A-Corp hearings in Colorado and DFOS takes a leap

Two weeks ago we announced the first Artist Corporations law had been proposed in Colorado. This week our bill hits the next step in its journey: public hearings and testimony in the Colorado Senate.

Tomorrow, I’ll be joining a half-dozen Colorado-based artists and creators to testify before the Colorado Senate Business, Labor, and Technology Committee on the merits of A-Corps. 

The artists and creators will share their experiences trying to fit into a system that wasn't designed for them. We'll share the experience and research that led to A-Corps and the benefits it unlocks: growing the economic and legal rights of creative people, improving health care access through group plans and pooled benefits, and establishing a new financial instrument — the A-Corp share — to help artists keep and grow the value of their work.

Colorado already has a thriving creative economy of 100,000+ arts and culture jobs, plus the Sundance Film Festival moving to Boulder next year. Becoming the first place in the world to make Artist Corporations a reality will grow the state's reputation as a hub for the creative economy nationally and internationally.

After testimony, the five committee members will ask questions and vote on whether the bill advances to the full Senate. A simple majority voting yes moves it forward — and the committee's chair, Senator Marc Catlin (R), is already a co-sponsor.

Testimony will be livestreamed here tomorrow starting around 10am MT. We'll report back next week on what happened.

DFOS takes a leap

Less visible but also significant: this week DFOS hit a breakthrough that brings our ultimate vision much closer to reality.

DFOS creates shared private internets — spaces where groups of people come together in worlds of their own. Worlds with their own look and feel, their own apps, their own density of content and functionality.

Earlier iterations of DFOS buried these powerful capabilities inside complicated settings screens, while the most visible surface areas felt more like Slack/Discord than the new world we’re trying to create.

This past week, Ilya designed a new approach that cracks that open. Instead of burying customization inside complicated settings screens, it replaces them with a tight experience of simple apps that dynamically produce unique experiences tuned to each community's needs.

Because DFOS was designed from the beginning as an operating system built on a protocol with apps on top, this evolution doesn’t require a hard left or big rewrite. The next steps are clear and simple. The world of mini-apps we've been building towards will now arrive even faster than expected.

In the near-term, this pushes back our planned launch by a couple of weeks. In the long-term, the improvements are well worth it. As these pieces come together, the foundations for a new internet are taking shape.