Project summary

Civic entrepreneurs are building the foundations for parallel societies and network states. Polis Labs embeds at these novel locations and conducts participatory research. We seek to learn about coordination and governance, when it fails, and what conditions generate those failures. We have already conducted two field studies and found a decentralization gap at our first site and concerns about local displacement at the other. We have field data from focus groups to back our claims. We believe these coordination failures are also the root cause of many other global crisis scenarios that exacerbate the polycrisis (though that is a long-term research hypothesis).

We are a nonprofit research institute, incorporated in Estonia, that studies how free people build social order without coercion. We treat network states, parallel societies, and pop-up cities as social experiments, then turn what we learn into open frameworks these communities can actually use.

This application funds one specific field study: a team embedded at Valley of the Commons, a 2026 pop-up village whose stated aim is to move from a temporary gathering toward a permanent settlement. The deliverable is a published, citable study that extends a research line we have already established with two completed field studies.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The goal is a single high-quality field study with a fast, public output. Our first study, at Alphaville, produced a counterintuitive finding: participants in parallel societies do not object to centralized decision-making. They object to the decentralization gap, the distance between a community's decentralization rhetoric and its actual centralized operations.

Valley of the Commons is the ideal place to continue research and testing. It is a community consciously trying to become permanent, which denotes the criticality of getting governance right and preventing coordination gaps. The question we will answer: when a community sets out to make itself permanent, does it close the gap between its ideals and its operations, or reproduce it?

We achieve this in the way we ran the first two studies. We embed on-site for the duration, conduct focus groups and qualitative interviews, code the data, and publish the analysis openly under CC BY 4.0. The output is a report that network builders can cite and use.

How will this funding be used?

The grant funds a four-person team embedded at Valley of the Commons in Hirschwang an der Rax, Austria, for the full run of the residency. It covers travel to and from the site, accommodation, and Commons Hub access for the embed period, per diems, on-the-ground research materials, post-residency peer research, and a small budget for the networking and partnership-building that keeps the work sustainable past this single study.

Total requested: $20,237.29.

A full line-item breakdown can be provided to regrantors.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

• Sterlin Lujan, Founder & President. Over a decade in cryptocurrency as a communications professional, researcher, and marketer; three years embedded in the network state ecosystem. Sterlin is an author with a deep interest in systems thinking and holistic psychology.

• Erin Suzanne, Cofounder. She has spent twenty years on complex international governance projects across South and Central Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East through Official Development Assistance programs, including post-conflict work in Afghanistan, Somalia, and South Sudan.

• Rafal Przemyslaw, Cofounder. Founder and principal of a risk management consultancy; twenty years directing international engagements in conflict and post-conflict settings, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen. Brings the conflict-resolution background behind the lab's Path to Resolution model.

• Cecillia, Executive Team. Joins the field embed to support data collection and on-site coordination.

Our track record is what has changed since I last applied to Manifund. A year ago, we had an incomplete vision and a rough website. Now we have two completed field studies of parallel societies, approached from two different vantage points: participants at Alphaville, where the decentralization gap surfaced, and the host resident population at Edge City. We have a disseminated conflict-resolution framework (Path to Resolution for aligned communities of 50 to 200), an active Substack publication, and a formed institute incorporated in Estonia. We have run two focus groups and engaged 17 participants across two parallel societies. The work is ongoing, public, and citable.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The most likely failure is access. Field research depends on the host community granting us entry and participants agreeing to engage candidly. If Valley of the Commons does not run, shrink, or decline research access, the study cannot proceed as scoped. Mitigation: we are already in the pop-up ecosystem, our prior two studies give us standing with organizers, and if this specific site falls through, the funding can be redirected to an equivalent 2026 pop-up with our agreement.

A softer failure is a thin result. The embed could yield a study that confirms what we already know rather than advancing the decentralization gap line. Even then, the outcome is a published data point in an open research record, and a null or confirming result is still useful science. The money does not vanish into overhead; it produces a public artifact either way.

The genuine downside risk to a funder is small. This is a bounded, single-deliverable project with a short timeline and a track record of successful completion.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

In the last 12 months, Polis Labs has raised no external funding. The institute has been entirely self-funded by its cofounders.