DAOFest – Bill Warren, Peeps Democracy

all right just one second bear with us for a moment while we figure out we just found a new bug in the the protocol here [Music] what's up and I get some feedback okay so it's not our side no worries sexually we're told my talk so so how does it go it's great just start speaking yes yes I'll get started while we're waiting on slides and just give a quick intro of Who I am and what our company does so we're peeps democracy where we're on a mission to make activism as easy as uber eats and we're starting with activism by people who are crypto natives so just as a little bit of background we started on this journey about a year and a half ago and we're launching our first dal product pretty much today so again peeps democracy making activism as easy as uber eats so we see the world as kind of this messy broken place kind of like Aaron talked about there's a lot of dissatisfaction with politics but I think that extends to the nonprofit sector right for 50 years we kind of said we'll let governments handle social change and then probably about 20 years ago we said well governments don't do a great job actually manufacturing positive social change so we'll let high net-worth individuals and their foundations like the Gates Foundation kind of drive social and political change and the results have been mixed to say the least and we think that kind of people hit this inflection point around 2016 and 2016 was for governance what 2009 was for banking right the collapse of the banking system woke people up and got them to start experimenting with cryptocurrencies I would argue that Bitcoin was a response primarily to the financial crisis and it's kind of built this amazing crypto universe ten years later 2016 with the election of Donald Trump and a bunch of outsider candidates around the world and the surprise says that those kind of shepherded in people woke up in a similar way and thought like okay the system is safe we just can fall asleep at the wheel and these technocrats will do what we need them to do and things will stay relatively broken but not so broken that were on the way to some sort of like post-apocalyptic future that all changed and the other change that happened at kind of the same time and has been happening for the last probably 10 15 years is that social and political movements have become by their nature more decentralized and fluid I think the great modern example of this would be Occupy Wall Street then you start with a sunrise movement that's a more recent example right people aren't attracted to these monolithic movements that are led by a single charismatic leader anymore instead movements are emergent they're coming from the bottom up and they tend to come with a lot of small leaders some of whom might emerge as kind of the face of the movement or the movement might stay relatively decentralized like a black lives matter stead you know people want to take charge they want to change the world the problem is it's just hard to do it right the challenge is that when it comes to coordinating these decentralized or even just spread out movements it's really hard everybody in a decentralized movement expects a voice and deserves a voice in the decision-making and success really depends on long-term engagement the reason that lobbyists kind of nine times out of 10 defeat ordinary people is because lobbyists play on a 5 to 10 year time horizon ordinary people they go do the March there are a hundred thousand people in DC and then they go home and think like we've been heard it's done and the reality is that you know any engagement and movement on that social issue that was driven by that March is going to peter out over the next year too so we want to leverage the power of dowels for good you know this fits within the original mission of I think the Moloch dolls and some of the other grant based styles that we've seen in the last year right except those have been focused primarily on good for the etherium ecosystem and developer ecosystem the challenges that dowels up until this point have been way too complicated even for crypto natives to get you know there's been poor communications within the Dow's so I was a member of yang Dail probably like a lot of you all yang Dao lived in several places that lived on chain and then it also lived in a telegram group and then it kind of lived in a discord group that never really got off the ground and that makes it harder to keep up for people to stay engaged over the long run which leads to this loss of momentum which meant which we kind of saw in yang Dao where there was a lot of energy in that first month of launch it kind of petered out though there was a core group of people that kind of kept it alive put up some great proposals and ended up doing some really cool things with like 4,000 died or so that ended up in yang Dao so you know the current solutions fail again because they tend to require technical skills or they're time-consuming or a problem that's near and dear to my heart based on my background as a lawyer and FEC compliance is they're not legal set up to be legally compliance which means that until you have legally compliant dowels you're not going to get serious people to give lots of money to them just because the risk is too great so the future is down and that's why we created this platform peeps so we let anybody easily launch a decentralized organization each doubt collects crypto for a cause we're going to launch supporting die rapped eath and then a peeps token which is just for reputation and then like any other dau donations equal votes so we can check it out really quickly if the screen cooperates so this is beeps Dao you can check