Designing Protocols for a New Social Fabric

Hello everybody, it's a pleasure to see you. Thank you for coming around. We'll start this is a design firm for Web3 and products. And Beth, do you want to introduce yourself real quick? I'm Beth McCarthy.

I'm program director at Funding the Commons. Thank you to everyone who came to Funding the Commons the past few days. It was a really special time to share with you guys. And I also work doing some consulting with Layer Labs, which I think some of our folks are also here, so hi, and have been collaborating with Andres for like five or six years now on various design interventions and activations. So really happy to talk about some of our thought processes here and how we think about protocols as embedding social coordination.

Awesome. Thank you. Beth is a badass, just for the record. So the session here is aimed to be interactive, but if you don't feel like it, obviously just feel free to listen in. But if you do, there's a QR code on the top left of the screen.

You can access it from your phone and from your computer. And it's a mirror board. I also have like physical post-its, but we don't have a wall, so we have to improvise. And only one microphone. So a lot of the things that we'll do today are quite experimental, so please bear with us.

This is kind of like a combination of a lot of feedback or any thoughts on what you liked or what could be better. Please let us know. And yeah, otherwise, we're pretty excited to start going through these things with you. Yeah, maybe we explain a bit more about the mirror board, because we thought this was going to be like a workshop room with like a whiteboard and had an exercise planned for putting like post-it notes on a whiteboard, you know, as in a design session. So we are trying to think about how to make this interactive in the way that we were anticipating.

So I know it is annoying to interact with a new app, but if anyone is down to download a mirror board and put some stickies on it, they will show up on our board. And otherwise, we'll just talk about all the examples that we have thought of or maybe call people raising their hand. Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, thanks. In terms of what we're up to, I just want to give you a quick overview of what we planned.

We want to first dissect what a protocol is from a social perspective. So you're probably familiar with technical protocols and the implementation of them. So we want to look at what exactly are behavioral protocols that can be enabled, changed, or transformed with the help of technical infrastructure. We'll focus specifically on protocols in the employment infrastructure. I'm aware that the description was quite general for this workshop, but because we want to kind of make things more tangible, we'll just use as an example the whole space of the employment infrastructure and labor economy, because there's a lot of protocols that make it obvious how they can be changed, improved, or transformed to most of us, because we're all kind of like involved in it.

We'll look at the friction points and relevant externalities, and then we'll go through the actual design and engineering process from a high level and with some examples and kind of real-world use cases. One of the reasons why we chose the employment infrastructure is also because we both have experience with these behavioral protocols, especially in the context of designing them. We have a lot of examples from our own work that we'll share with you. So the design process is broken up into ideation of components, thinking about technical trade-offs, stakeholders and their conflicts, managing those, and then we'll see whether that's actually useful or whether a protocol needs improvement. Just for context, our goal is to kind of explore this unseen world of behavioral protocols, and together with you, start a conversation about how we can use technologies that are being developed here to actually make a real-world impact that shifts us from existing challenges into something that will be a much more sustainable social fabric.

Do you want to comment on anything? Oh, every now and then we'll switch microphones and improvise a little bit, or should we just carry on? So this is maybe, do you want to go to this slide? So yes, so one of my favorite quotes that if we have ever talked about my work I probably brought is Protocols are Principles in Practice from Adrienne Marie Brown's Emergent Strategy. I love this sentence because I was reading that book at the same time that I started working in crypto, and I was like, it's fascinating that in that context she's talking about the protocols of cultural work and creative practice, not protocols that we are designing on a technical level, but I think one thing that is special about our space is that the protocols that we design for coordination mechanisms and to solve coordination and collaboration problems are also, they have this both behavioral and societal norms combination with existing in a technical framework.

So I think one of the things that's really interesting for us to explore as organizational designers is how those things collapse into one and complement each other, and how we can bring design research practices into designing some of these technical protocols. So here we have three examples that we were kind of thinking of before settling on the double-clicking into the kind of labor economy environment to highlight our thought process. So, you know, we were going to a whole kind of speculative fiction example when I was recently watching Last of Us TV show and was struck by, you know, how many different protocols come into place in something like an apocalyptic environment. You know, you encounter someone and immediately, you know, are testing for whether they have the presence of a zombie virus because there's a social understanding that everyone is potentially infected. So, you know, there's a shared understanding in that universe that, like, everyone is a possible threat until verified otherwise.

