Simona Pop ~ Impact IRL: Effecting Change & Empowering People Panel

foreign [Music] welcome everybody to our um impact irl affecting change and empowering people thank you everyone who is here and not in the other at the other stage we love you all um and we have um an amazing lineup today and i'm gonna ask the wonderful women sat to my right to introduce themselves what they're working on what the projects are and then we're gonna tackle a couple of questions and what i'd love to do is to get some some questions from from the audience so um christina we'll start with you let's pass it around awesome hi everyone i'm christina lamazo i lead the blockchain team at unicef innovation uh we have a venture arm that investors invest in early stage startups in emerging or developing economies and also have an internal team who builds in-house products one of those which is the boost token which we announced yesterday during chris fabian's impact speech hi my name is gloria cabuella i'm formerly with square i lead initiatives that deal with diversity into tech and inclusion into the tech space now transferring into the blockchain space i've worked with kids from two all the way up to college teaching them how to code and getting them into tech and leading different types of camps and it's also like diversifying companies from sea orgs all the way down and so inclusion is definitely one of my passions my initiative for 2019 is to have in conclusion in the ethereum space both in emerging markets within minorities and also with women hi there i'm grace torrellas i am a founder of blockchain for humanity and giveth and i am actually representing blockchain for humanity in this particular panel it's a not-for-profit foundation that actually supports projects using blockchain technology for social good and we do this in a number of ways and i hope i can explain to you a little bit later exactly how we do this thank you hi my name is and i run a network called cryptography which is a network in sweden for women and non-binary to kind of get into crypto and blockchain we're about 2 000 members today so it's it's growing steadily and there is a lot of curiosity which is nice i'm also cmo of superblocks we build developer tools um yeah for solidity awesome um and i'm simona um i'm a co-founder of the bounties network um we've been doing a lot of work in terms of diversifying the application of bounties into environmental and social impact um and speaking of impact how would you define it because there's a lot of talk around it particularly in terms of um what blockchain is going to do how it's going to really design things how it's going to really engineering re-engineer things but i feel as has been the pattern in the space a little bit there's a lot of talking and not that much walking so i would love to hear from all of you what does impact represent to you guys okay no pressure in answering that question um i think that's a big one and i think it's very individual to organizations or individuals and everyone defines it differently but for me personally impact is making a positive change and that's a super broad definition but that's how i view it so i have a different perspective i think for me the like crypto anarchist inside me really enjoys anything that empowers non-traditional communities to be able to find their voice and be authentic whether it is creating transparency through governments by voting or whether it's empowering people economically and that's for me is impact and so i really like to see those type of impacts happening in like different types of communities whether it's africa or non-traditional communities here within the united states just having more empowerment through digital technology i'm not sure i can add more to that but i will try so actually impact in in my world is it's very much addressing all the gaps that we have we have corruption and now we can give transparency that's huge for me financial inclusion to people who never had it in the first place digital identity for people who never had any possibility of that so for me it does that's huge impact and it affects individuals and it affects communities it affects societies and i think that we are here because we know that we have a technology that has the power to make some immediate changes in that way and i think that that's what this panel is going to discuss and and i i can't wait to get there because uh impact that's it's a lot more than what we think right yeah for me i think i really have high hopes for like the decentralized future with blockchain like the potential to redistribute power and wealth from like the huge tech giants of today to more of the users and and i really hope that us like users will be able to kind of in the future control the systems that today control us in many ways and i also think it's important that we like that we have diversity and inclusion among the drawing table of these new systems to be able to really shape a future uh for all of us and and build tech that's more human than we've seen in web too i would say okay um i think because so everything that i've heard and of course uh something that i i feel very strongly about is this broadening of access is this inviting everybody at that table and discussion economic um access um access to information to resource and so on but again because we're such a new technology we have so many barriers to that um and we're still you know we'll we're building things in very traditional economically you know um well positioned centers in the states in western europe um in in australia and how do we i mean or what are some practical examples from what you have seen or you've worked on that are whether at the beginning of the journey or whether really kind of showing a lot of promise and how do we boost those things i had to slip that in there um it's the boost token basically we minted it together so um and it's it focuses on you know incentivizing positive action within communities so and it's very much what we're after so i'd love to hear some concrete examples of stuff that that you've seen that you're you're really excited about again focused on this like who is walking that walk and what are they doing okay okay so um i would i think the things that make me the most passionate or anything that's decentralized and so the second that we start to really like centralize as far as