out the two dowels I've created below we've got peeps test party da which is really just our way of trying to figure out how to break and then there's yang doubt to the yang ring since haven't given up on ubi or some of the kind of future policy pieces of the yang platform let's see if he runs for Senate or governor or mayor somewhere but these Styles are all live on the platform a little bit like Dao house you can go to a particular Dao page and then once it loads you can request to join just by entering the amount of dye that you'd like to contribute the summoner or admins can then go to your membership profile and admit you as a member if I were signed in as a summoner I'd see a little admit button there you can then create easy proposals that we track along the way so I won't create proposals just because as you guys know it can take a 15 to 30 seconds for something to write on chain and then you can also see your account info so this way kind of you have your details in one place and your account info actually differs from doubted Dao since one thing we wanted to be sensitive to is our dowels are meant to fall into a couple of buckets the first bucket is to serve as fundraising platforms for decentralized PACs and super PACs so those are organizations where we need to collect a relatively I amount of information from you so that the summoner's and admins can fulfill their FEC reporting obligations the second bucket is what is lovingly called dark money where you don't have to collect as much information you still need kind of name make sure you're a US citizen but done that's all we collect and then the final category which we're really excited about is kind of the everything else so if you're trying to influence US elections of course you have to provide certain amounts of info you can't accept money from non-us citizens but then if you're trying to do something like global Internet freedom or funding democracy activists in Nigeria or Hong Kong we want to make sure that we're collecting minimal information just so that if we get hacked for some reason people can't associate your donations with a real person so we have kind of three tiers of the information that we collect from you guys so let me go back to this the foundations of our Dow are the Maliki to code where we've added a simple Factory and we've also made changes so that our dowels operate kind of within the more traditional nonprofit and political organization milieu in the near future we'll offer some open law forms to help with entity creation so that once you create a peep style you can also easily spin up your own 501 C 4 or your own PAC or super PAC which then you'll be responsible for filing with the right government entities and then where we're different from a lot of the existing dowse is we've done a lot less configuration or we've put a lot of less configuration on the user which means there's more defaults and the near future will kind of offer in advance dow creation paths for people that really to alter kind of the voting period lengths that really want to alter the way ragequitting works and so on and so forth we've also made member onboarding easier you know this is one where we had to trade off a little bit of decentralization for ease of youth so that summoners and anyone who's invited as an admin can admit a member just with a single click it doesn't have to go through a proposal process that way if somebody wants to join they just have to put in their die and then wait for an admin to approve so membership approval can go from a couple days down to a couple minutes we also have kind of generally more powerful summoners and admins in the sense that they're able to pull the demographic and user information for their particular Dao so that they can do whatever kind of reporting they need to do we also made it so that only admins can sponsor and process proposals which is a little bit different from the Maalik v2 code where any member can do that work again we're sacrificing decentralization a little bit for something that will allow these dowels to work within kind of a existing political organization or nonprofit just so you don't blow your tax status or get in trouble with the government and all of the kind of compromises we've made with decentralization versus centralization of a Dao are all so that we can again fit into this 501 C framework or a 527 political or graham work you know that said while we've made compromises on some of the processing and sponsoring and admitting members we did think it was relatively important to keep kicking out members completely decentralized just out of fairness so you know we're not troll proof and if there's a troll you have to go through the guild kick so in terms of future plans we are right now in kind of an open beta test period for on the rinkeby network we would love everybody in this room to sign up help us break our help us figure out how to do some kind of better error handling for early Dow users in March we're launching on maintenance and that means you guys were able to be able to play with fire create causes support causes using real crypto we've got a couple communities that were bootstrapping one will be focused on cannabis liberalisation one will be focused on kind of civic takun decentralized democracy TAC another will be focused on crypto policy and then starting the spring the goal is just to grow and form as many active communities on our platform as possible so questions I'll be around please ask me anything please tell me where we're wrong or right in the meantime please visit our site at rinkeby beep style.com break are shut let me know how it breaks and we will forever be grateful to you so thank you guys