Why DAOs will change the world? with Lauren Luz

[Music] um thank you for coming and hanging out with me this beautiful Saturday morning my name is Lauren loose and the title of my talk is why Dows will change the world so to get started let's I want to Define how the world is today from a next perspective basically by kind of talking about private Goods versus public goods so you guys are all probably familiar with this but I'll go over it a little bit private goods are excludable goods and services that we have in society they're the pay to play ticket to entry kinds of goods and services these are things like food clothing housing laptops computers anything that you need to pay for in order to access um the private Goods private Goods in our society benefit from being scarce because that enables these supply and demand dynamics that we have in capitalism that allow people to coordinate so effectively to innovate and create better and better private Goods basically because you can profit from making good private Goods people are driven to coordinate super effectively to to innovate and make better private Goods um so it's funded basically by supply and demand Dynamics public goods however are non-excludable they're not pay to play anybody can access them they're completely open and non-rival risks so these are abundant things in society that are often provided by governments and non-profits things like infrastructure roads Public Safety Clean Air public education and some countries Public Health Care these are things that anybody can access for free because they're provided for them um the the disadvantage of public goods however though is because there's no profit in it there's not a lot of opportunity to innovate there's no people coordinating super effectively to innovate in the public goods sector it's it's more of this kind of like charity charity gift sort of thing they're funded mostly by taxes when they're provided by governments or by charity by donations when they're fun when they're funded by when they're given by non-profits so without effective systems for feedback and innovation in the public goods sector we're setting ourselves up for failure we can say that the government is going to take care of the environment but the reality of our situation is that governments are only responsible for taking care of the environment within their own jurisdiction if there's a river that's being filled with plastic and that river is Flowing outside of the region that the government is responsible for Suddenly It's not their problem anymore it becomes a global problem and who is taking care of this who's taking care of Plastics in our oceans we're taught that the world looks like this but in reality it looks like this we're all connected and we're all part of these systems and we need to address global concerns so when governments fail to provide public goods that are in demand people start non-profits non-profits are the ones who are rising up and saying I will take care of these environmental causes but the disadvantage of the nonprofit sector is that nonprofits are super heavily dependent on donations please donor may I have some more there's this this kind of like need to raise funds and and accept charity in order to have any funding in order to do any good work to add this value this non-excludable value to society and once that what ends up happening as well in these Dynamics is that in order to keep and retain donors non-profits end up having to kind of bend the wishes of what their donors want in order to maintain this donor retention so we have even ineffective systems around non-profits who are providing this non-excludable value that we need in society you never change things by fighting the existing reality to change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete so the opportunity we have here in web3 is to make a new model around public goods that replaces these inefficient systems around non-profits and around governments providing public goods that we can actually have a chance to change the world for the better so the solution that I'm proposing here today are effective so impact Dows are bottom up constantly evolving purpose-driven coordination Network they are decentralized organizations around a cause who are taking into account the feedback of a variety of stakeholders and often as well have their own regenerative funding streams so we'll talk a lot more about impact as and I'll kind of talk about the pathway of basically turning non-profits and empowering them with this web 3 technology to turn them into impact dows in order to do this I'm going to walk through all of these steps so we'll get into them a lot more in detail during this talk the first step would be to identify the stakeholders who are the people who should have influence over a particular public good step two is Distributing reputation to what capacity should each of those stakeholders have influence step three is Implement voting systems Implement systems so that these organizations are able to coordinate in a decentralized way around how fun should be allocated and around how decisions should be made and then step four is launch regenerative economies to actually bring in these sustainable funding streams so I'll be talking about a case study in this example basically just to kind of like illustrate how this process will work and I'll be talking about a non-profit this is a real nonprofit called the ocean cleanup um they're a non-profit who's focused on taking plastic out of the oceans they're they've they've and and actually they've figured out that 80 of the plastic in our oceans is currently coming from only 1 000 Rivers worldwide and this non-profit has built these boats they're called interceptors to basically clean up plastic that is in these rivers and and bring the Plastics on board and then they sort it and they recycle it it's a super super cool project and um yeah and they're funded for now primarily by donations so if we're talking about this non-profit um step one in their transformation to become an impact out would be identify stakeholders and I think the easiest way to separate this voice distribution process is via these four categories of stakeholders one are who are the people who are doing the work the people who are doing either volunteers or paid contributors who are doing the labor in the case of this ocean cleanup project these will be the people who are operating the boats the Interceptor operators the second category are relevant experts who are people in the field that are experts on what that non-profit or what that public goods project is doing um who can provide valuable input so this could be people like stream ecologists who study the biodiversity in rivers around the world they would have valuable input on like the design of these boats and actually like how they should be operated the next category are beneficiaries and maybe beneficiaries isn't the right word but these are the people who are being affected by the public good project so in the case of this Interceptor project it would be people who are living alongside the rivers like in in Jakarta Indonesia where they're doing a lot of work the fourth category of stakeholders are capital providers and this is the one that we often think of in non-profits