Humanity-Centered Design: Incentivizing a Better Future | Will Morgan - Opolis

here's the mic hi everyone it's great to be with you today my name is Will Morgan I'm a founding Steward and chief of staff at opis I was also the executive Finance Steward for our beloved eth Denver from 2018 until last year's event uh that might seem surprising since this is my 1th Denver and I am a somewhat unfamiliar face uh but that is also kind of by Design because I'm missing parties at Night by rage eating funnel cakes while cutting checks to food vendors and hold up in my hotel room reconciling buffer coin payments and the like uh regardless this is my 7th Denver and it's my first time on a stage with a mic in my hand and it is really great to be with you today here's a little brief outline of where we're going today uh we'll touch briefly on eth Denver since we are here and it's such a big part of my story in crypto uh but we'll also touch on your role at eth Denver as well then we'll go into how web 3 is designing and bidding a better world the current state of design of incentives and a future state of incentive design I truly believe that human thriving is good business and I think that incentives are the way of the future that will get us to the better world that we know is possible so going back to eth Denver it was uh 2017 um some sometime towards the end of 2017 we were just down the street in a co-working space and John poer uh came up to me and said hey I'm thinking about hosting this Colorado crypto Meetup uh can you run the accounting for it and I said I don't know what that means but sure mistake number one no I'm kidding um so I started building sponsors we started seeing money coming in and then the weird invoices started showing up the um can you pay this invoice for 40 oversized bean bags can you pay this invoice for five kegs of Kombucha uh it got more and more bizarre but the bizarreness didn't stop there until the first time that I stepped into the venue I brought my dad and the the first thing we did is we collected our buff of coin and we went to the food trucks and he was he had a sweet tooth so he said I think I'm going to get an ice cream sandwich well his first onchain transaction he very proud to admit was a funnel cake coffee ice cream sandwich this is two funnel cakes with ice cream uh three scoops of coffee ice cream smashed in the middle we then wandered through the venue went to the maker space went to the art exhibits and we're just amazed by the diversity by the imagination that we saw in every room we sat through one talk of a project you might have heard of called crypto kitties that was big that year wrecking gas prices along the way we got done with it and I asked him I said so what did you think how did how what was that experience like and he said well it was kind of like that Cantina scene in Star Wars when you walked in and you saw people from people and creatures from across the Galaxy and you kind of felt like you didn't belong but somehow you did uh and I responded to him well I'm really glad that no one got their arm chopped off with the lightsaber I don't think the general liability insurance that I had procured would have covered that um but at any rate whoever you are wherever you come from however many e envers you've attended uh you're welcome here this is a space where your ideas and your contributions are valued and it's a place where um you come with the skills that you have whether you're super technical or whether you're not um you still have something to give and something to receive for me that was bringing uh my years in public accounting to an event crypto prior to knowing any other people in finance or Accounting in the space for my dad it meant uh who was a total crypto Norm um took it back to the foundation that he was the president of and was able to accept crypto donations for philanthropic uh donations for Northern Colorado which funded many really cool nonprofits so whoever you are wherever you're from you matter here um I'm a little nervous uh it would help me if I saw more smiling faces so if you can do me me the the favor turn next to your neighbor and give him a smile that's great dopamine rushes we're all getting high on dopamine e th pastime of drugs all right um let's see next I want you to turn to your neighbor and tell them your ideas and your contributions are important here your ideas and your contributions are important here it's the truest thing and if you don't take anything else from my talk I hope hope you take that um they are important here no matter how many times you've been here whether it's your first or your seventh so web 3 why are we're all here we care about it deeply we care about uh future that we know is possible that we know that web 3 can help bring in um there's things that web 3 can do to uh combat and fight against uh corruption it can better more equitably distribute profits and economic incentives worldwide we know that it can protect privacy it can drive efficiencies and it creates new opportunities globally in areas that have been underserved we all know this is possible and we all in our own ways are build building to that future it will take all of us collaborating benevolently to get there and I believe that incentive design is the mechanism we have to create a future 30 40 50 Generations down the road um that we know is possible when better world so here's a few question questions I want to pose to kind of get our minds thinking in this state the first is what if web 3 could game design better outcomes for entire communities via thoughtful incentive alignment okay next how can we diversify our Innovation as an evolutionary necessity and third how can we build incentives for those championing human thriving