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    "utterances": [
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 0.0,
        "end": 0.0,
        "transcript": "Okay."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 15.0,
        "end": 15.0,
        "transcript": "So welcome, everyone, to the I think this is our third short talk, which is kind of a reboot of the Lightning Talks that we were doing. It's an opportunity for people at MediGov to come together and talk about ideas that they wanna that they're working on, seek co collaborators, write a governance question, share an article that they've been thinking about. And today, we have two presenters. We have Anant, who is going to be talking about decentralized governance of meta organizations. And then we have Tucker, who is going to be talking about CrowdRight. And I'll let both of them go into more detail about their projects and their background, And I'll go ahead and pass it off to Anant, who will start us off."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 30.0,
        "end": 30.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. I'm unmuted. So I guess my time starts now. Right? Alright. So I'm gonna talk about decentralized governance of meta organizations. Right? And I guess everyone can see my screen, hopefully, my presentation. Okay. There we go. I mean, this is just a bit of a bio. Just to summarize quickly, I mean, I have a I combine a lot of streams of experience and expertise, both in terms of research and industry. I've spent most most of my time in industry, however. And what I'm doing now with Cyberium, you know, combines all of these things. Right? So now let's get into what meta organizations are. The the definition by the people who put it together, right, there were three people who came together, a couple from the Harvard Business School, one from LBS. So they defined meta organizations as, you know, a a collective entity of autonomous firms that are coming together for a system level goal. Right? So this is essentially autonomous organizations that are coming together for a certain goal for a certain period of time. And the examples of meta organizations are, you know, the two big buckets of mega projects, major projects, and of supply chains. Right? Both of which are extremely important in many ways to both, you know, economic systems and social systems. Right? Now why is this important? I mean, decentralized this is a problem in decentralized governance. Right? Because you have a bunch of autonomous firms with conflicting interests, and they do have conflicting interests because everyone is essentially there to make a profit to kind of get, you know, their slice of the value that is being created. You have very complex workflows, multi party workflows. You have disconnected relationships. You know, everyone has a party with the bilateral contracts disconnected from other bilateral contracts on the same project or the same supply chain. There is no trusted source of truth, you know, that can be shared across all of these parties. The actual systems that are used, like, SAP or project management software, like MS projects are disconnected across all of these parties. And there is no universal identifiers of companies, you know, and then this goes back to the dead and the VC question on web web three. Right? Which will allow people to synchronize across systems. So this is the world in which this is happening. And, obviously, the supply chains and big projects have very large social consequences. Right? I'm gonna focus more on projects. So projects, of course, are bringing together a group or network of entities to build something in a fixed period of time. So these are temporary organizations, temporary met organizations, right, which are focused on creating some kind of a unique result. And the track record is is pretty unfortunate because, again, the problem is decentralized governance is not very efficient with today's technology. Right? The size of the problem is massive. We spend about $10,000,000,000,000 in capital projects alone. We need about 3 plus trillion dollars per year just to meet climate goals, which we don't have. And if you look at this track record, which I will summarize in this chart here, you you see why, you know, project performance is extremely important. You know, most of these project sectors have very significant cost and schedule overrun. So if you're talking about $10,000,000,000,000 being spent, you know, you're probably gonna end up spending double that amount, right, to deliver the same scope. And so this is a enormous economic issue, but it's a it's also a huge social issue. And if it comes to things like climate goals, right, which are time relevant and also cost relevant, we we don't have the money to build the projects to meet net carbon goals at this time. And on top of it, you have these enormous cost overruns that are wasting trillions of dollars per year, and you're not completing these projects in time either. So this is a massive problem, you know, and this is something that goes to the heart of, you know, decentralized governance. Right? How do you get all of all of these, you know, complex organizations constituted by independent companies with conflicting interests to work together efficiently? So that is the crux of the problem that we need to solve to make a difference to this track record. Right? I'm gonna get a bit bit more into detail. The only thing in this slide that I'll say is that, you know, IT projects, which are not in that chart, also have very high overruns. Average cost overruns a 100% in IT projects. Right? So it's projects of every kind, not just bridges, railways, and power plants that have this problem. Right? Now this is a chart from my paper on offshore oil and gas projects. You know? So what you see here is, you know, overruns, you know, cost and schedule overruns. So that's what you see on the x axis. And this chart is something that you see