And, of course, there's many examples from real world that are less fun to talk about with this kind of health protocols. But, you know, there's health protocols that we see all the time in an airport or somewhere. There was a really cool summer protocols fiction prompt about a month ago that maybe some of you answered that was thinking about protocols as they present in the real world and, you know, what those look like in terms of, like, enshrined behavioral norms. So something useful to think about. And Andrei maybe can talk about the...

Yeah. I mean, these are just kind of three examples. The behavioral protocols are essentially like what people are doing and what they're not doing. And like the science here, a good example for like what people are doing and like the technical infrastructure, which is in this case, just this plastic, the plastic science helps kind of move people's behavior in the right direction. And that also exists in nature, like with Stigmergy, as an example from ants, where their protocol is like, you know, follow the one with the pheromone trail.

And that will leave you to survive as a broader kind of ecological system. The difference between ants and humans is that we can actually modify our protocols with these. It's like kind of genetically ingrained. But I like the image of it because that's like from the macro perspective, how humans also ultimately behave. Yeah.

And the last thing to just highlight about this framework of protocols or principles in practice is that I don't know if this was the author's intention of this quote, but my interpretation is that it refers to first principles as in like what are the primitives and basic principles that we are building behavioral norms and codes and practices around, as well as, you know, principles in the terms of values. So, you know, just to use this zombie environment example, there is the principle of, you know, ensure that a newcomer is safe from infecting other people before they enter the environment, which is, you know, kind of first principle for how to engage with an unknown entity. But then there is also the underlying that from a values perspective of our shared desire is to protect our end group and the behavioral protocols that we lay out are for that purpose. And so as we go through this exercise today, we'll be thinking closely about how does the principle as in the kind of guiding underlying purpose align with the principle as in what value we are pushing forward and having a shared alignment on in this context. Yeah.

And so in reality, we also have existing protocols. Yeah. By the way, because this board is editable, whoever's on there, just be a little bit careful. It's very easy to kind of like move things around. At least so far.

Yeah. So there's a lot of like existing protocols in our society, like dating and marriage or domestication of animals. And Covid had a lot of like protocols as a response to a global threat. And yeah, the employment infrastructure, as I mentioned earlier, this is what we'll focus on. By the way, for those who just came in after we started, the QR code on these slides will lead you to the mirror board where we can work together in a way.

Yeah. Yeah. So and and within the employment infrastructure, there are also some behavioral protocols that we're already aware of. You had some examples. Yeah.

So some examples of, you know, employment situation protocols that I think all of us are from, you know, being in the labor economy in general or from specifically working within Web3, which is our particular interest, are things like, you know, grouping meetings on particular days because people are in such different time zones that you are that it's unrealistic to have a meeting every single night at 9 p.m. for some people and 7 a.m. for some people.

So kind of these practices that kind of become standardized, you know, having a one to one with people that you work directly with, like having a weekly stand up like all of these behaviors that are pretty obvious and standard when you've been working in, you know, emerging companies and decentralized infrastructures for a long time are not necessarily obvious and they are protocols designed for a particular purpose. And the same as, you know, has been talked about to death and discussions about DAOs, then also protocols around, you know, determining when someone, you know, needs to leave, what it involves to onboard a new person, what is involved with working with an external party, for example, within Slack or Discord, like protocols around who gets to see which information is, you know, determined by this question of like who is able to see what as, you know, expressed by who is in a certain channel. Obviously, when there's a situation of people interacting in a multi-sig, then processes around who gets to make a decision and when and all of these questions can be thought of in a framework of behavioral protocols that are sometimes enshrined in technology and sometimes enshrined in behaviors themselves that don't necessarily have a technological component. Does that make sense so far? What we're kind of like when we're talking about protocols, what we mean by that.

Okay, cool. So, now let's start with the promised interactive part. So, whoever has access to the mirror board, I will, this is going to be a little bit wonky, so I'll have to, in real time, you know, navigate here a little bit, but whoever has access to the mirror board, you'll see, let me actually see if I can bring you to my screen here. Bring everyone to me. Oh, okay.

Everyone. So, protocols usually emerge in response to certain friction points or certain kind of like problems, like if you think about the COVID pandemic, for example, protocols are implemented as a kind of measure to self-control society. So, let's maybe start by just listing out a bunch of problems and friction points that you can see within your experience in the labor economy. So, these are just like a couple of examples that I brought up here for reference. Feel free to maybe use the space underneath and let me see if I can just, so like take one of these red post-its.