as I said at the top I believe human thriving is good business and if we can build projects and communities to Champion in our Humanity I think that is going to be a beautiful thing for us as a species but also our entire ecosystem and Planet so before we get to a future State we have to start at current state where are we at today what brought us here because we know what brought us here probably won't get us there the current state um i' like to use the principles of ux design I'm not a designer as I said I'm Finance and Accounting backgrounds but I think that ux design teaches us something and it teaches us intentionality it teaches us where to put a focus of Care on experience uh for our users and for our communities so using these principles we go to web one which was primarily tech center design right it's technology that's static the ux component isn't nearly as important as it is in other projects because it's technology for technology sake we need adoption we need it to work we need those layer ones and layer twos and many of us that are building infrastructure projects here e thin um are still in this design mode and that's totally fine there's nothing wrong with it it's just a um a less of an experience Centric design Choice then we get to web 2 where as many of us know privacy is uh not always well considered because we're focusing on user Center design human Center design where you find a personality you find a Persona you Market the hell out of it you exploit it you get profits rinse and repeat um the peer-to-peer technology doesn't always work because you have a middleman in between right it's uh it's solely for focused on the single user that that is the target market which excludes a lot of people while it creates Great Value in a product and it eliminates all of the pain points that you might experience in a project it um it doesn't have a great community and that's where I believe that we can go with our next phase in a world of pings dings rings and the tyranny of the Red Dot as I like to call it it is really hard to have long-term Vision we are uh immediacy biased we are uh limited in our ability to think really long term and in fact we're incentivized not to have to because we go from zero to unicorn status in the shortest amount of time possible to maximize profits and uh to move on to the next thing this leads uh a wake of issues in our in our uh path behind us our economy is designed to reward those who go the fastest but it's at the expense as many of us know it leads to burnout it leads to uh inequitable wealth distribution there's a lot of Downstream impacts that weren't game designed 30 years ago when our economies were booming and down this road of adoption for these internet Technologies so I propose a future state where we design something better we game design a new game and we put incentives in place that will Thrive our future there's a new book that I loved recently uh from Don Norman a VP of Technology at Apple former um who wrote this book on designing for a better world and these are the five principles that he outlays and I believe that they're ones that we can adopt whether you're a product designer whether you are an executive whether you're a Dev these same principles apply to each and every one of us and what they enable us to do is to come up with a framework on design incentives um that allow our projects to think more longterm to think more robust and to be more Community diverse so i' like to go through each one focusing on the entire ecosystem of people uh this also includes all living things the physical environment uh I actually don't like his title of humanity centered design and after I titled my talk this and I was able to chew on it for another month or two um I prefer Community Center design because uh what about our robot friends what about animals what about our ecosystems there's a bigger broader community and when we think about it in the sense of humanity um not every stakeholder ER in the ecosystem gets considered so with hum uh Humanity Center design Community Center design I believe you have to focus on the entire ecosystem next is to solve the root issues there's a few different types of incentives we can deploy and and economic incentives are the ones we're most familiar with but there's also empathetic incentives there's social incentives and if you're not solving for rude issues you might incentivize the wrong behavior and achieve the wrong outcome in the long term so it's it's very important to focus on the root issues next take a long-term systems point of view we must realize that the impact of our actions will take years or generations to appear we must game design good incentives today with the desired future state in mind we know that technology changes rapidly things change from regulation standpoint and our needs as communities change so it's also important to continually test and refine are our incentives working are the outcomes that we're seeing now the ones that we intended when we first designed our systems does our governance structure still work to achieve the outcomes for all of the stakeholders that are participants in our ecosystem finally the last one is to design with the community not for them this is the the beautiful thing about web 3 and the opportunity that we have is that we are Global we are completely decentralized and our perspectives are all very nuanced when you design for a community and the user Center design you exclude a number of participants in your ecosystem but when you design with a community you embed yourself in it you make friends with your uh shared interests and then you look around and you say what are the things that this community needs to thrive what is it that we're missing and