in every project sector, whether it's IT or bridges or power plants or whatever it is. Right? You see this chart. So this is not a normal distribution. This is a flat tail distribution. And, also, you you can see that the the the chart itself is, you know, shifted, you know, towards the right, towards overrun. Right? So the average overruns in the sector is up 30 plus percent, you know, which is not too bad compared to some other sectors, but also important to note is the size of the fat tail. So there's a significant number of projects that are extremely, you know, high in terms of overruns. Right? And this is something that comes from because of complexity, because of the vicious cycles, you know, that emerge when emerging when when you have emergent issues and the form of vicious cycles that leads to these black swans and dragon kings in the flat tier. Right? So it's not only the high average overruns, it's also the extreme overruns, the significant number of extreme overruns that are a problem in big projects. Right? The issue, like I was saying, is again related to decentralized governance. I mean, principal agent issues in, you know, supply chains and projects have been studied quite a bit. The principal agent issues is, of course, is across every contractual relationship. You have a principal and an agent, and agent is always looking for their own interest as well. So every contractor on a project is going to understate the cost and schedule to get a job, but they're also incentivized to make the most profit and stretch out the work as much as possible. So you have this fundamentally misaligned incentives, biases. I mean, cognitive issues are a huge thing in complex systems. I mean, humans are not able to process the amount of information that's generated. You don't have a trusted source of truth. And, you know, you also have things like optimism biases and so on, right, that make it even more complex to manage these projects. Complexity when you have emergent outcomes that cannot be forecasted and when you have these disconnected temporary organizations, you know, with these incentive issues, principal agent issues, they're not able to collectively react to emergent issues, you know, which again leads to the huge problems downstream. Right? And this is essentially what we're trying to solve. I'm not gonna dwell on these slides because of time. But that's essentially what we are trying to solve. Right? And this is essentially what my focus is both in terms of research and in terms of what I'm doing with Siberian, which is my company, you know, to be to build a project governance tool, which recognizes the fact that projects big projects are made up of networks of entities. Right? So how do you how do you enable participatory governance? You know, how how can everyone participate in setting goals in in planning a project? How can they have a trusted source of truth, you know, for the entire project network? How do you have verifiable consensus on anything? Right? And how how do you collectively you know, the the issues in a project often happen at the edges. Right? So when something happened at the edge happens at the edge, how do you track that information to everyone else that is involved, everyone else that is affected in that project. Right? So these are the specifically speaking, the type of issues that I'm trying to solve with Cyberium. Right? And in terms of the technical kind of inputs from the Web three world, since we're coming from that world, definitely, like, some of the things like smart contracts, I mean, and DLT technology in general is pretty critical. Zero knowledge proofs are quite important because you're talking about trustless ecosystems. Right? Because these are independent companies with their own interests. And coordination under zero knowledge proof is something that will really help with synchronizing all the costs and the schedules, payment systems, etcetera, etcetera across this complex network of stakeholders in a project. Right? The other kind of things that are coming together, like, you know, with this community. Right? I mean, I've seen a lot of people with backgrounds and complexity theory. I I heard something about executional theory. Right? I mean, and so on. So these these bodies of theory are also extremely relevant to the problem that I'm trying to solve. So what I'm trying to do, right, what I want to kind of collaborate with with the community is, one, in terms of the research, I want to, you know, look more into the application of complexity theory and so on into project performance research and into, you know, resolving some of these issues with complex projects. I have a very specific kind of stream of research in mind. And if someone is interested in the research side, please do get in touch with me. And if someone is interested in working with us on Siberian on the project governance platform that is bringing together all this technology to resolve this complex problem in multi party governance, decentralized multi party governance, do get in touch with me as well. Right? And if you scan the QR code, you will you will get my contact details on your phone. Alright. So now, I guess, we get into the questions. Right? Sent."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 45.0,
        "end": 45.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. That's right. So there's nothing in the chat yet. I wanna leave some space at the beginning to see if anyone has any comments that they wanna make. Is anyone who"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 60.0,
        "end": 60.0,
        "transcript": "Yes. I had a just one question. So and perhaps I missed it during talking. That that was really interesting, by the way. I think you're grouping that together. Really really enjoyed that. I'm curious like do you have an idea of some of like the mechanism designs? I know this is early. It sounds like you're kind of early in the stages of research and thinking about this and for collaborators, but looks like you already have like a contract up. And so I'm curious, like, what you think some of the mechanisms are."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 75.0,