Yeah, if you have access to it, I don't actually see, maybe I can show it this way. Yeah, I'll use, so depending on, oops, depending on whether you have a tablet, phone, or a computer. Yeah, or, yeah. If anyone would like to say an example of problems and friction points in the workplace, and then we will, or in, you know, yeah, coordination environments, and then we will add it to this list and talk about how protocols, you know, interact in that space. Does anyone want to share one?

Just raise your hand. Determining pay. Any other one? Yes. Lack of social time when everyone is decentralized, I guess.

Yes. Also. Wait one second, I'm trying to remember them. Okay, perfect. Okay.

Oh. That's saying the quiet part out loud. You want me to repeat? Yes. Okay.

Like how to load balance the work within a team. Usually some people do more, some people do less. And you want to do it, I think, fairly and equally. Okay. One more.

And your one. Cool. I think these are all, yeah, ones that are perfect illustrations of what our objective is with what we are getting to with this. So thank you so much. This is great.

So we'll use these as an example and a starting point. And then we'll kind of like shift from these friction points over to like slowly designing kind of protocols or behavioral structure. So with all these things that don't work that well right now, that's obviously also certain reasons for why they even exist. And I think it's often easy to kind of like get angry about the stuff that doesn't work and forget why they exist in the first place, because there's also positive externalities for like the reasons why certain things exist. I'm not sure if we want to go into those also just for the sake of time.

I think it can be good to say some with the examples of what we're saying. So, you know, a great one is this one about hiring someone to travel with a friendly passport. And I think that also goes into one of the examples we were talking about yesterday that I think comes up later in here, which is, you know, are you trying to hire people in a part of the world where like they might expect lower pay? Are you trying to hire someone in a time zone that's like favorable for more people on the team? So these, you know, they're positive externalities for some objectives of the organization or for existing folks that are working with them.

But then it's, you know, a negative one for, you know, necessarily fairness or justice or even hiring the right person for the job if they don't meet these criterias that have nothing to do with their expertise. Similarly with, you know, these issues like no pensions, a major one that I find, you know, as a struggle for those of us that are working in these kind of, yeah, free-flowing like non-localized environments, then there also is the tradeoff of that amount of freedom or of the ability to bring in, you know, potentially the best person for the job from all over the world. It also comes with these legal difficulties around providing pension, around providing adequate health care structures, et cetera. So with a lot of these issues, there's the tradeoff for, you know, is the company able to keep existing in the first place because of using their budget in a way that's maximizing for survival opportunities and, yeah, a lot of these tensions surface and are both exacerbated by protocols that are put in place or just kind of, yeah, calcified by those basically. So, yeah, so super useful examples.

So I guess, yeah, I guess we talked about one. So, yeah, we'll be good. Normally if we would do these workshops or maybe next time if you want to join the next time we try this, we would also kind of vote and prioritize those so we can narrow down our focus a little bit. But I think this is fine. We can just stick with the ones that we have as a reference.

Yeah, exactly. So but this is a great starting point. So now we can kind of like think about the actual design and engineering process, which is from second. I want to give the right reference. The great video online from a systems engineer.

Yeah, Brian Douglas called Systems Engineering. Have a look at it. It's really informative. And I kind of took the process that he's talking mostly about, like building physical products or physical solutions, and translated it into kind of the social infrastructure. Because the process is similarly complex or like it's approaching complex systems.

And it's very, very similar. Because at the beginning, we always start with this kind of like vague idea of what the thing like this protocol should look like. Like now we have a couple of things that we are interested in. Like we we want to kind of solve all of these things where that is not a problem anymore. We also don't exactly know how this is going to look like.

We don't know the exact boundaries, the exact technologies, the exact people who will be involved in that. But that's kind of the starting point we go from. The second part is we would have to start by like creating a more formalized concept. This is where basically this exercise comes in. We're kind of like narrowing down our focus.

These are exactly the problems that we're trying to solve. And we might also have some ideas of what we like don't want to get towards, don't want to explore. And then the process is actually kind of rudimentary. We just decompose our ideas slowly and start defining the individual blocks. So kind of like breaking it apart and validating each individual piece.

So we design each piece separately and validate how it works. And then make sure that it can sustain itself in the stakeholder environment because other people are involved. And it meant slowly validate, integrate. And then finally we would arrive at a system that is pretty much exactly how we imagined it, except now it's like very, very specific and integrated and can be maintained in the ecosystem where we're trying to solve the problem. So that would be kind of like the broader, from a broader perspective, the labor economy in our context here.

