Hardening the Commons | Devcon SEA

[Music] all right people trickling in uh as you can see from my hat it's my birthday today so make this Workshop a [Applause] success it's not it's not just my birthday it's a big one it's 50 so how this Workshop goes is going to be the predict of the rest of my life so please make it go well okay uh all right welcome this is the hardening the commons uh Workshop uh if you were at Tim talk yesterday you heard him raise the theme it's been part of like um many of the talks here the cipher Punk history uh session so a whole bunch of talks had these teams going so this is a workshop and it'll be have like some talking but it's mainly a working Workshop and this is a research Workshop we are not here to teach you anything you are here to help us do some research so we have we have what we think is a good question it's one of the most important questions uh how to harden the commons um is in our opinion one of the most important research questions and this has been validated by like two years of the summer of protocols program and we're hoping that in the next 3 hours you guys will help us come up with some really good answers right and this will um actually oh sorry please oh sorry okay um so this will actually help us shape the agenda for the 2025 program so this is not just going to be like you know you do some exercises on paper and it then vanishes into uh the void and nothing else happens so please uh we will be collecting the workshop output we will be analyzing it and we'll be trying to make use of it to shape the 2025 program if you don't know what summer protocols says go to summer protocol.com or talk to the various program alumni who are scattered around the room all right let's see okay oops so the goal of the workshop is to try and put together everything we know and have been talking about for years in the ethereum community you know sens capture and sensorship resistance decentralized governance permissionless Innovation how do you put this all together in a big picture model and what we calling a capability maturity model raise your hand if you've heard the term capability maturity model one two three four five so if this had been one of my traditional you know big Corporation Consulting gigs and I had asked a question 100% of the middle managers would have raised their hand because this is like standard LinkedIn boilerplate business management stuff it it can feel very like um awkward and bureaucratic but it's a very useful way to put lots of random thoughts together in a model so this is a capability maturity model workshop I'll show you a few examples to see what that means uh um and if we do a good job it can serve as a road map for a lot of people trying to adapt the Technologies we've been um we've been all working on so Harden the common so two terms there Harden is in two senses one as in Harden technology against threats like you know radiation hardening uh electronics for space missions that's one sense of Harden the other sense of Harden is the ability to make strong commitments about the future and this is something Josh Stark will talk about in his provocation in um like an hour so uh and the commons of course you've all heard the term Commons and we have a lot of examples in our mind so you know ethereum L1 is a Commons open source projects are commons uh forests and lakes and rivers are commons so we want to like think broadly about Commons and uh Trent is here he'll be actually leading a breakout session on how to think about Commons but here's some examples to keep in mind and I've put this icon on some of the slides because for the workshopping pieces it'll be helpful to have the lists handy so take pictures of the slides where I have these um s of like prompty things um available okay so these are some examples of Commons don't worry too much about the definitions systems for producing or stewarding shared resources is a good enough working definition for our work here okay all right how how many of you have heard of Elanor ustam okay this is impressive like more than half the room Nobel Prize winner did some amazing work on how Commons are built and stewarded these are her famous principles for stewarding Commons there's a little bit of a cult or religion aspect around um ustr so don't take this as a gospel but take it as a thought stutter they're good ideas but feel free to contradict and challenge them okay so again another picture taking slide we do have a shared G Drive uh where hopefully you'll dump your final CMM model so you'll be working on paper you'll be like making revisions of the model that you're working on but final one take a picture and dump it in this folder if you have trouble uh just hand your paper model to Timber Timber are you here raise your hand can you stand up and show face to everybody so Timber is going to be running Logistics in the room okay so that's the housekeeping done so the agenda is I'll give you a quick introduction to what CMM are then we'll do a set of five alternating provocations and breakouts so short like 7 Minute lightning talk type thing followed by 17 minutes where you'll do one pass through the CMM um then another talk and so on so we'll do that halfway through we'll take a little bit of a break and then we'll come back do some share backs broad room comments and then wrap up so standard Workshop structure but hopefully the content is what will make this okay okay so short tldr version of hardening the comments problem right how many of you have are seeing this cartoon for the first time raise your hands okay so most of you have seen this cartoon right so you don't want to be too idealistic we are not writing science fiction we we are not writing weird time machine stories we are being realistic so any speculation we do has to be kind of like plausible and realistic which means yeah don't get into like weird fantasy scenario about cryptos keep the you know uh $5 wrench condition in mind that's what it means to harden a commment against attacks you should be able to defend against $5 wrench attacks okay what's a CMM it's a well-known model that management Consultants like me and uh you know career bureaucrats use to just think about how organizations acquire and learn capabilities by Rising through several levels over several years okay so we need to adapt it a little bit to apply to Commons and open kind of systems but I think it works and yes it can be you know LinkedIn middle manager if it's done poorly but I think this room can do it well okay CU remember it's my birthday you have to do it well as a gift to me okay so here's like a classic if you Google CMM this is the kind of diagram you'll find it's a pyramid with high levels you start out with an initial condition of skills where maybe there's random skills people have like crappy disorganized ways of doing things like you know all of us using web3 wallets I would say we are in this initial disorganized level managed is when there's a little bit more structure is coming in then defined people have like textbook definitions of what things are then people are beginning to measure things so things are getting quantitative then finally people are starting to optimize things like you know this is the mature stage so this is a generic CMM template here's another way to visualize one you can think of it as like a ramp increasing in time so this one happens to be about analytics so this type of diagram was popular about 10 years ago when people were talking about analytics so as you can see the maturation is when your capabilities are very primitive you can only do hindsight analytics but as you progress through the level you can do foresight you can do Insight right so this is evolving high level capability based on like the micro tool level tactical capabilities so you learn to use the tools better and better and you go from being reactive and hindsight to predictive some some organizations actually acquired capabilities this way other people talked a lot about analytics but didn't actually get there here's another one these are all things I pulled from Google Images so they're real images that people presumably used in some organizations this is an example of security capabilities and this one is interesting because it visualizes it as growing capabilities on three vectors technology process and people so the red blue and green and each of them evolves through multiple levels right so another good example you've probably heard a lot about this one if you have been following like the self-driving cars discourse people talk about five levels of autonomy what does it mean well little bit bureaucratic little bit engineering it's a mix of both it's technocratic we'll have Sam doing a provocation later on challenging the you know um ideology of technocracy but there's a technocratic model of what self-driving should look like bureaucrats plus engineer putting it together this one actually I just made half an hour ago I was in a workshop that I was running called Web of roots and it was you know all about the problems of crypto adoption and the uh breakout session I was in was about how there's a lack of tools in the ecosystem and I made up this capability maturity model so I have like five levels AI is like a cloud around that so you can get creative with this stuff this one Tim do you want to quickly speak to this vitalic road map is kind of of like uh uh CMM so Tim come around speaking to the mic oh okay oh we lost my slides okay um yeah so in ethereum like vcat was saying we don't have a lot of LinkedIn CMM and I think this is the closest we've come to as an ecosystem uh to mapping things out um and it's sort of like an implied CMM here where if you think of the way vitalic you know know um summarizes thisum world map um 2020 it was just like here's a bunch of stuff we have to do in the next 10 years and how they fit together um and not on this slide is the 2019 version which is here's a bunch of stuff scattered over the Internet that we have to do in the next 10 years um and it sort of like a refinement and thinking over the years where