then you're it becomes obvious to you what services and products and other subcommunities can form to make this better World tied to that is a sense of necessary uh diversity as a evolutionary necessity this is really important and I i' like to frame it around this idea of collective imagination my wife came up with the term sitting right here it's so great to see her um Collective imagination in 2016 uh she and I quit our job sold our stuff and traveled for a year we had originally decided we were going to go to Australia New Zealand first because that' be most comfortable and familiar so we bought uh tickets via Bangkok and we were going to spend maybe a week or two in southeast Asia before continuing on our journey uh suffice it to say we fell in love with Bangkok and we stayed in Southeast Asia for a good three or four months and why it's this idea of this Collective imagination everywhere we went it was something new you kind of cocked your head of like ahuh I didn't know it could be done that way or I've never seen it kind of thought through I'll use coffee shops as an example um everywhere that we went all these coffee shops it's got a thriving coffee scene in in Southeast Asia I'm thrilled that devc con's going to be there in the fall uh I think it has a lot to teach us in our industry every every coffee shop you went to there'd be something odd something bizarre a curved spoon or weird dish wear or chairs are in a circle or different types of coffee one that's meant to be drank over 30 minutes while the espresso sticks uh that were frozen melt into your warm milk or done in 30 seconds and three shots going from bitter to Sweet and hot to cold everything was just a little nuanced and I contrast that to our coffee shops in America we value As Americans and as westerners convenience efficiency speed when we do that our Collective imagination then informs our designs and informs our incentives to make design choices that we're not even conscious enough that we're making whereas in Asia they have a different mindset their perspectives and their values are different than those of the western world and it comes out in their design choices and you see these beautiful innovative ideas come through that wouldn't have been possible unless it was this broader Collective imagination in web 3 being as diverse and AS Global as we are we have this unique position to make communities globally we're not tied to these Geographic bounds and our networks are able to have a broader wider Collective imagination that brings in new ideas New Perspectives more beautiful thinking and that will inform our designs and our incentives to be more inclusive elephant in the room I'm a white American male up here talking about diversity uh if you are not a white American male um as I said at the top your ideas are important your contributions are important you have something to bring to the space that is Uniquely Yours and it's necessary to make this a broader wider more inviting space for our entire industry and if you are a white male acknowledge that we're in the endgame of terrible design choices that have got us to a place where we've ultimately won the game and kept our power and it's not a bad thing to imagine a new future where we distribute that where we bring others into our strategy decisions and our governance boards to allow for a broader wider more beautiful world I'd like to go to opis as a a project obviously I'm most familiar with it having spent seven years building it as a example of a project trying to do some of these future State ideas um the first that I'd like to highlight is a limited Cooperative Association is a legal rapper for Dows we just released white paper yesterday you can find it on our website at O.co um analyzing exploring the different entity types available to Dows which ones allow for the best incentives the best participation the best economic and governance distributions and we really believe that this one's a great one and that's how we've organized ourselves it allows us to push work tokens to those that Patron the comment now if you uh or an investor or if you're a partner or if you're an internal contributor or if you're a member you all are designed to participate and be a good actor and you get rewarded for your patronage the more you participate the more you're rewarded this balances our economic incentives it balances our growth incentives and it balances our vision for sustainab sustainability in the future another uh opportunity is uh as I said have equal representation on your boards if you have multiple classes in your Dows or if your projects has investors but you also are building for a long long-term sustainable future ensure that you have multiple voices on your board that can speak to the different incentives and the different ideas of what you're trying to achieve don't exclude some stakeholders in favor of others because of monetary incentives and finally uh build for Collective need right control um connection over control equals mutualistic wins that should be our outcome is continually connect as a means for mutualistic wins we can employ uh design Community centered design as a mechanism for design incentives for the future it's a beautiful world that we know we can create and the incentives and the long-term system thinking will get us there and the main thing to remember is that your ideas and your contributions are important here you are welcome in the Cantina of web 3 and we need you so come as you are bring your gifts and your skills and your passions and come Biddle with us I hope you enjoy e Denver thank you for your time today and uh I'd love to meet any of [Applause] you hello hello hey ladies and gentlemen so I'm going to be uh I'm seeing the next panel