1. FTC Bogota Introduction - Bogota 2022

um hello everyone my name is Evan mizono I lead the network Goods team at protocol labs and I am kicking off the fun in the Commons track at shelling Point uh thank you all for joining love this excitement so much excitement over coordination mechanisms I love this is great um I am going to be talking specifically for the first 15 minutes on how Humanity needs better coordination systems and um I will mostly be talking about this but there's Al a brief uh overview of what we're doing here for the rest of the day in this particular tent um as you probably know this is one of four tracks going on in addition to the wellness Hub most of the other ones are in that I I guess I'd call it a building um that thing over there um but we're the one we are the uh the track that's out here funding the commons is its own set of events and we are graciously hosting hosting a popup um thanks to collaboration with gitcoin and shelling Point um fun in the Commons is a project within protocol abs for those of you who don't know with the company behind ipfs filecoin a bunch of other projects that are focused on making sure that people have control of their data and the ability to control who has it who gets it how it gets to where it's going how it's structured Etc we in addition have a bunch of other things that we think are very important for improving the internet Compu technology to move Humanity forward I like to frame this as we are embedding human rights into digital infrastructure and within that umbrella comes the network Goods team which I lead and this includes things like funding the commons and a few other projects I'll mention in a bit our mission is to build tools and opportunities for revolutionary collaborations and I'll unpack that a bit more as well uh specifically rolling right into what these coordination systems might be I would say that Humanity has a lot of these um you can imagine uh Insurance like corporations the financial derivatives Bitcoin markets uh like mechanisms like democracies or checks and balances or even peaceful resistance like stins printing press um assembly line all of these things I would highlight were invented at some point and I would pause for a moment to let you imagine what it would be like to be the person who sat down identified one of these as a new way that humans could get a bunch of people together to do to accomplish shared goals more effectively either more peacefully more more quickly um the like it's hard to look at the world and pick these out until you see a few examples but once you have a few examples it's really easy to start pattern matching and I would love to hear if there are other things that you can think of that should be on this list that aren't um this is obviously a narrow subset of the things that I would consider coordination mechanisms but if you start to look for not just what we have but also what we could have and where there are failings where we where new coordination mechanisms could be applied I think this starts becoming really interesting I think we have the technology to make a lot of this much easier especially when we move things like the financial assets through cryptocurrency generally on chain into uh interactions that don't really require the same kind of uh like bureaucratic hurdles to be jumped in order to implement new systems so I I think that you can look at history and see tons of coordination systems but also as you look to the Future it should look like both the difficulty to implement a new one and the ability to generate novel coordination systems should start exponentially growing and so I think that this is a very interesting exciting time for these systems it's also really compelling because I would claim that the future will look roughly unrecognizable in 10 or 20 years this is definitely a claim rather than a fact but you can look at a lot of the trends that we're seeing and identify that there will be qualitatively different shifts around how civilization works either in the face of new developments in artificial intelligence or uh brain computer interfaces or climate change um you can look to science fiction and it's pretty obvious that some of these things can be predicted Jules Vern did a great job predicting a lot of aspects of the future but also so did George Orwell and so I think it's pretty important to be able to look at those examples extrapolate from what works and what doesn't and try to address these things far earlier than otherwise would be possible especially in light of the fact that the way human culture and Society tends to work is that people and like this is just part of Being Human we all look at the things right in front of us or immediately around us we have I like to generalize the idea of affordances from design where like a push bar on a door tell like implies that you should push it a button is something you should press a like scroll bar is something that you can scroll but there are also career affordances like job postings are an affordance for career directions and like knowing that startups exist is another is a new affordance people don't necessarily have all the affordances to know what possible is and so creating something like funding the commons is creating new affordances and people will follow the affordances that they see toward their local incentive optimizations and this is just something that is part of human nature uh there's like what you see from that optimization is very well described by the um the saying no single raindrop feels responsible for the flood um there's also the reframing of you're not stuck in traffic you are traffic um as a human in society we are all more responsible for the problems that markets or capitalism or representative democracies are making then we might initially think we and that responsibility is both a burden but also a power um like this should be feeling responsible should be both uh like creating some amount of guilt but also some amount of empowerment we can actually fix these things and we don't necessarily fix them by just ex like just interacting with the systems in the affordances that they offer us there's more to being in a democracy than just voting and I feel like in both we've lost sight of that and we've lost sight of taking that and applying it via other analogies to uh creating new affordances within democracies or others uh I would highlight this um for those of you who don't know handon Razer it's never ascribed a malice what could be describe with stupidity um I actually like this framing a lot better it predates hanon framing um but it's originally in German so uh you find it a little bit less frequently but uh yeah Mis misunderstandings and lethargy produce perhaps more wrong in the world than deceit and malus do at least the latter two are certainly RAR and this when I read it is a coordination problem