ETHKL24 | Noah Yeh, Organizer at da0 | Web2 to Web3 Social Movement, Digital Democracy & Plurality

we have a speaker to be speaking about the transition from web 2 to web 3 social movements digital democracy and plurality ladies and gentlemen NOA organiz organizer at Dao Some Noise people come on there we [Music] go hi guys uh my name is Noah I'm from from Taiwan so basically my context is a little different um basically in the past uh one and a half year I've been trying to bring uh web three technology web theories web three experimentations into uh a social movement Taiwan um and specifically um we're talking about this at the center of all this is this community called gozero so gozero is an interesting community in Taiwan that has been around for 10 years so if you think about it the web 3 space hasn't been around that long but 10 years ago it started gzero already started as a decentralized organization and it has existed for 10 years sustained for 10 years already a couple of interesting things that if any of you have read the book uh plurality or know anything about the the plurality movement then a lot of narratives in poity talks about G zero and the community basically of course uh first of all it's open source Community everything's open source if you don't like someone's project you can just forget just like web 3 that doesn't uh that's not so different um another thing is uh interesting about Gob zero is that the community never votes they don't uh vote on anything basically if you don't like something your action is your vote so you basically just do it and so that's basically how they uh what what they've done in the past 10 years they started as a as a as a group of hackers who are trying to open up uh government data for everyone to use to make sure all this so um but in the past couple of years the um the the gzero momentum has come down a little bit so for us we're trying to bring a lot more momentum into go zero and see how we can help the community so today's talk will be about how we've been what we've been trying to do for this specific community and what has been achieved what have we not done and what's my thinking process now which is still in process about how uh these things should be going forward so this was the start of for context this was the start of gozero the was this was again 10 years ago the it's called The Sunflower movement where uh people uh the the the government was trying to push through a bill push forward a bill that's not widely agreed upon with the people so there were students there were protesters occupi tying the uh the the Congress uh basically and G zero played the community played a big role in terms of uh providing tech support live streaming all the events and keeping all the record keeping all the data so everyone has access to that's how it basically started and if you think about it the community started with uh a force of anger towards things that they're not very very happy about it becomes a movement and later transition to something else right starting from this starting point starting from this inspiration of anger towards the government they became uh later transition into uh a force of trying to change the society for the better with all these different kinds of Open Source projects so if you uh look at it there were like uh 10 10,000 plus like participants contributors every single slack channel is a project projects being proposed of course not all of them are are successful but um there are a lot of momentum going towards that direction as you can see some example uh uh some example projects will be like opening up government data or visualizing government data so other people can use it during Co there was this mask Maps uh that help people find mask there was this uh factchecking like web services to help you come back fraud on the internet and so on and so forth and um the uh the underlying thing is so as you can see becomes from one single uh mission one single project and it started to diverge right and they started uh 10 years ago they called themselves a decentralized community because they want to decentralize decision making but later on recently they don't think uh DEC visualization in their context not in web context would be practical and uh so now they call themselves a polycentric polycentric organization meaning that there's a foundation that everyone shares but every single project has a relatively more centralized uh managements relative uh relatively centralized efforts that push every single Pro projects forward and that's uh the community right now and the base layer of the foundation that they shared is basically this bimonthly hackathon so basically everyone gathered together everyone can come up to the stage propose a projects find people who are likeminded and uh do something together so that's the context of the organization we're trying to help so what we did was uh two years ago I went to this funding comms funding commment is probably still one of the most inspiring event that I've attended in New York 202 22 so we started K up this uh Community code uh Dow zero in in Taiwan and as uh mentioned our goal is uh very straightforward we're trying to supercharge gzero trying to supercharge this public good space public good ecosystem that open source community that everyone uh continues to to make efforts to so our strategy is also pretty simple right we're trying to drive Global uh web resources into Taiwan and run use Taiwan or G zero Community as a field of experimentation and then export our results export our learnings so that can be a continu continuous effort and for Taiwan to basically be a stage that people can run experimentations on and this is these are the some of the things that we've done um so as you can see there are a lot we've provided we've tried to research how r active funding uh can be utilized in the mainstream or Taiwan context not even web to in government context in community context in every single public goods or ecosystem context we're trying to see how dow can really play a role in our society what what kind of role does it play why is this organizational structure important um how and we did a lot of did research suggestions to the government how dids should be done uh under uh National context going forward we build products a lot of different Pilots for the IDS uh we've done a lot of toolings for for DS we hosted funding comment in taipe we hosted PR taipe and education we hosted uh several classes lessons in the top universities in Taiwan talk about digital public goods talk about how web three Technologies experimentations can be utilized in the mainstream context so these are just some kind of so this is one of the project that we use ZK to combine with uh Taiwanese National IDs so this is one of the the project that if you're interested you take a look at funing commment type was conducted end of last year so this was uh something that we we we were uh also uh a