Will Ruddick

Econo-optimist - ❤️ Common Pooled Resources & Regenerative Agriculture🌱 - Founder: @grassecon (a/yeye)

[Will Ruddick @wor]

🌱 Grassroots Economics - Book Published!🌱

After years of learning, listening, and working alongside incredible communities, I’m thrilled to share Grassroots Economics: Reflection and Practice—a book exploring how we can rebuild trust, pool commitments, and create resilient economies from the ground up.

This journey has been made possible by the generosity of countless teachers, communities, and supporters. Special thanks to Kevin Owocki (https://t.co/tOB2eGuo6y & Gitcoin) and Béla & Ellen Hatvany (Mustardseed Trust) for believing in this work.

📖 Read more and download the book here: https://t.co/niNlq14BM5

[Will Ruddick @wor]

A "millipede knot" can form when several individuals are responding to the same pheromone trail.

Gongolo (Giriama) Jongoo (Kiswahili) Jongololo (Kids)
Good morning!

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I appreciate the intention behind your promotion.

But there is no such thing as a “Sarafu currency.”

And the work doesn’t spread through raising consciousness, tagging accounts, or advertisements.

It moves, flows, and spreads quietly through the people who actually find it useful and make it part of their own living practice.

By framing it this way, you’re not doing me ( or anyone truly in the practice ) a service here. It pulls attention away from the embodied work itself.

I’m gently choosing to step back fully now, so I can stay focused on the practice with the people already living it day by day.

Wishing you well on your own path. 🙏

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I appreciate you coming back once more.

But the work doesn’t spread through comprehensive records, popularisation, or smart questioners.

It moves, flows, and spreads quietly through the people who actually find it useful and make it part of their own living practice .... not through advertisements or external promotion.

If you think of it this way, you’re not doing me (or anyone truly in the practice) a service here. It pulls attention away from the embodied work itself.

I’m gently choosing to step back fully now, so I can stay focused on the practice with the people already living it day by day.

Wishing you well on your own path. 🙏

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I appreciate the many offers and references to technologies, tokens, protocols, and products.

I also feel I need to keep asking myself is I am starting from the tool, or from the living system?

Am I trying to fit a community into a protocol, or am I really listening to how care, labour, trust, memory, repair, production, and future commitments already move?

This work keeps reminding me to slow (the f*ck) down.

Before asking whether a technology can be integrated, I want to better understand the underlying patterns.

What is the economy here, in practice? What obligations already exist? What should be measured, and what should not be reduced? Where might a tool help? Where might it distort, extract, or capture attention?

I am much more interested in alliances than integrations.

And I need to hold that standard for my own work too.
The question I want to keep returning to is not:

Can this community use this protocol?

But:

Can I be of service to a living settlement system without making my tool, model, or theory the center?

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I didn’t mention Holochain because the protocols are meant to be tech-agnostic and, in a sense, ancient.

The important layer is not one specific stack, but the capacity to curate, value, limit, exchange, relay, and repair commitments across pools. That can use blockchains, pool relays, peer-to-peer architectures, local ledgers, or witnessed agreements depending on context.

I’d be very happy to see these patterns implemented on @Holochain . The point is not to make communities fit the technology, but to let the technology serve living settlement systems.

For now they work quite well on @ethereum thank you!

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I really appreciate the thoughtful way you’ve engaged with all this.

We’ve spoken from several angles now, and from my perspective it still keeps circling back to the same institutional framing… while the one thing I keep returning to ( embodied, living practice ) hasn’t quite landed the same way.

This post of mine captures exactly where I am:

https://t.co/G5miGgAZ1G

“I do not know the whole picture. I am in the picture.”

I’m gently choosing to step back from this discussion now, so I can stay focused on the practice itself ... with the people already doing the work, growing food, building trust, tending the soil, and living it day by day.

Wishing you well on your own path. 🙏

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I’ve been sitting with two fish. 🐟 🎣

Two fish, five people who need them, fifty people who want to learn how to fish, one tired nervous system, and several incomplete theories.

At first it sounds like an allocation problem.

Who gets the fish?
Highest price? First come, first served?
Loudest voice? Most guilt? Most excitement? My inbox plays these bad little games with me every day.

