A Cosmo-Local Coherence

Reflections from a General Forum on Ethereum Localism in Boulder

Author

Aaron Gabriel Neyer
March 07, 2025

The Beauty of this Bioregion

We continue cohering. This time, the weave extended beyond just our local Boulder community, and connected with an amazing group bringing community together in Portland and the wider Cascadia bioregion; as well as a wide and diverse group of humans who primarily gather around the Web3/Ethereum Ecosystem.

2 weeks ago, we all gathered for a General Forum on Ethereum Localism (GFEL) in Boulder, climaxing with our Cosmo-Local party on the evening of 2/22. We had over 100 people gathering together in the Riverside, many who had traveled in both for this event, and to attend the much larger EthDenver event which followed it. The first two GFELs had happened in Portland, and our friends Kevin Owocki (Allo) and Benjamin Life (OpenCivics) had felt inspired to bring one back here to Boulder, with the support of many of the original GFEL Portland crew (Ethereal Forest, Regenerate Cascadia). Many of the crew from COhere (OneLocal, The Wheel, Woven Web, OpenCivics, The Riverside, Regen Hub) came together to support it.

We came together through dialogue, sharing meals, enjoying our local landscapes and much more. We dove deep into a variety of topics with deep conversations happening on and off stage. It was a truly remarkable experience and it touched deeply into a conversation we've already been having here; what are we doing to weave a resilient community in our own backyard, and how does our work here relate to a wider movement across the world?

A term that floated around a lot this weekend served as some kind of answer to this inquiry. Cosmo-Local is a term that helps acknowledge the necessity of locally rooted community and local solutions and the unique approach needed for each bioregion, alongside the need for global coordination and sharing of systems and protocols that enables us to work in tandem wherever we are. This term also helps create some vital bridges that clarifies that this movement may leverage Web3 technologies, but it's not defined by them, or by any specific technologies.

To put it bluntly, Web3 and the crypto economy is still largely an ‘exit’ play for financial and coding elites, practicing the arbitrage of nation-states, but without much connections to local communities and resilient production; Similarly, local communities engaged in relocalized and regenerative production are not in sync with the mutual coordination capacities developed in the crypto/web3 context.

(…) Cosmo-localism is a third option, next to the two great competing options of the Western ‘mercantile’ world order and the neo-sovereignist alternatives that are based on a renewed control of associated nation-states. In these two options, the digital is merely used to reinforce existing logics of power and control; in cosmo-localism, the digital is used to fundamentally reorganize the world order.

Our Cosmo-Local party on Saturday night, as the climax moment of this GFEL weekend, sought to bring some of this vision even more into reality here. We got to enjoy the fruits of our local community with local musicians such as Pinnir Bot, Andy Babb & Lara Elle, and River Mann; alongside another traveling band, Justin Holmes & The Immutable String Band. We also got to hear from 6 different local organizations (Climatique, TinkerMill, Boulder Food Rescue, Food Not Bombs, Neighborhood Accelerator Project, and OneLocal) about the work they are engaging in, and we all engaged in a participatory budgeting process, which brought a Web3 funding mechanism into a more accessible form using an app we built called AlloIRL, to allocate $5k in matching funds to these local projects. This felt like a really unique experiment that people seemed to really enjoy, to bring a deeper level of engagement to how we tend together to our local community and support the work that is already happening.

We're still feeling the ripples from this event. Many of these conversations continued out into EthDenver and we even piloted our AlloIRL app at two other events and have received interest to use it for many others. Our friends in Portland are carrying forward the momentum from this event to keep growing the movement of Ethereum Localism and the resources around that. Conversations that started at GFEL have now led to the formation of the Regen Commons, which is bringing some exciting coherence to how regenerative values are making their way through the Web3 ecosystem. And here in Boulder, we're feeling an increasing growth in the coherence of our coalition, as we continue to weave our relationships and build our systems to support our continued collaboration.

We'll be sharing a lot more soon here about Woven Web and how we're orienting as well as information about this wider coalition that has been collaborating, particularly through COhere and GFEL, so stay tuned and keep gathering.

Coming Up in Community

See you out in the world. Keep cohering friends!

~ Woven Web

Enjoy these photos from GFEL! And if you want to hear more about what went down, and see videos of talks, and even chat to an AI agent trained on transcripts from the whole event, check out Benjamin @ Open Civics Summary Thread.

Nathan Schneider (CU Boulder) & Azuraye Wycoff (Yellow Barn)

Brett KenKairn (City of Boulder) & Angelique Rodriguez (Water Unite)

Owocki delivering the pizza at Regen Hub

Cam, Benjamin, Savannah & Eileen

This panel on social change & political shifts spontaneously widened to include the whole community.

Lively discussions at unconference sessions

Justin Holmes & The Immutable String Band

Local Favorites: Andy Babb & Lara Elle

AlloIRL allowed folks to vote on projects and see distribution changing live!