the primary stakeholder in most non-profits today are donors those people should also still have an influence what we need to do is kind of divide up influence among these different categories so in in traditional stakeholder analysis you kind of want to map the entire field of stakeholders talk about what capacity they have influenced whether they're positive or negative stakeholders what durations of time do they have influence and then kind of maneuver the project in order to balance those different needs the opportunity we have in web 3 however is that we can actually decide what influence each stakeholder should have by Distributing tokens by Distributing reputation so that's step two step two is Distributing reputation tokens to this field of stakeholders and I'll talk about a variety of ways in which a non-profit could do this the first one is the most obvious one is an initial distribution via an airdrop so before you're introducing actual money actual transferable tokens into the mix I think a non-profit Dow should use non-transferable reputation tokens but can airdrop this to their community of existing stakeholders who are already adding value another advantage of an airdrop is that it builds hype around a project it attracts those stakeholders into what the impact the project is doing so that they're they're paying attention again but we also need systems for cons for continued distribution over the life cycle of a project the influence of different stakeholders will change you'll have new contributors coming in you'll have old contributors dropping out so we need strategies in order to address those those General Pathways so I'll use one example here something that we do at giveth um it's inflation token distribution where basically we distribute reputation tokens to our contributors every quarter and every quarter we give them more tokens according to the Fibonacci sequence so q1 everyone gets one Q2 everyone is eligible gets two Q3 everyone who's eligible gets three Q4 everyone is eligible gets five so a contributor who came in in Q4 would get five tokens and a contributor who was only around in q1 and then left and dropped out would only have one token so they would be very quickly diluted by new contributors who were active and present and have the valuable feedback on that organization at that time we also need to consider a variety of other contributions and like how Staples are getting stakeholders are getting involved the easiest one of course is quantitative contributions we can give reputation tokens to people who are providing Capital we can also track other quantifiable data and there's tools like Karma which actually transforms data like the length of forum posts on and off chain votes GitHub contributions into tokens and um and this is just like one way that you can kind of determine how much how many reputation tokens to give a person based on in the case of like the Interceptor project like how much time they are spending operating the boat but we also need to consider qualitative contributions these are rewards for someone goes above and beyond and they didn't just put in money they didn't just put in time but they did something exceptional this is where systems like praise comes in Praise is a product developed by General magic and the common stack and used heavily at give us we're basically written peer recognition is then Quantified given a score and turned into tokens so in the case of the Interceptor project there could be people working their regular shift and then someone notices that the engine is overheating on the boat and then they fix that engine so it ended up that the the project was able to continue and there wasn't like serious mechanical problems with the ship and this would be something that would be worthy of Praise it's something that goes above and beyond just their regular working hours and actually is is worth something even more we also need to consider the level of impact a person has on a project so this is like talking about experts those people who are experts in a field who should have influence that maybe aren't directly involved in the project right away but maybe are writing papers on stream ecology or writing papers on plastic in our oceans those people should be given reputation tokens as well so a way of Distributing tokens to them is perhaps via award ceremonies where you can recognize excellence in the field and then this one is one of the ones I think is important is um the level of impact the project has on a person the stakeholder is often completely neglected so these are like people who are living along the rivers in Jakarta we need to consider the positive and negative implications of a project like the ocean cleanup project operating in rivers next to their homes how do we give these people power and in the case of I mean if you if you look at the conditions of the people are living in here it's probably not likely that they're looking at Forum posts and hanging out on their computer and claiming tokens all the time so this is where we end up needing things like representative governance people who are paying attention to the needs of those stakeholders and then voting on their behalf or or communicating back and forth with those communities we need to have that stakeholder input as well so once we've kind of like mapped this whole field of stakeholders and distributed tokens reputation tokens then we're ready for that impact Dao to start governing in a decentralized way so there's a lot of really basic ways for governing on chain one is one is Snapshot we use this to give us all the time where you have basic yes no on-chain voting using tokens or quadratic voting ranked Choice voting probably many of you are already familiar with this style of voting this is useful and effective but it also requires people to be boring through those long Forum posts understanding all these complicated governance things and wrapping their head around it so what I'm more interested in is tools that are actually using signal aggregation to to kind of track how people are voting without people needing to understand everything every part of the system so here's just one example of a project that's working in that direction this is pairwise and the way that pairwise works is it basically gives you two options you're like do you want to do the Interceptor trash fence or do you think the Interceptor barrier is a better idea and then the person who's interacting with pairwise chooses one and then they get another two options and they choose the best of those two options then they get another two options and choose the best of those and pair airwise Aggregates all this data and can say which was the top preferred proposal which was the second and third and so forth so tools like this are actually getting closer to real signal aggregation you don't need to understand every single component you just need to know which of these two options you think is better and there's also like abstain and Skip so so tools like this are really really valuable and I think are kind of the future of decentralized governance especially when we're considering this diverse set of stakeholders in a non-profit Dao the last step is of course after identifying stakeholders Distributing reputation effectively