# Gravity medium article Q1 2022

## Title: Still pending

Imagine a startup moving along successfully, and then a disagreement occurs between founders. Suddenly, people spend all their time and energy justifying their position, contributors slow down or stop, uncertain of which direction to follow, and supporters start to turn their attention elsewhere in their portfolios.

Conflict [is very costly](https://https://www.acas.org.uk/estimating-the-costs-of-workplace-conflict-report), and even common to all types of organizations, but it's also something we are not usually very competent at, even though it keeps presenting itself over and over again.

As restorative justice advocate Dominic Barter formulates: If you have a kitchen to prepare aliments, and meet the need for nutrition, why don’t you have a dedicated place to talk about complex issues, safely, and meet needs for expression and transformation?


Gravity tries to create a framework for communities (especially DAOs) to process conflict in an effective, compassionate, non rivalrous way, and support through competence the happening of meaningful communication processes where all parties can learn something and make amicable decisions looking for win-win scenarios.

Some of our intentions are:

- Save resources on coordination issues.
- Allow an effective management of conflicts through mediation.
- Facilitate the individual wellbeing of members inside the community
- Care for the public image of the organization providing discretion and confidentiality.
- Train people to have cultural skills around competence managing communication and complexity.

Sometimes it’s difficult to see the necessity of a group like Gravity in the web3 space. The promise of decentralized technology is enough for many crypto-enthusiasts to envision a future utopia where code is law. While the technology is necessary and will certainly improve human coordination, the technology alone is not sufficient for creating the non-rivalrous world we desperately need. The technology will inevitably reflect the values of the builders. By intentionally building a culture we would want to see in the future in the DAO space today, we are planting the seeds of that culture within the very infrastructure of the future.

This self compositive public good, born in Token Engineering Commons, aims to to prevent conflicts from tearing the precious social fabric that holds communities together, and the cultural build they have developed. We recognise the importance of our human nature and its role in the technological revolution we are experiencing.

We want to support online communities to build tooling and practice to provide more effective management services.

The objective is achieved applying E. Ostrom’s Principles number 4, 5 and 6 (Rules are enforced by effective & accountable monitoring, Sanctions for violations should be graduated, & Conflict resolution should be easily accessible and low-cost), to manage conflict and support soft governance rules inside the DAOs.

We have handled over 20 cases of mediation so far, with only a few of them boiling over into public view and or scaling without much management margin.

Our mediation service starts with funneling the inputs that anyone in a the community can provide, then we assign a Graviton that offers a first approach, and if necessary, maps the situation with private meetings, to prepare the space for a joint dialogue between the parties to find solutions, helping to draft a voluntary agreement, and finally following up on its compliance.


Gravity offers a free 3-month certification program, called "Graviton Training", in which we certify mediators at an initial level, which allows them to participate in gravity cases, and facilitate the dynamics of other DAOS.

**The next graviton training will start at the Late April 2022**, and at the beginning of that month we will be circulating the pre registration for those interested, who do not need any prior knowledge in conflict mediation or negotiation.

We have multiple activities planned on the roadmap for this year, including a lot of continued education (role plays, book clubs, practice groups), provition of mediation services in multiple communities, working on our own DAOification and leading a research on web3 mental health and psychology.

In **Q3** we look forward becoming one of the first users of [Unbreakable vows](https://https://forum.1hive.org/t/unbreakable-vows-private-contracts-arbitrated-by-celeste/5012), a tool that would help us encrypt the agreements between parties and have have cryptographic signatures in our mediations.

In **Q4** we want to become a Schelling Point for the conflict management public good, and create a collaborative economic design around it.

We want to do this by iterating on the Commons Stack and TEC frameworks, where the culture is respectful, inclusive, and seeks to nurture all talents, to provide fertile ground for the collective management and advancement of competencies around handling conflict in DAOs.


## So, What is our call to action?

We don’t want DAOs to continue repeating the practices of violence that we see in our current systems.

Solve conflicts peacefully with Gravity. Here is a form to contact Gravity DAO direct, right now, in the event of damaging dispute or conflict. https://the-commons-stack.typeform.com/to/rCVsK5RK

__________________________

### Join our calls!

Liberating structures and deep democracy practice groups on Tuesdays, with leen and jeremy

Coordination calls on Wednesdays

Book club Thursdays! Margaret Wheatley: Who Do We Choose To Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, Lead by leen

Every Friday Implementation of psychological practices in Web3 with Bianca

This was our 2021 generation of Gravitons poap:


To stay up to date with progress in the emerging Gravity DAO:

Follow us and boost our socials in twitter @gravitydao

Come join in and make a difference, in the #gravity channel in the TEC Discord Server:
https://discord.gg/kJ2f5fBedT

Support us with our Gitcoin Grant
https://gitcoin.co/grants/3951/gravity-conflict-management-dao