Do you want to add anything or should I move on to the next one? Yeah. Also that as Anurag was mentioning about addressing complexity, I think it's very useful to think of these problems through the lens of a complex system because on one hand, you know, we have these overarching issues that we want to control for, such as ethical behavior and creating and maintaining organizations that often is in direct conflict with the individual's needs or with the needs of the organization's survival or the realities of working within like shifting regulatory landscapes, et cetera. So coming in with this idea that like it is not going to be possible to completely solve the problem, but instead thinking through what are the points of tension in which it's the most fragile and likely to fall apart so that those parts can be addressed and see where an approach can fork or where something should be modified because the intended purpose is not meeting the outcome. So, yeah.

I hope you're still with us. We can move over to the next piece that will be a little bit more interactive again. So once we have the problems defined, the components, which we're going to have to break it down, are essentially going to be the ideas for certain solutions to each of these individual problems. We don't know exactly what they're going to look like, but at least we can now kind of like think about what they like, how I like how in some case the solution could be approached. Again, this is like we're starting out by breaking it up and now like coming up with new ideas, new components that could then slowly converge into a stable system.

I'm not sure exactly what would be the best way to do this with you here. You have an idea. I mean, we can also go through like each individual and then if anyone has an idea. Raise your hand. Does anyone have an idea for a solution for determining pay?

Has anyone seen, so this is also maybe like a way to look at solutions for these things. Has anyone, yeah, Liron. Money circle. It doesn't have to be perfect, like, so, yeah. And this is a great example.

So when you're thinking about solutions, think about things that have worked in a different environment that you have potentially, you had your hands up, no, yeah. Yeah, let's move to the next one, sorry, sorry. Pay is as normal in crypto versus what, you know, the pay is in the country where you are at, because these sort of things also, I think, make a huge difference, yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Anyone has an idea for lack of social time? Has anyone experienced the working environment that there was? Yeah, yeah. Nice. Yeah.

Yeah, sorry. At the Funding the Commons roundtable about labor, one of the panelists said that they had a imposed video game break time amongst his team that he set for an hour where they would together play video games to make sure that they all took a break during work. Okay, good solution, yes. Nice. Yeah.

Period of time for nerve behavior, I guess. What about, what about, let's do maybe like one or two per red problem. I would love to see balance, I know, oh, yeah, okay, never mind, cool. We have more time than I was worried about. So, okay, what about the undervaluation of care work?

So, I would, I mean, in an employment context, I would define care work as things like appreciating the time that someone puts into doing logistical stuff around, you know, somebody's role is to take care of other people's calendars and making sure other people have all of their items that they need or organizing the kind of team time stuff we were just talking about, often that work is super undervalued. And so, I mean, I can share one solution. I mean, also, you know, navigating people's emotional challenges or like mediating between team members that are having issues. I would say all of that kind of work that's probably not in somebody's job description, at least in the way that it ends up playing out, but is vital for keeping harmony and efficiency in an organization. So, I mean, one solution I would say is like when there's a recognition from leadership and, you know, often men in leadership positions or high expertise positions of how important that work is and continually giving credit for it, I would say is definitely one solution that I have seen rarely.

Does anyone have one to add? Yeah. Yeah, maternity leave in general and family off time for, even for fathers, maternity and paternity leave. For fathers so that it doesn't become something that's viewed as women being out of work. Yeah, I mean, I understood the undervaluation of care work a little bit more towards the people that could go above and beyond, like sometimes to make things work for the team.

And there was this project, the karma project. I don't know if anyone knows about it. Like what happened to it? Is it like, does it actually work in practice where you give karma points and people tried this kind of dynamic. I don't know if it was successful or not, but I think it was addressing this kind of problem.

It's very, very basic, but like in high functioning teams I've worked with before, we set time at the end of like every big team meeting to do like a kudos exercise where effectively you just have an open floor where anyone can give kudos, which is just sort of recognition and affirmation to other people. Always close out meetings with that. And it's a good way to just, yeah, like cut across the sort of trackable as well as like non-trackable kind of things that are just valuable. So good, I highly recommend it. In that same vein, yeah, like praise channel and Slack is always one of my favorites.

So underutilized. Yeah, and that it's environment where they feel safe doing that instead of people thinking that they are attention seeking by doing that, et cetera. So yeah, always some layers. Let's do online harassment. Anyone, any solution for online harassment?