        "end": 75.0,
        "transcript": "Right. So I problems. Yeah. I I I have I mean, there there's more specifics in terms of the research into the the the system. Right? I mean, into the the architecture of the platform, I do have a paper. I mean, if you go to the website, I think on the first page, you can kind of download that paper, which gets into a lot more details about this. Right? But, essentially, I mean, we're looking at a, you know, modeling, you know, projects as DAGs. I mean, projects are DAGs, basically. You know, if you look at a project a project diagram, a project network, right, that's basically a DAG that goes from the beginning to an end. So we're looking at spot contracts, you know, to, you know, align in the, you know, the the schedules and the project contracts. Right? I mean and the payment systems across all the stakeholders. We are connecting the smart contracts together so that, if something happens at, you know, any part of the project, I mean, that is that information is transmitted to all the other milestones that are affected, which could involve other stakeholders. Right? And, also, they another key part of this is the verify the credential thing, because you need to have a universal kind of verified credential architecture in order for people to be able to use their identities, you know, for companies to be able to use their identities on more than one project. So, basically, I mean, in terms of the broad architecture, there is a lot of specific, you know, detail in in terms of where, you know, what we've sketched out. Some of the problems have to do with the maturity of some of the technology in the web three world. Like, VCs are not mature yet. Right? Smart contracts are not ready for deployment yet in real time. I mean, the Oracle systems that we will rely on are also not something that companies would be ready to rely on to execute real, you know, x you know, these b to b business flows. Right? So part of the thing in fact, the biggest thing that's holding us back is the maturity of some of the technical components in general. Thank you."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 90.0,
        "end": 90.0,
        "transcript": "Do do we have others who are interested in joining the discussion? This might be one way of opening it up a little bit. I'm curious. You you said you had a very kind of, like, specific research project in mind or inquiry in mind. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what that might look like."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 105.0,
        "end": 105.0,
        "transcript": "Right. So in terms of complexity. Right? And this is one of one of the specific kind of research agendas that I have in mind. In terms of, you know, complexity, I I want to apply complexity theory to, you know, projects in a more systematic way. Now it's it's quite well recognized that projects are complex systems. Right? There's a lot of researchers who state that. Right? But I want to I want to show demonstrate that using a quantitative approach, for instance, which is something that is lacking in the product performance literature. Right? For instance, like, give me an give to give you an example, if you look at this chart, if you look at that dragon, right, I mean, the that stands for Dragon Kings in some statistical papers. These extreme outliers are called Dragon Kings, right, because of the rarity and impact. Now I've seen I have been part of projects that have seen this 200 something percent overruns. Right? So on the x axis, one is 100, two is 200, three is 300. Right? So one 300% overrun means $1,000,000,000 project is not $3,000,000,000. Right? So I've what what this essentially the the generating factors come from complexity. Right? Because you have emergent outcomes that cannot be predicted. Right? So some of these emergent outcomes react to each other in and they form these vicious cycles. For instance, the 300% overrun that you see there was this BP oil platform. You know, in 02/2008, what happened was that it was they were about to tow it out to get it to install it in the Gulf Of Mexico, and it was sitting in a yard in Texas. So that was a freak hurricane that, you know, people didn't, like, forecast. Right? That's the platform was designed to withstand even though it wasn't moved yet. So that happened, and then that that itself would not have been a problem, but someone had installed the ballast control wall backwards. So instead of pumping water out, it was pumping water in. Right? So you have, like, this series of emergent events that cannot be forecast, but in some cases, you know, they they kind of form a vicious cycle that leads to these kind of extreme overruns. And these sort of things are the things that I want to kind of demonstrate in a quantitative way using agent based modeling techniques. Right? Now for for this to happen, I need to bring together streams of researchers from across the project there. From not just in the project, you know, the the project performance research world, but people who are applying complexity or in a quantitative way. For instance, biologists, for instance, are very active in agent based modeling. Right? I know I know I know that some of them are in the Meta Gal community. So in order to drive, like, you know, complexity, the application more rigorous application of of complexity theory to, you know, these outcomes in these big projects. I want to put together, like, a stream of researchers and, you know, I can definitely share more details. And I've got a few more things on the agenda as well. I mean, when it comes to Web three, for instance, right, like, there's a very specific agenda that I have identified as well. You know, this is a game, like, even if you take it out of projects, I mean, this is essentially about commercial meta organizations. Right? Decentralized governance of meta organizations in the b to b world is is the research question. And I've got quite a few things on that agenda as well. So, basically, I want to bridge the gap. I mean, most so much discussion in the Meta Gal community has to do with DAOs, but these are in a way decentralized autonomous organizations. But these are coming from the commercial world and these are very compelling use cases with enormous implications. Right?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 120.0,
