2024 IN REVIEW
It’s been a massive year for OHM!
In particular, 2024 was big for WISDOM, the collective sensemaking platform we’re building to help communities self-organise, reward contributors, and coordinate to solve complex global problems.
Much of this work has been behind the scenes, and I haven’t been blogging very much this year, so I thought I’d wrap up 2024 with a review of all our achievements, along with a sneak peak into the exciting year ahead.
AIMOS Collaboration
We started the new year by forming a new collaboration with members of the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-research and Open Science (AIMOS), applying WISDOM to the AIMOS conference. We built a new prototype and made it available to the community, enabling collective nominations and valuations of conference contributions, spanning presentations, administration, registration fees and more. Together with our Tiny OHM prototype, this study showed that the same model can apply across diverse sectors of society, helping aligned communities share resources and coordinate effectively.
Github Migration
The AIMOS project also marked the beginning of our GitHub migration, as we moved documents and processes from ClickUp—where we’d been prototyping—into the even more transparent and replicable environment of GitHub.
Artist-in-Residence
From February to April, we hosted Zarshua as an artist-in-residence at hOHM Base. Zarshua is a Wongi/Mirning First Nations artist who spent two years traveling songlines across Australia, witnessing sacred ceremonies and opening conversations around Woman’s Lore. During her stay, we turned hOHM Base into an art gallery and held several gala events, where Zarshua shared the story behind her unique paintings weaving Indigenous wisdom with modern physics to create a holistic understanding of the universe. These events also served as the launch pad for Mundanuari Kuddadu, a not-for-profit sharing Zarshua’s teachings on the dreaming, colonial history in Australia, Lore vs. law, sovereignty, songlines, politics and culture.
World Tour
From April to June, I traveled across America, Africa, and Europe to present at various gatherings and conferences, including:
- Vibe Camp solar eclipse gathering (Texas, USA)
- Astera Open Science demo night (Berkeley, USA) [6 minute video]
- Embassy co-living community (San Francisco, USA)
- Zanzalu pop-up city (Zanzibar, Tanzania)
- Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science conference (Nairobi, Kenya)
- ZuBerlin pop-up city (Berlin, EU) [26 minute video]
During this journey, I met many aligned entrepreneurs, community leaders, researchers, artists, and developers who were excited about our work, confirming broad interest in the WISDOM system.
App Development
In Zanzibar, three OHM-azing developers volunteered to help build the WISDOM app, sparking fresh momentum for the project. Since then we’ve been hosting weekly calls with our local developer team and moving methodically through a collaborative design phase to clarify our intentions before writing code—an exciting milestone we reached this month.
As they say in Africa: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” Our vision for WISDOM is deep and transformative—reaching into the very depths of our cultural conditioning to foster a regenerative gifting economy—so it feels right to be taking the latter approach. I’m deeply grateful and honoured to be surrounded by such a talented group of developers, spanning diverse backgrounds, cultures, and continents (Australia, Africa, India, USA), who are generously gifting their time and skills to build this dream of a more open, fair, and collaborative future.
Closing hOHM Base
Under the full moon in September, we ohm’d our final “ohm” at hOHM Base—the house we founded in March 2023 as a co-living and co-working space for OHM. In its time, hOHM Base hosted a range of community activities, including meetings, art gatherings, women’s circles, and potluck dinners. It was an invaluable experience that revealed many insights into communal living; however, the challenges of maintaining such a space in dense suburbia proved too great, and we decided to close this chapter to be revisited if and when OHM has land of its own. I’m still reflecting on my experiences and plan to share more in the future—but for now, I just want to thank everyone in the cOHMunity who contributed positive energy and helped us turn this house into a loving “hOHM.”
Thailand
In October, I headed to Chiang Mai for Edge City Lanna, the latest in a series of “pop-up cities” experimenting with new ways to live collaboratively while developing transformative technologies. I co-hosted a collaborative workshop with the founders of Logische Phantasie, an award-winning Vienna-based non-profit working at the intersection of climate change and digital technologies, where we prototyped WISDOM in real-time by having the audience vote on the value of project contributions. In parallel, I discovered that Edge City was just one of many such pop-up communities happening in Chiang Mai, including The Mu and ShanHaiWoo, giving me even more opportunities to share and connect.
In November, I flew to Bangkok for the Funding the Commons Design Jam, where we formed a team, designed impact metrics, and tested them with the WISDOM prototype, before being invited to present this work at the Funding the Commons conference. I followed this up with IPFS Bangkok and the Superintelligence Summit, learning about state-of-the art solutions in decentralised data and Beneficial AI. Finally, I capped off my trip to Thailand with Devcon—the world’s largest Ethereum conference—where I spent much of my time at the Regen Hub, presenting and connecting with kind-hearted humans dedicated to planetary regeneration. The response to WISDOM was overwhelmingly positive, and I’m excited to see where all these new connections lead.
Open Science Conferences
In November, I traveled to Canberra for another AIMOS conference, this time armed with data from our first prototype. I gave a talk and we hosted a hackathon, sparking conversations with board members about potential integrations for the next AIMOS conference. Afterward, I headed to Melbourne for Research Bazaar, another progressive research conference where I presented and gained more support for WISDOM. Following this positive response both overseas and locally, the team and I have now started writing up a paper on our AIMOS prototype, so that we have something to point to in future applications. Watch this space.
What’s up next?
In January, one of our developers and I will fly to India for ZuGrama, another pop-up city that awarded us both scholarships to live and work on the WISDOM app. If we can release our first version by mid-February, we’ll be in the running for $50k in prizes—along with some fantastic exposure for the project. We might need help to reach this milestone, so if you or someone you know would like to help by writing code, analyzing and visualizing data, or through other contributions (e.g., communications), please get in touch!
Next OHM Gathering
Once the app is released, we’ll finally be ready to (drumroll, please)… host another Gathering! OHM Gathering 2023 was truly magical, thanks to our wonderful cOHMunity. We recorded over 500 OHM-azing contributions in our transparent workspace, but need the app to process such a large dataset. With the WISDOM app at the next gathering, we’ll be able to review contributions in real time—recognizing and rewarding the value each person brings, and potentially distributing donations accordingly.
This, in turn, will give us another real-world opportunity to test and refine the system, bringing us one step closer to transparent, replicable templates for the autonomous recreation of OHM Gatherings around the world.
Little seeds, waiting to be planted. 🌱
Stay in the loop
I’ve been focussing on other things this year (as you can see!), but with the groundwork laid I’m expecting to have more time to blog next year and, well, lots of exciting things to blog about! So I’ve decided to commit to monthly posts in 2025 — let’s call it my new years resolutiOHM 🙂
If you’d like to stay in the loop, join our mailing list using the form below.
Happy holidays
That’s it for now– thanks for reading! Wishing you a safe and happy holidays and a great start to the new year.
Love and OHMs,
Cooper
