706 Protocol as supportance for diaspora decentralized self-organizing communities
Team member names: Raphy He, Chen Deng
1. Short summary of your improvement idea:
We aim to establish the “706 Protocol” as a set of executable community protocols, toolkits and supportance schemes.
The 706 Protocol is grounded in the communities of Chinese progressive youths scattered around the world, having undergone 12 years of continuous theoretical and practical exploration since 2012.
Among its most well-known embodiments, "706 Youth Space”(706青年空间), was once a physical space located in Wudaokou, Beijing, China. After the physical space closed by authorities in 2020, the community known as “706” expanded its physical presence and cultural influence globally over four years along with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During 12 years of community iteration and governance, this network of Chinese youths, unified by the the aspiration of self-organizing communities, has accumulated a wide range of protocols and practical experiences. Furthermore, it has also incubated a series of creative consensus, plans, and projects that have contributed to the improvement of the real world.
Through 12 years of updates and iterations, it has always maintained ample positive energy, continuing to grow even under the invisible forces of irresistible authoritarian power.
In the face of rapid socio-economic modernization, young people in third world countries are becoming drastically atomized and disoriented. We hope the 706 Protocol can alleviate such global challenges.
By providing referenceable meta-rules, consensus, protocols, and practical methods, we generate universal rules based on a vast number of real-world governance cases and solutions accumulated both in China and overseas Chinese diasporic communities.
706 Protocol aspires to offer operational supportance tools for people in the whole world to build decentralized, self-organized communities.
2. What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance? Eg: hand-washing, traffic system, connector standards, carbon trading.
The protocol we aim to improve is the “706 Protocol”.
This is a set of executable community protocols and empowerment schemes designed to improve and strengthen self-organized community governance and cultural activities within youth communities.
It establishes rules, consensus, protocols, and practical methods for free-thinking, non-conforming individuals both in China and Chinese diaspora to establish their spiritual and physical connectivities.
Our rapidly modernized society’s structural neglect of individuality is becoming increasingly severe. Young people desire access to social connections but lack the social capital and resources. How to build nourishing social connections while consciously defend oneself from mainstream pressure remains a difficult task.
From China to the Asia-Pacific region and the world, such individuals need to build nourishing communities, to cherish the freedom to think and live differently.
As Individuals, people lack a nourishing environment for personality to develop and self-identity to be recognized. And when thrown into the social world, they were confused by the distortion of values caused by capitalist maneuvers, gagged into silence and powerlessness because of authoritarian pressure, and struggle with the out-of-control society in technological acceleration.
In the past 12 years, the “706 Protocol” offers a nourishing communal adhesive with experimental spirit, safeguarding and inspiring the pursuit of freedom and openness among the diaspora of the Chinese-speaking world. It helps curing the spiritual condition deprived of cultural and intellectual nourishment, laying the foundational premise for the cultivation of individuality.
The growth and renewal of this protocol are based on the flow of people, marking a departure from centrally-formulated, top-down organizational frameworks. Serving as an organic communal adhesive, the 706 Protocol loosely binds diverse, locally self-organized communities of varying sizes, models, and geographical spans, endowing them with strong community resilience and vitality.
The current version of the 706 protocol already includes many executable procedure design and tool-kits, which can be used to create projects and events. Here are some of the units:
1.WAMO Festival:
In August 2022, a group of Web3 enthusiasts and community members, holding the principles of “positive externalities, openness, common good, and open source,” and carrying a passion for technology, exploration of DAO governance and self-organization, reflection on public goods, and envisioning the community and future, initiated an experimental project named the Dali Web3 Summer Fest in Dali, China.
Today, it has become a collective celebration and unique culture among Chinese-speaking Web3ers. This collective narrative of decentralized offline collaboration has redefined the Web3 ecosystem in the Chinese-speaking world and has given rise to a series of public goods and DAO organizations characterized by positive external actions.
Dali has gradually become the center for Chinese-speaking Web3, DAO organizations, digital nomads, and community life. Moreover, participants of the Summer of Tile Cat have spread this spark to various corners of the world, giving the WAMO spirit a borderless attribute that transcends geography and nationality.
2.The Urban Living Room:
As a part of the 706 Protocol, provides a physical space where young people from different social backgrounds and value orientations can engage in safe and relaxed public discussions on non-profit-oriented literature and arts, public issues, and avant-garde trends in the same physical space.
The Urban Living Room is an indispensable component of future community and consensus society infrastructure. Over the past 12 years, “706” has launched the Urban Living Room movement in dozens of cities globally, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Dali, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Japan, bringing thousands of multicultural communication and knowledge-sharing events to various locations.
3.The Creators Co-Learning Community:
This is a co-learning and co-creation group oriented towards “action,” “output,” and “business sustainability.”