governing as a Dao is to introduce regenerative economics this is where you introduce Market feedback into the public goods sector basically by launching a transferable token or creating uh creating a money system around the non-profit Dao so I don't have a ton of time to talk about this here but Tam's giving a talk later and John Ellison from refined I was giving a talk later and they're going to be talking a lot about regenerative economics but the main point I want you to understand here is that regenerative economics brings Market feedback into the public good sector so that we can actually have sustainable funding and Innovation it's kind of like a lot to wrap your head around but but basically it's like creating an economy around a cause so people can buy into it and there can be Market feedback there can be supply and demand dynamics that determine which projects are successful and drive people to innovate in that sector I think this is this is hugely important and a major step in the future and what we're doing with this at giveth is it's called gurves and uh if you're interested in that come talk to me later talk to Griff later it's a Hot Topic um but one point I do want to get across in this talk is that once a dow is moving to the stage and ready to launch transferable tokens they don't need to get rid of of the non-transferable reputation system and I actually think that this is totally critical you don't want to just replace the reputation with money essentially because then suddenly contributors who are working part of that organization are getting paid in these tokens that they need to sell in order to pay for their life but they should still be able to keep their reputation because their influence is extremely important so if we have a mix of transferable and non-transferable tokens then we can actually have distributed stakeholder input that people aren't losing over time Capital contributors can buy in and have one type of token and vote with that and people who are contributing their time can have a different type of token that still has the same level of influence in the Dao so anyway it's a lot to take in but um if we were able to succeed in transforming non-profits and impact as how would the world change well instead of having public goods education systems where children are just expected to fall in line according to our systems we could actually have Innovative education systems where each student's unique learning style is targeted and and supported and and nourished and allowed to grow systems like the the Waldorf communities that currently exist in healthcare instead of having it primarily funded by pharmaceutical companies and just Pharmaceuticals being prescribed for absolutely every ailment we can have a combination we could have Holistic Health Solutions being used in combination with Pharmaceuticals in order to provide the best supportive health care for any individual's needs if we're successful with things like this we can actually start to pull things from the private sector and bring it to the public sector imagine if private Goods like food became public goods we had such abundant Community Gardens that instead of needing to go to the market instead of needing to pay to play to meet your basic needs you could actually just be part of a community where food is a public good imagine if lodging became a public good imagine if we had systems where instead of people needing to build 10 cities in the streets of Denver and be kicked out once in a while by cops we could actually just provide them housing then people would be able to focus on their spiritual growth or the things that they're passionate about be able to focus on on their self-actualization we would have world domination a world where people are really able to focus on the things that that drive them instead of just focusing on their base needs in this system of capitalism we're currently a part of so this is where we're working towards it giveth we have this pathway where basically we're pulling non-profits into the web 3 space and over time we want to empower them with this technology and help them on a path to become impact house oops and the common stack is working on the research side of it they're using collaborative economics methodology cultural Frameworks a library tools and research and basically combining this information so that we have great systems that are that are easy for people to understand so that they can launch their own economies and own commences the bottom line is that by empowering non-profits to become impact as we can foster community-led economically sustainable Innovative public goods creation and can build a world of abundance that everyone can enjoy my name is Lauren loose I'm at chromatic acid on Twitter and this is why Dallas can change the world thank you [Applause] oh great I can take two questions does anyone have any questions yeah um hi so the question would be how would you coordinate um basically public infrastructure builders to build a um infrastructures that are compatible with each other they're compatible with each other they can work together yeah I mean I think I think we're able to create um like Dows with their own economies around public goods we could actually have competing organizations and then we can have the market determine which ones are adding the most value we could we could have the people who are the end users of public goods to be able to provide that feedback so then you would have it's like right now in public goods everyone's just like working blind doing the best that they can because they're dependent on these donations they only have one stakeholder input but if we actually are able to add in a variety of stakeholders and open it up to the market so that like the people who are using the public goods can provide their feedback in real time then we can actually have these organizations coordinating we create shelling points around public goods that currently we don't have in society um any other questions yeah just curious to see if there's any regions in the world which are really kind of taking this forward and saying hey we're a non-profit and we're now using web 3 to you know get donation streams and actually we're going to start doing this on the ground in our community so there any geographies that come to mind that are using giveth today well I mean you know it's funny that you're because I'm like the climate Community the climate Community it seems like all the work that the refi space are doing it's like a lot of climate projects are really interested in getting in this web 3 world and we saw that a lot in like the get coin Alpha round that there was this entire round of climate projects who are working super hard to start using and understanding this Tech and I think that like it's like the climate Community seems like the first one that's on the path to really using these tools uh in an effective way and then even just like working through it because right now it's like in this learning growth phase where we're like still working out like the best way to really launch a Dao and then and but the climate Community is like interested in doing that work and bringing it closer so that any non-profit could use it worldwide okay those number two questions thank you so much