        "end": 120.0,
        "transcript": "Right. Right. I don't I don't mean to put anyone on the spot, but I I I do know that we have Chris Ray Rai with us today, who I know has has done a lot of work around, like, project management and thinking about some of the pitfalls there. But no pressure to jump in, but I'm if I was wondering if anything about today's presentation resonated with you or if you had any kind of thoughts on that. You can also just say pass if"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 135.0,
        "end": 135.0,
        "transcript": "No."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 5",
        "start": 150.0,
        "end": 150.0,
        "transcript": "I I do have thoughts, actually. I'm I'm I was just in a very noisy place, so I didn't want to bother everyone with with my background noise. No. It's it's it's very cool. And I I can sort of see how I can see how coming from the, you know, mega projects and complexity and kind of the more more modern more modern versions of systems thinking and systems engineering that would be relevant to kind of systems of systems and these kind of, you know, network situations. It is it does it does all feel somewhat similar to to the Web three say space. But I guess I'm also yeah. I'm interested to know how close how close it really is. Like, I, you know, I can accept a point, say, you know, zero knowledge proofs. In theory, you can see how that might there might be application for that. Because as you say, there are, you know, potentially, you know, distinct corporate or commercial entities with their distinct interests, and they may well not want to fully share information. And that that's but it yeah. It still feels quite theoretical to me how any of the technology in this space can really help with with with these kind of mega mega project issues."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 165.0,
        "end": 165.0,
        "transcript": "Right. I mean, there is there is a theoretical aspect. I'm I'm sorry, Chris. I I I guess I'll just wait for you to finish."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 5",
        "start": 180.0,
        "end": 180.0,
        "transcript": "No. No. No. No. I mean, by by all means, comment on that if you want. I I I was I'll I'll come to a sort of another more standard point, but I'm pleased to to give give give give you give you"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 195.0,
        "end": 195.0,
        "transcript": "There there is a theoretical aspect to it, right, which which, you know, is essentially, like, what I was highlighting as a research agenda. But there's also a very practical aspect to it. I mean, essentially, you're trying to synchronize across different systems in different companies. Right? For instance, you want to synchronize the schedules across every one of these companies at the milestones without sharing details of the activities that are getting into the schedules. You know, right now, of course, everyone just reports something every week and through an email or something like that, and someone sticks them in as Excel spreadsheet. That's how it's done. So now we're trying to synchronize the system payment systems. Right? If you're trying to synchronize schedules or the milestones without sharing activities, you know, that's kind of when your zero knowledge proof, you know, comes in. Right? In terms of the architecture, like, you know, I've got a pretty specific architecture that I've sketched on in one of my papers. You know, some of these aspects could change and so on. Right? In terms of the practicality of it, I think the the the deterrent I mean, or the stumbling block or rather the roadblock, right, has to do with the maturity of some of the things. It's not in terms of the overall architecture that wants to make use of things like zero knowledge proofs. It's about the readiness of, you know, of the, you know, things like, you know, smart contracts and their relationship with legal contracts, all of the which thing all of these things are not just a technical thing, but also a kind of sense making thing, right, which which researchers still are still trying to figure out. I mean, how do you interpret something that has been like if you have a smart contract where a bunch of companies have agreed to do certain certain things, how will a court of law in a common law system interpret that? Right? So what does that mean for your commercial kind of agreements? Right? How how do you refer to that? So these are the kind of things when it comes to making this practical. Right? In terms of, like, architecture, I'm quite confident that the architecture that I'll describe, you know, is something that would be very applicable to this problem area. Right? And and, again, like, we can definitely talk about these things in more detail because, I mean, obviously, time is a constraint here. And, you know, also got a couple of papers that I can share. But, yeah, in terms of, like, the the practicality, the thing is, like, the the maturity of things like zero knowledge proofs. I mean, how many projects really are relying on zero knowledge proofs in a commercial workflow at this time, even if you take a survey of every project that's out there? How many business to business workflows can have really deployed something like small contracts, right, which has to do with not just the technical, you know, aspects of smart contracts, but also, like, things like, you know, the, you know, the interpretations, you know, which is still an evolving thing, you know, with in course of law and things like that. So this is also why this, you know, a community like MetaGo is really interesting because it brings together people who are looking at this from different angles. Right? It would be good to have people who are also looking at this from a legal perspective. I know there are some researchers who are, and I don't know if there's any of them who are part of this community. You know? But this kind of, you know, collective thing is what is needed to remove some of these things and open the way to actually, you know, make this, like, a practical application."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 5",
