Hello there
gm and welcome
I am Scott Morris, aka @TheTokenJedi
Some know me, many don't, so before I do a lil a speedrun de moi I'd just like to say it's an honor and pleasure to join the many PUBLIC GREATS here in this round. It's really nice to see those doing often unappreciated work getting the recognition they deserve, funding flows aside. Special props to Izzy | @decentalizedceo for taking initiative and to the rest of the team for making it possible!
Before I go any further, a somber moment for our common humanity: This may seem counterintuitive here but for a moment forget about me and please go donate to the Sameer project, a Palestinian led project supporting the people in Gaza. Any god worth praying to knows they need the help more than anyone else right now. Free Palestine!
With that, here's that speedrun on --record scratch-- how I ended up in this situation. Cue the montage!
It was in 2009 that I first heard about Bitcoin while I was organizing my first local currency experiment: The HERO Rewards program.
In 2010 and 2012 we ran our first pilots and were lucky enough to be filmed for the Money & Life documentary, featuring incredible luminaries like Bernard Lietaer, Hazel Henderson, Riane Eisler, John Fullerton, Charles Eisenstein, and so many more.
In 2013 I attended my first conference on complementary currencies in The Hague, hosted by RAMICS and Qoin among some other European partners.
In 2014 I gave a TEDx talk ya'll might enjoy entitled "Putting People and Planet before Paper Wealth"
In 2015 I launched "Ithacash -- money made for main st." and its "Ithaca Dollars -- i$" as the successor to the Ithaca HOURs currency in Ithaca NY (1991-2009); and in the course of organizing a Hunger Games themed scavenger hunt with businesses downtown that year initiated a Pay It Forward program that later won the City of Ithaca a $50k prize.
In 2016 I was part of a hackathon team that won a genuine honorable mention by putting a union on Ethereum and pitching it as a solution for vulnerable gig workers.
In 2017, after initially meeting the team through my work on Ithacash, I supported Bancor's historic, world record setting ITO, where it raised $153M talking about how "smart tokens" (the primitives of DeFi we refer to as "Automated Market Makers" or "Bonding Curves" today) would create liquidity for smaller tokens like community currencies. This performance was due in large part to their having the support of the late great Bernard Lietaer, the advisor and mentor of mine I helped recruit to the project on top of rewriting the original whitepaper with his help. By the way, if you get the feeling I'm making something of a point here it's because I am.
in 2018, I was invited by longtime MMT champion and now Professor Rohan Grey to join him in teaching some courses at Cornell Law under Prof. Robert Hockett, whom I would come to learn was also co-author of the Green New Deal. Ya'll've heard of that thing yeah? Good stuff.
In 2019, I was focused on helping reinvent Qoin as a crypto-friendly foundation and attended the Bancor-organized event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Bretton Woods monetary agreement, where I helped co-organize the participant-led working groups track and put forward a vision for a "Global Impact Alliance" to catalyze the kinds of multi-stakeholder coalitions necessary for that "more beautiful world our hearts know is possible" to again borrow from our dear Charles Eisenstein.
By 2020 though, I was "cooked" as the kids say. As in, super burnt out; basically useless work wise and in dire need of time to recover and heal. Good thing nothing particularly bad or stressful happened that year right?
In 2021 I left the US to become a digital nomad and found myself out in Austria at an event called the Crypto Commons Gathering where I met another particularly wonderful group of humans. Especially if you're looking for a cool venue for your next hackathon, retreat etc, come check out the Commons Hub sometime! P.s. that's where my cover image was taken, courtesy of my epic wingman Jeff Emmett.
Speaking of whom, in 2022 Jeff and I had the original inspiration for "MycoFi" there at the hub during an event on Collaborative Finance (CoFi) as a way of helping people advance their thinking about new resource allocation / coordination systems in a more nature-attuned way. If you haven't read the book yet, check it out at https://mycofi.art! Special thanks go to Owocki and Jessica Zartler for their invaluable support bringing that little gem out to the world!
More recently alongside a handful of other projects I've been working with ReFi DAO, with special focus on the DAO-ification working group and the Local Node Network where we hosted a Beta cohort of the Local Node Incubator earlier this year. I tried to bring as much knowledge as I could to the content plan / curriculum based on my earlier days in the trenches doing face to face community organizing; hopefully some of it was instructive.
That explains how I wound up here, here at least to some degree. Anyway, what were the prompts again? Oh right, well I hope whatever it was I was talking about said something about that stuff.
Got some Jedi business? You know how to find me.
@TheTokenJedi