uh you know couple years after that we were able to um actually break this down in specific tracks so like the merge Verge surge uh all all those specific things um but still sort of just like these like rough pointers that we have that are quite low context um and then just before Devcon and vitalic actually put out a blog post for each of these tracks sort of like going very deep into details around like okay what's the actual thing that needs to be done where is it at what are the blockers and what not and so you can see that we have this sort of like evolving capability um or at least falic has um and then guiding the EOS system to like articulate or understand like what this entire set of things we have to do is and um how they all relate to each other thanks all right so now you have a bunch of examples of CMM to refer to all these are like real world ones so don't worry too much about like what an abstract definition of a CMM is keep these examples in mind so how do you make a CMM so one pick a specific important Commons two pick a specific Target social group that's trying to mature its capabilities right so if you if the commons you pick is like a lake and a community around it that wants to keep the lake ecosystem healthy the lake is the commons and the people who are trying to keep it healthy is the social group try and Define four to seven levels don't go over over seven keep it actually close to four or five if you want because it gets weird the traditional ones are initial managed defined Quantified optimized but feel free to get totally creative name each level and characterize it in terms of people Technologies capabilities then this one is very important number five try and Define a test for each level so so if your CMM is about like you know preserving a forest and you have a five level hierarchy of how to preserve a forest and say oh this um you know Brazil is at level three but Indonesia is at level two what the hell does that mean Define a test for level two and level three about how rainforest Commons work okay um pick a visualization so I gave you a few examples pyramids ramps uh stacked blocks and stuff so pick a good visualization if you don't like the ones you have make one up but you know this is not an art Workshop this is like bureaucrat Workshop so you don't have to get super artistic with it um think of this whole CMM exercise as this is a collective learning curve from like ad hoc sort of like kind of illiterate levels to very mature and refined capabilities and it can go from like you know very scattered skills like everybody here uses web3 wallets I presume but there's like no coordination it's like you know very fragmented but if it matures presumably there'll be a wide conversation about how uh which wallets are better maybe they'll be there already are but you know there's not like textbook versions of the discussion so collective learning curve from ad hoc to uh mature from scattered to integrated and usually there's an element of codification and documentation too in building a CMM and both the organizational structure and the people in it are learning as you go along right forming procedural memories so that even if people join and leave the organization or system still remembers right so a whole bunch of people create a CMM for something and then half of them get new jobs and go and a new half comes in the system should not like break completely the knowledge continuity should be there so special challenges for us as kind of an open uh ecosystem that's decentralized and all these weird things so CMM are typically for top- down traditional organization where you know the CEO can say hey I'm appointing a bunch of people to impose this training program and all of you are going to go from Level zero to level five this is not that so how do you do it in an open ecosystem context uh CMM rely on codification and documentation in open systems that typically happens in a much more ad hoc way like maybe you know some volunteers start documenting stuff um eips are a good example where it's somehow jelled into a very formal codification but not in a corporate way uh CMM are usually technocratic but can we actually not make this about LinkedIn middle managers and work with direct technological agency and finally CMM often are about acquisition and installation of behaviors in big corporations because it's all theater the CEO wants to have like a big program that they can brag about once that happens and then the big parties are done people forget and the skills are not actually maintained so in an open ecosystem actually the reverse emphasis is better like it's better to acquire and install a very limited capability that then endures for 10 years than to like pretend that everybody's level five black belt and then like one year later nobody knows how to log on to the system right so you really should think in terms of Maintenance of small skills okay we're going to head into the first breakout session so this is my provocation okay so what is the bounding box for your chosen Commons right so what is the physical medium medium of the common so if you're talking forests it's like trees and grasslands and the animals and the ecosystem if it's software it's the git repository where all your software lives so think of what the actual physical material medium is think about the neighbors of it right if your code is on GitHub like ethereum's code is one of your neighbors whether you liked it or not is Microsoft because Microsoft owns GitHub and so forth right so think about your n uh neighbors what is the nature of the boundaries and the threat and exposure you have across those boundaries so here's an example of what I mean by a bounding box so treat this as like straw man I don't know if this is really any good but you can think of like you know censorship resistance ethereum development processes these are the boundaries for it the fact that the codee lives on GitHub that's a common not a threat but a thing you have to think about right um everything ethereum does is based on compute and compute relies on chips and chips come from tsmc and that's vulnerable to conflict right Quantum resistant cryptography another threat so all these are like the bounding conditions for what makes it possible for ethereum to be healthy and just to have a very different example if you have a public Lake you have to think about things like are there invasive species what are the Environmental regulations that are like constraining what you do a really good example of this came up in one of our sop research projects last year where the people in Brooklyn trying to preserve the waterways they discovered that the local regulations said that if the water is being used for like human activities it has to meet higher quality standards so an activist group started canoeing in the sewage contaminated canals of Brooklyn and because of that they forced by regulation The Regulators to actually start cleaning up the canals right so this a very interesting example of stewarding the commons so Lake okay so breakout number one so this is the first one so first form groups of three to five people so just where you are look at your two nearest neighbors bring your chairs a little closer together and sop people I do not want to see two sop people in the same group so distribute yourselves accordingly uh and yeah together choose a common to work on choose a Target population and maybe draw a bounding box if it's useful and then draw version one of this um you know capability maturity model for your common so set of named levels people skills and so forth and test for the abilities so we'll take 17 minutes to do this starting now and I think Timber is going to go around Distributing paper if he hasn't already so form your groups of three please three to four you want to come us we'll have e e you e I sh [Music] Serv [Music] spe [Music] you for [Music] C e no [Music] sure [Music] it really the GRE [Music] differ [Music] back back back by want all right one minute left start wrapping it up e [Music] Che [Music] break keep this don't discussing I'm going to invite Sam up here to give the second provocation philosophy cool all right hello hello okay uh this is going to be maybe like 5 to 8 minutes just uh some provoc ations on IDE of punk uh disclaimer I'm not an expert on Punk I've just thought a lot about it over the past years I'm going to share some maybe thought starters or frames that we can use uh about that so all right uh thinking about Punk uh in the spirit of punk um looked a lot at the genre of uh of punk cyber Punk and others uh and the main theme that emerges is the idea of the small versus the system uh like the punk genre isn't really like about saving the world it's really about like this kind of non-heroic uh anti-heroic uh character about it if you think about something like Blade Runner right you a lot of people remember the world better than they remember the the specific uh characters uh and this is element of um asymmetric conflict about uh about punk where it's often this small Indie protagonist versus big institutional antagonist so there's this kind of theme around punk being uh the small versus the system uh and another angle Punk is the idea of like prep as the opposite of punk right so uh you think of like a lot of cultures there's these like I guess prep schools or people who are brought up for for greatness uh often insiders and Elite uh school for Success very institutional and then like a punk is really often a protagonist are kind of from very opposite kinds of uh stories right they're like Outsiders every man like uh what's destiny right you kind of like you just grew up on the streets you may be like a pizza pizza delivery guy it's about a school of heart nox and you're very uh alienated um and one of the visions of punk is the idea of like uh can can there be technology without a technocracy right could we could all these new new um tools that emerge uh if we have systems to have a global digital uh information system if we have ways of like uh growing food could we have them without