so we decided to create this thing called family nouns, which we actually used, thank you to Zora for building nouns build, which is an easy platform for forking and launching a nouns fork. And as an example, these are our family. Each of our family nouns. You can see family people come in all shapes and sizes and colors and and things. It's not easy to launch unique NFTts that where the art is on chain using pixels.

So, you often need an amazing artist to come in and get involved. And so, David is that person. And we would like to hear what you were thinking and when cuz you could go so many directions with with what family nouns could look like and it did go lots of directions and it came back to what these amazing things are right here. And so we Yeah. If you could give some background on the process and and how we ended up where we are.

Yeah. Yeah. So um we were using nouns as like our inspiration because we used we fork nouns. So, primarily we did want to try to stay true to the nouns look using the glasses and their bodies, but we wanted to make it personal to our project. And kind of what Sky was saying, you know, people come in all shapes, colors, sizes.

And what I was really trying to do was trying to make a a unique collection where anybody in this room or anybody in the world could hopefully find themselves in one of these characters in one way or another. Um, so that came through, you know, having various different hairstyles. um you know, tones of skin color. So hopefully anybody could really resonate with this person or this noun and or maybe resonate with um have it remind them of a family member of some sort. So yeah, we just tried to have fun with it and um yeah, it was it was a lot of fun to do and we kind of got to have some fun with the hats and things like that to just make it a little bit more playful because you know, everybody has different personalities.

But yeah, primarily I just wanted to make sure that it was available for everybody to hopefully find themselves in one of these characters. Yeah. And so these little comments about like this new noun comes up and you're like, you know, that really reminds me of my crazy uncle. I'm going to buy this for myself. I'm going to buy this for him.

I'm going to drag my crazy uncle into this into this ecosystem. You can have a lot of fun with it. Um it's a it's a newer project. We don't have like the largest awareness and user base there. If this QR code up here, it goes to the nouns build um auction place.

You can you can go to it right now. There's actually a live auction on a family noun right now. It'd be interesting. Well, I can show it to you on here. The internet was so slow, but that little maybe lady with bun hair is the current one that's on auction.

There's 13 minutes left. So if you want to go to this QR and and join uh family DAO, you can do that through this mechanism. Um, at any time if you meet someone interested in this in this arena, this space, you can just have them go to the site, they can actually settle the last auction and start the next auction and you'll you'll get the new uh um the new the new family noun to have a chance on um Brit like yeah do what uh on in terms of like mechanism or the fun of this auction or building the Dow do you have any comments or thoughts related to like the idea of using na nouns in the mechanism for family dao. Um I I mean one of the fun parts of his project was that I was not unfamiliar with nouns but not this intimate with it. Um and and learning about the fork and and being there while Dave is figuring out pixel art because he's a traditional handdrawn artist.

So that was a whole amazing adventure to watch. Um but just really the openness of it like the the ability for us to cultivate a small group and say look we know that this needs to be conquered. We know that this is a topic that needs to be broached and we want to create a platform that allows anyone interested in it to broach it. And and I think it's really important to note that you don't have to currently be a parent to be in a family now. Like like Sky was saying, everyone here is currently part of a family.

Um you know, this is a journey that I think all of us have been on on our own ways before we got together. So, like a lot of my hackathon projects previously were about onboarding the next generation or making conferences a safe and interesting space for small people. Um, and I that's, you know, that's sort of like where I'm at with it, right? we're we're this sort of nomadic web 3 family, but I think the really interesting part of this protocol is that yes, like that's that's a box that we fit in and there may be more people in this room that fit in that box, but our family DAO is so diverse and we all have different backgrounds and different needs and and really getting to hear that conversation has been the most interesting part of it. Um, and I'm really excited as we expand to see like how that grows and changes and and things like that.

Yeah, this obviously is going to start as a very small experiment with not too much money. Anyone that has ideas that they want to experiment with can come um you so the we don't use discord. We actually use common ground which is kind of like a web3 discord. Uh you can find it on the home site familydow. You can come with ideas obviously you can participate by getting a family noun and you can that allows you to make proposals um to to fund using the treasury.

I like to think about like this idea but like a thousand times the size. Imagine if this thing grew a thousand times and we had people that work in the Dow space and the web 3 space that are here that like have an emergency and like there's no corporation that's going to look out for them and if they live in the US the you know the the government structure might not even look out for them. Maybe Europe's a little different, but what if this family DAO could like come in and and help someone in need? It could be a really big uh um ask. It could be a really or it could be a small ask, but it's um really cool to think about.

So each one of you I'd like to ask like we we haven't had many proposals to family uh family nouns yet. So anyone can bring some but if you could imagine like the an awesome proposal that could come to family nouns once we have a decent amount of funds to start giving out as grants. What what what would you like to see as a proposal like as as crazy as you can think? Yeah. Well, I think right now one thing I do know is a lot of my friends are having babies.

They'd love to be in web 3. So even just the basic maternity support and coverage would be a dream to have projects that support that. But I love love love the idea of the expansive family of taking care. And I think it'd be amazing if we had funds that really went to however people define their family. if there's people that they're taking care of to actually be able to send them that whether it's extra funds or just a gift of acknowledgement in their moment of need.

I think something like that can be super powerful at scale. And right now we just don't have the funds or the concerted effort or organization to do that. But that could be just I think really really wonderful to have in this space. Totally. Yeah.