        "start": 210.0,
        "end": 210.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I I don't know if there's time for me to make a further comment."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 225.0,
        "end": 225.0,
        "transcript": "We have some more time, please."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 5",
        "start": 240.0,
        "end": 240.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Okay. Then then just briefly so, I mean, this this is very cool. My my own interest personally is is specifically in DAG like structures. And in particular, where those cross organizational boundaries. So it's it's absolutely to this kind of problem situation. And the question is, what of the, you know, what of the information will be allowed to to kind of permeate those organizational boundaries. And so, obviously, to what extent can you use smart contracts and and all the rest of this technology to to kind of manage manage those those boundaries when you have, you know, a a a system, a a structure of related intents of crossing various scales that that does involve distinct organizations within it. So but I I mean, it just feels like there's way too much detail to even begin to get into it here. So but I'd I'd absolutely love to read your papers on this stuff. So somehow, I will make sure I I get hold of those. I suppose my my last comment now and an interest in your reaction is that my sense is that the the there's something quite different about about a state, about a nation, about governance in the sense of government, the kind of political governance that is often that is often central to to Web three projects on the one hand. And on the other hand, very much the the the important and huge use cases you've you've discussed here, the the, you know, systems of systems, mega projects. There does seem to me to be something quite different about endeavors that are fundamentally political in a way, and that they bring in a different set of problems. But I I I'm just interested if you've got any kind of thoughts on that or insight on that."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 255.0,
        "end": 255.0,
        "transcript": "Yes. I mean, essentially, I mean, mega projects are in many ways involved, you know, in in political problems. Right? Because these are always cross boundary projects. Right? Every project that I've been part of has been in some other country involved, you know, contractors in a bunch of different countries, suppliers, contractors, etcetera. And they are directly exposed to geopolitical situations, you know, to things like inflation, you know, rates and so on. Right? Because you're talking about yours, and you're you're talking about cross portrait boundary things. In almost every project, I mean, you always choose, like, a place, you know, a jurisdiction. Right? Like, you usually use The UK because contract law is better understood there, for instance. So this this is completely involved in governance and and political systems and social systems beyond the the project itself. And there's a whole thing called, you know, external stakeholder management, which I can get into and also, like, refer to, like, this architecture, how this helps with external stakeholder management as well. But but, yeah, let's I think we should connect offline so we can talk in detail about some of these things. One more thing I'll just say is that I really like, you know, the things when you talk about systems or systems, you know, what projects are SOS, systems of systems. And I do come from a systems point of view, which is, of course, related very much to complexity theory. Right? I mean, I'm I'm basically an engineer. Right? That that's kind of where I come from. But, yeah, I'd I'd like to get in touch with you outside of your address, and let's talk more about this. Right?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 5",
        "start": 270.0,
        "end": 270.0,
        "transcript": "Cool. Cool. I'd I'd absolutely love to. I will I will read all your papers first, and then, yeah, we'd love to have a conversation."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 285.0,
        "end": 285.0,
        "transcript": "Alright. Great. Sounds great. Thank you. Perfect."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 300.0,
        "end": 300.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Thank you, everyone, for contributing and and now for presenting. And I believe you both are in the Slack, so it should be pretty easy to find each other there. So sorry. I'm gonna that's too quick. I'm gonna pass off to first of all, I'm gonna ask, to stop screen sharing."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 315.0,
        "end": 315.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I'm just trying to do that now. Okay. I think I've stopped or paused."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 330.0,
        "end": 330.0,
        "transcript": "Pause for a moment. Okay. I still see the screen."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 345.0,
