The Marma J ecosystem has always been focused on social good – but this is a subjective concept with potentially multiple meanings. How can we make sense of the projects and initiatives we’re looking to launch and endorse if we don’t have a common understanding of what our core mission – leveraging Web3 tech for social good – means?
Over the fall of 2022, we posed this question first internally to ourselves, the Sub-DAO representatives and members of the Marma J DAO / Marma J Foundation infrastructure. Over around a month, we undertook an exercise where we each wrote out what we felt ‘social good’ meant to us – the theoretical, the practical, and the philosophical. Several key themes and common terms emerged and were extracted to form a picture of the synonyms and meanings we believed the concept of ‘social good’ had for us as a core team.
What ‘Social Good’ Means To The Marma J Core Team
During my MARMA J CON workshop on January 8th, 2023, I then posed the question to the assembled group of students and professionals interested in Web3 and blockchain from Antigua and Barbuda. I walked through our core team-affiliated terms as an example, and then handed it over to the group to throw out what terms and concepts that stand out to them when they think of ‘social good.’
See for yourself, what they said:
There was a good discussion around the importance of the distribution of power – an ‘appropriate distribution’ – and how an imbalance of power could result in social harm. Information access or the availability of knowledge was raised as an important need to overcome challenges and to collect perspectives in order to provide assistance or support (financial or otherwise) and to ultimately determine how to benefit or improve the quality of life for people. Preparing for ‘rainy days’ and having the social aspects of a community for folks to heal together from natural disasters, in particular, were also insights from this sharing around what ‘social good’ meant to this group of Antiguans.
This workshop was included as part of our inaugural MARMA J CON programming for a couple of reasons: 1) to better understand the perspective of local Antiguans; 2) and to see whether or not the views around what ‘social good’ is was aligned with our core team’s understanding or not; 3) and to spark conversation around this topic that is so core to the Marma J ecosystem as a way to introduce the conference participants to us.
Personally, this conversation was so enlightening and vibrant that it blew me away. There were a number of elements in common between our two groups, but also some key variations that have helped to enrich our working definition around the concept of ‘social good’ and what it can encourage us to focus on as a community. And as we grow in our understanding of what ‘social good’ can and does mean to the global Marma J Community, I for one will be returning to this workshop often as a starting point for the work we can and should be doing for good.
Stay tuned for more related to SOCIAL GOOD and the Marma J DAO as we think about love and positivity this February. If you have thoughts about the topic of this blog, feel free to comment and share! We’d love to hear from you.