Pescadero, California

The “Transformational Finance Co-Design” workshop was held in October 2024 at Pie Ranch in Pescadero, California. It brought together open-source agricultural technology innovators, community practitioners, funders, and place-based investment communities. The event was brought together by OpenTEAM, the 11th Hour Project's Ag Tech Program, and Transformational Investing in Food Systems (TIFS). 

The initiative aimed to address the challenges posed by conventional funding models — such as venture capital, the charitable-industrial complex, and competitive public funding — which often lead to perverse incentives, barriers to access, and concentrate innovation. 

Throughout the course of the convening the group examined transformative models of community-led innovation and funding, and explored what a more resilient, equitable, and responsive ecosystem for agroecological innovation might entail. This involved sketching out a preliminary democratic funding processes, including devising decision-making criteria and a community engagement plan that empowers open technology, agricultural knowledge, and place-based innovation.

Participants engaged in discussions and activities centered around:

• Participatory Mechanisms: identifying the processes needed to achieve transformational finance, moving beyond traditional capital flows, including protocols for community membership and participation in decision-making.

• Challenges in Ag-Tech: intellectual property, scaling, and overcoming locked-in feedback loops in existing systems. The conversation highlighted the failures of ‘unicorn’ startup models in agriculture, emphasizing that current problems are not solely technical in nature.

• Value Beyond Financials: resources and value extend beyond financial capital, with knowledge capital being almost equally as important.

• Community Governance: best practices from community-owned funds and sharing circles, as well as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) such as Big Green DAO and IndigiDAO, discussing their purposes, community definitions, scaling methods (e.g., subgroups, consensus models), entity structures, and challenges like decentralization and the cost of building/teaching about DAO technology. Out of this came a working group for a "Community Governed Organization (CGO) toolkit" as a "living document" that provides a roadmap for groups to establish structures and share lessons learned from DAOs, co-ops, and other aligned community governance models. 

• Interoperability and Infrastructure: creating shared infrastructure and interoperability between various tools and platforms. This included considering a "Utility Layer" (commons, foundation) and an "Enterprise Layer" (companies, fund, incubator) within a framework to connect and weave entities into an ecosystem.Spring transitions