Cursive Connections - Rachel

I want to introduce Rachel, who is here repping the cursive team. Thanks, Althea. So I'm Rachel. I work on designs with cursive. And today I'm going to be talking about things from my designer RD perspective.

So we're not going to get super technical and we're going to be thinking about things in more metaphorical ways. Cursive started, we've been working on a series of experiments for about a year and a half now. Testing this hypothesis, can cryptography be used to help humans connect? To foster human connection. I think that this hypothesis was compelling to me when we started because when I first was introduced to cryptography, I'm thinking about it as this is this tool to secure information, keep it private, like almost protect yourself from the world.

Like, almost protect yourself from the world. But could it also be used to help you connect with other people? We started these experiments with NFC tech that helped. The early experiments were super simple. It was, can you collect digital signatures from tapping NFC that you can then make ZK proofs about?

And we've expanded that concept quite a bit. But your wristbands that you got for Edgelana, they have the same NFC tech in them, and you can tap it to your phone to register, set up an account, and now you can have some really interactive experiences with other members of this community. So when you go around tapping the wristbands of other people, you're collecting a signature from them, and you're collecting this contact. And in the Cursive Connections app, it's like a Rolodex of people that you've met. And another way that we can visualize that is like a flower garden that's growing over time.

So in this video, this is from an earlier version of the app, and I went around this event, meeting people, attending talks, and I'm collecting these flowers, and the flower garden is growing over time. When you start growing this database of people that you've met, things that you've done, that information is yours in the app. And it is private to you. The cursive team doesn't know what information you're storing. So every person, their information is private to them, but we can use some cool cryptography magic to see where people have intersecting private data.

So this is a video that I ran with my collaborator Steven earlier. And we tapped each other's wristbands. And it's performing the computation. And sometimes you find out you have nothing in common. But as you go around and meet more people at the event, you can run this private set intersection feature and see if you have any common interests.

And if you don't, that should spark conversation to find where you do have common ground. A lot of these features that we're building out, we want it to help people spend less time on their phone and more time connecting with the people that they're meeting here. So you can think about this as icebreakers and fun ways to use cryptography to connect with people on a deeper level. So this is just the very tip of the iceberg of what we can do. And we're going to be rolling out more features as the month goes on.

And I want to give you a sneak peek of what that might look like. So let's say we're looking at Alice, Carol, and Bob, and the different flowers in the garden. And Carol has connected with Alice and with Bob. But Alice and Bob are not connected yet. Alice and Carol, if they ran the private set intersection together, they would see that they're both looking to find collaborators while they're here.

But a cool thing that we can do with the cryptography is Carol can become what we're calling a super connector and because Carol has found that both Alice and Bob want to find collaborators, Carol can then connect Alice and Bob through the app. So this could be based on interests, like information that is kind of static in the app and probably not changing for the month. But it could also be on information that kind of has a liveness to it, things that you say want to do in the next hour. Let's say that you're looking for someone, you don't just want to meet people who also want to get meals with people, you want to get breakfast now with someone else. There's a way to, what we'll be rolling out is features to allow people to find those connections in the moment when they are looking for them.

That's Alice and Bob being connected. So this idea of being able to find people to connect with in the moment, we're calling this narrow casting. So you'll see a new page in the app soon where you will be able to narrowcast to your social graph that you're building through these NFC taps. And if you've already started using the app, you've seen that when you meet a new person, you can give them a tag. And we only have five options.

But those tags, you can infer whatever meaning you want onto those tags. So I feel like this relates to g-certification, where we're not telling you what to do with this. You get to decide what it means to you. And then you can be sending out these signals that you want to connect with people in a certain category that you have labeled. So in this example, Carol's looking for people who want to, she wants to connect with over lunch, but she also is sending out this signal, which we're kind of calling this like a digital pheromone, it's like always present that she's looking to hire and she's put out this job posting.

I can hire someone with these qualifications for this amount of money. And if someone else fills out a job form and they have those qualifications and the salary works for them, they can get matched in the app. So we're going to be testing. We've tested this hiring feature before at another event. We're going to roll it out here again.

So you can look for that soon. And, yeah, the cool thing here is that you get to decide who you are narrow casting to. And also, there is levels of consent depending on which party you are in this scenario. So if you're a job seeker, like, you might not be automatically matched with recruiters. You might see, I can, here's an opportunity that matches me.

Do I want to now reveal my identity? And the tags is one thing, but another way to think about these networks that we're creating is through the NFC tech itself. So like your wristband has a chip in it and it is connected to Edge City. But you could have NFC tech from DevCon. We're going to have more stuff there.

And then you have people related to that community. We also have we're experimenting with apparel, so we have these a bunch of NFC rings that you can set up, like, whatever persona you want on your gear to be able to interact with different communities in different ways. And we're going to be giving out these rings as prizes to people who start using the super connector feature often and connecting more people who should be connected and wouldn't normally. They might miss the opportunity otherwise. So we're funded by Privacy and Scaling Explorations, and there's some social links.

Thank you. Thank you. Does anyone have a question? Got one right here. Thank you.

As you can hear, my voice is not very loud. So I need this. So I'm curious to hear... My voice is not very loud, so I need this. So I'm curious to hear, I guess, because all, I don't know how many of us are actually here for the whole month, but I assume enough people are going to be here for a while.

So I guess during the month, I guess, what is the experience that you want us to have through this? That's my my question. What I'm hoping for is as we are rolling out features we've never tried before, that people actually do get matched in meaningful ways, whether they are looking to maybe get hired, as the example, or just make friends and make new connections here, people that they can do the things that they want to do together, whether it's exploring, having people to, like, you know, I think this is just such an easy example. In the morning, you want to get breakfast and you can like message a few friends they might not be up or you could narrow cast to like all of the different people that you potentially want to connect with and if someone also is looking for that in the same moment it's like serendipitous and exciting and I don't want people