the maybe accompanying systems of of rule and order from above right so a lot of the the genre of punk and the spirit is really around exploring this uh possibility right so we can explore think about the idea of governance uh without governments uh and of course ethereum is an example of like some things that can be achieved uh Building Technology without the kind of traditionally we think about you need big institutions and big order to really be able to benefit from Big public goods right but uh me the punks period like if you've seen some of the cyppher punk stuff over the past couple days right you that's a lot of the ambition to to believe we can build uh big public stuff without the same kind of institutional top down social order visions that dominated much of the 20th century uh and the last thing in the bottom right corner is this uh kind of almost like uh sort of cycle of how like uh bad systems create a lot of punks right so like when the system sucks everyone ends up kind of being a deviant in some ways uh and then like there there more punks I guess like you go to some maybe reform maybe Revolution and then you try and build new institutions and then if those like when you have those then everybody wants to be part of the system the system attracts a lot of people to work in those institutions to reinforce it but if you get complacent you get thaten and then you get to that cycle right so there's this kind of cycle that exists and this is so Punk isn't just like about like uh so I'm approaching this not just as like uh you want to make a system of punks but also like what is punk in a more systemic context uh and I want to kind of share like a few now systems level perspectives of what what Punk is in a broader kind of like systemic view right so part of the characteristic of punk is that you're often aligned according to the letter of the law but not in the spirit of the law right so if you think about look at 2 by two on the side right you have the traditional thing is that you're either an outlaw you don't like us you're not following the the rules or you're a citizen you're the inside right but you can also have uh you know like uh noobs who are basically people who I kind of want to be a good person I want to participate in this community but I don't know the rules yet right so I'm still learning and that's kind of like a forgiving nature about we can give you some time to onboard if you're a kid you don't know what it's like to you don't know the right way to like like I don't know like use the toilet right so we give you some grace period but then you have punks which is kind of outside that typical framework where like they know how to use the law or the system they know the code really well hackers knew really well how to interface with these systems right but they're subing it for a different Spirit right so like uh from a systems view right like uh Punk isn't pun forces us to think about Beyond just the idea of ux Designing for the default users you're trying to serve but also for like uh what I can think of as exceptional use cases right so how do you design for the people who actually might repurpose your system uh and do different things uh with it uh and on the top right uh the idea of affordances versus instructions so like uh puns Embrace technology in the sense of uh you you give me like give me this new thing what can I do with it show me how to do it so like uh I can use this thing called the internet what can I do with this how can I build it but they resist this idea of like uh give being directed or giving being given direct uh instructions uh so don't tell me what to do don't control how I use this right and this this if I zoom back and take a more ecological view of this right uh the function that punk is playing is really it's about like a emerging use um Evolution acceptation if you think about in a biological system right mutations happen creativity happen happen uh happen so like uh nutrients in a forest get repurposed into different kinds of organisms they create different kinds of things and that's really important for the dynamism of a particular uh system or ecology but if you have too much of that then becomes dangerous right so we have this kind of thing where uh there is a Cypher Punk Spirit to this but if we want to think about hardening a commment we have to think also about like if you like if you make it just for punks it kind of blows up right so like how do you have some sort of sense of like uh order within there and like you almost have to create something that's kind of balanced and I want to leave uh you guys on this idea of like uh like uh there's almost a spectrum of systems that are more buang prone where like I just if you look at the picture on the left right like clearly this is a bad path right you going to everyone is to be not using it but you could also Imagine a really Punk proof system which is where like everybody has to follow the default way and that's no deviants at all and like uh it might be tempting to think that that's The Sweet Spot that's the ultimate Harden commment right but or maybe it's not because we actually for this system to be able to grow and Thrive going forward we need some sort of space for for messiness for mutation for Creative Evolution to occur right so where's that sweet spot is it in the middle is it on the right I think that's something for us to explore in this section so that's the provocation thanks [Applause] so this is the second breakout think about what Sam just told you and try to integrate Punk and hacker elements of your Commons into your CMM so it's weird it's like you know the the man incorporating like the subversive element but I think if you don't try to do that you kind of end up with something fragile so revise and refine the developing model you have to kind of like reflect make your model Punk aware think of it that way and by the way just for your reference on that whiteboard I put up all the commons that you guys have chosen up there so I think it's air water Wikipedia encryption schemes what do we have internet memory Civic Norms distributed intelligence and distributed social media so wide variety of like physical and digital systems so all right another 17 minute breakout continue working on your model add the punk element e [Music] [Music] e e see [Music] all [Music] e for [Music] like e [Music] for e you to feel now trans be know IND SP it's you may not it's like build a can build that you way inst all right guys one minute morning three or four all right so the third provocation will be by Josh Stark who came up with the concept of hardness we've all been talking about he'll give you a prompt based on that this is the clicker cool okay hi everybody um yeah I'm taller than Vates um okay so let's run through this I want to start with just kind of like a primer I want to kind of give you a sense of oh thank you abblock don't think I did that oh boy sorry y'all okay so what kind of ideas hardness I want to stop there and then I'll dig into it a bit more so if you've read the like thing I wrote about this a couple years ago um I start with this idea about the invention of of information there's a great book called the information that is about the history of the concept information and uh one of the things I learned from that book is that it's actually a very recent idea um if you you know like 200 years ago at least in you know most places in the west if you ask somebody like what do what does a book and and a piece of music and you know our language have in common they wouldn't really be able to articulate that that is you know kind of a shared thing that all of those things share this property called information uh it really was not until this guy Claud Shannon um who worked at Bell labs in the 30s and 40s on lots of stuff uh he was trying to solve various problems um relating to I think at first like military applications in like targeting software used during the war um and then in 48 he wrote a mathematical theory of communication and this is the paper that first coins the term the bit and he you know kind of articulated very clearly a you know a concise definition of the idea of the bit and of information being a thing that can exist in many different mediums uh and he was using this for a spefic purpose but this idea of information as something that existed in all these different forms and could that we could apply a similar set of principles and and mathematical tools to understand that information um that really kind of took off and became what we understand today uh it's very hard to unthink ourselves out of our modern understanding of information because it's just so obvious to us that it is in all these things right so after he publishes this paper um one of the interesting that happened immediately afterwards is uh Homer Jacobson who was a Prof in Hunter College in New York City took these ideas and thought well if you can measure the amount of information that's used in these radio transmission systems then I suppose I could also measure the amount of information that a human ear can like you know process a time and then he also wrote another paper doing the same thing for the human eye uh it was I think at the time astonishing that this thing that we were using to talk about radio waves could also like equally be applied in a useful way to biology and of course DNA you know is information we all understand that now and actually some of the same ideas that CLA Shan invented um about like good principles for um like uh error in or like a you know preventing errors through like duplicative uh systems um we actually find Evolution figured out uh in terms of avoiding mistakes in how DNA is replicated um so cool right so I think that the idea of hardness is is supposed to be kind of like that my my pitch is that there is this property called hardness that exists in a ton of things that we all take for granted and interact with all the time but we don't really understand them as having a uniform property and I got here initially because I was just trying to explain ethereum