Journey Into Fractally - #3: Creating A New Fractal

So I’ve already decided to building a new fractal for my non-profit Universal Gift Dividend Project (ugdp.org). Now what?

Team vs. New Fractal

Currently the main fractal is the Genesis Fractal and there are a few others that have formed. The Alien Worlds fractal meets weekly. There is also an Eden on EOS team that I initially thought was its own fractal, but is not. What is confusing is that their team name is ‘Eden fractal’. Thomas (@highsteem1900) also recently started up a Bitshares fractal. However, as @highsteem1900 writes his goal is to first be a Genesis fractal team before converting it into an independent fractal. More confusion. Haha.

What’s the difference between a team and a fractal?

A team is a group within a fractal that supports the mission of the fractal. Hence all the teams within the Genesis fractal work to support fractally.

To learn more about teams you can read here: https://gofractally.com/posts/22696113?utm_source=manual

There are currently five teams: 1) Eden fractal, 2) EOS translation foundation, 3) Fractally in Orbit, 4) fractally francophonie, and 5) Team fractally (ie. the core team members building the platform.)

So at this stage there seem to only be the Alien Worlds & the Genesis fractal that I am aware of. So should I create a team or a fractal? Because I can only be part of one team I’d rather create a separate team that is focused directly on helping the Genesis fractally. I can probably help in business development or marketing. If I were to create a UGDP team there would be some confusion about the goals of the team vs the goals of fractally. Hence, I’ll just go ahead and keep UGDP as a separate fractal.

Things to Know Before Creating A New Fractal

Most of the things you need to know about ‘bootstrapping’ a new fractal is in the whitepaper and the concept of teams and fractals can cause some initial confusion, but hopefully the difference is clear now. A new fractal community is limited to 7,776 members to minimize the potential for corruption. There are also natural limits to how many people someone can truly know (google the Dunbar number). Because of my failing memory due to age and because of the great number of people I meet online, I understand very well the difficulty in participating in large communities. The 7,776 membership limit applies to those involved in governance of the community, but there can be many more passive participants who own tokens, post content and provide liquidity. When a community reaches 7,000 active members, anyone can create a new fractal with the same mission as the first one.

The main function of the fractal community governance is to 1) allocate the budget 2) create or change the community guidelines and 3) update the smart contract.

There is a Council that is ultimately in charge of the governance of the entire community. It is comprised of the top 12 team leaders who’ve earned the most respect in the past 20 weeks. Team sizes range from 4 to 12 and a ⅔ vote within a team determines the team leader. 8 of 12 Council members can make changes to the smart contract, but team members have a 24 hr period to vote their team leader out to invalidate their team leader’s vote. Any smart contract upgrade or changes are done via petition and is similar to how a Bill becomes law in the US government. The Council can fine and evict users as well as recover accounts in case of a hack or lost password. Some of the actions the Council can take are:

1. Upgrade the community smart contract
2. Update the community guidelines
3. Charge a fine to community members violating guidelines
4. Evict a community member
5. Allocate a budget
6. Make a statement on behalf of the community
7. Resolve a dispute
8. Recover an account
9. Appoint representatives to other communities

The community also has veto power over any decision the Council makes. 8/12 of the top team members based on respect rankings for the most recent week can block Council changes.

Getting Started.

Founders will eventually be able to sign up to fractally.com and deploy a smart contract to create their fractal. The contract has to be known and approved by fractally.com to be hosted there, but the software is open-source for those who want to self-host. The founder has complete control over membership and parameters until there are enough members for a Council. If the founder never yields control, the other members can always secede and create their own fractal without the founder.

Questions:

Q. Will the same respect tokens be distributed only to the Genesis fractal or all new fractals?
A. Each fractal will have its own token per the whitepaper.

Q. Is there any communication between fractals?
A. It doesn't seem like there will be official lines of communication between fractals. However you can provide liquidity between two different fractal tokens. You can also buy & HODL other community fractal tokens to earn their respect tokens.

Q. How much flexibility is there on all the parameters for Respect allocation for the Team, Content, Referral, HODL, Market Making rewards? Do we need to implement all the categories?
A. Not sure. Good question and will try to find out.

Next steps.

So now that I have a better understanding of how the new fractal will work, I’ll refine the UGDP mission statement and draft some initial community guidelines to make sure new members are aligned and then start scheduling meetings and growing membership. Excited to see what the future of this new fractal holds! Until next time!