EthCC 2: James Pitts

okay here we go alright sorry I was late okay so this is about self organizing in a decentralized galaxy and my name is Jamie and I built this prison tent this really cool framework okay so you know a lot of newcomers come to our ecosystem it's very difficult to navigate they don't know where to start it's just vast they think there's these starting points and it's not it's not always the right starting point and you have these people who know a lot of stuff but we don't have enough actual navigators building the right Maps the theorem foundation's website hasn't been updated in a long time and yeah we need navigators what's the structure of the universe what's the structure of our galaxy in this universe I think you can look at the history like an astronomy you trace the history so you you think about the history of what's happened in our community big players and people like that you can kind of start to see why it looks like this crazy galaxy and you know obviously the key thing are ideas and proposals it starts with the white paper and white paper gathered so many people together and just they just started working on stuff almost immediately self-organizing teams you know teams are very independently organized here and there's personalities and they collect together and then they disperse and that's a big factor and of course enormous amounts of money or at play in this situation creating a lot of bright stars in the galaxy and we are you know as we emerge we have these shared values and that's a huge factor now if you look at the galactic stew this is this is DEFCON zero I mean this is literally everybody who went to DEFCON zero in the photographer right I think and that's the audience and they all watched each other give presentations if you can imagine that and if you see who's in that photograph many of the constellations many of the things there in our galaxy were led by them as they would would start together and through the interpersonal conflicts and all the different things they dispersed and create all kinds of organizations and projects this is Galactic's to DEFCON one and you know you could see the audience is much larger now and again pretty much everyone in the audience at DEFCON one started all the you know so many projects and institutions in in the galaxy and so what's what the result are lots and lots of indie teams and then these I call it quote-unquote organizations because the media and many people assume that these are monolithic entities you know they the etherium foundation did this you know consensus did that right I would say that the teams are a lot more powerful than people think or know or understand and that the teams are just cluster around resources and they coordinate from there but they're very loosely controlled the key thing is that team teams do not follow orders they just don't that it's like pushing string you there's no one pulling strings I mean there there might be murky people out there with lots of ether there they're pushing strings they're not pulling strings and and I think it's rooted in this mistrust of Authority decentralization culture I think comes from that it stems from that and I came up with this phrase no one is in charge right people take responsibility for stuff but there's there's no one in charge here and we we keep having to say this on all these forums and getter channels and people come in or like who's in charge of this who's doing that and you can direct them to a team that's looking after something taking responsibility for something but you know it's not like vitalik is like telling Gath team what to do it just doesn't work like that at all so the one key thing that comes out of a situation like this galactic cloud kind of thing that we have is a tyranny of structure lessness and this is a great essay if you haven't read this essay look it up it's just a wonderful thing written it was written in the 1970s I believe in it came out of the feminist movement and basically did to escape the tyranny of structure lessness you have these independent teams that adopt that that adopt their own structures there they're doing they're adopting their own policies and they form protocols and in the keys independent coordination between them and it's up to the teams to coordinate they have to learn how to coordinate and for me for me like when I want to started analyzing this and just reminding me of one of my fate one of my favorite kind of top weird topics from college and stuff cybernetics I don't see this term used a lot but it you know just it's a really deep term and what's really ironic is there's a technology called kubernetes that actually is the root you know it's really related to cybernetics and so there's I I don't want to get divided up into these big realms but I kind of see like there's control systems right and that right there is a control system from I think it was in Chile they were gonna control the entire economy using this really cool deluxe this 1970s sci-fi looking room and then you have ants self-organized systems that they're able to coordinate just with pheromones right and so like an early I mean the philosophers of cybernetics go way back but a very important one is Weiner Norbert Weiner and he worked in World War two anti-aircraft systems and that's where he kind of like came out with site the modern cybernetics and it's the notion of feedback systems particularly negative feedback systems and he you know the notion of entropy that everything falls to entropy he he challenged that saying that information actually leads to localized a difference the decrease in entropy and that kind of leads into organizational theory come the 40s and 50s right another philosopher Hayek and he came out of the term called Cadillac C which is like voluntary cooperation and links into his economics and he he took the cybernetics notion and thought that you can think about price in in economics of pricing in in markets that the price transmits the information and of course we all know there's so much more than price but he reduced it to this and it in a really made sense you can have a self-organized economy in which they're able to achieve great goals just using this one piece of information about it good Heather Marsh is a very interesting thinker she was involved with Occupy Wall Street and WikiLeaks and she came over this term I don't even know how to pronounce it Stig Berg ecstatic society it was really interesting and I'm reading these quotes and I'm like this sounds really familiar it starts with an initial idea and the project is driven by the idea not the personality and no individual needs permission to work on stuff like in our community there's all this work right there just get to work grab it grab it and go it's yours right and people don't understand that they're like I want a leader I wanted someone to tell me what to do where do I go but it's like take responsibility you see something interesting you want to join a team or crew get involved we're very open to that and just grab things and go with it and I and here's an interesting difference here you have no individual needs permission it's related to competitive and consensus cooperative and it's really interesting like those dynamics of competition consensus another one is Falkvinge he was involved with the pirate party and he wrote a a really great book swarm wise I I am I was really excited about the book and then I read it and I'm it wasn't as good as I thought it was going to be but I thought it was a very very good introduction to the idea of swarm swarm organizations and I don't know if there's anyone from status here but I believe status has adopted this I keeps I keep hearing that they call their team swarms and things like that I feel as if they've adopted this philosophy and so like I think there's these attributes of a theorem teams like these what I would consider an ideal aetherium team and you know they have these shared values that we