and blockchains to people and the Insight I came to was that it's not that we don't understand blockchains it's that we don't understand everything else and so we don't have this meta category to put them in that would make sense of them so uh the pitch is that these kind of three categories of things all have hardness as a property inside of them um so one category is atoms right just the physical stuff around us um we make money out of just things we find in the dirt right we picked up gold and over time different civilizations learn that there's not very much gold uh that it's malleable that it's small enough and so it became a very useful currency and so that you know has been a thing and continues to be a thing for a long time many other cultures found other objects in their ecosystems uh shells other metals gems and these things just happened to have these properties that were durable right uh the amount of gold available in your region of you know the continent was not going to radically change from one year to the next there's this dur able kind of Supply relationship that makes this thing a useful money um then later we invent institutions and we use institutions to build all of the things we call civilization right so contracts and legislatures and police forces uh this is another source of hardness we can give an institution instructions and trust that they will be followed long into the future uh and you know we also make money out of Institutions um the money that we use today is just really the property the result of a whole bunch of people coordinated into some organization that follow rules and sets of behavior that gives a certain stability to certain properties of that money about its Supply and you know tracking property rights all that kind of stuff um and lastly you know Bitcoin and ethereum are another source of hardness they're a new source of hardness that we also use to make money and do many other things we can do contract like things with ethereum that really are a substitute for the things that we use institutional hardness for so that's the the big idea that these things you know beneath the hood like the reason we use we only use these things to make money and the reason that we only use at least institutions and blockchains to make these complex conditional relationships overvalue is because they share a property so that's the big idea um I have a definition that I've used in talks before for uh and what I'm getting at here is that hardness is like a capability to just make something more likely to be true in the future right we can do this with institutions we can give them instructions we can do this with blockchains by giving them code um and we have some like uh understanding that it will be durable in the future it is very likely to be certain in in the future uh and it's certain enough that we can kind of hang these other social structures on them we can use it to be money we can use it to organize the government etc etc so a few examples uh I talked about gold already right uh atom hardness is pretty good it has very very virtuous properties it's the same everywhere the rules of physics don't change depending where you are but one weakness of them is that as humans become more powerful and have more capabilities things that were hard stop being so hard right so if we can go pull an asteroid full of gold from somewhere else in the solar system and bring it to Earth suddenly the supply of gold which was a pretty hard fact for a long time becomes soft and it is no longer true that gold will preserve its value in the same way um there's the kind of famous case of of zinga in Facebook where uh Zinga this company that made games on the Facebook platform um was really reliant on the institutional hardness of Facebook uh to not you know totally just change the way the terms of service worked and change how the platform worked to you know erode their business and take control of it um but this institutional hardness was not very hard they were just relying on the whims of this company and it turns out that it wasn't very trustworthy it wasn't didn't have hardness um bottom left this is the symbol for uh I think the like International anarchic squatters Association or something um the case of squatting is interesting it's kind of two things at once it is a way that people exploit institutional hardness you can think of squatters as like institutional hardness hackers they're kind of looking around the world for where are property rights not actually being enforced and we can set up camp here and just see what happens and then you discover that ah we thought there was institutional hardness over these property rights but there actually isn't we can stay here uh and then of course squatters also use institutional hardness because in many places there are such things as squatter squatter's rights where if you live somewhere for a long enough uh the law says that now it is yours and you can't be evicted um so it's an interesting kind of edge case that is uh punkish in in in spirit of the previous uh provocation and the last one is of course an ethereum based one um many of you might already know of this artist uh Salon de deer I just mispronounced his name um he made this great piece of art uh a few years ago called this work artwork is always on sale and the idea is that it uses ethereum to pre-commit that whoever owns it anyone can always buy it by a certain price determined by a harbater tax and so as an example of the kind of commitment you can make to the world using uh ethereum based hardness that you couldn't really do otherwise right I don't think there's really a way that someone could legally set this up in most places where you know whoever owned it would always be forced to sell it and transfer property that's not a thing that our institutional Harden systems are are already set up for so I think that's yeah that's all I got um so that's the the big picture maybe VES will tell me if there's some big missing piece that I should talk about in the remaining seconds but if not I can sit down all good okay cool all right so let's J quick slightly structured uh prompt here so in your group all of you privately think about your chosen Commons and assess on a scale of 1 to 10 how hard you think your Commons is and how hard you think it should be so for example if you think your Commons is three out of 10 and should be seven out of 10 so make up those numbers and then in your group share those numbers with each other I oh I'll do that in a second all right before you guys get too into it that was just kind of a warm-up to get you thinking about hardness in a hard way uh but yeah let's actually take a quick um maybe five minute break then come back and we'll go straight into breakout number three and actually talk about this and try to integrate hardness into your evolving CMM so 5 minute break come back here we'll do the Breakout so yeah [Music] on [Music] to VAR [Music] you [Music] Serv a [Music] there [Music] hour [Music] there [Music] all right we are back and we are into breakout number three so you should start to converge a little bit by now so by the end of this breakout session try and have at least an initial list of names for your levels short one or two word names for your levels and um you can put it up on the board when you're ready you can edit it later but you should have at least an initial list of level names at the end of this breakout so 15 minutes starting here for think yeah St e some Comm e fr also talk set [Music] like e CL know e [Music] was I where that 's where number e am all right guys one minute warning before the next minute W up this round of discussion the have all right we're ready for the next provocation so Trent is going to be talking about Commons and in next breakout session I would like you guys to start converging towards the set of level names so please don't call your five levels 1 2 3 4 five creative one or two word names like this group is talking about air maybe one of the levels is you know aqi measured right aqi measurements are available for everybody that's a good name for a level but all right over to Trend talking about Commons okay yeah so I'm Trent I work at the ethereum foundation and I've been working on this project protocol Guild for the past few years and this will be kind of like an applied example but we'll we'll talk about enclosure first um this idea of enclosure uh I first came across it about a year ago through the work of this guy Benjamin burkenbine he's a professor I don't remember the school he's never responded to my emails but uh really inspired by him um but we we're talking about Commons and how they're peer produced resources uh we've talked about fisheries and forests um these are naturally prod Commons and uh I think what's important here is that they are naturally occurring and then humans engage with these systems which would already typically produce them maybe not farmland or pastures but fisheries and forests these are naturally occurring Commons when we get to things like um the internet or scientific data or software systems these are produced uh by humans deciding to do them so they're um it it it matters the production system that um ultimately leads to these things as the output and so when we talk about the ethereum commons uh we are sometimes talking about main net sometimes we're talking about the software there's a couple different things that are wrapped up in here um but for the software bit uh an example I come back to quite often is this uh the Linux ecosystem they have 30 years uh of longer history than ethereum and there's some instru Ive examples specifically um the idea of uh what Benjamin burkenbine calls incorporation uh the incorporation of the commons and um so he has his this entire book on the topic and the case study he he goes into and I've written a little bit about it is the idea of red hat uh which is a company that works in the Linux ecosystem and how their posture has changed over time so they started in the early days uh the early 9s s uh had a very good posture and