ETHKL24 | Jesse Katz | Community Graphs Enables Tomorrow's Collaborative Cybersocial Infrastructure

and make some noise for our next speaker Jesse cats now here's the amazing thing about Jesse um I talked to him a bit off stage and he's not cold at all he's actually feeling a little bit warm right now which is unbelievable so ladies and gentlemen how Community grass enabl tomorrow's collaborative cyber social infrastructure ladies and gentlemen Jesse Catz hello everybody uh I know that's a bit of a mouthful I'm going to try to break this down today in a way that we're we're introducing a new primitive for social coordination H this is like an identity and a reputation primitive called Community graphs and before we get into how we've productized this technology I'd like to begin by discussing a little bit of the human intuition behind this um that starts with a problem statement right like most good creative problem solving it's a matter of what problem you're solving not just like forcing technology into a situation so in this particular instance this was born Bor out of the zalu community which was started and funded by vitalic butan um this is like a series of pop-up cities happening around the world nearly every month of the year now but in Istanbul there were a lot of conversations around what decentralizing zalu was going to look like and that led to questions like who's allowed to use the zalu brand or how are invitations going to work when demand starts to far out strip Supply how do you balance what essentially boils down to inclusivity and exclusivity who's allowed to apply for zalu grunt funding what's a zalu aligned Village all of these kinds of questions U the community was wrestling with and and the trying to find a balance and like a lot of things in crypto that you can boil down to polarity um like one person one vote one token one vote well they introduce something like quadratic vouching or quadratic funding to mitigate for those two extremes at at either end of the things in polarity right and similarly and this is a dramatic oversimplification I'll get into it a little bit more detail uh but what my co-founder Leo came up with was a really clever solution to introduce something like quadratic vouching in order in order to uh mitigate for the the extremes and polarity between inclusivity and exclusivity with when you have positive and negative elements to both of those things as well right um you want to you want a group to be welcoming you want it to grow grow and be inclusive but also preserve the intimacy of this really highly exclusive intimate community that made it special in the first place so this is the these are the things these are the things that we're talking about and the the way that this works is that first we need to talk about about vouching can I get a show of hands who's familiar with vouching as a concept and what that really means technically okay I'm going to speed I'm going to speed through this just to make sure that we don't I don't uh make any assumptions uh that the crowd isn't following me so vouching is essentially like staking social credit right it's like co-signing on a loan that if you bring someone into a group in this instance say you're allowed to invite someone into a group you're responsible for their behavior right so if they cause problems in that group um you need to be you need to be held accountable for the person that you invited that's intuitive but it's also kind of problematic in the way that it's like it's a blunt tool it's valuable especially you know this goes back a long long time where Fringe communities need vouching because if you can't go to the authorities for help because you're doing things that might not you know you might be it might be a group that meets around the margins of society and it's like you're not allowed to go ask for help because they wouldn't consider your group The People what what you're doing in that group legitimate in the first place so it's a it's a way of self-policing but what I'm talking about at being a blunt tool in regards to is like it needs to be necessarily public right so at least to the interested parties they need to know who is vouching for someone so that they know who to hold accountable if there's a problem well that Al leads to some social pressures right the social pressures include certain types of personalities having an easier time of getting those vouches you know like hey man vouch me into this group where the person might not feel entirely comfortable with that but they they kind of buckle to the social pressure and then predictably you know power consolidates where power exists and so even if this person is not a bad actor they kind of bring more people into the group like them and and and too often that leads to a small group of people wrestling control over a larger over a larger group and having o undue influence over that larger group so what we're introducing here is something that there's there's a few qualities to these attestations I want to run through um attestations first of all need to be private and that controls for the problems with public vouching that I'm talk that I just talked about um secondly they're positive endorsements that means that you're not down voting anybody and and one of the most important things about this is that we want to avoid boiling people down to overly reductive social credit scores like a single a single score that represents you know your goodness or Badness in or standing in in some group so any attestation is only is only categorically positive the next thing is that they're non-binary and that means that you're able to issue attestations along a Continuum not just like a PO badge or a participation trophy you're saying like on a scale on a relative scale of participation um how much of a member of this group do you consider any person to be and and let's let's unpack that a little a little bit because what that means is like we're going back to the human intuition and goals here before we before we productize something we're saying like how do how do people actually relate to each other within the context of a group and let me let me ask you to just think about this for a moment when you come to something like eth KL and you like like me I I don't have many points of contact