For me, I think uh something that would be interesting to me is just helping families stick together. Um, my wife travels a lot for work and we're fortunate right now that my parents a live here and b there is child care here, but that's not true at all events. So, I would really like to see us help families stick together and have uh child care, but not only child care, like child education. It' be pretty awesome for my girls to not only be being taken care of while I'm at an event, but also maybe being taught a little bit about what we're doing so that they can be ready for the next, you know, steps in their life in in web 3. Yeah.

And obviously we cohabitate so our our needs are very similar. Um, but for me, like I would really love to see Family Dao providing some of that support because as parents or or women that choose to ch travel with our children and bring our children, like it's at great expense. It's not only at great fiscal expense, our mental load is huge. Like you guys are all here, you know how crazy it is to register for events and things like that. Now imagine like feeding a child in between there and then making sure they have somewhere to be and things like that.

So I think really building out the infrastructure for parents today that are encouraging incurring that expense to to break the mold and to create these new infrastructures for us to to ease that burden because it's it's expensive. You know, traveling as a family of four, sometimes I have to bring a caregiver. That's an extra hotel room. Like it's insane. But the whole goal is that us doing that, us doing sort of this hard and expensive work today makes it easier.

And hopefully, you know, things like ETH Denver that are limiting boundaries like that we can do that for families all-encompassing. Um, so that's what I'd love to see. Yeah. And we'd like to give a shout out to Ulie. Ulie who's in France who's probably the main driver of family da and family nouns couldn't be here.

She has co so she couldn't come to Denver. But she actually cares a lot about um like if you're adopted or you're an orphan or whatever like or you just like like you know don't aren't close to your family or whatever like family doesn't have to be their like blood family your kids or your parents or your grandparents or your cousins. It can literally be a group of friends or people you cohabitate with or there's houses of, you know, a lot of nomadic people in this in this space and everyone's moving around and so like you might not be around your real family or your your blood family. So your family is really like anyone or your DA or your community. So family is when we say family, it's really the broadest sense of family.

Um, the other really interesting point that she wanted me to stress is though, what are kids good at? What are kids good at? Spreading germs, right? Really, really good at bringing germs from school and everything. You know what else they're good at?

Spreading memes. And so, Ulie has a really strong belief that that kids and parents and cousins and families can be some of the biggest meme spreaders in the world. And so uh like whether you like public goods, social causes, whatever, this whole space gets like driven by memes, right? And so if we can leverage families to drive the memes behind all of the things that we're trying to accomplish, whether it's family DAO or uh other beliefs and and and ethos of uh of web 3, like we really need to like empower and strengthen families more. And so this project is that's yeah, one of one of the goals.

Um, we have a few minutes left. So far, no one has bid on family noun number 36. It probably looks like someone here. Not everyone has their wallet here, but if you want to join um we will have Yeah, maybe if a last thought we could each give um about ETH Denver um what you learned this week so far, what you're excited for, how it relates to families. I checked out the I just I didn't want to be like weird guy looking in the area, but there's like a Buffett kids hangout area upstairs.

All these little kids are like playing and having an awesome time and there's people looking after them. I wouldn't say go up there and check it out, but like it's awesome that it's here. There's an arcade over there. Um there's food everywhere. So, it's a great place for families.

But if you have a last thought or wish, ask to the crowd. Let's yeah, go through again. Well, beyond the wish of just please, if this interests you, support family nouns and get involved. Um I think my other wish would be to take awkward family photos while you're here. you know, get together with the people that make up your web 3 family.

Uh, get together and document this because this is a really amazing artifact to be at this stage in the ecosystem where we are forging relationships and families and networks that are really leading us into the future. And the more we can bring our family in whatever sense that means together, the better. And so, take pictures and and enjoy your time here with your loved ones. Uh, yeah. For me, I would say to anybody here who is a parent and doesn't have their loved one or kids here, I know it sounds crazy, but just bring them, you know, bring them to these events.

I mean, you look around. This place looks like it's meant for kids. There's buffalo unicorns. They're handing out stickers. They're handing out candy.

It's like trick-or-treating. Is it going to be easy? No. But bring your family. Make it something that you guys can do together.

Especially if you have little kids. This is what we're building for them. Um, I think you guys covered it so well. No, I I think my my wish is here. I think Sky like and Ulie's sentiments really here.

You know, family is important, right? The the family you choose. Um, and in web 3, especially those that like travel a lot, sometimes we see each other more than our actual families. Um, and I think that's such like an important part about what we're doing here. Like yes, you have your blood family, but like you also have the family you choose and and the family that chooses you.

um and takes care of you. So look around because like right here we are all amongst family. Um and if I did any surveying at my last hackathon, most of y'all are planning on having some sort of family of your own if you don't have one now. So I hope that we can do this work to build that infrastructure whether it's because you have children or because you don't have a relationship with your own like parents or something like that that we can really build this family space together. Yeah.

Yeah. And I the Yeah, the force I some of us go to Burning Man and I I think for children, Bernie man is one of could be one of the coolest places a kid can go. This is probably the second best place. Like I agree. Bring your children here and they will love it.

Like Ethereum was built for every every age. And I think okay, Ethereum and Web 3 I say Ethereum, but it's greater than that, right? But I think there's going to be like schools where your kids can enroll and you're like learning all of this from the start and the the values are programmed into the curriculum and the code that's like running that school. Hopefully it's not run by AI, but um I think that's going to happen. So we have 30 seconds left.

Any last comments? I want to shoot a quick uh thank you to the two tiny mini hackers in the front row there because raise your hand if you're I would never try so hard in my life if they weren't mine. Um so they're my inspiration and I hope that they help set the grounds for you guys in the future too. Thanks everyone for coming. [Applause]