Since Dec. 2021, Branch Out has corresponded with a wide range of individuals from the Regen Network, Foundation, & Community re: building our Climate Wiki on Regen.
Branch Out is a non-profit which integrates climate media with regenerative projects to create a real symbiosis—both materially and financially—between the two.
Climate Wiki is a ‘sprouting’ knowledge commons tackling the interrelated challenges of information overload, knowledge inequity, and knowledge-action disconnect. Its priority is aligning the interests of our stakeholders: land stewards, ReFi investors, and climate writers. It will subtly offer Web3 features while working as a familiar Web2 Wiki.
We are currently nurturing the Wiki in ‘stealth mode,’ while we build out a foundation for engagement. At the end of this week with our formal proposal, we will share a walkthrough video exhibiting the Climate Wiki page on Biochar and its unique features. Our team has developed this page and others like it as media partners of the Kulshan Carbon Trust, who are codifying their biochar eco-credit methodology with the support of the Regen Network.
You can also get a sneak peak of the Biochar page now on our Built on Regen notion card, which outlines the Climate Wiki’s design principles and provides more information on Branch Out. The notion card gets into our broad value propositions, and its intended audience is the wider DeSci / ReFi community of climate activists.
This post picks up where our Built on Regen card leaves off, offering a deeper dive into our value propositions for Regen itself. We are very excited to propose the Climate Wiki for official partnership with the Regen Community Pool & look forward to your feedback!
Integration & Value for Regen Foundation:
Solidify EnDAOment processes through an organic media platform capable of Web3 on-boarding, education,
Thank you so much for taking the time to provide this constructive feedback and ask questions. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify and expand our concepts!
Primary Audience
One of our main goals is to help bridge the Regen Network community and the general public. We feel our work is high-value for RND & Co. in large part because it will provide a wider context from which to solicit interest in Regen Network from new audiences.
Perhaps we can elaborate using two principles from permaculture:
Stacking Functions: The Biochar Codex (i.e. the “Minimum Viable Page” on our notion card) is under development in close collaboration with a Regen Network partner—Kulshan Carbon Trust—to support their ecocredit methodology as both publicizing media and customer support. As we help them get an ecocredit off the ground, they are helping us prototype Climate Wiki as a knowledge-sharing and publicity tool for other methodology developers on Regen.
At a different scale, these biochar pages will be a comprehensive, accessible, and participatory resource for anyone to learn about biochar in general. They will not only be intrinsically valuable to a wider audience; these pages will also direct them towards the full scope of innovative work that the Regen Network & partners are doing in an area of shared interest.
Zone Design: While some pages may cater more to a general audience and others more to Regen Network’s specific interests, both constituencies would benefit from a knowledge commons and the interconnections between these ‘zones’.
One can imagine a series of nested audiences widening out from Regen Network:
Zone 0: Regen Network
Zone 1: ReFi / Crypto
Zone 2: Climate Movement
Zone 3: Land Stewards
Zone 4: General Public
In one direction, Climate Wiki will facilitate drawing new audiences into the Regen Network. For example, pages designed for land stewards will support their ability to take climate action through regenerative techni
Hey, just quickly summarising some of Thursdays discussion during the Regenerati News hour so the discussions don’t get too fragmented:
Feasibility: pretty easy to leverage existing functionality to mint tokens on Regen. May not require a huge token launch and public campaign.
Token: $BRANCH could be considered a social token of sorts acting like reputation on WikiPedia and other platforms.
Complexity creep: what is the minimum viable product (or minimum loveable product)? What is the simplest functionality that delivers the most value? Gregory suggested there could be a quarterly human led review process that leverages the existing tech stack such as the eco-credit/groups/baskets module and authz; then play with it for a period of time and iterate through upgrades.
As I’m paraphrasing I think its probably better to have a listen to the conversations here directly.
First of all, I’m in support of this effort with regards to the climate wiki, but have some remarks.
My main concerns (similar to Will’s) are around the tokenomics.