....the old proverb: teach a person to fish......

I still love it a little. But teaching someone to fish also takes fish.

Not the swimming kind. The attention kind. The patient kind.

The kind that listens when the knot is wrong for the seventh time.

This is where I keep returning to commitment pools, stewardship, and the games we practice at Grassroots Economics. The question is not only where the fish goes. It is also how the fisher is honored, how learning happens, how limits are held, and how we repair what we miss.

I do not know the whole picture. I am in the picture.

Still, the fish are here. Someone is hungry. Someone wants to learn.

So I listen, choose, leave room for correction, and try again tomorrow.

Maybe we learn not only how to catch fish, but how to decide together what...

... fish are for.
( 🐟 deeper fishing on willruddick dot sub-stack dot com 🎣 )

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I may be wrong, but I think this is where commitment pooling matters most.

There may be no single group-owned pool.
No central community treasury.
No clear membership boundary.
And maybe that is okay.

Maybe the community is not the pool.

Maybe the community is the overlap.

One person is part of a food pool.
Another is part of a labor pool.
Another is part of a care pool.
Some commitments touch.
Some do not.

But where they do touch, trust can move.

That feels important...

It means community is not only a club, brand, Discord, DAO, or organization.

It can be a living pattern of people making commitments, fulfilling them, and becoming visible to one another through practice.

... I would not want to claim ownership over a community....

I would rather ask ....

What commitments are overlapping here? What values do we have in common? What do we both value?
What practices are surviving here?
What promises are becoming trustworthy enough to route through?

That feels humbler and much safer to me.
Less like 'building' a group.

More like noticing a commons already forming.

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I think we may be using the word "community" differently.

When I write about a community of practice, I am not really talking about a brand, platform, Discord, organization, or membership structure.

I am talking about people who are practicing something.

Growing food.
Building trust.
Repairing relationships.
Reducing dependency.
Running pools.
Making commitments.
Fulfilling commitments.

I do not decide who gets to join such a community, and I am not asking anyone to.

In that sense, it feels less like a club and more like a commons of attention.

So when you ask whether I understand what happened in Bankless, the honest answer is probably .... not in the way you mean.

What I am interested in is a different question ...

What practices survive when the platform, brand, leader, or organization disappears?

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I'm curious.

Have you played Social Soil?
Read a chapter of the book and responded to it?
Looked at the datasets?
Used the tools?
Run a pool?
Reduced your own dependency on money? Increased trust with a neighbour? Created a reciprocal exchange that didn't need cash?

Because I notice a pattern that concerns me, including in myself.

.. it is very easy to offer advice to a practice we have not entered.

The papers, book, datasets, software, and experiments are public.

So before delegating, build a platform, or organizing a community, A simple question:

What part of the practice have you already taken responsibility for?

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I just compiled some reflections on C. Thi Nguyen, games, scores, and Grassroots Economics.

The global economy is not a game in Nguyen’s sense. Too much of it is involuntary. But local economies, mutual aid circles, savings groups, baskets, restoration groups, and commitment pools can become bounded spaces where communities practice different ways of valuing, exchanging, limiting, repairing, and settling.

I am reading Nguyen not as asking us to abolish scores, but to design them with care.

A score can help us coordinate. It can also capture our attention and slowly replace the value it was meant to serve.

At @grassecon, this matters because we are building tools, games, vouchers, value indexes, receipts, and commitment pools. So the question becomes: can our scores stay humble, local, plural, revisable, and answerable to real fulfillment?

I also reflect on delegation. I welcome it deeply, but I am learning that this work cannot be delegated from enthusiasm alone. It needs a community of practice.

Practice first, then responsibility.

With gratitude to C. Thi Nguyen for helping me see these questions more clearly.

(see my sub-stack for more)

[Will Ruddick @wor]

What I have been learning is that community is not a platform, a Discord server, or even a governance framework. Those can be useful, but they come much later.

A community of practice for me begins with practice.

Can I reduce my dependency on money by 1%?

Can I increase trust with a neighbour by 1%?

Can I create one reciprocal exchange that does not need cash?

Can I tend soil, food, care, repair, or stewardship with others over time?

Can I read a chapter, explore a dataset, test an idea, and report back what actually happened?