It has conducted collaborative learning on various topics, including zero-knowledge proofs, full-chain games, the web3:// protocol and future Ethereum technologies, Rust programming, the Move smart contract language, and Solana project development. The community encourages everyone to engage in project-oriented learning within 4-6 weeks, embodying the principle of learning by doing.
4.Agora Dialogue:
A sharing-space initiative focused on private living rooms and various independent spaces. It advocates and supports more space hosts to host salons, gatherings, study tours, and other activities, connecting young people scattered across cities who are concerned with public issues.
Through sincere interactions, it aims to overcome the alienation of daily life, explore the possibilities of interpersonal exchanges in the context of interdisciplinary topics, foster communities with a sense of trust, and establish a global network across different regions.
5.The Living Lab:
Co-living forms a crucial part of the 706 communities in Beijing and subsequently in various other locations. Whether it’s progressive exploration or public concern, it’s realized through the medium of communal living.
This is a set of co-living space protocol established on a mature “New Form of Co-living Protocol,” serving both as a basic unit of communal living based on friendship and shared interests, and as a new fundamental social unit parallel to “family” and “clan.”
It compensates for the emotional and trust support traditionally provided by family relationships, and offers a basis for risk-taking, savings, retirement, and creative support, laying a solid foundation for creating a new decentralized consensus society.
Supported by the 706 protocol, the Living Lab project has already formed dozens of local Living Labs in cities worldwide, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Dali, New York, and Los Angeles, providing a modern co-living experience to thousands of young people, while summarizing a set of living conventions that can serve as a "Co-living Protocol.”
6.Social Layer:
Drawing inspiration and origin from the “706” community life, has evolved into a modular community-level Web3 social infrastructure that aids in establishing and maintaining the resilience and sustainability of the community.
It is a subjective, relational, programmable social network built with SBTs (Soul-Bound Tokens) that crystallizes your relational value into on-chain badges.
By issuing, acquiring, and passing badges, you can present a decentralized identity in this network that reflects your diverse roles, values, and consensus. You can also compile and open-source the community’s relational structure into code through combinable badges, realizing the vision of a programmable social network that is participatory for everyone.
In the future, Social Layer aims to integrate decentralized and Web3 technologies to record, transmit, and reconstruct human deep social needs, realizing the concept of “human” as the core node of discovery and connection. It seeks to create a new social network that counters capitalist value consumption structures, creating new, widely recognized value symbols that can enter and shape Pop-up City and the exploration of human prototype societies, becoming a crucial infrastructure and foundational framework.
7.Creator House:
A short-term co-living camp oriented towards output based on a specific topic.
Inspired by the success of HackerHouse, we aspire to see more creators stimulate their creativity through short-term co-living arrangements. Starting from the first trial in Istanbul, to the second experiment in Kunming with “community research” as the theme, and the upcoming CreatorHouse sessions focused on independent board games, permaculture, and social design, this format has been increasingly accepted by both members within and outside of 706. It has gradually been validated as a viable method for connecting a broader range of fields.
8.The Slice of Era:
This is a cultural card game incubated by 706. The game consists of 54 cards, each representing a key term of the era (such as New Workism, Identity Anxiety, Interdisciplinary Cognition, Contemporary Nomads, How We Entertain, Intimate Relationships, Local Culture, New Education, etc.), allowing players to connect the keywords to grasp the core spirit of the times.
The entire project, from its conception, content creation, production, to crowdfunding and promotion, was completed within a community-based setting.
3. What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?
In light of the current situation of self-organized communities in the world, especially those from the Chinese-speaking sphere, we aim to constantly renew and expand the 706 Protocol as a set of executable communal protocols and empowerment schemes.
Currently, it operates as an internal protocol under the “706” title. Now in this proposal, we aspire to evolve it into globally applicable protocols, a set of usable tools, and a carefully-constructed framework through a series of methods. Self-organized communities inherently possess transnational and global characteristics, thus, we need to expand the protocol to enhance its adaptability when connecting with a broader array of peoples.
Moreover, most existing research on self-organized communities has not yet fully incorporated the Third World into its primary focus. We aim to address the self-organizing needs of the Third World as the protocol’s connection point with the real world, offering it to a wider global diaspora, supporting the establishment and improvement of self-organized communities.
The 706 protocol emerged within China’s unique social context, as a self-organized protocol based on the reality of an sometimes-quite-harsh environment.
Its decentralized and flexible operational framework, inclusive and humanistic spirit, and firm communal emphasis, alongside homely-public-mixed spatial arragements, high adaptivity to a hostile institutional environment, together fostered its flexible, diverse, and free-flow communal practices.