by posture I just mean like uh how they interact with open- Source norms and engage with the projects that make up this this software Commons and so in the 90s had a really great relationship with all of these individuals and the teams and companies that are working in Linux and over uh decades at this point their relationship changes the way that they engage with this open source software changes they get acquired by IBM and all of the sudden uh their mode switches from contributing back to all of the sudden they have these restrictions on how they the the licenses that the software was released under and they start to break the Norms that this community is producing the software under and this this gets into what I just mentioned about like uh for software Commons it really matters how it's produced because it it's not naturally occurring uh there's people that have to actively um work on these things and make sure that they you know there's always bugs or they need to be maintained over time so the production system does really matter for software and so for ethereum the these three resource types that it produces are the network the asset and the media um the network is defined by protocols whether it's the sync mechanisms P2P architectures um the fork choice there's there's things that define how the this resource is produced uh the same for the asset this is another one of the resources um ether can be put in a number of different contexts um it's defined by things like the proof of stake issuance and the 1559 burn sorry if this is unfamiliar but these are just you know there's more of it or there's less of it and there's rule sets that are coded into the software that explicitly defined how it goes up and down uh and we're going to specifically narrow into this this media bit um because this is this is the production system that these other two depend on right there's software which defines how the network acts the the way that peers send data to each other uh the the software defines also how the asset acts and how it interacts with the network because it's it's an incentive for validators to participate in consensus so all of these three things are interwoven in some way and then they produce this thing that we we call ethereum Main net [Music] um right so the these are the the common resources and they are produced by today a a pretty wide variety of entities these are both commercial for-profit and and nonprofit and they all take up a different slice of the main net Commons um and they all have their own interests their own uh Tendencies towards extraction or enclosure whatever term you want to use they have incentives so for example uh Paradigm is a venture capital company their goal is to make money for their LPS or you know the The Entity itself most of the time I'd say 99% of the time or maybe all of the time this interest is coincident or moving in the same direction as what the commons needs or what the ethereum what is best for the ethereum protocol and the people that use it uh the companies that build on top of it um but there may be a case in the future where a venture capital company or a large commercial actor uh engages with this this set of main net contributors or let's say they purchase a company you know if it's if it's for sale somebody might be interested Google shows up with $20 million and says look I want to engage in this production this system of production that's maintaining this software and uh get some sort of political benefit benefit um because ultimately um this is Commons is uh they're not just the output right it's not just the tree it's not just the fish it's the process by which it's replenished the the natural resources right the fish is going to make more fish unless you completely depleted the trees will grow the software will not it it doesn't spring from the ground right it's it's a production system which is maintained by people showing up uh day after day and it's released again this is this is an open- Source software Commons it's released without uh restrictions on how you can use it this is kind of a a core component about um how this thing actually works and the guarantees that it has so you can't necessarily make a claim on the output but what you can make a claim on is the the production process and the way that you get exposure to that production process is by um you know becoming active or or having a voice and so um these for-profit entities they may have external incentives to pull out from the commons uh but you can also Imagine a a nonprofit found uh entity like the ethereum foundation is there in the middle bottom um let's imagine an evil version of the EF they want to dominate and take control of this uh you know this system of production and they want to pull themselves into it and it's crucial that um the constituent entities don't necessarily gain too much control right it's it's good that there are many different kinds of organizations and many different entities that are able to engage in this process it's open it's public and um anybody can can participate in it uh whether their their incentives are to pull out or to pull in and dominate um there is it's important to just be aware of these Tendencies and uh have mechanis Ms that maybe constrain uh the Tendencies of these different kinds of organizations so what protocol Guild does um it's a if you're not familiar with it it's a a collective funding mechanism for all of these individuals who are working on the software and it composes a higher level abstraction to um approximate the edge of the comment or the shape of the the software comment all of these little bits of software the teams and individuals that work on this uh again they have their own incentives their own Tendencies um the the the own their own legal structures which contain individuals so what protocol Guild does is it uh combines them all together on the level of the individual and makes them more legible on the scale of the commons and this does some things um so imagine Google shows up it's a lot easier to buy one of these tiny little boxes than it is this this large protocol Guild shaped object so you you return some of the agency you can think of it either to the individuals uh because you materialize them as part of this larger Collective abstraction which is all of the sudden you uh represent it at this this higher level scale and so when you have this abstraction then you can start to do interesting things with you can send funding to it um whereas when all of these entities or the projects within them are um embedded within a number of different organizations with uh again different incentives different payment structures suddenly you have this this very legible like this this exists on chain as an organization that splits funding directly to all of these individuals uh you can fund it um if you want to think of this as like a core core contributor Ubi if that's useful to you um we send funding to the median contributor and they get US dollars to sustain their work uh alternatively we also provide ecosystem exposure to these individuals because one of the challenges with open source software is especially in the crypto industry is that you don't have exposure to um the the the promise of venture capital funded projects like it's you're never going to to be able to match the the the massive pool of capital that's swirling around the edges on the outside but what we can do is start to provide some uh material Financial benefits for people who are still doing this important work and so you're able to rebalance a little bit of the incentives to resist what might otherwise be this pull outwards to extract uh and avoid enclosure um so that's like the money aspect uh but there more subtle things this is a solidarity mechanism that only uh comes from the output of uh people cooperating together and recognizing that yes they may be an employee or a member of a for-profit or nonprofit but what they really are a part of is this larger scale Commons construction um and and I could probably do a much more refined version of this but then you start to think about okay we can provide these carrots to people to participate in this uh this higher level abstraction which is the financial benefits uh but the the Ostrum definition would start to think about okay what are the penalties for defection I mean there's we can't really enforce a penalty because again the the output of this uh Commons or commoning process is free the software is free for anybody to use already so we can't cut off anybody's access but what we can do is provide these positive incentives to make sure um the you know the level of workmanship the kinds of ideals that are being baked into the software we can have common standards uh uh I should probably choose a different term than common standards but shared shared realities for what kind of values should this software um this this software embody and that's where the guild term is really descriptive because you know guilds were important in the Middle Ages for setting these standards and uh we imagine that this is a use ful U mechanism for U championing credible neutrality for uh ensuring that the software of the ethereum commons is credibly neutral these kinds of things um yeah and then and then the related to hardness I think the one thing that you can do with these um larger funding mechanisms relative to uh enclosure and where funding is coming in and out of a Commons is that you can start to distribute funding over time um whereas somebody might get fired or you know made redundant all of a sudden they have this external um source of funding that is not necessarily tied to the you know the movements of markets and things like that so you can start to layer in a ton of different things when you um make these individuals legible outside of their immediate employment context and on the scale of the the broader Commons itself so yeah okay so we are now getting into the meat of it so next 17-minute breakout session think about these questions what are the enclosure and capture Dynamics psychology of the