Performance Management of Blockchains for Social Impact with Michael Cooper

in 15 16 minutes and then um we're going to open it up for a little uh q a at the end as well so um if you have questions please remember them and we'll make sure to take them at the end my name is Michael Cooper I'm with a group called impact plus what our group focus is on is working with different impact funders whether those funders are our governments we work with the British government the U.S government uh multilateral donors like United Nations the World Bank as well as those funders and donors in the web 3 space like uh polygon is one of our major clients and what we do for them is you know these different funders are are using web 3 Technologies and their own funding sources to fund web 3 solutions to social problems and for for social impact and when we say things like social impact we're talking about um you know these outcomes these objectives like improving access to education improve proving access to financial services for the ultra poor for those at the bottom of the pyramid and what we do is we work with these different funders to help them figure out what are the best projects that will that have the highest potential for impact and then how do they work with these projects to help ensure that impact and then we measure performance towards that impact and we use the results of those measurements to help everybody curate their their we help the startups curate their models improve their performance and we help the donors and the funders improve their own decision making on when and how to fund these initiatives so that's what we do in a nutshell I'm going to speak a lot today about value creation and the reason we're going to be talking about value creation is because even though we're talking about social impact in order for all of these statement these social impact activities that we fund to be sustainable these activities have to create value in some way shape or form and unless you have really good measures of that value that's being created and you use those measures to improve your own decision making on how you create that value using a blockchain then your model isn't sustainable and so we're going to be and so that's why we're focusing on value creation today in terms of my own background I spent about 15 years with the U.S government as a with the state department and then I moved over into some of the foreign assistance arms of the U.S government U.S agency for International Development Millennium challenge Corporation and then I went into Consulting with groups uh with different un agencies in the world bank and I'm with impact plus and the reason I bring this this up is because we all come from you know our team we come from the social impact space and we're all working in the social impact space before web 30 became a thing and then when we started to see the potential for blockchain and web during go to advance social impact we really wanted to make sure to start building the bridges between social impact practitioners and those spaces and the web Trio spaces because the way we see it right now social impact practitioners policy makers and professionals they don't really understand web 3-0 and web 30 doesn't really understand social impact and so we're trying So within our our group here we've got skill sets from both spaces and we're starting to build that common lexicon that common understanding and those common operating protocols where we can start to integrate our workflows a little bit more effectively to achieve the type of social that we want so so this is one of our mantras blockchain doesn't do anything people use blockchain to do something and the reason we say that is because we tend to be very technology dependent and even within the social impact space there's Decades of evidence of how we've been over Reliance on technology to actually solve the problem when in the end it's actually humans solving the problem using the technology as a tool to do it and so our kind of entire approach is very human-centric right we always have to remember that the blockchain is a tool that has to be used by humans used by humans and so the blockchain tool has to be designed for human use and designed for the specific problem that it's trying to solve and you know this when we talk about this you start to get into your head that this is a lot of experimentation it's a lot of curation right it's a lot of trial and error it's a lot of incubation and one of our main jobs is to work with the the funders and the startups to get them the data that they need so that when they're going through that curation and that incubation process their decision making is well informed and they're actually making improvements to the blockchain tool so um we're not finding problems for the technology we're trying to find problems that we already have that the technology is good for so again we're very we're problem driven we're not we're not we're trying not to be a hammer seeing and now um but at the same time we recognize that blockchain is a novel tool and it's going to create novel solutions to these problems so if we want to have good evidence about how well we're solving these problems using blockchain then we have to come up with new methods of measurement uh new data quality controls new uh standards by which we need to do our work and that's a PR and that's one of the things that we're going to talk about that we're doing today but we get back to this this question about we're going to come back to this question of value creation and measurement and why measurement is so important because without measurement and effective measures that you trust that you're actually creating an impact and you're creating that value then you don't really you don't really know what you're doing um you have to have a high level of trust in those measurements and the people that are taking those measurements for you in order for your model to be sustainable so what is impact and we have a direct correlation between impact and value correlate and value creation and this is why so for example let's say we have a project in rural Kenya where we want to improve literacy amongst uh early grade students so our project is we're we're going to use the blockchain in some way shape or form either as a Supply Chain management tool or you know however we're using within this activity we're going to deliver the books to the school right well delivering the books and that's the project we're going to deliver books to the school and that's going to improve literacy and that's our project well that's not a really sustainable model right if you deliver the books well that's all cost right you haven't achieved anything yet all you've done is incur a cost by delivering books now if those books are actually used by students to and they're picking up the books they're using them they're practicing their reading you might have a return on your investment for delivering those books in terms of improved literacy but how do you really know that you've got to return on your Investments unless you actually go and take some kind of measures that you can trust that those students are actually have higher literacy cognitive abilities because you delivered those books they're using the books Etc and that's where we come in we're experts at measuring social impacts like improved literacy so we can work with whoever's activity this is and say okay we're gonna we're gonna help you measure these new reading skills so that you can have a reliable measure of the outcome that you achieved with your investment of delivering all those books right we're going to tell you okay you had this much of an outcome and with all this other data that we've collected we can give you better Insight on this is where it went wrong right like yes you delivered the books but the the the books were at a grade above the grade that they were delivered to and they had a hard time understanding them or it was content area that they weren't as interested in so there's a million variables that have to go right in order for you to achieve your outcome and we can tell you which variables you're hitting and which ones you're not and so it gets back to this value creation piece the improved literacy is where you've created value right that's what makes your impact model sustainable right because you've so there's a direct correlation between achieving your objectives and the impact improving literacy and you've created value by creating a population that now has improved literacy abilities um and that's your ultimate ultimate objective but unless you have good measures on that you're not going to be able to communicate to any of your stakeholders or your partners that your model is worth investing in that you actually are a high performer and so a lot of the data that we end up producing for our different clients is used in their own Communications and marketing materials to expand the scope of their activities and to build trust in the community that they actually know what they're doing so the reason we're able to do this so well is it comes back to this human behavior piece all the evidence shows that technology is actually the easiest solution in a lot of these social impact activities the humans behavior that it takes to pick the technology up and use the technology like it's envisioned is the hardest part and so that's part of our expertise is helping web 3-0 clients adapt their Technologies to the human behaviors in the context in which they want to use them and this is what we're talking about anytime any type of digital solution whether it's a web2o solution or a web 3-0 solution is introduced for some type of impact it's being introduced into a digital ecosystem that's made that's that's comprised of these primary uh uh Dimensions here digital economy infrastructure and adoption rights governance and Society this is actually a framework developed by the U.

