Our pilot gathering

Heart + Mind Gathering was our initial foray into the world of gift-based gatherings, creating a safe space for diverse perspectives in the wake of the COVID pandemic. 120+ artists, scientists, healers and dancers co-created three days of art, music, science and wellbeing workshops in the heart of the Gold Coast hinterland, Australia.
 

Our first prototype

After the gathering, we invited all participants to express gratitude for event contributions via an open review process. In brief, each reviewer was given a survey that listed 57 major event contributions and asked to distribute pool of ‘gratitude tokens’ between the contributions in any way they saw fit (see here for the full report). This prototype was based on a common model we see in the cryptographic space, and we learned a lot through this process that will feed into our future experiments in open review, recognition and reward. 
 

 

Major learnings

  1. Biased. One reviewer gave 500 tokens to a single contribution and 1 token to all others, demonstrating how easily this model can be gamed and subjected to bias. 
  2. Requires expertise. Token allocation is relative, meaning that fair completion of this task requires a broad understanding of all contributions, how they relate to one another, and their relative worth. This makes the protocol non-inclusive, as there are very few people with that degree of knowledge.
  3. Requires time. Considering the relative value of contributions takes time, on average 30 minutes for this particular survey. This also makes the protocol non-inclusive, as it requires a significant time commitment to add a meaningful unit of data.
  4. Not user-friendly. The user interface required for this type of protocol is fairly detailed and could be another barrier to inclusivity and accessibility.
 

Materials

 
(photos by Synaesthete Media)