        "end": 345.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. You still see the screen. What's going on here? You know what? I'm just gonna exit and come back to the meeting if Okay. Or actually, can can you cut me off, Santo, and I'll just go I'm"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 360.0,
        "end": 360.0,
        "transcript": "actually I'm actually not co host today."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 375.0,
        "end": 375.0,
        "transcript": "Oh, you're not?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 390.0,
        "end": 390.0,
        "transcript": "Nathan is able to do that. Nathan, are you still present?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 405.0,
        "end": 405.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. Perfect."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 420.0,
        "end": 420.0,
        "transcript": "Alright. So we're gonna pass over to Tucker now, who is gonna be talking about CrowdRight. And yeah. So we'll start that now."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 435.0,
        "end": 435.0,
        "transcript": "Awesome. Thanks. I will share my screen. Is that is that showing up?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 450.0,
        "end": 450.0,
        "transcript": "Yep. I can see that."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 465.0,
        "end": 465.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. Well, great. Alright. Well, thanks everybody for having me. I'm really glad to be here. I'm looking forward to coming to more of these in the future, and looking forward to, you know, fully getting into some conversation around CrowdRight after this short talk. My name is Tucker MacLachlan. I'm a designer and technologist in Toronto, and I'm developing a project called Crowd Write, which is a tool for large scale participatory writing. And what I thought I'd do is share some context on the project and then give a quick demo of the current state of it, and then open it up for conversation and feedback and, invite all of you to to play with the tool and its current state if you're interested. So I wanted to start with just this crude diagram to talk through one form of collaborative writing and governance that I've experienced and been a part of in more traditional offline institutions, and that's where there's a small team that is empowered to make changes to texts that affect the broader membership of the organization. So maybe, for instance, what we're looking at is a company that has a team updating its remote work policy in light of COVID or something of that nature. So the team has discussion about possible changes, and they have some form of protocol governing how they're gonna make decisions, and through that, they take these governing texts from one version to the next. And one thing that I felt both when I've been within the the team circle and outside of it, is just that there there could be a much broader range of possibilities on the table and that the institutions themselves could be more vibrant and creative if more people could be part of this process, if everybody could be part of this process in a meaningful way. There's this great Thomas Paine quote to this effect that I learned about from the website of a a really interesting organization called Mass LBP that leads citizens assemblies. It says, there's a massive sense lying in a dormant state that good government should quietly harness. So that resonated with me, and it's, very consistent with the the ethos of of Crabbe as a as a project. But one challenge is that, the idea of hundreds or thousands or even more people all collaborating and giving their input on a document can be super overwhelming, just on a logistical level, thinking about all of the track changes. And I think that's probably where the impulse to bring a graph to a smaller group can come from where it's just easier to manage the protocol and the decision making around change. But on the other hand, we do have subreddits with millions of members and code bases on GitHub with tens of thousands of contributors and Wikipedia, which is edited by millions. And so we do have these common experiences that show us that large scale participatory writing can work online. And so the question that CrowdWright is exploring is how we might bring some of those Internet participation dynamics into an editing experience so that we might be able to open up writing processes that are often somewhat closed off to people and constrained to a limited number of collaborators and invite participation on important texts at the scale of an entire city community or entire university community or other large institution. There's this great conversation between David Graeber and your Teal that I was introduced to from a link shared by the artist Joshua Sidarella, where they're debating different forms of governance. And there's this moment where Teal says to Graeber, I always get the sense that your solution is a larger thing that somehow, ultimately, will require more structure, more bureaucracy of one sort or another. And when I heard that, I was struck by this irony that in certain ways, the tech firms that Thiel aligns himself with and and sees as unbureaucratic do have characteristics of highly structured but also very participatory bureaucracies in the sense that developers at companies often have access to much, if not all, of the company's code and are encouraged to collaborate on it in a deliberative, narrative way with pull requests and code reviews and branching strategies and things like that. Source control is very much a form of high-tech participatory bureaucracy. So one way to think about Crabtree as a project is that it is aiming to introduce more structure and more bureaucracy as as Theo is, like, using Graber upon to do in that conversation. But, hopefully, a kind of highly automated, enjoyable bureaucracy that