like you know getting it rather it's like you know certain educations or whatnot it becomes really scary to me but i like decentralized education so i've seen a couple of different projects where they would just have like lesson plans or just simple lessons plans where a student who maybe is in rural africa and doesn't get to go to school every single day they can still have attract learning and then show like okay well this is where you were before and then this is where you're going afterwards i think that that type of thing um it gives access to all different types of people so the more that we kind of like break the current molds and see like let's create something totally different rather than reinvest them and that to me is something that's really exciting especially if it can be given towards other communities i i think add to that it's um there are incredible projects that are making great strides and towards impact but they are doing it against all the challenges that have confronted right and many of them are not making it and and i think this is a probably this is the first question i would ask before we actually actually say okay so which projects are actually out there making that impact right because there's a huge number of potential projects that could bring that impact but they're not making it because they don't have the funds to do it and and that's the problem that i'm actually facing right now i'm sorry about that the the the problem is the potential is there the ideas are there the teams are there the technology is ready the the features and the and the proof of concept is already there and we can't really deploy these projects and i'm talking about microfinancing farmers in mexico who are actually looking after the coffee and they need to have very small amounts of money to be able to make that that crop and we're talking about a circular economies in very small countries in countries not countries towns in south america where they are creating a kind of a circular economy a local economy creating a local token and being able to implement it and we have like in order to implement that it would be ugly educational uh assistant it would only be a very small amount of money that would actually make this go and it's not happening and that's probably the the one thing i'd like to talk more about this is why is it not happening why is it that we're talking about here oh you know yeah there's a great potential of projects out there that are doing good but god no they're not because they don't have the funds to do this i also think like from the developer standpoint from the engineering standpoint like i would really love if every engineer here had a passion project an emerging market that they were willing to contribute on github towards because i feel like a lot of times we kind of gravitate to what we've seen at denver what we've seen in nff and whatnot but we're really like people who are in you know the congo and they have these projects that are growing and they like just need some steam and it would be nice if people like knew like hey i could give my intellect to to some of these projects i mean we can we don't have to be just kind of confined into our local economies in our local areas i think a big piece of that is visibility as well um we're so used to these traditional models of funding projects closer to us that we understand best and what i when i joined unicef was really excited about was this venture fund which gives a hundred thousand dollars to early stage startups which for many people in silicon valley or based in new york that doesn't seem like a lot of money but to do these companies who are based in bangladesh or india or wherever 100 000 is a lot of money to get their projects up and started and so we finally see solutions that are being built by the local communities and i think that's what we want to see more of the model of building a solution in new york or denver wherever and trying to transplant that into rural uganda won't work it will fail and so we need to empower the local communities to go out and build for their communities and enable them either with the technical skills or with the funding or with mentors or whatever that is um but also bring visibility to that both like we're all responsible for that the media is responsible for that all the dialogues are important yeah um i have high hopes for i think like systems outside the systems that can kind of improve um yeah lives for people in countries that aren't as free as maybe the western world um we at superblocks worked on a kind of a pilot or a small project that we called merchant blocked this summer where we like launched a platform where same-sex couples could register their vows on ethereum it ended up being very piloted due to of course gdpr and the infrastructure of blockchain still very early on um but it raised a debate around this question whereas like in 87 percent of the world's countries today it's still illegal with same-sex marriage uh so i have really high hopes for for those kind of solutions on uh yeah coming with blockchain i also think like another practical thing is that we yeah here at eve denver have this impact track and we have this impact panel which is great and next year i hope that we will be both men and women in the panel so that everyone is really like because this is not just like a women's question or a minority question this is all our our question and like even like looking at it from like a profit standpoint i think like bringing in um again bringing in diversity and and equality in your companies kind of make you at least according to ernst young's they studied 20 000 companies in 90 different countries and saw that the companies with diversity at the top were more profitable than the others so yeah it's a good start it's important i really hope we can continue on this conversation absolutely and i think one of the main things that i've kind of gathered from all of your answers is we kind of need more collaboration don't we um we need that let's call it collaboration 2.0 where we actually tie in all of these projects and we make sure that we've got education covered we've got funding we've got these streams that lead into one another a lot easier than we have had it traditionally and also that that the work that we've been doing in terms of different projects we kind of need to bring those