here here this is like far away from the reaches of my social graph right so I come here without any inherent like level of trust as a known as a known party um and and that might change if I was say a representative of the of the ethereum foundation yeah I might be given a certain level of trust inherited from the group that I'm a part of and I'm going to get I'm going to come back to that point later what I want to talk about now though is how I interpret and it make sense of a new situation and I bet that you do too so how long does it take for you to kind of get an intuitive understanding of like well who are the organizers who are the speakers you see volunteers putting in effort and you know people participating in really meaningful ways but what that participation means in and how we value that is different to each of us and that brings us to the last quality so I ran through four of them this is the last one and subjectivity is my favorite part of this because what it means is that each of us value participation and contributions to a group we give a certain amount of difference to the people that we respect as being Central or more stakeholders in any group different people for different reasons to different extents we're going to kind of go with them like if you're talking about a mer meritocratic Marketplace of ideas um that might be true and also we tend to wait people that we that we value as really contributing to any group right does the intuition there track for you guys does that make any sense um so so this is where I'm this is where I'm coming from with the qualities that we want to build into attestations and what this is is this is something that is really complimentary to social graphs so what community graphs is as I could explain it most simply is like it's like social graphs for groups where social graphs map our relationships one to one Community graphs is about mapping the extent of our membership in groups and it's the overlap and interplay between the those groups that leads to some really really interesting things that we can do with that so it's like a primitive for social coordination tools that we can build on top of that we're not building say for example a reputation protocol we're building a primitive that reput identity and reput reputation protocols can leverage and the first one that we're working with is EAS are you familiar with the ethereum attestation service they just they just released a new algorithm called transitive trust and this is really interesting it's it's super cool um so what this is saying basically is that if a trusts B B and B trusts C then a trusts C some amount more than zero but also some amount less than 100 right because there's this distance Decay you know the reliability it's like a game of telephone like you get a few steps removed and I'm like I don't have much trust in this person who trusts a person who trusts a person anymore so they're trying to create some composable mathematics to represent this this trans this property of transi of trust and what we're doing is we're pairing transitive trust with Community graphs to establish some additional context and and another dimension and and additional like a a Nuance to this that allows us to do some really interesting things and the first is to create a meaningful measure of social Cil resistance which has not previously been possible but again it's going back to this overlapping membership in groups in a way that for group for any groups that meet offline IRL what you're able to do is when we give attestations to each other's membership levels in groups there's also an implicit ability to attest to each other's unique personhood so that's the best kind of participation right is no additional steps required but if you're able to just say like do you know this person in real life have you met them in real life what we're able to do is we we're creating something that goes all the way back to pgp style web of trust um pretty pretty good privacy for those of you that might not have heard that acronym I goes back to the '90s and it was a really really valuable experiment a lot of a lot of hard-earned lessons in there um and we can go back and we can basically bring that forward bring that forward to build new social coordination tools on top of that because once you've unlocked that type of subil resistance now we can do a ton of interesting things like uncollateralized lending um one of my favorite potential use cases for this is to say Well here here's the here's the use case I'll just describe it so say you have a decentralized scientific journal you want to eliminate the barriers to self-publishing Scientific studies and we're talking a lot about things that exist in polarity right so in this case you have on one side the truth objective truth Like A Perfect Circle that only exists in theory and and at the other end of that Spectrum you have almost posttruth Your Truth follow your bliss right and so what we can do is to mitigate for these two things at either end of those extremes is to say you can basically create highly subjective and contextual knowledge and Trust graphs where for if I want to know about a subject that I don't have any domain expertise in what I can do is I can follow my social graph and Community graph and these robust and scalable and contextual knowledge and Trust graphs to to basically through this property of transitive trust follow the people who I trust who they trust until you get to someone that has a qualified opinion on that subject so you can have people that are going to arrive at different conclusions on a similar subject and they're all doing science they're all participating in good faith doing serious work not just not just uh you know living living in a kind of like polarized kind of polarized politics so that's just one example of many many different kinds of social coordination tools that we are talking about and I'm only trying to give illustrative examples because again we're not building an an identity protocol or a reputation protocol this is just a primitive and I wanted to take a quick few minutes to talk through the kind of social coordination tools that we can build together so if this is anything that's interesting to you please come talk to me afterwards thanks thank you Jesse