Has anyone seen online harassment being dealt with? Well, that's sad. Right, Bessa? Right. Cool, thanks.

Cool. Let's do two more, let's do these on the top, yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah, I moved it up, yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry, balancing expertise? Oh, yeah, authority and expertise, yeah, cool, okay. Yeah, do you want to start with that?

Balancing authority and expertise? All right. Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. Does anyone else have any ideas for balancing authority and expertise? Okay.

Yeah, I think this is actually a great segue into where are we going next. I keep that thought. Apologize for typing. Let's keep those and keep working with those. So responsibility touches on something that we'll get to in a second, which is the stakeholder environment.

But before we do in that process, now we have a bunch of kind of ideas on potential solutions. This is kind of probably quite simple to think about which of those might actually be worth the technical tradeoffs. So if we look at certain solutions that we came up with, some of them we might have influence over. Some of them we might be able to influence in our working environment. And that's obviously also kind of the first starting point.

So if we're building a new protocol, we want to kind of adjust what we can control locally and then start building infrastructure to scale that up and copy that and make it accessible to others. And of course, we don't have all kinds of tools at hand. But this is the first consideration of like, well, do we can we actually influence the way that peer reviews happen? Honestly, can we actually manage the responsibility of other people? Can we build something with karma points?

And that's the first kind of like decision we need to make, which components do we actually want to focus on if we select a certain problem space? And that's like if you work together with other people, like you have to align and make sure that you can see at least from a human and technical perspective that you can address these issues. And then. We're thinking about the stakeholders. So I think this is like potentially a good example with the responsibility.

Which are like who are the people who are involved in this? So if we say. Take this on. We have probably the actual employees or like the people who do the work. We could categorize project managers who have to probably also interact with.

With the employees that feel like or like that have a certain authority or expertise, and then we might have the founders or the C-suite that also have to kind of balance the goals of what they're trying to. What they're trying to achieve with the authority versus expertise balance often combination between the technical and social constraints. So that's an important part, because with the conflict story with people and stakeholders, that's probably like also the most. The reason why all of these things take so long, like it's very easy to imagine technical solutions that can solve a lot of problems in the labor economy. And yes, we have like access to the infrastructure and we can just code something together.

But the longest stuff is actually starting to negotiate and align the interests with the individual stakeholders to make sure that our new approaches can even be considered. And again, this would be a next interactive step. Let's take maybe a few of those. So from those, we have honest peer reviews. Closing the gap between balancing authority and expertise.

And then knowledge sharing. And I'm just going to skip a couple of steps because we haven't done those interactively or together. And, yeah, maybe we can think about the conflicts that might arise there. Because, again, before we did not have that particular problem. So before we have a system for balancing authority and expertise that relies on certificates, for example.

And that's like you have the right certificate, you have the right authority, and then you can do stuff regardless of whether you have the expertise. That's how it currently works. But if you want to change that, we need to address. And discuss any solutions with all of these people. Yeah, I think it'd be good to ground into kind of concrete examples of that that came up for me.

So one is of folks that have a high technical expertise, but they don't like to manage people like they prefer to be, you know, in their coding or in their researching. And while they have the highest technical knowledge or contextual knowledge, they are not someone that necessarily wants to have authority for decision making. So how to, you know, bring in their expertise while having them, you know, be working in the role that they want. And then one that's kind of a counterpoint to that, I was just reading an article in the Harvard Business Journal or whatever this publication is about why there's such a high turnover of CMOs. And one of the things that I thought was super resonant with the discussions I've had about people's experience, which is that this is like often a role with like a high responsibility and very specific stated outcomes of, you know, there has to be this much, you know, community growth or like adoption measured by these specific metrics.

But often CMOs are not having the authority within the leadership team or within the company to be involved in strategy to the extent that they are able to actually influence the pathways that would meet those goals. So there's a huge mismatch between expertise of, you know, on a strategic level that is often why that person was hired in the first place and the ability to actually execute. So I think, you know, that kind of fits in, I guess, with the closing the gap part. But this is an example of something that couldn't necessarily be resolved by the honest peer reviews because it's more about how that person's role is carved out in the organization. And I think another aspect of that as well is thinking about, you know, there's someone's expertise subject area such as, you know, are they able to code a particular thing versus do they have an expertise in like managing organizational structures or building useful data infrastructures for capturing that information, et cetera.