people both inside and outside like you identified a Target group of stewards in the first breakout but they all are not necessarily aligned some of them might defect and become the threats right so think about what Trent just said and like think about you know mechanisms like the protocol Guild that can Harden against those um uh challenges right so 17 minutes but at the end of this breakout send one representative from your group over to those white boards there's like nine columns there you should have your list of level names identified maybe you can later edit them five to seven at most and put them down there right so at the end of this breakout that those three whiteboards should be full so 17 minutes go and producing it's you is always ter little fr that's just more so want number SI do B [Applause] so that'll be the next IM it's solve right to you want like in the shape of the pyramid now I think honestly I think than I think it's hard to come up with list it's even harder to come up with a lot I different levels of all right couple more minutes then we'll go to the last pration so finish writing up your white last is like it's kind of like but like also all right we're going to go into the last provocation please go back to your seats you can finish up later back from the whiteboards all right Tim's going to like now set you the hardest provocation connecting this all up to ethereum hi everyone who here's not in summer of protocols raise your hand wow thank you for staying full three hours um so far um yeah so this is ethereum Devcon so we're going to sprinkle a little bit of ethereum and all of this um so Josh uh talked about hardness uh right before me uh and I gave a talk uh bit related to this yesterday but in short there's a few things that are like special about ethereum's hardness first is that it's globally homogeneous anyone in the world uh that accesses ethereum has the same experience very different from institutions or atoms um independently auditable so all the chain data is public which you can just go and look at again different from uh other forms of hardness and then permission to see accessible meaning that there's just like a very low barrier to entry right like you could just plug in your computer and use it but one thing ethereum uh sort of does not do quite well is having a view of the outside world uh in crypto we call this the Oracle problem um but the like non-technical definition of this is that if you want to put a fact fact about the world on ethereum you need to have a mechanism and then that mechanism is not as hard as ethereum itself and so um I want to dive a bit deeper into like where ethereum hardness works and like where the challenges are and then um how that can potentially be applied to um these vast diverse uh Commons that we've been looking at um so the first very obvious one ethereum as a blockchain provides a Harden foundations for applications and assets and protocols to be built on top of it um so if you put something on ethereum you can have an expectation that you know it will stay on the chain that it will function in the way that you've programmed it on chain um and you know we see this in practice there's billions of assets uh issued on ethereum but there's also things like you know cultural artifacts like say nfts um where um you know the fact that the chain can preserve uh the nft itself is a valuable property but then there's another part about the ethereum community that uh relates to hardness and uh vcat mentioned this at the very beginning there sort of these two definitions of hardness the definition around like um sort of jous framing around longevity but the definition second definition is more around like battle testing thing or like resistance to external shocks um and ethereum's culture sort of mixes both in an interesting way like um both at the protocol level at the application Level um we have all of we we operate in like a very adversarial environment um we have all these hacks that happen or attacks and we sort of built these systems and processes and Norms to mitigate or response to them in an efficient way and then at the cultural level you know ethereum has this uh set of values around trying to optimize for the long term move the focus away from a single institution not have like a central point of failure in the ecosystem and also have a technical road map that's long-term sustainable so that's like a softer way to like export ethereum's hardness into other domains and so um you know putting those things together a couple examples that I again mentioned yesterday today uh in the talk but um that we've seen in practice where like ethereum's been kind of good to integrate with things outside of it and and have like this positive feedback loop the first um is this idea around quadratic voting quadratic funding so was this new uh allocation mechanism that was sort of theorized uh in Academia um that didn't really have a good place to be deployed because um existing institutions tend to be more risers when they're allocating funds so we were able to deploy this on ethereum um initially on gitcoin run a bunch of grants and learn from that process about okay what works what's broken with the mechanism tweak the mechanism and then sort of improve the theory back and there's like a positive feedback loop there where ethereum is kind of the test bed for this and we can bring it uh we can test things in like this isolated environment um and then scale them up to a size that's like relevant for the outside world and then another similar example is a prediction market so again this is this theoretical idea that um didn't quite have a place to get prototyped uh got some early prototyping done on ethereum augur was I think the first version of this um or maybe the second um even though augur itself wasn't quite successful um the idea and sort of being on ethereum and seeing it live inspired others which eventually led the poly market and then we can see you know poly Market played a major role in the current US election and so you can think of this as like V diagram of things that uh leverage ethereum's technical hardness things that Leverage the cultural hardness and potentially there's like some intersection in between um that are uh things that are not necessarily built on ethereum directly but that can either um learn from it or do things on it but then have an impact in a broader world and I think that's like a useful frame to to to use when you're when you're trying to think of like okay how can ethereum actually help you know something that's not an app on chain um and so this will be like my prompt basically um how can ethereums either there sorry how can e ethereum's technical capabilities or sort of cultural hardness can can uh how can that improve your CMM um and one thing I would like encourage you to do is like think are there alternative sources of hardness you could use rather than ethereum and like why is ethereum the right one and maybe ethereum is not the right one and that's fine and you'll learn something but um if if it is right like it's worth thinking like okay why can't the government do this why can't you know gold do this or something like that and similarly though if you are thinking about like a way that this can leverage ethereum um I would think through how can people bypass this just back to like this Oracle problem um you know if you have something where you're saying um we're going to monitor everybody's going to like put something on a blockchain to monitor that like the air quality is good to take my example um how do you make sure that the people putting the air quality numbers on the blockchain are putting the real air quality numbers and not just you know faking something to get a reward and um then yeah I think the third thing is kind of going back to this poly market and get quite example is there some sort of positive feedback loop where like if you experiment and learn things by like using ethereum um you can then push this back into the real world or and then you know potentially bring the bigger version on ethereum and so on and so and it's like the last part that uh or sorry the last iteration that we'll be doing on a model so um yeah take all of this try to apply it to the model and we will do a share back session after this in 17 minutes thanks all right question remember it's my 50th birthday and this is your birthday gift to me so I want I want two very clean sheets like one two Max sheets with your complete model in like as cleaned up a form as you can make it that'll be what we take a picture of and you know publish right I'm sure you guys have like a lot of messy working notes let's make this breakout a little longer so like uh 25 minutes think about Tim's prompts about uh ethereum but also like clean up your model and capture it in one or two paper sheets of paper all right have cap you saw that building from got promoted to we help priv whatever so meone boed something e to Miss do e come all e say is I think long f all right guys 8 minute warning and appoint someone from your group to like come and do the share back so maybe like 3 minute version of your idea all right so 8 minute some us not of that's ch point 7 AA foring nice terraforming one minute warning is now rep all right let's bring it back in So yeah thank you all first of all for like persevering through three hours to do this exercise I know it's like not the easiest kind of thinking to do like it's that midlevel of abstraction that can be really annoying especially late in the afternoon uh but yeah thank you all for pers persevering and we have nine very interesting lists of phrases here so after we done with the share backs as you're all heading out do take a moment to just walk past and like look at each of them and maybe take pictures for your future reflection but now let's get into the share back session and I just um slightly tweaked um the suggested outline so take about maybe three minutes for each group send up one representative here to speak into the mic so we have a proper live stream recording so Point your