together and i think one of the main main things that i've been very conscious of at with bounties is that looking at how we enable this access to information and resource and how we make it accessible to anyone in any region but very much being aware and and concerned with the cultural nuances and what the needs are um and and how we can we can solve them is is very very important so um what do we think then and also like you said about the panels and now we have an impact track hopefully we're going to have one at every hackathon and maybe it doesn't just last for 48 hours but maybe we have an ongoing situation where the conversation continues we don't just have a panel for half an hour on a side stage and then you know we'll go home but we don't really what are the next steps so what would be the next steps for you what would you like to see what would you essentially won the takeaways to be and how can we continue the conversation how can we make sure that this collaboration doesn't just remain you know a word in the ether um and we we produce something tangible and we produce something that truly has an impact okay yes i i i feel very passionate about this particular topic here so at the blockchain for humanity we feel responsible to actually make those connections and and make those kind of links between initiatives we have seen a number of great initiatives that are pretty much working on the same thing with a little bit variation of more and less efforts or more or less resources and we see that one of the great um opportunities is to actually start making those connections right that person or that initiative that group of people who are developing the uh the digital identity can definitely help this other initiative would want to have that or there is an initiative for example we have three particular initiatives that we work very closely with and this initiative became part of our core support because they won an award so every year we give two type of awards to all the uh projects that are there that are doing some great work on social impact the dreamers award and the shapers award the dreamers award are those projects that are really at a very early stage so we want to push them to that pilot or proof of concept so that's something that we really take on very seriously to move them forward the shapers award are projects that are a little bit more mature and they actually serve us models for these dreamers and they actually are also part of that coaching effect for the dreamers awards so we found a little bit of synergies between these projects and also that all of them have elements that they can actually share with each other so this was a great opportunity to kind of see the bigger picture and say okay so how do we make these links and how do actually we work together so we have this sort of project called cryptoconcerge who is actually educating merchants vendors in the border between venezuela and colombia because there's a whole number of refugees going through that border every day and they're trying to create a micro economy using crypto currencies but what they're lacking is actually education so they were on the ground they created this airdrop um you know wallet uh hard wallet they they disturb they distribute them around and they actually talk to each merchant so that they would understand what they were getting into i thought that was like wow you know it didn't take much it was like four people really working uh you know on the ground with this uh with with the the people who were getting their drops and the merchants and that was already a huge step forward which actually then led us to think okay what they're doing there is what this project circular who's actually implementing this um sort of um they call it mutual credit type of system between a community this is actually what they need that model of education is what they need because they don't know how to explain it to people and they don't know how to actually get the community incentivized to take them on board so these two projects are actually working together and you know giving each other that sort of uh you know support but also sharing that expertise so this is an example of where i really would love to go which is actually collaboration and like you were saying it's the funding it's the education it's actually the technology particular pockets of the technology that we're using so this is i'm sorry i'm taking so long with this but this is like the part that i was waiting for to talk about and this is where i really would like to leave the audience with something to take away collaboration and making those dots and collecting the connecting those links that we need to really do because otherwise we're not going to create the impact that we're aiming for so i i think i'm gonna just come from an engineering perspective and i have asks of all of y'all and my ask is for you to like look at things and say like is there a way that i can decentralize this even further and have a deeper impact towards different communities also allow yourself to be your most authentic self um look at if there's opportunities for translations like i know a lot of times when we're in giving these talks or having writing docs it's all in english and if we could have an opportunity to like translate so if you know another language translate it into the language that you do know fund a project that is something different than what you are working on would be great mentor a person that looks totally different than you that would be amazing fun some of these things are happening in those computer communities apply towards east cape town would be fascinating see if your product actually works within some of these communities that you don't necessarily like interact with that would be something for me that i would personally like absolutely love and it's something that you all can do like immediately as you walk through the door and then the other aspect of it is like if you can do absolutely nothing amplify if you know that there's a voice that is representing a community that's different from yours even if it's like in a different language or whatnot just kind of spread the knowledge out there so that people can find the resources that they are looking for in the communities that they want and that people who are identifying in that um they can and like my biggest