I’ve seen too many projects focus on “token stuff” too early which distracted from other important tasks. As was expressed in the Twitter space and the proposal, the $Branch token is supposed to
Incentivize participation / funding of content creation
Give $Regen holders a stake and stimulate interest
Potentially work as reputation signal (mentioned on the Twitter space)
The proposal leaves it open how much of the funding will be allocated to the token launch. I would’ve liked to see more clarity there and would urge further open discussion assuming the proposal is approved (which actually was already mentioned in the comments).
The focus should be the content and the token is not a requirement to launch the wiki. $Branch could also be a retro-active airdrop that rewards early content creators. The proposal suggests that $Branch is airdropped to $Regen holders and then finds its way to the content creators … why not include early adopters/creators in the airdrop and buy yourself more time to get the token right?
The second item I’d want to comment on is the vision to have “Profile” pages for projects as can be seen on the sample notion card. I think this should be a second priority as it sets the wiki up to be yet another platform where projects are asked to register and describe themselves. The goal of attracting investors to “browse” a catalog of (verified) projects is 100% at the top of the list, but it is unlikely that the climate wiki will be able to capture a majority of regen on-the-ground projects just by being a wiki. Therefore, I’d suggest to keep these two products separate:
Project Registry (barebone) to register a project across all web2/web3,
Climate Wiki integrated with the project registry.
The separation would allow other platforms that host regenerative project
We are largely in agreement with what you’re saying here. The focus of our discretionary budget will be on getting the Web2 MVP Wiki set up (content) - as this will be Phase #1 of the project (also demarcated in the final proposal text here: Keplr Dashboard)
Beyond this, we also anticipate raising additional funds as needed for the token launch, once we are ready for Phase #2 of the project. Our intention in describing the token launch was to openly share a broader outline of our vision, with discussion of our longer-term plans for a token being an important part of that for $REGEN holders, the Regen Network, and how we are designing Climate Wiki as a Web3 platform.
We also recently thought of future $BRANCH payments as an additional option for compensating early content providers for the Wiki - something we will definitely look into for anyone interested in exploring this option. Love this idea!
Regarding the featuring of projects on Climate Wiki, it may be helpful to distinguish here between a directory and a registry. By their nature, wikis lend themselves well to Layer-2 functionality and so we are not intending this to be a “registration platform” for ReFi projects. Instead, we wish to work with any such platforms, including the Regen Registry + RND partners like Hylo, to help publicize projects and situate their work in valuable contexts for wider audiences.
At the same time, we are adding in the functionality for any interested projects or organizations to create accounts, use private wiki pages for research collaboration + information-sharing as desired, and contextually publicize their work through the Wiki. (Currently, we are deciding between several MediaWiki extensions which support these features)
We think that by providing private pages, flexibility, interoperability, context, and discovery, our project directory will support a diverse array of onboardi
First of all - It’s super exciting to see a first community spend proposal make it onto Regen. Thanks @Branch Out for leading with this and writing such a thorough proposal!
I’d like to comment on some specific constraints that y’all should keep in mind with respect to technical implementation of the $BRANCH token. As this isn’t expected to launch until later in the year, I imagine you all will have plenty of time to deliberate and find the most appropriate option.
First of all - ecocredits on Regen Network, while flexible and possibly usable in this case, have a number of design constraints that I think you should keep in mind, as the initial intent of hte ecocredit module wad to support functionality necessary for minting & managing ecological assets that reference verifiable ecological health.
Some things to keep in mind:
Ecocredits are issued through a “hierarchical issuance structure”. This means that for each “credit class” (e.g. you could create a new credit class for the $BRANCH token) there is a fixed set of addresses, known as “issuers” who can arbitrarily issue credits of that credit class
Ecocredits are issued in discrete batches to token holders, and each “ecocredit batch” must always have the following metadata:
batch start date & end date (usually corresponding to a monitoring period of ecological monitoring that’s happening)
project ID (reference to the on-the-ground project which is doing the ecologically regenerative activity)
project’s must always have a “project jurisdiction” designating the physical location where the project is based
It’s not possible to have a fixed or programmatically limited supply of an ecocredit credit class (as the whole point of ecocredits is that issuers mint new assets based on verifiable ecoligical state change).
Ecocredits are not natively transferable over IBC. They must be converted in to IBC-enabled assets using the Basket module in o