part of so but the question Bears did we really help did uh what we do we did so many different projects we did so many different researches did we really help so one of the things we did that we think we may have helped a lot is we drove this hypers search experimentation if you're familiar with hypers search this is like an impact certificate you give to people and uh retroactively uh you can use specific funding to basically buyback all these different kinds of impact as a as a as a as a reward to the community contributors so this allot people may not we we did Infuse a lot of funding into the GV zero community and try to dis uh distribute all these rewards into the hands of different people we don't know we we so the the result of this is that because the web to community gzero community uh especially Civic hacking Community they are uh re uh not not very receptive to web three Technologies uh due to the previous you know scams and and all that all the reputation stuff so but we're gradually getting them to understand why this kind of uh funding distribution system allocation system is useful and getting them to get to know the tools and all that so on that front we did push a little bit but so uh this year in April gozero made a social post basically saying that we're running out of funding we have to uh we for 10 years every two months we had this hackup funds but we're probably going to stop because we don't have enough funding so in a sense that even if we done so many experiments did we really help in the most important aspects that we are not entirely sure so do we really help maybe just a little how might we if we are re going to do this again or if we do this today what's the things that are most important um and there are two things that comes to mind of course the first one as you can see is sustainable sustainable funding for these kind of digital public or open source Community uh dig digital public goods infrastructures or ecosystems another one I think also think is very important is attention because although people are doing all these projects that's uh quite uh interesting or or uh serves the public interest there's very little attention that's being given even in the web 3 space right being given into the public goods uh projects as uh except for a small amount of community members so how can we capture a little more attention into that and the lastly can decentralized Community approach uh Dow zero as a decentralized community does is this really the best way to help so the uh thinking process is basically if the community can create uh achievements or projects that are really relevant to mainstream demands mainstream needs then and if we can Market Market those or capture attention those creatively uh maybe we can find Value aligned resources so I will explain this a little more with some examples so um sustain one example of sustainable funding is that we talked about a lot at Pagoda a lot at code for Japan in these different kinds of communities is a model called endowment fund it's not that complicated it's actually very simple so you you amass a large sum of funding and you uh with that funding as principle you used to invest in some lowrisk Financial assets lowrisk Financial tools and then every year for example you the US treasury bill every year you earn back uh 4% to 5% profit and interest and you only use that profit and interest to invest in these public goods infrastructure so every single year you'll have the profit to invest in the the infrastructure so one example in Japan they're driving forward uh from code for Japan is that they're doing this for a joint effort for uh disaster prevention in both Japan and Taiwan so there uh one of the goal is to intend to raise $50 million so there are like uh 10% uh five five% um uh money that $2.5 million can be invested into these public goods projects which uh more or less are open sourced or basically help the ecosystem so this is one of the example that for sustainable funding that can be uh uh a possibility in the future another part when talking about attention to digital public goods because these are very generous projects and this is a book by Chris Anderson um the founder of Ted wir and all that so he recently found uh wrote a book called The infectious generosity and the book is basically talking about how uh not only generosity because there are a lot of charity projects that didn't capture intention and in the public goods space we always think that because we're doing something good that people should pay attention but that's simply uh not how things work right so uh in this sense if we can use uh generosity creatively if we can uh uh try to drive uh creativity into generosity then this can actually be a business model this can actually fits uh business or organizational interest you know way let me give you an example so if you guys I think most of you have heard of the brand pagonia and pagonia in a couple of years ago in 2022 they basically shifted 98% of their shares to uh uh uh trust called pagonia purpose trust and the purpose of the pagonia purpose trust is basically just simply to protect the Earth so now 90 98% of the intention alignment now is basically aligned with protecting the Earth uh for the Patagonian Corporation this is interesting because no one has ever done this before this is interesting because this type of generosity is being done in a way creatively that's an innovation in a way so and hence uh Forbes also said pagonia now is one one of the top brands that's driving the space forward and being giving example demonstrating how these organization should go forward so I should be I don't have more time but should it be done by Dow if you think about think about DS um the difference between DS and centralized organization is centralized organization going towards a single goal right but Dow starting from exp experimentation uh starting from inspiration and then expand into different direction different projects so so the uh the key here is basically how we can diverge and converge constantly like design thinking process and to make sure uh different organizational types work in different context uh and for different purposes this I won't talk about you guys know protal Guild we can learn something from it too so the imagination the the the takeaway is basically so we have all these different kinds of uh public goods ecosystems ecosystem that's trying to do good uh we have all these dig digital public infrastructures but how do we really support a community like gozero or other uh digital public goods systems to sustain to thrive I think sustainable funding uh with a lot of experiments and uh creative attention capturing is probably the key going forward so um yeah that's me if you need to find me I'm Noah yeah everywhere okay thank you thanks Noah uh Noah can I ask you to stay on St stage because we're having a panel with you next oh sure yeah and I'd like to apologize for butchering the