Menagerie

 

Mission

Mission:
Nurturing grassroots communities with positive reinforcement (for innovation and decentralized commerce)
Intention:
Harnessing our longing for community to create personal fulfillment and group efficacy: at work, at play, for social change and innovation
Vision:
An ecosystem of communities that forms an effective organizational structure, from pyramid to mosaic, with people fairly rewarded for following their conscience and passion while transforming alienation, unfairness, and self-dealing from omnipresent reality to anomaly. 
Founder’s Story:
Hi, We’re Wulf and Tony, and we created Menagerie in 2021 on the premise of building self-governed communities for a new economy with better long-term incentives for individuals and communities as a whole. Wulf spent a long and distinguished academic career discovering the fundamental economics that drive growing and prosperous communities – and then put those lessons into practice with several successful DAOs. Tony spent a lifetime handholding large orgs through tech-driven transformations, creating savings, efficiency, and impact while weeding out bad actors. They joined forces because community building will become the next revolution in productivity, marketing, innovation, and human fulfillment – but it will face resistance from rent-seeking bureaucrats, administrators, and middlemen displaced by real evaluations of merit, decentralized grassroots governance, and a liberated workforce. Together we will give businesses, non-profits, and governments the confidence to embark on this transformational journey and ensure that it leads each of them to unparalleled success.
Our Why:
Humanity has a fundamental longing for belonging. We thrive when we’re part of a community that we trust and embrace. We are alienated and tired as ill-fitting cogs in machines we don’t participate in governing. By fostering effective, fulfilling, self-governing, and fundamentally fair communities in every aspect of our lives, we will harness that primeval drive to accomplish unprecedented bursts of efficiency, innovation, and social impact that will outcompete businesses, NGOs, and even governments. But just as importantly, we will transform the daily lives of all participants from work to play – following their passions, trusting the system to reward them fairly, and creating lifelong connections.  As we grow, the social impact we create will grow with us, so will the power of community. Together with everyday people and communities we create, we are contributing to important social causes in new and innovative ways. We believe that there is a natural harmony between communities and social impact.
Our Culture and Values:
  • Our values live in each one of our communities and in each team member in those communities individually
  • We are not afraid to aim high – transforming existing high-profile orgs and collaborating with top brands to advance not just Menagerie, but the entire industry and organizational approach of community building
  • We are representing a new way of building organizations, and the old ones will point to any failures as a reason to reject the entire model. So the communities we built must be impeccable in their design, attack-proof, and operated with 100% integrity. We cannot set up anything that is designed to DAO-wash the same old centralization or enable rug-pulls, sock-puppeting, or any of the other myriads of known attacks. We build as if the eyes of the world are on us – and they will be.
  • That said, we understand that each org has its own journey to community building, so we will aim to build multiple paths to the same goal and accommodations for those journey that offer a broad road and not a tightrope
  • We recognize that ultimately decentralization, blockchain, Web3, metaverse etc. are tools to accomplish specific organizational goals, not goals in themselves – so if a community needs to run on a centralized database using fiat payments, that’s ok. 
  • We want to be invested in the success of the communities we build and work on performance-based compensation. Specifically, we believe that financial flows are the lifeblood of all healthy orgs, and will aim for the financial success of the orgs we work with – whether through generating revenue, obtaining grants, or other models.
  • Reputation is everything. Reputation tokens are the one sacrosanct tool in the community-building arsenal that should never be for sale. Our small-r reputation is also paramount – we are asking established orgs to take a leap of faith with us and we need to be 100% trustworthy at all times to warrant that leap.
Principles of Engagement:
To meaningfully live our company values with our clients, partners and investors and in terms of our services and products, we must be decentralized, self-governed, agile, efficient, and entrepreneurial. While these are common buzzwords in the startup space, they have distinct meanings here at Menagerie.
  • We serve others – we provide the tools communities need, and together we build a new economy.
  • Communities choose with whom they wish to work – communities forge a bond through shared values with those who are seen by the communities as fitting their required skills and values.  
  • We are agnostic about any and all Menagerie community engagements, communication, values etc. except for any community action that is prohibited under the respective communities’ chosen legal framework and jurisdiction 
  • We support execution – our support communities not only recommend a course of action, yet back our recommendations with the work and play suggested to implement them successfully in each client community.
  • We earn trust every day with every action – we follow through on our commitments, and require our partners and anyone we vouch for to do likewise. 
  • We overdeliver on our promises – we are resourceful and our effort is only bound by what benefits our client and the universe as a whole
  • We support diversity, equity, and inclusion through the core Menagerie voting engine which supports powerful change to happen through people with a variety of lived experiences coming together to form creative and productive teams. We also do this with our our internal governance policies listed here
  • We are engines and drivers of transparency – we raise the bar on each ecosystem we touch by shining the light on any corrupt, unprofessional and nefarious conduct 
  • We believe in the transformational exponential power of technology and innovation in governance – web3 can only exist through and with systemized and careful decentralized governance and we provide a beacon of hope on decentralized governance through the decentralized toolsets we endorse and help proliferate.
  • That said, not all that is new is better – we believe in rigorous evaluation and audit of every new technology, tokenomics of new coins, of new governance proposals, and real effects of every new technology 
  • Decentralized grassroots action – we are not paternalistic – we will partner with the communities we serve to help them use the best decentralized tools to organize & lead
  • We believe in ourselves, communities we create, and in making a difference together
What do we do?
  • Building, accelerating, and horizontally scaling communities 
    • Setting up communities via Menagerie software licensing and via the Menagerie Forum
    • Providing support services that support the needs of Menagerie communities
    • Providing communities with payment rails to pay each other
    • Provide tools and a mechanism for turning ideas into real actions 
    • Supporting democracy through decentralized and more transparent decision-making processes

Both traditional organizations and DAOs have goals, in the most recent years they most likely have impact goals which require community engagement to some extent. However, traditional organizations preserve the power of decision-making to themselves leaving communities behind. DAOs with even organizational structures, in turn, have a super power to create communities and engage them directly in the decision making processes. In DAOs, each individual has voting rights which depends on the number of tokens one holds. No member has any additional rights or privileges other than others. All decisions are made collectively by individuals versus centralized governance systems where executives and big shareholders often hold a disproportionate degree of control.  Because of their unique nature, DAOs in the real world focus on community rather than just financial goals, and definitely offer a more socially-conscious system.  DAOs have merged as potential innovative, almost revolutionary sites that hold a bright future for communities and everyday people in many different ways. Anyone can start a DAO community, find supporters, build movements around the causes they stand for, play games, and more importantly out of everything else, turn it all into revenue streams / income sources. 
How do we do it
  • Provide software licenses in a multi tenant architecture (like Salesforce) of the Menagerie voting engine 
  • Provide access to the Menagerie Forum and community building engine on the forum 
  • Build continuous decentralized infrastructure products via the menagerie core voting engine and associated products. Including but not limited to the following: 
    • Arbitration system for smart contracts
    • Data Verification community 
    • Oracle communities 
    • Decentralized underwriting communities 
    • Investment communities 
    • 501c3 communities 
    • C-Corp, LLC and B-Corp, etc. communicants 
    • Social Impact communities
    • DE&I communities
Why?
  • The new economy of reputation driven communities requires a support structure. (Community building is hard and requires support structures that help communities with the setup phase and ongoing support l)
  • Work to earn  or turning your passion into pay is the future of commerce and labor 
For whom? 
  • Dreamers – the humans with the vision to better the world who want help to execute
  • People who are looking for alternative lifestyles and more liberty and choice for the industries that need it most
  • People who want to live their values at work and play