All of this function as supportance for people’s deep involvement and genuine participation in 706’s self-emerging traditions. Even after the physical facilities of “706 Youth Space” ceased to exist in Wudaokou, Beijing, due to unfortunate situations, it remained as Beijing’s, and possibly China’s, most influential youth public space, a refuge for free-thinking people, and a tangible utopia for contemporary progressive youth to explore avant-garde ideas.
In the years following the closure of its beijing space, 706 community did not shrink back but start regeneration and protocol updating. It gradually transcended its original form characterized by offline spaces in a singular city, to foster a vast multi-city nomadic network, a constantly experimenting online-offline-mixed communities with both strong ties and weak links.
Now, we as the globally dispersed 706 participants are dedicating ourselves to renew the “706 protocol” for the future methodology of communal self-organization, through the formulation and implementation of a series of rules, consensus, protocols, and practical methods. And we think our past experiences can help Third world people outside of China to build resilient self-organized communties, too.
4. What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol? Eg: field observation, expert interviews, historical data analysis, failure event analysis
These methodologies offer a comprehensive approach to understanding and refining the 706 protocol within its community:
1.Participatory Action Research (PAR):
Researchers, as active participants in the protocol’s journey and operation, undertake both observation and study of the entire process.
In the research phase, they aim to further ascertain the protocol’s current functioning, transforming some implicit aspects into explicit norms or agreements. The impact of these changes is observed, and adjustments are made based on actual feedback, with the goal of identifying the protocol’s effective elements.
2.Qualitative Interviews:
Key participants who have been involved in the development and implementation of the “706” protocol, both historically and currently, are selected for semi-structured interviews.
This is supplemented by multiple focus groups to capture diverse individual perceptions of the protocol’s formation and enactment, and to examine these differences.
This data will be further processed through thematic analysis to identify, and document themes or patterns will be located, which are then validated and refined by key participants.
3.Case Studies:
Significant events happened in the “706” community’s development process, of those the protocol had a pivotal impact, are archived as cases within a case library.
These cases will be analyzed individually. Case studies are integrated with qualitative interviews, aiming to establish the relationship between perceptions of past protocol development and implementation and the actual outcomes.
4.Historical Data Analysis:
The Notion collaboration platform of “706” houses articles and the rules and protocols of hundreds of autonomous spaces from the past decade.
A comparison of these protocol documents will unearth commonalities. The findings from historical data analysis and field research will be compared to discern if there is a discrepancy between espoused theory and theory-in-use, enhancing understanding and potential protocol improvement.
5. In what form will you prototype your improvement idea? Eg: Code, reference design implementation, draft proposal shared with experts for feedback, A/B test of ideas with a test audience, prototype hardware, etc.
The 706 Protocol comprises two types:
1.Community Governance Framework Protocol, which includes:
a. The Governance Layer with community authorization to conceptualize and practice relevant affairs;
b. The Energy Layer that assembles based on community links and self-emerging mechanisms, without committing to the execution and design of specific affairs, characterized by full vitality and high solidarity;
c. The Function Layer focused on the operation of specific community affairs and public practice;
d. The Project Co-creation Layer centered on specific projects or observable goals, committing to specific projects.
2.Toolkit Protocols:
Referenced during the seperated or related operations of various projects.
These protocols are often created, iterated, and governed by the project teams based on the community’s basic consensus, embodying sufficient complexity and practical significance.
Additionally, because these protocols are more closely related to specific projects, they tend to be more dynamic.
Both types of protocols are the shared operational protocols currently in use by the community. Based on historical practice and protocol iteration, we will create a prototype protocol that includes both the community governance framework protocol and the toolkit protocols.
This prototype will be thoroughly explained through various media such as workshops, manuals, websites, and videos, setting up clear communication channels to facilitate users of the prototype protocol to understand and provide feedback in a timely manner, including but not limited to meetings, forums, newsletter, chatbots, etc.
6. How will you field-test your improvement idea? Eg: run a restricted pilot at an event, simulation, workshop, etc.
We will conduct field tests of the prototype in the following ways:
1.Pilot Program:
We will start the test run with what we call the 706 Energy Layer, optimize through both internal and external observations and feedback, and then spread it to more project teams for pilot testing
2.Localization Testing:
We will collaborate with community organizers from other countries, especially those from the Third World, to test how the prototype protocol can be localized.
3.Modular Testing:
The prototype protocol may include different modules or functional kits, such as finance, media, and decision-making, which are several basic functional modules.
Different projects can use different rules for the best financial management implementation, testing which method is more suitable.
4.Situational Testing:
Setting up specific hypothetical situations to find out how the community adapts, for example, when certain technological tools cannot be used, or when the community is under pressure.
5.Technical Solution Testing:
Test the integration and operation of various technical methods.