Can I play a video game called Social Soil and report back?

.... I often hesitate when the conversation jumps immediately to the platform, token, protocol, DAO, or governance layer.

The work I am interested in is much slower and more embodied than that.

If a Discord helps a community of practice that already exists, wonderful.

If it becomes a substitute for the practice itself, I become much less interested.

For me, delegation starts when someone has entered the practice deeply enough that they no longer need my example. They have their own observations, their own experiments, their own responsibilities, and their own relationships to steward.

There is no rush. For me rush just destroys practice.

[Will Ruddick @wor]

On delegation ... yes, I want that deeply. and I am learning that this work cannot really be delegated from the level of enthusiasm alone. It needs a community of practice.

For me, that means first entering the Practice: using the tools, reading the work, playing the games, tending something real, testing the ideas with neighbours, and noticing what actually changes.

A few simple entry points could be:
Play Social Soil seriously and reach a high score of 5M.
Reduce your own dependency on money by 1%.
Increase trust with one neighbour by 1%.
Create one small reciprocal exchange that does not need cash.
Read and respond to one chapter, one dataset, or one research note with care.

Note that Sarafu Network itself is also evolving into new app and protocol layers, so I am less interested in “spreading Sarafu” as a brand and more interested in people learning the deeper practice: how local commitments, trust, repair, and settlement capacity actually grow.

So yes, I welcome healthy delegation - a lot.
But the path is practice first, then responsibility.

[Will Ruddick @wor]

@lifesmyth Bien sur.

[Will Ruddick @wor]

Social Soil Game!

Now free on Play store for Android https://t.co/FLs7dw2h8U
&
this will work on computer or iPhones https://t.co/NiTRE3msbR

Let me know what you and your kids think!

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I simply can't take praise well outside of a community of practice.

What matters most to me is the practice itself: building tools that listen, step back, and serve what is already alive in communities.

Steps (ala NVC)

Name what you actually observed
Not “you are amazing,” but “when I read this sentence / saw this choice / witnessed this action...”

Name what it touched in you
“I felt relief / clarity / trust / encouragement / resonance...”

Name the value or need it met
“because I care about integrity / grounded practice / humility / service / real community benefit...”

Name the impact or learning
“It helped me see...” or “It gave me language for...”

Avoid turning the person into an icon

Keep it connected to the work, not pedestal praise.

Example compliment:
“I appreciated the way you named the risk of tools becoming the center. When I read that, I felt clearer and more grounded, because I care about technology serving living communities rather than replacing them. It helped me reflect on my own practice (which I understand as XYZ).”

[Will Ruddick @wor]

for a deeper dive on the concepts: https://t.co/281iAcaEKS

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I didn’t mention Holochain because the protocols are meant to be tech-agnostic and, in a sense, ancient.

The important layer is not one specific stack, but the capacity to curate, value, limit, exchange, relay, and repair commitments across pools. That can use blockchains, pool relays, peer-to-peer architectures, local ledgers, or witnessed agreements depending on context.

I’d be very happy to see these patterns implemented on @Holochain . The point is not to make communities fit the technology, but to let the technology serve living settlement systems.

For now they work quite well on @ethereum thank you!

[Will Ruddick @wor]

What does health look like for a society?

Maybe it is the ability to coordinate care, food, labour, trust, repair, memory, and future commitments without collapsing into panic when cash is scarce.

ROLA-like traditions (rotating labour associations), such as Latsab in Bhutan or Mwerya and related traditions in Kenya, show that value can move through memory, obligation, labour, care, and repair.

A household receives help. Later, that household helps another. The circle remembers. The circle repairs.

Money can help. Money can also interrupt.
At best, money is a bridge.
It should not become the root.
...
In recent Sarafu Network analysis, looking at subset of 73 village-run community pools in Kenya:

Over 1,200 producer commitments were accepted into those pools.

More than 5,000 exchanges happened where one local commitment was exchanged for another.

In the most recent 90-day window, more than 80% of pool exchanges were commitment-to-commitment exchanges rather than only exchanges into cash-like assets.

More than 1,300 verified community reports were connected to farming, cleaning, construction, training, permaculture, lending, and education.