have throughout the community security or integrity anti-authoritarianism productivity and liveness these are actually qualities we like in the network and these are qualities we like in people as well you have these roles and there's many other roles besides this but I will highlight maintain errs because we glorify builders we glorify organizers but maintain errs like keep a lot of things running I'm a maintainer my selves very good and philosophers also like there's an emerging philosophers scene and I think often in the community we try to reinvent a lot of these things but we really should at least look and we could just browser on Wikipedia we'll find someone has invented everything we're talking about in governance basically social code this is very often implicit right now like a diphtheria magicians where we're trying to be a little bit more explicit about it but the first three is definitely throughout the magician's it's your social code like what are your what's your mission I mean I think a lot of teams understand that part but what are your principles like how are you doing it what's guiding you what principles are guiding you and principles are really nice because you can without defining all these specific laws you can be guided through decisions saying oh you know we we have this deep principle of you know into like that people can pick up work without permission so you know then you can make a decision about something else knowing that principle it simplifies things greatly you don't have to be specific about everything and and behavior right taking responsibility managing resources like that's how its resource management that's what all all of us are taking responsibility for some piece in the ecosystem and we're saying that's that's what I'm going to work on doing the work self-steering and the key is coordinating with other teams this this is a skill I think is not developed enough and a lot of people like to just roll with things they'll pick up something and they're so enthusiastic they're so smart they're gonna roll with it they're gonna go for it and they're gonna not get too much feedback and this is like the classic like thing that they talked about in Design Thinking right you should get feedback earlier you should learn to coordinate and communicate you should think about like you're you're gonna you're going to make a big change in the protocol order you're gonna propose big thing think about the stakeholders that are affected by this that's that's coordinating behavior I think that needs to be learned a lot more and this is it no one's in charge right so take responsibility simple as that any any questions I guess you first hi great talk I loved how you brought all the disparate things together into kind of a narrative I was curious about the roles that you mentioned I think is this last of the yes yes no yeah so interesting and what I was thinking about is the roles just to make you more concrete like who are the like I understand builders maintain errs what do you mean organizers I like the tech people who organize conference organized teams yeah and what about your philosophers yeah I see philosophers is or why you know and why it's so important and you know these are just archetypes these aren't like you need a philosopher on your team I'm just saying that there should be that quality swirling around in the team just you can think of some people in the space yeah I think we tend to be more philosophical than many other fields I've seen out there but yeah the philosopher it's like somebody thinks about the deeper meaning someone he thinks about the impact of what we're doing in the future so yeah there's another question I think it's way over we need special roads for routing first of all thanks presentation I really wonder how this shared values appear who recognized them have you discussed them like why those three yeah for the values um I just threw those up there but I think you know there's a really great little gathering at DEFCON 4 in Prague and it was organized by Reid Reese who's like one of the big organizers in the event and basically what we did was he give us a bunch of stickies and he said what are your personal values you know what how do you do things and so we just put them up on the wall and then we first you throw them up on the wall and then you start to cluster them so it's a little bit like MapReduce and and you throw them like ones together and you can see there's a lot of consistency between the all of us who are putting these together and there's like maybe 15 people from the community just all random people and and then the then Rees asked us what are the values of etherium or what are the values of the etherium community and we did the same thing again and you can see there's a lot of connectivity there's there's a you know it's almost like our values were being mapped into what we thought a theorem was and there's a lot of commonality there and these three showed up and I'm forgetting what the other ones are maybe an updated version of this I'll I'll put the I took some photographs of it so I think that's you know if if you do exercises you can find out what those are but you have to be methodical about it I think a lot of people do guesswork on this subject for sure so hopefully it's helpful yeah hi that was a great talk thank you the universe is very inclusive right everyone has a role in it and I'm wondering how do you see the community kind of expand into the mainstream or the early adaptors which are not so technical or not so they're not philosophers they're not maintained errs what are they are they they're not in Vangelis maybe they're not ambassadors yet but they're like the crowd which need to onboard into this universe that we're trying to create yeah totally um yeah we need to we need to understand those kinds of people who are likely to be the early adopters of it I think there's a big gap there and again it's that assumption making we need to be scientific about that to find out who they are Isis but my suspicion is that they're a little bit more businesslike like they're people who might want to use some of these technologies for like go through a little bit of the pain because it solves such an important problem for them and so that's my suspicion is that's the early adopters I mean the early adopters for us has been developers right DAP developers and even before that is like crypto crypto nerd types but each every expansion of capability gives us more opportunity to onboard people so I think yeah I think the next generation is really important to understand who they are and who they're going to be yeah hey Jamie thanks for the great talk hey so so initiatives such as the magicians and the cat herders have emerged in a very grassroots I guess dig Merrik fashion I think I'm pronouncing that right and and sort of seeds were planted by yourself and by others to kind of get these things off the ground which is awesome I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on other seeds we should be planting now so philosophers is a great one other things for other communities that we might want to see emerge yeah I think um I think psychology I think behavioral like behavioral economics and psychology and organizational psychology I think that's a huge that's a huge gap is it psychological sophistication to know what what users are going to do or know what people are gonna do in these economic situations because economics like there's a lot of reducing going on like a lot of hey let's talk about it in-game theoretics right that's really interesting good way to check check things for security check things and understand what could happen crazy scenario kind of things but behavioral economics has changed the game right and this is what people are doing it's very similar to user experience research right so I think psychology to me is like the big right now yeah I think that's it we have a consensus on that it's over okay [Applause]