S agency for International Development um and it's kind of a mapping tool that we've started to use and adapt to say whenever that we use it with our clients where if they're going to be using blockchain for whatever purpose we help them map out the context in which they're introducing that digital solution into and we start to identify the assumptions uh and the necessary behaviors and changes a task to change happen within each one of these ecosystem dimensions for them to actually accomplish their objective and so we help them map out this context identify the primary risks within that context towards their objectives how do we account for those uh risks how do we monitor these risks and how do we monitor your performance within this within this ecosystem so when we talk about technology being the easiest part it's because this is the most difficult part right uh you know we all know that blockchain is deterministic and that's one of its biggest value ads the most indeterministic thing in the universe is humans right and this is where humans operate and this is where we have to operate with our blockchain Solutions if we actually want to have the impact that we want and so we help navigate all of this with our clients so um I'm going to skip this this first part but we also have a major problem as well um history is against us there's Decades of evidence within the social impact space of Technology Solutions being misapplied and to where we've actually have a lot of evidence around we call them the principles for digital development and so there's just reams of all this data that we can now use within our within the current web deal landscape on how we've misused Technology Solutions in the past and some of these have been pretty disastrous but the reason I bring this up is not just to demonstrate that we're aware of this Legacy and we're accounting for all of this evidence and we use it moving forward but it's I think we have to go into this with our eyes wide open that we have just because we have this amazing tool in a blockchain there's great there's a lot of potential for harm if it's misapplied and misused especially for social impact purposes and that's a huge risk so there's not only the risk of your blockchain solution failing but your solution actually inflicting more harm than if you had never done anything at all and we mitigate both of those risks um so I'm actually going to go forward here these are just some of our our principles again one of the in terms of our model and how we approach this with our clients um we're barely we're really inclusive right on our team we've got a lot of those uh emerging disciplines within the web 3o space but we have working relationships with token Engineers developers crypto economists behavioral scientists and we wet those in with our traditional social impact practitioners and their skill sets where we get more integrated workflows that we can provide for our clients we're very Behavior Uh focused we use a lot of Behavioral modeling when we're going back and mapping out this ecosystem with our clients we take a behavior change approach to it where we focus a lot on the capacity opportunity and motivation of all the actors in these different spaces to do the things that we need them to do in order for our impact to be achieved um I'm actually going to stop there I'm actually just going to speak for about 30 more seconds and then we'll open it up for questions um because we only got a couple minutes left but one of our our long-term Visions is is we want to get to the point where we have kind of like a a menu of service or a menu that we can offer clients and other people in the space where if you're encountering this type of social problem right whether it's in the education space agriculture space um you know D5 space these are the types of problems you have and these problems are defined using Behavior change terminology and they're defined in a certain way to where it's easy for users to say this is the type of problem I'm having these are the type of blockchain templates and solutions and token templates and solutions I could maybe start with to help address this problem these are some of the evidence and Lessons Learned around previous applications that that use this token design or this blockchain for this type of problem these are some of the risks they encountered and that kind of knowledge library that kind of evidence database those types of tool kits and guidance are really in uh where we want to go with all of this because we want to see this technology go to scale but we want to see it go to scale and then ethical and responsible manner so I'm going to uh keep it there and we've got about two minutes for questions well first off thank you for coming to you I know that 9 A.M isn't easy ah yes sir yeah the question was an example of a client that we currently have so we're in the midst of a study right now it's called UK Aid it's the foreign assistance arm of the the British government they have a Frontier Tech Hub which focuses on funding Innovative Technology Solutions for poverty issues overseas and they've got an entire uh they've got a approximately 30 blockchain Pilots that they funded and they're in different phases along the scale-up pathway from some are still in ideation phase some are in um you know proof of concept summer field testing and some are ready to go to scale but they wanted to know what the value add and the enabling factors for that value add of using a blockchain and all those different uh projects what the value add and the enabling factors for that value-add is so we're looking at all of those blockchain projects we're using a variety of on-chain and off-chain data to help answer those questions and the end result of all this is is the British government wanted a way that they you know principles tools and guidance that they could plug into their processes to say okay out of all of these candidate applications which ones do we fund what type of help do they need in terms of technical assistance mentoring coaching to get them along from ideation to proof of concept to field testing successfully and then how do we measure the return on our investment and so that's that's an example of a client that we're currently working with on this he had a question yes sir yeah yeah this is the last question the question was on um uh and and tell me if I captured it right you know like with web3l we have greater potential for individuals to own their own data monetize their own data and things like that so some of the social impact activities that we're researching right now and working with our different clients on do include some applications where uh individuals are given their digital identity and they have the opportunity to monetize their own data in in different ways shapes and forms and this is a big step in the social impact space because it creates a revenue stream for the world's Ultra poor who earn less than a dollar a day so hey I'm going to wrap it up there thank you very much cheers [Applause]