kudos i guess in this whole thing right now from this whole weekend today will have to go to scale because scale not only had a black woman leading like she had a black woman at the booth which is great but they also had a black woman giving a technical talk that dealt with live coding which if you're not an engineer that's super difficult to understand right now and if more of our companies had women not only behind the booth but giving technical talks i'd give you kudos all day long like that to me is something that is super important if you can have different people from different communities gaining the exposures being on the live streams having the recorded talks that would be huge so i mean i would gladly give my spot for them we should also be gladly giving the spots for different people that represent different communities uh yeah i would also like to touch upon like collaboration and i think that's like important also like within our space there's so many beautiful open source projects like um yeah making the world a better place to talk like the old web too but i think we also have some like powerful i don't know enemies or or whatever you like to call them but the power holders of the old world are of course also looking into blockchain and how they can kind of own that technology so i think it's really important for that reason also for us as a community to to work together and then if you are running a startup and you're thinking about uh hiring someone who's different than you um yeah like think about how to also create a culture where that someone will feel welcome and thrive because i think a lot of the time we stop at recruiting like great i recruited someone who's different uh but then like also creating a professional and and welcoming uh culture internally um is is gonna be important and thinking about what what biases you have because a lot of the time we walk around with even unconsciously we expect different things from for example men and women and so just like looking inside of you and see what you have there i would like to send you all remember it's not just men and women it's like different races different extroverts versus introverts it can be you know different social economic statuses or different education status in engineering it can be self-taught versus like college educated there's so many different biases that come up about it and i think uh especially in like this community where we're trying to make an ecosystem where all people are welcome it is really important to sit there and say like is this is there like is this vanilla is this is this meeting vanilla is it all the same if it's all the same let's let's sprinkle some sprinkles on this like let's make it a little bit different and decentralize it and really question if we're coming to the right conclusion out of this meeting if we're all coming from the same point of thought like that's really not happening at all i'll just add to that in saying that over the last little while that we've been chatting there seems to be three pillars there's education there's the funding and then there's the actual going out and prototyping and so collaboration obviously underlies all of those would actually challenge us to not just talk about it within our community and collaborate within our community but go outside and this doesn't apply just to impact but the blockchain space and early technologies are really bad about talking about what the technology is and what the benefits are and so we somehow our team stumbled on newsweek and said hey would you come here and help us shape stories so that more people can understand what the technology is and the impact that they can have and so more that we can pull in groups from outside into our community and make it more decentralized um i think that that will also help us boost impact for it as well boost i like that um so again just just to kind of get a conclusion out of this and then um hopefully we'll have some questions from the audience it's creating the dynamics that enable this and i think what again um as you just mentioned to christina we as an ecosystem we aren't necessarily the most you know accessible um ecosystem and our materials aren't exactly the lightest reads and the applications or or the events are necessarily the most kind of friendly and i think in terms of education and in terms of translation it is very very important to maybe create these frameworks where people can access information in a very um you know non-jargon-laden format maybe also create earn as you learn patterns because not everybody can afford to go on a developer blockchain developer course um and really thinking about these variations that will enable people to get that control to really empower them to go okay well so i can earn some cryptocurrency by learning to do this and then then maybe i can set up a project then maybe i can get some funding from unicef ventures then maybe i can get some mentorship from people who have been there before me and really make it to where you don't need to come to colorado even though it's amazing but also very very high up and this altitude thing is really messing with me um but that you don't need to turn up to a specific place in order to access this information right you can tap into it from wherever you are and i think that is the key to it all is getting that freedom of access where web 2 kind of failed well certainly didn't necessarily do a great job and we were looking at chris's slides yesterday in terms of access to 3g and connectivity and hell it's happening in the us let alone you know in the broader geographies um so yeah i i don't know if you guys have any closing thoughts um we've got maybe five minutes so i will actually like counter your okay section so i do know like yay we like we got to eat denver and it's so expensive but on the flip side of that for someone who like i was not working at the time i was on maternity leave so i needed something that was free and the ethereum community has a lot of information that's available that's free and that was one of the things that was like made me like highlighted it so i feel like we should be utilizing our assets in a way that like benefits other people but we also need to be cognitive of other people that don't that could access it if it was in their language so it would be helpful if like at the plaza notes if we sat