we just need better coordination systems and we can reduce the impact of these sorts of things uh there's uh uh this talk which I am a big fan of that highlights corporations as artificial general intelligences which I think is actually a really good model especially if you're worried about paperclip maximization where in this case paperclip is share price and I don't mean to single out Facebook um individually this is part of a larger system in which we live uh when I say that we need better coordination systems I also want to leave you with some directions of what this could look like um there are a bunch of second there are a bunch of directions that protocol abs and specifically the network Goods team is working on um we have a tool that will be up in I think two talks from now called hypers seert that we're really excited about that we think can incentivize the creation of new positive externalities more robustly uh we have a additional tool for incentivizing the uh immediate and continuous sharing of knowledge creation to try and revolutionize How We Do Science we also have mechanisms for organizing and creating uh faster temporally scoped non-profit efforts um we have another project called governance for git uh git as you might know is uh very effective in that it's this delightful hybrid of uh like forkable what I call forkable autocracy the uh maintainers can control everything but anyone can be a maintainer basically um this project introduces voting why not have a primitive tooling that is democracy in this system um so that you can opt into that if you want and then the last thing I wanted to highlight is that um we have this movement funding the commons where we're trying to not just build things and demonstrate our things but create an ecosystem where other people can come and talk through and collaborate on various other mechanisms and coordination systems that they are trying to build so um welcome to this last project of ours uh very EXC excited to have you here and very glad to be building this community and being uh welcomed as part of the shelling Point Community uh in terms of things that we're interested in there's a couple of things on here that I realized there are great opportunities that feel like very low-lying fruit in my opinion this is basically all research questions but these are a bunch of research questions around how novel mechanisms like liquid democracy or quadratic voting would perform with reasonable assumptions or open R you for better science um might perform in realistic systems that one could simulate if you know of any researchers who are uh have backgrounds in behavioral economics or agent-based modeling um or multi-agent systems these are questions that I would be happy to try and get grant funding for um I I will be posting these slides online and they'll be all recorded so feel free to please share those um additionally there are a bunch of opportunities for new tools new implement of these novel coordination systems there are things that people are proposing but not necessarily implementing I just realized that uh mayy minimum anti cusion infrastructure is not on here and I would love to see ways of making that either easier to understand or easier to explain I think that it solved kind of the biggest problems about electronic voting and all the people all the cryptography experts are still out there saying we don't know how to do online voting and I think that they might not know about the uh the solution that Macy brings generally I think that it would be super to have tools that are so easy to use that in the same way that people will use uh like web two tools like venmo or something uh some app to pay like each other when a group of friends go out to a share a meal I would love to see some interesting tooling like decision markets or quadratic voting in order to decide where to go because in getting people to adopt those in their day-to-day life you create habits where people engage more with better tooling so when they start engaging in their local or federal or um other scale elections you see people reaching for the same tools which are better like fundamentally provably better at eliciting what people want um aggregating those beliefs and helping people execute against them um generally I think that building these first and getting them into people's hands is something that is going to be incredibly impactful and can be done with any Community you are in at any scale um for instance uh I am considering implementing hypers certs which we've uh or not implementing I'm considering using hypers certs which will be discussed later in this track in our internal performance reviews because I think it's a fundamentally better way of tracking who did what and who deserves credit because it's all agreed upon at the time of the collaboration so try to as you go through this track think about Way new ways you could use the tools that are being described and new tools that you could build or propose or collaborate on with others here to solve the problems that you see most uh most frustrating or highest friction within your day-to-day or month-to-month life uh other than that I would say if you have any any questions that you would love to see added to those lists please email Commons protocol. we'd love to add them to a database of open problems that we're willing to help coordinate help fund and if you have any ideas on any of those we would love to have you present at a future Fund in the Commons we're looking at having these events um at least quarterly uh we'll probably have two large events uh in person per year in addition to a large number of smaller events similar to this one as popups at various other events uh and as far as this particular event I will highlight that we we have two rough uh components the first is talking about creating knowledge artifact or sorry the first is creating knowledge artifacts there'll be a much of talks presentations um and these are about new funding mechanisms and uh new funding entities how to make them what they are and uh how they work and then the second half of the day starting with uh around 150 is going to be a bunch of workshops that will comp consist of a few lightning talks and then the speakers will break out into other parts of the tent and will'll Lead breakout conversations and so that should be really exciting we did get feedback at previous one in the comments of I want to interact more with the speakers and the ideas and the things they're talking about so uh we're commenting that we're going to see how that goes as a fun experiment and other than that I think that I'm about a minute behind my allocated time but uh I'll be mcing the first half of this and I would love to have you uh come find me to me um in between talks particularly after I finished mcing during second half of this event anyway uh thank you so much [Applause] and