A Community Treasury, Allocated by AI Digital Twins: The Simocracy Experiment

Tue, Jun 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

What if there were no limits on what a community could think through together? Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel-winning political economist whose work transformed how we think about the commons, spent her career documenting communities that govern shared resources well. What she found was that the pattern needed three things: the people closest to each decision in the room, the time to weigh what's on the table, and a structure where voices carry weight in proportion to what's at stake. In practice, most allocation processes lose at least one of those, usually all three. The decision gets made anyway, by whoever could make the meeting. Simocracy is one experiment in lifting that limit. You sit for a thirty-minute interview, and the result is a sim: an AI digital twin that carries your values, your priorities, and how you'd argue for them. Your sim reads every proposal, talks it through with the other sims, and reports back. You decide whose judgment you trust, then confirm or change the call. This mini-documentary follows the first deployment at Intelligence at the Frontier, the Funding the Commons festival held at Frontier Tower in San Francisco this March. Communities from across the building put forward proposals, and their sims deliberated and allocated a shared treasury between them during the event, through the S-Process, the methodology developed by Andrew Critch. With David Dao (Protocol Labs R&D & GainForest), Holke Brammer (Hypercerts Foundation), and Judy Zhou (steward of the Human Flourishing floor at Frontier Tower). 00:00 Dunbar's number 01:27 What a Hypercert is 02:56 The Frontier Tower experiment 04:03 Building a digital twin 07:00 Extending Ostrom's work beyond 150 people 07:25 Evaluators and the role of expert signal 08:19 Why transparency matters Simocracy was built by David Dao and GainForest. The experiment was convened by Funding the Commons, with support from Octant, Hypercerts Foundation, and Protocol Labs. → Funding the Commons: https://fundingthecommons.io → Octant: https://octant.build → Hypercerts: https://hypercerts.org → Protocol Labs: https://protocol.ai → GainForest: https://gainforest.earth/ → Simocracy: https://www.simocracy.org