whiteboard list and just read out your levels so people have a sense of like the you know motifs you're going for um maybe talk about one thing that was really hard in the exercise because this is good research input for us we want to know like what's hard and what to try and make easier and then maybe one good Insight that came out of um your process but otherwise yeah free format so if there are no volunteers I'm just going to pick randomly any group want to go first all right Trent I have it up there yeah I come up here and speak in the mic that way it'll be well I just I really just wanted to say the one Insight but I guess I'll do all of them um all right so the levels so we were talking about air and the levels we had um specifically thinking of Bangkok and Thailand broadly first level is air Anarchy there's polluters bad emissions no systems of measurement visible smog Smoky season in the north uh and then the punk is like eot terrorism of people you know taking direct action against the production of this this poor air quality um the second one is air awareness so we we imagined you'd start to understand it through data start a process of localized data collection um understand the scope of the problem ways to mitigate it um punk would be the organized protest ways of surfacing visibility to this issue um third air assessment regulations on uh ideal parts per million goal setting maybe you have DIY air measurement distributed pollution monitoring uh four is air actuation that was not very good incentives and sanctions you can start to think about Regional Regional commitments because obviously you have your local context but there's also it's a it's a good that moves across borders and doesn't really care for them um incentives and sanctions commitments to targets policy accountability uh or like the re the ROI on the policy that you're implementing and then the last one was um air reforming or air augmented but yeah so this could be like building the actual infra and um making sure that you have systems to to produce clean air uh maybe people are getting their um daily vitamin intake through this this augmented air um we don't really have a system for implementing that but it it sounds interesting um one thing that was hard do you guys what was hard I don't know test coming up with tests for each level all right we'll go with that uh the main thing I just wanted to talk about was during the the capture bit I guess this is mostly relevant to me but we were thinking about how defining the scope of the problem and the people that are tasked with fixing it there needs to be some sort of bounds on the definition otherwise you end up with this Perpetual um you know you know similar to like the philanthropy or charity industry there's a vested interest for the people that are Distributing Aid to continue these uh Distribution Systems regardless of whether there's more efficient or more um uh yeah systems that are that are just better at Distributing funds or resources to people there's there's a vested interest in keeping them the way that they are because people get paid through it so that was one thing that we uh was kind of an interesting bit about like okay how do you define the scope of this problem what what does it mean to solve it um because at a certain point there will be uh the people that end up um engaging with the production of a solution you don't want it to get entrenched as the um the new uh status quo even when it you know there's Improvement on it and maybe there's perverse incentive to to maintain this over time that's it [Applause] right since it's 6:12 we have to be like mindful of time so 3 minutes exactly I will time all of you guys let's just go order by yeah three minutes go all right everyone my name is Daniel our topic was Civic Norms which we were kind of proud of as like kind of a a clever idea of culture itself as a resource so that we ended up just kind of rediscovering kind of a whole sociological theory of History so that was kind of funny but um our our kind of phases were something kind of like the king you know no real structure very top down power- driven then we had the tribe where we have kind of simple notion of order kind of like a Ten Commandments Society um very kind of Shame High control and then something like the state development of more institutions a bit more personal freedom um a bit more regular a bit more sophisticated law system and then the culture which was sort of the um somewhat solar Punk Collective Enlightenment restorative justice um internal motivation all around and then the last one we couldn't quite articulate so we just kind of called it the great Cosmic om which was a na to sartha um something that was hard was you know as we kept going through all these different phases and we kept kind of complexifying the model you know we kept trying to you know abstract and shoehorn things in and some things didn't quite fit and we tried and just acknowledging that you know this doesn't quite fit in the model that's as fun as it is like we got a drop this that was a bit of a hard conversation to have sometimes and um one thing that was uh one Insight was you know once we kind of worked out the the framework everything really fell into place in kind of a beautiful way like every cell kind of got really easy to fill in once we knew what we were doing and that was a real that was actually really quite Pleasant to have it all kind of locked into place like that so that was kind of nice to experience [Applause] hi everyone uh my name is harith uh so our topic was encryption schemes and um I'll start with the one thing that was hard was that uh our one teammate that suggested this topic uh who actually knew more about the subject had to leave halfway so so the main learning was maybe to get enough team members to know what they're talking about um when it comes to a particular topic uh so for our levels uh the first one is we describe it as Wilderness um so for encryption schemes where there's only academic research and there's minimal distribution uh of the research on the subject then the second level is managed where there are now developer ecosystems that have formed um in the real life example is uh say psse in etherum foundation and others that are working towards um kind of creating their own ecosystems for this then the next level the third level is irrigated where there are now open source libraries or licenses and there's documentations on uh established ux patterns uh for this uh encryptions the fourth level is monitored where there are agreed upon uh standards for incentivizing uh researchers whether that's in bounties or having some sort of retroactive public goods funding uh for uh disclosing vulnerabilities and the last level is uh thriving where there are now automated economic mechanisms to uh sustain uh maintenance uh of these researchers and um the research that they're doing uh one big insight about the process was that um at least for this topic it's multi-dimensional uh so there are like potentially governments that are trying to like forbid access to uh this kind of research uh there's corporations who might want to kind of co-opt it and like create patents and own uh all this stuff uh and there's like developer burnout how do you make sure that these developers can keep on being incentivized and sustained so that they can keep doing the best work for everyone uh that's pretty much it for us thanks okay so we did uh Wikipedia as a kind of knowledge Commons um for our our levels level one we call gibberish which is just unverified and unorganized level two is uh what we call propaganda which is organized but very biased level three uh we call Academia which is manually verified but kind of closed and gate kept not not open to everybody uh level four was open source which is um transparent and verified and then we have uh the final one was Oracle with an asterisk um and this is uh we have some kind of attestation system it's Dynamic auditable and transparent uh one thing that was hard I mean honestly we kind of we kind of just knocked this out of the park right away so um I'm just kidding I think uh what was hard uh we had a good discussion about um on the punk access axis um total anonymity versus total transparency what's the right what's the right level of anonymity versus transparency and how to na navigate that uh one big Insight um I guess I'll just share one thing I observed is that um we can think of naming things as a way of closing them down or finishing them but I actually found that um naming things is a good way of iterating things because the the name never actually quite gets it right so when you name it you can kind of go oh that's that's pretty good but then there's usually another name behind it and I thought that was pretty interesting [Applause] so we did evacuation routes and evacuation routes uh number one was dirt road so just um yeah not not on a map or anything just a a route number two was making it onto a map so that there's a collective reference for where the road is three was paved and serviced um so actually maintained kept free of potholes um and uh participation of a municipality four was evacuation status recognition so kind of like elevated to the special uh recognition that it's essential and so this comes with like daily servicing with the plow five was Community convergence um and with conver convergence was also conversion so the community is now are now active participants in the maintenance of the road um which leads into six of just redundancy planning making sure that you don't have one um response plan for what to do in an emergency and seven was enclosure strategies is we started to respond to like potential corporate use and overuse of the road how do you make sure that you're defended against um yeah those potential um kind of interruptions to evacuation and what was hard was I would say navigating like these kind of two layers of um actors so on one hand there's the municipality and then on the other there's uh the neighborhood and the people who actually um in the case of an emergency