7. Who will be able to judge the quality of your output? Ideally name a few suitable judges.
Firstly, we will establish evaluation criteria for the prototype protocol, a measurement scale staring from the community. Namely, those qualities are important for the good operation of a community. For example, the soundness of finances, the completeness of decision-making, the correct handling of mistakes, etc., and whether the operation of the protocol can satisfy community members in these aspects? We will establish an objective and systematic assessment.
1.Participatory Observation:
Through the observations, and in-depth feedback of internal users to feedback and evaluate the effectiveness of protocol.
We will solicit stakeholders of the protocol, determine the purpose of the assessment through facilitation, and further identify the dimensions, indicators, and weights of the assessment.
Next, the assessment scheme formed based on collaboration is distributedly evaluated by actual users of the Protocol across different regions and levels using these indicators.
Finally, a certain number of assessment participants will be invited by the researchers to collectively synthesize the results of multiple assessments, form an overall evaluation, and confirm it with the stakeholders of the assessment. An evaluation report will be produced in the end.
2.External Observation:
Feedbacks and suggestions about the protocols by the external observers.
3.Expert Assessment: Inviting external experts and organizations for evaluation and analysis, such as FIC（Foundation of Intentional Community.
How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea? Eg: Submit proposal to a standards body, publish open-source code, produce and release a software development kit etc.
We will create multilingual websites and establish channels on online media platforms, utilizing manuals, articles, games, videos, podcasts, AI robots, and other forms to introduce our protocol and toolkit, making it accessible for anyone around the world who is interested to adopt the protocol and receive our assistance.
If we develop technical tools, we will publish the source code, data, and toolsets on our GitHub page.
For community organizers with in-depth experience, we will provide comprehensive documentation, including a clear and effective reference framework similar to the design of Community Canvas(https://community-canvas.org/). This will also include theoretical and experiential references to offer full support.
To improve based on the feedback of the onboarding program for the community and community participants. we will collect feedback during the prototype testing process to understand how novice users can best comprehend and utilize this set of protocols.
Our goal is not to present the protocol as a set of dry and impersonal rules but to help those interested in joining self-organization and those diasporas to join the community and participate business, and to reclaim the homeland that was lost.
Self-organization exists not just online but involves offline real-life interpersonal interactions, gatherings, spaces, etc., and includes tacit knowledge. Therefore, we will spread and exchange experiences through offline workshops or training sessions. We will travel to different countries to hold events or invite self-organized workers from around the world to visit 706’s spaces in various locations, to operate and continuously update this set of protocols together.
Establishing self-organization in different countries involves different cultures, languages, and contexts, and any self-organized worker can localize our protocol according to local needs.
The 706 Protocol community will frequently collaborate with various friendly organizations to hold events, and we will also spread our protocol to other such organizations.
We hope to present the release of the protocol as an instance of “open-source social innovation” or a “Commons management system.”
Once the protocol is released, anyone using this set of protocols needs to acknowledge the principles of open source. Changes in versions should be recorded and traceable, with any modifications shared with others around the world.
8. What is the success vision for your idea?
The urbanization process in contemporary China has dismantled the earlier communal connections between individuals, dissolving the rural networks built on kinship and local roots.
A significant number of new urban migrants, both voluntarily and involuntarily, have entered urban spaces, creating an urgent need to establish new supportances of social relationships.
In cities, many unoccupied spaces do not spontaneously generate beneficial interactions between individuals. Sociable individuals struggle to find a fitting place, leading to widespread isolation. The refuges where genuine connections and emotional interactions can be nurtured are gradually diminishing, causing those who have once lost their spiritual homeland to be displaced once again.
Moreover, the centralized institutional environment, social structural pressure, the limited economic development and distributive justice in the Third World, often make the establishment of self-organization even more challenging.
However, it is perhaps these factors that lead people to choose, whether actively or passively, to detach from mainstream social organizational forms and seek more open and autonomous organizations and communities.
Whether it’s those attempting to establish self-organizations in China or those leaving their homeland and establish diasporic organizations abroad, they are part of what we define as the displaced. And there is an urgent need for the displaced people to build new communities. Many of them find more freedom in overseas life.
In response to the various difficulties faced by the diaspora, we aim to implement the 706 Protocol as a set of executable support protocols and empowerment schemes. Our goal is to alleviate the increasing atomization, isolation, and lack of connection among diaspora communities and groups worldwide.
By providing referenceable meta-rules, consensus, protocols, and practical methods based on a vast number of real-world governance cases and solutions within the Chinese-speaking world, we seek to offer operational assistance plans for decentralized, self-organized communities among the diaspora in the Asia-Pacific region and globally.
This initiative aims to widely apply more democratic, autonomous, and decentralized forms of self-organization, enabling diasporas around the world to find each other and gain strength.
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