These numbers do not prove regeneration.

But they show that local commitments can become visible, circulate, return, and help coordinate settlement.

... and even a gift can become a trap.

Philanthropic capital can create breathing room in these systems. But if external capital is too large, too central, too frequent, or too disconnected from local production, it can capture attention.

Then the question shifts from: What can I offer, receive, fulfill, repair?

to: How do I unlock the next money?

I am beginning to think of this as settlement attention capture.

Does capital help local commitments circulate?

Or does it become the center around which the whole system must turn?

I do not want finance that replaces our reciprocity and care for each other. I want finance that helps communities need less external finance over time.

Regenerative finance cannot simply be more injected capital.

It is capital within the carrying capacity of a settlement commons.
Medicine that knows when it stops being medicine.
A bridge that does not become the village.
Liquidity that helps a community recover its own future.

............

A more formal version of this work, with data, simulations, and clearer limits, is coming soon.

[Will Ruddick @wor]

When we look at coordination at scale for pooled resources and commitments:

Cash (or any singular medium) works at small scale precisely because it’s not a single chokepoint. At Ethereum scale, we need something better.

Everyone can make their own commitments (as tokens) and pool them into (locally) curated pools - that connect just like AMM pools connect (over common tokens).

This is exactly what Commitment Pooling Protocol (CPP) and Cosmo-Local Credit (CLC) deliver: legible registries for curation, valuation, limits, and settlement so intentions (promises, capacities, needs) become verifiable, routable, and trustable across sovereign pools. Forkability and cosmo-local pluralism keep any one pool from becoming a chokepoint.

It is tempting to counter this with: “this isn’t possible without strong privacy.”

Yes and … as long as we can see privacy is secondary, not central to our goal. It is essential at the local edge …. protecting individual dignity, vulnerability, small-scale issuance/redemption, and preventing personal capture or harm. https://t.co/hlGd6WHaf0

But at the coordination layer (routing across pools, free-rider detection, settlement velocity, liquidity rebalancing, verifiable contributions), strong cryptographic privacy (large anonymity sets, unconditional mixing) actually can hurt more than it helps. It erodes the very legibility that makes large-scale pooled coordination possible.

Any singular medium of exchange (a single token, one dominant privacy pool, one canonical rail) dramatically increases the surface area of enclosure ... a single point that regulators, insiders, or captors can dominate.

Plural, locally sovereign, legible pools connected over common protocols give us both coordination at scale and real resilience. Privacy tools (gated or unconditional) don’t solve free-riding or cross-pool trust.

Legible trust surfaces do.

@mbauwens @devanshmehta

[Will Ruddick @wor]

Open questions on $ETH @ethereumfndn 's new Mandate :

First, how will EF measure CROPS in practice? Without metrics, CROPS may become a slogan.

Second, who decides when incrementalism is acceptable? The document allows bounded incrementalism, but this is where compromise can enter.

Third, how does EF engage with regulation while preserving censorship resistance and privacy?
Fourth, how does it prevent “right association” from becoming insider culture?

Fifth, can Ethereum scale privacy, UX, and security without adding complexity that weakens verifiability?

( read the Mandate here )
https://t.co/mKTpAuzBGA

@VitalikButerin @devanshmehta

[Will Ruddick @wor]

The real bottleneck for me isn’t privacy. It’s coordination at scale. Massive pooled resources and mutual commitments only work when participants can actually see, verify, and trust what’s happening.

That requires legible, auditable surfaces ... not fragile anonymity sets that collapse the moment real-world stress (or real-world accountability) hits.

Privacy doesn’t solve free-riding, settlement velocity, or cross-pool trust. Legible trust surfaces do.

I think that's a hard problem the EF Mandate’s CROPS framework needs to address.

[Will Ruddick @wor]

I don’t think we should teach people to “hide” things on-chain or online as a default posture.

A healthier rule is: assume anything you put on-chain or online may become public to someone, someday.

Then make intentional choices about what belongs there. Public, transferable commitments, pooled credit spaces, receipts, and shared coordination records can be powerful precisely because they are legible.

The key is consent: don’t expose people by default, but for the things we genuinely want to make visible, accountable, and shareable, Ethereum can be an incredible commons.