there and said here's a bounty for you to just translate the plaza you know and i think that it would be very wrong of us to assume that people from other countries don't have the right technical depth and have to be brought up sometimes they just need it to be in their language and they have the technical depth so i think that we should really just try to sit there and bring people up but also be bringing up the ones who have to be brought up in it so i think that we really should be utilizing amplifying what's our good in a way that should be amplified but really driving that uh and thinking it very global across the board and thinking like how can we globalize this a little bit more too i i believe that yeah language is definitely a problem i mean and we are at fault of that i mean if you go to our website b4h.world you would only find it in english at this point right and we want to be global and we have to promote global impact and we're failing at actually doing in the multiple languages that we need to reach out to so that's something that we have we're very conscious about and we want to make sure that we actually address this and in conference in general obviously if you're in a panel you're you're talking in english and most of the talks are all in english unless you are very specific in a few countries but if we actually started implementing this multiple language conferences whereby you have different streams and different languages that people could be probably be more welcome to actually participate on it probably that could help a bit in general i feel that we always promote the decentralization inclusiveness and all this stuff but i think we're very hypocritical about that in many ways and you know i am uh well you agree exactly right we're all we're inclusive we love to be everyone it's open source you take it it's yours it's a gift for you you know kind of like come and join us and it's like it doesn't happen like this everywhere and i don't think that we're really walking the talk when we actually say this thing so i don't even know why we do it because i went to three talks already of people that english was a second language and i just thought like well why aren't they empowered to speak in their first language like why are we not supporting them enabled to them to speak in their first language and in english because they can do they obviously are speaking both like you can translate your own thing why are we why do they not feel empowered to speak their first language why is that a thing here and why do we not make and say like hey you know alexi or whoever you speak both czech and english why don't you do your presentation and check in english so that we're we're letting both audiences have access to the information or saying can your slides be in check or english or hey do you mind if i translate your slides like there are certain things where the assumption is done that it will be in english and it shouldn't be [Laughter] uh no but when i when i created this network in sweden uh that was a big thing actually just to create a group where we could talk about crypto and blockchain in swedish because it is very complicated stuff if you're not from a technical background but then having it in english that's so that's very true like it's it's these barriers that we don't think about so it's the empowering of local communities to actually then create create these things but we definitely um so we're running out of time um we won't have time for questions is there one question that somebody okay yes repeat the question so how do we broaden this outside of western um broaden the conversation outside of western audiences how do we how do we achieve this so i will just start by repeating something that nick the steward of the impact track said that continues to stick with me which is that talon is universal and opportunity is not and so the more that we can take steps even if they're baby steps to open the dialogue up i am happy to have a conversation with anyone and how we can do that on individual local levels in terms of unicef and what we're trying to do in our innovation team we're actually building a global series of hackathons to go to individual countries to host hackathons in local languages with youth to give them a new skill which opens a whole other marketplace that then they have access to an opportunity to and we're open to partners for those so if anyone wants to join that you can reach out to me on twitter or dignity.works we have a forum you can fill out we have a whole bunch of initiatives and there's lots of great groups working on initiatives like that we just have to talk to each other more um so that's my small piece of mind yeah and i think there's almost like there's a bounty in that like opening up for all the talented people around the world because i've been thinking about like tech in general it's almost like we're missing we must have missed like every other vitalik every other steve jobs because they weren't they didn't get into it for different reasons so i just submitted a talk for the un on specifically on social impact and blockchain so that will be happening in april and hopefully we'll get some more heads of state uh involved in the conversation as well awesome but yeah let's let's continue the conversation throughout the weekend and we'll hopefully um create some sort of um maybe write up after this so we can have some sort of um just a silence for me i will on my twitter i always take a question in any language because i can use google translate and it usually gets me to where i need to go so i'm more than happy to answer any questions or take any questions offline today or later on feel free to reach out to me i'm a very public person i do not mind at all or if there's communities that you feel like i should personally be engaging or could benefit from talking to me i'm more than happy to do that as well g cambral if you seriously type gloria and kimboella in the internet it's only me it's the benefit of having like the african last name it totally works so if you find gloria or even gloria and blockchain it's still this beautiful face it will totally work for you amazing well um thank you so much i see the uh harbinger of the end of our panel thank you so much um for for joining us thank you wonderful wonderful ladies and let's continue the conversation throughout thank you