The TenTogether Story

TenTogether is the expression of my, Heath Arensen's, vision for a future of human organizing that first looks to the past and then reimagines how we design the systems and technologies to build, share, and maintain collective value.

This is a space to clearly articulate my vision and to connect with those on a similar journey. It is my personal goal to faciliate the investment of $1 billion to communities in 10 years and through this investment create $10 billion in shared value. This cannot be acheived alone.

TenTogether is a blueprint for a return to our earliest structure of cooperation, the village. It is a fund to facilitate the shift in wealth from individuals to community at scale. It is technology developed in the open, free for all to use and improve. It is an innovation in governance that recognizes and accounts for the dynamics of the individual, small groups, those who build, and those who benefit from what is built.

TenTogether is a story. It is my story, it is our story. It is a story of community, of connection, of togetherness.

My story of understanding the power of connected community starts in Kenya as a child when a group from our boarding school would periodically volunteer at an orphanage. We would usually just bring a ball and play soccer. Most of the children were barefoot, adeptly navigating the thorny and rocky soil. There was a day one of the young boys received a gift, a pair of shoes. What I saw next would impact me in ways I still don’t have words for. He took one shoe and put it on. He took the other shoe and gave it to his friend. With smiles they ran onto the soccer pitch, with one foot bare, the other protected. There was not event a thought of ownership, no this is mine. Just ours.

Can we think about ownership differently? Can we think of wealth differently? Can we shift from mine to ours?

Let’s talk about the village. The village is community. The village recognizes that we are not individuals floating through life disconnected and alone but that at our core we are designed for connection. Designed to create, to know, to give, to respect, to love. The village has people, but it is not only people. The village is rooted and sustained by nature. The forest, the fields, the river. A village is an organizing system for sustainable communities.

TenTogether is based on a set of design principles for the stewardship of community assets, the shared resources a village must collectively maintain. These principles can be used to design the systems of governance, financing, and participation required to manage the creation, and sustaining, of collective community value.

TenTogether looks current systems square in the eyes and says, we can do better. We need a vision of markets that sees wealth not as controlled primarily by individuals but more by the custodianship of communities.

The ambition of TenTogether is to facilitate a migration of wealth to assets stewarded by, and creating value for, communities.

Technology, as demonstrated by a number of emergent Web3 models for web governance, can enable a shift to increasing community rather than individual avenues for economic participation. This shift to the village can increase equal access to resources while leading to more sustainable economic systems.

Here are the principles.

1. Store wealth in what is shared

Wealth takes the form of assets or money. When wealth is too concentrated with individuals, preservation and growth may become misaligned with the regenerative health of a society. Communities rely on shared natural and created resources. The more we can steward wealth collectively in the form of public goods, the more efficiently the free market can allocate resources.

2. Shift from units of 1 to units of 10.

In many transactional contexts, collateral and trust are a prerequisite. By shifting this from an individual to a group, risk can be diversified and greater access to resources achieved. Why 10? It is an optimal group size for collaboration with a diversity of voices but still small enough for all to be fully engaged. (it doesn't actually have to be exactly 10, just close)

3. There is hierarchy in what is created.

Communities gather around a vision to create. These ideas form projects and flow first from an individual. The vision is sustained by this individual and as a community forms to achieve it collectively, the individual must continue to own the vision.

4. There are natural limits to growth.

Take a cue from nature. A tree will grow quickly once planted, reaches a natural height then stops. There are optimal sizes of communities, rates of growth, regeneration of resources. These must be considered in system design. Exponential in place of regenerative growth is rarely sustainable.

5. The future is decentralized, the present is not

While we see a future where decentralized communities self organize around collective ambition, current institutions like banks, governments, and employers are not. Transitional structures can be designed to act as bridges and play a custodial role on behalf of the community when transacting with traditional organizations.

6. Contribution is the foundation of participation

Giving to a community can take many forms but contribution in the form of time, skills, or resources are required to maintain community assets. A well designed system for recognizing and incentivizing contributions should be viewed less as monetary compensation and more as voting influence.

7. Governance matters

In a designed system, governance sets the expectations for participants, defines how decisions are made, and protects the community. It must be well designed and have the necessary levers for enforcement.

So how do we do this, first, we map it out:

Using the Ten Together principles, we sketch out the design for a particular type of community endeavor. We start by looking at the individual, then the group. The size of a group is so important that it is in the name, Ten Together. By organizing in units of 10 and connecting them through a community of communities model, human connection can be maintained at an ideal size.

Here is an example of how this can work. An individual wants to buy a house but has neither collateral for a down payment nor access to a housing loan. Move it to a group of 10, each with the same challenge. Through pooling resources and sharing risk, the group qualifies for financing. The system design uses enforceable community governance to manage the group repayment of the loan.

However, a system like this won’t work if financial institutions are not willing to create financial products for them. This is step two. Financial instruments must be designed to allow the investment in Ten Together communities.

By organizing communities of communities, sufficient scale and diversification can be achieved to justify financial investments in these communities.

Lastly, this system design provides the basis of a technology platform. Through the use of tokenization, blockchain smart contracts, and collaboration features, the technology becomes a gathering place for the community allowing for effective governance and scale.

As tokens are an efficient and transparent tool for community governance, what is the role of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance in Ten Together system design? It can play a role but it is not the store of value. The goal of Ten Together is to apply resources to community projects and the assets of these projects have an intrinsic value. The tradability of tokens outside of a specific community can be destabilizing so in most cases should not be incorporated in the design.

The governance, system design, financial flows, and technology all work together to allow communities to build and maintain things that matter.

We imagine Ten Together communities everywhere. We see open source communities organizing to maintain their projects, independent gyms operating as co-ops, decentralized manufacturing by independent artisans, community owned housing, farmer directed crop off-takers, and carbon offset initiatives in communities threatened by deforestation.

Each with a Ten Together system design, financial instrument, and technology.

Ten Together replaces capital with community. Capitalism was designed for centralized aggregation in the hands of few, we believe this can be replaced by connected communities organized for scale.

While this system is managed down to a grass roots individual task level, it only works at scale.

Therefore, we are designing for scale.

Ten Together is not proposing anything new. It borrows heavily from microfinance groups, cooperative societies, and collectives. In fact, it is modeled on humanity's oldest settled organizing structure, the village.

If this vision resonates with you, join us. Subscribe to our newsletter. Join a Billion for [___] working group.