are responsible for maintaining the road um so like yeah knowing how to be dynamic between those two actors and how to layer them on top of each other um governance and the actual like practical use and um some insights are that Commons arise when governments don't act or fail to act enough um and yeah we were curious around using ethereum for like recognition of Labor and when people are doing so much work that is uh hidden whether it's like removing a tree from the road or um um fixing some aspect of it that there be a shared source that is able to compensate those people and um kind of like direct uh Commons uh fund thank [Applause] you uh yeah ours was uh internet's memory uh it was going well until somebody from the internet archive showed up so um so yeah so um the uh the four phes we have is the first is uh undiscerning centralized storage so essentially what you have now with internet archive where you can upload like save things but um the governance is pretty centralized and also uh you know the government can send it uh the second one uh the second stage we have is uh sufficiently decentralized storage uh so in this case the governance is Central we call it centralized fuzzy governance it's still not fully decentralized but maybe the storage is much more uh decentralized uh maybe there are uh it expands into multiple locations in multiple continents uh so that it's not easy to censor um and the test for this uh stage is is it always accessible so that's the question um that should be answered and uh the third stage is uh capture assistant utility uh so at this stage we want um a more uh of like basically a moderately decentralized governance incentives for maintaining incentives for archiving and maintenance um um and um the question that we want answered here is like is there rough consensus on how this is run uh so U yeah that's basically the sort of third part and um the fourth one is yeah so uh we call it indispensable utility so at this stage um people should be able to Fork multiple instances of the same thing and there should be like standards uh for forking these instances and so standards adoption becomes a thing there um and also uh solving really hard problems like basically we uh realized once arar who works at internet archive came in there are sort of like basic issues that we sort of forget that are pretty hard such as like d duplication uh which is uh which he mentioned is something that has not been solved yet uh so those are s of basic things we only considered at the fourth stage uh but um so I think that was maybe one of the hard things about doing this was um yeah like sometimes there are like things that you sort of take for granted that end up being extremely uh have extreme complexity um and uh yeah and for the first stage uh the question we are asking is uh is there standards adoption uh for it to become an indispensable utility um and yeah uh um yeah what was hard I think was um it's such a broad thing like internet memory so maybe uh narrowing it down more would have helped uh but also when you the bounding boxes like you run into so many other systems that have their own complexity such as like like state law and stuff that is its own uh like systemic complexity that is like hard to grock so uh I think um yeah like so it becomes hard once you like start asking a couple more questions there um but uh yeah so that's it from us thank you right so the comment that we ended up choosing was uh decentralized AI of how exactly can uh Commons based on AI actually be developed and then s successively governed now we ended up our CMM ended up taking the form of a you can say a chronological Evolution model you can see that torpedo over there it's supposed to be a pyramid but you know if you squint just right enough it looks like a pyramid um so the level one is the birthing stage and this is where any talk of decentralized AI is currently and that's largely just regular open- sourced AI that you see current you see currently stuff like llama you know it's been sort of uh it's all contingent upon the benevolence of a specific centralized entity like in the case of llama it's Facebook sure you have people using the license to work on llama but still largely centralized sorry for yeah I was touching the keyboard I did not realize that uh the second stage is the community capacity building stage now the community capacity building stage when it comes to Common governance it should ideally follow the principles of progressive decentralization so there's small aspects that you entrust to the Community First and then you follow it up with more important decisions um ideally this stage culminates with the exit to community stage where the centralized intermediary which birthed the project no longer has any control or say over how it proceeds next up we have the curation stage so this is where the community working groups hopefully of now there are many because of exit to community they are actively developing improving and deploying this resource the resource being the decentralized AI the end result of this uh stage is the development of various use cases that daai can be used for Integrations that it can be deployed with users whose needs it can actually sort of cater to and next up is the value generation stage this is not exactly a final stage because the curation and value generation stage uh keep on shifting back and forth uh the value generation stage is where basically this Commons can actually be independently it can have an independent life of its own through money right so it basically involves the creation of monetization strategies which are not contingent on uh on intermediaries and the creation of a common treasury which is held in common trust and govern accordingly you know ideally by stuff such as quadratic funding mechanisms now going across each stage requires various cultural shifts we've also come up with a list of several different cryptoeconomic Primitives on ethereum which can suffice to um govern um decentralized AI I'll just list them very quickly won't describe them one stake based shelling game mechanisms two a Marketplace for compute three civil resistant tokenized governance mechanisms four quadratic funding pools and five zkl tools now that being said what was hard about this project well just getting started was hard I think our entire first 20 minutes was just us staring at each other and not knowing what to do what actually to write down but once we got over that stage I think I had a lot of fun and you know I had I I had a great time talking to my team this is a contribution from all my team so they all uh deserve a round of applause for this and you know if you had more time I think we could have come up with a great proposal for decentralizing AI which we could then pitch to investers and make a lot of money hopefully but thanks a lot so we did a water reservoir and the first layer was fully vulnerable slopen SL Anarchy um so no institutional hardness second one was stewarded by by one group so one sort of institution decides to take care of the reservoir um and uh so that would be a allow medium Punk medium hard uh kind of yeah openness and then the third level would be governed uh so with some cultural expectation around um how the reservoir should be managed um and um yeah having some level of policy basically policy and culture around it the fourth level we call networked pluralist um which would have many overlapping structures um managing the reservoir and um yeah and then we we made a comment about hardness being different from rigidity rigidity uh and I think something difficult in the activity was that we were dealing with the natural resource type of thing that was very specific so we were not talking about just water as a whole we're talking about water reservoir and yeah it was difficult to apply some of the Frameworks to that um and yeah just the difference in the vocabulary also uh of the challenges with ethereum in comparison to that [Applause] your guys hello my group handled uh decentralized social media um and we split this into stages based on the size of um the number of people that the social media could support um so we have uh friends which you need like peer-to-peer uh connectivity uh basically a group chat um you need to be able to do boundary definition and have like uh like an an immediacy to um the the user experience um we've got neighbors uh where you start to need distributed storage and uh ident sovereignty um you need some form of administration um and then discoverability um so that you can navigate the network um we have strangers within a shared culture um and here you start to need uh composable uh privacy and anonymity um and Federated uh domains of of administration um as well as filtering as you start to need to to uh adjust the content that you're seeing based on your uh your sphere then we have uh strangers within different cultures um and we start to need sharding for the uh amount of information that you're storing um reputation plural governance um and uh concentrated efforts at at accessibility so languages and and other methods of providing access um and then finally we have all beings um so a theoretical version of social media in which it encompasses all forms of human Communication online um so we have human right uh access to the network is ensured as a human right Network sovereignty the the network itself is is completely self- Sovereign and uh multiplanetary connectivity um I think the biggest challenge in this was determining what our like success criteria was like how we defined hardness because there's a lot of ways to Define hardness for this particular subject area um and I think that we settled on the number of people just because social media becomes stickier and like more entrenched by the number of people that are using it um which makes it harder as a system thank you seconds over so is the end of this session thank you all for coming remember to take photographs and hand your sheets of paper to Timber here and please look at the whiteboards on your way out all right thanks a lot