So thinking about expertise in a more holistic way and being really intentional about what somebody's skill set is for management, et cetera. Does anyone have any ideas for what conflicts might arise from these four things? So this is like this kind of strategic stakeholder alignment process. Like, we have to think and anticipate what needs to be changed and then respond and negotiate these things out. So if you think about closing the gap in the organization, then like that's just mentioned in the context of structure needs to be changed.

To the knowledge sharing point, I think one foundational issue is that often the sort of attention that knowledge gets organizationally is determined by the authority of the people who craft that sort of that knowledge. Right. So how do you how do you find some mechanism to cut through that? And yeah, it just seems like a pretty foundational conflict to me. Yeah.

So what yeah, what conflicts arise from these solutions such as there, you know, there could be one where like someone doesn't want to give over the amount of authority that they have carved out for themselves to make room for someone who has more expertise. So if anyone wants to add. I mean, I'm going to say this in the context of also, yeah, I think it can be related to pay someone who has a certain expertise in some domain that is important for the organization and therefore they're able to use that power as a way to ask for more money. And by sharing that, you know, or it could even be in the context of as well, you know, by sharing it with other people can do it, then they're no longer needed or like having that feeling. So I would think someone could push back from maybe that whether consciously or not from that position.

Anyone have another one? Yeah, this is a super good one that will flow into our kind of next section as well, which is like, yeah, how do you determine what is actually the best idea? Because maybe what is the best idea from a technical approach might not be the best idea for the, you know, an overarching goal around product market fit or over, you know, a person in leadership, individual desire, etc. So, yeah, who, who has authority there? And how does that authority get deployed in terms of budget or in terms of defining a roadmap and stuff?

Yeah, a super good point. So now, just like in the context of a design process, we have these potential conflicts now. And if you're involved in designing and building a protocol, this is where like stakeholder and user research kind of expands the timelines, but becomes extremely important for the feasibility, because now we can or we would have to assume that each of these components has its own kind of challenges. And now we would have to basically manage the tensions. So go to different stakeholders within the organization and discuss with them.

What are the, like, what are the potential ways to manage a disagreement to measure an idea or expertise? Or how would someone with authority be willing to give up some of that authority? Or how would you negotiate between people who have enough authority and expertise to restore that balance? And these things are mostly conversational, because ultimately, we have something to offer already, we have some solutions that could be interesting for all the stakeholders or should be. And this is what we're trying to find out with user research, and or with stakeholder research, and solving a bigger problem that affects all of these people.

And so like, throughout time, as we run these conversations, and run these negotiations, and persuade every single stakeholder that we know of, in our local environment, we slowly kind of bring these pieces together, and then can validate whether our ideas are actually worth the, worth resolving and managing the conflict, socially and financially too, because they have to ultimately be lower cost for everybody than the initial or existing alternative. Yeah, I would just add to go back slightly to the last one. I think this, this designing and validating the new protocol element is where referring back to this idea of principles, like, what are the principles that are being expressed and maintained and solidified by the protocol, both in terms of, you know, what is the basic objective that is being achieved with it? Or, you know, which values are being expressed through it? And I guess, yeah, I don't know how to say that.

So, for example, if the, if the principle that we are operating under is, we will make choices that are the most likely to get us an investment of capital through these particular means, then that would often end up establishing a very different decision making structure and determination of how funds should be used, or determination of who has the final say, then a principle around, you know, we want to make the coolest cryptographic system that we could make, like, often those things would be in opposition. So being explicit about which principles are being put into practice through this system is super important for at least identifying what the conflict points are going to be and trying to head those off. All right, this is pretty much it. Does anyone have any questions or anything that, you know, stood out to you, anything that is worth unpacking further, or anything, any interesting thoughts? Cool.

Then thank you so much for joining this. And thank you so much for bearing with us as this is obviously supposed to be a little bit more interactive. Next time we'll do our best to make it a bit better. If you have a project or an idea or a protocol and would like to explore how to make that more accessible and build that into something that people can actually use and resolve certain problems, reach out to us. We'd love to jam on those and also figure out how we can together use technology and make it more accessible for real world solutions.

And yeah, just wanted to add this was moving from what we thought was going to be a highly interactive workshop involving small groups, et cetera, and now was a more shouting stuff out format. Thank you for adapting to that with us, and we really hope to continue these conversations. We will be posted up at DAPCON and having kind of office hours for people who want to come by and jam on some of these topics.