feels more like collaborating code or participating in a forum and brings together aspects of what's worked well for developers and forums and wikis to facilitate effective large scale writing as a practice that can be widely adopted, both by traditional organizations and more Internet native structures. So that's kind of the the spirit of the project and and the the goals for it. And I'll just flip over to, a demo now and share the current state of it. It's up at crowdrate.xyz. I can throw this link in chat as well. Let's see. And the way it's set up is that, in this example, which is for some park rules, activities that are allowed and not allowed in parks, we can see the main text of the document. We can see suggestions that people have left along the side, and these are sorted based on how much support they receive. So things that have more support show up at the top. But the probably the most kind of novel aspect of the tool at the moment is the use of an editing protocol. So in this case, the document is set up so that suggestions will get accepted when they have 10 more upvotes than downvotes. And this is where I I started to get really excited when I learned about modulating politics and started to think about how you really could have kind of a wide variety of editing protocols that would be suitable for different structures of organizations. So if we go into one of these suggestions, it'll show us how the text would change, if the suggestion was was passed with a difficulty. And we have this ability to participate by supporting the change or opposing it. If we wanna make our own change, we can go and edit the document and say, you know, actually, speakers should be allowed now, and and we want to add that as a suggestion. I'll have speakers, and then that'll show up and show us what we changed about the text. So that's that's kind of the current state of CrowdRight. If you're interested in playing around with it, the the new document editor is at crowdbryte.xyz/create. It's got a limited range of governance controls at the moment. But, yeah, I really welcome thoughts and and discussion about this. So thanks for having me, and that's that's kind of state of COVID."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 480.0,
        "end": 480.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Thank you so much. I I can't quite tell if Tyler is clapping or wants to say."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 495.0,
        "end": 495.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. First of all, I really, really enjoyed that both, like, the problem statement and how you walk through that, but then also with the MVP as well. And I I kind of see the question about, like, expertise in in this. Like, you brought an example in the very beginning, which is about, like, HR policies. And HR policies are one of those things where, like, the sensible thing to do can often be illegal. Like so, like, is the kind of thing where if you're, like, crowdsource, like, what is, like, a reasonable thing we should do in this situation? And you crowdsource from across the company. You get, like, a 100 people. They're like, yeah. Thumbs up. Let's do it. Like, let's make make this change in our policies, but, actually, there's, like, there's a arcane law that only is one person would know who's, like, a a nature policy expert. And so I'm just kinda curious, like, how you think about that kind of tension between expertise and, like, crowdfunding suggestions."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 510.0,
        "end": 510.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. That's a really great point. You know, it's it's it's interesting. I I I did talk to one of my HR friends about this early on and kinda asked their thoughts, and they they had kind of a similar thought, which is, you know, you don't necessarily always want people to be able to participate in things, or you you do want that expertise because of those laws. I I tend to think sort of sort of where I'm at with it is that a lot of the time, you would want people to be able to voice things and to discuss maybe why something is impossible because institutionally, like, in the organization, people might not know that you can't do something that is reasonable. And so having the decision making authority rest with the the person who has expertise makes sense, you know, because they have the expertise and you wanna keep everything legal. But I think there I think there's value in, you know, the organization being able to see that, oh, actually, this thing that is common sense but not legal is something a lot of people are are thinking about and would wanna do, and maybe that's something we should we should talk about or or discuss."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 525.0,
        "end": 525.0,
        "transcript": "That that that makes a lot of sense. I'm just kinda curious if you've thought about ways of, like, baking in expertise into this, like, different weightings of of, like, votes, for example, or, like, wait. People can, like, shut down a suggestion, like, an expert can shut down suggestion. I don't know. Just for"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 540.0,
        "end": 540.0,
        "transcript": "Totally."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 555.0,
        "end": 555.0,
        "transcript": "Totally. It's it's really fun to think about, you know, giving giving certain groups of users a veto, for instance, or or different weights associated with Ronan. So, yeah, definitely definitely thinking about that. I'm looking forward to taking that further. Awesome. Thank you."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 570.0,
        "end": 570.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Thank you both. We'll go to Ronan."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 585.0,
        "end": 585.0,
        "transcript": "Thanks. Yeah. This is this is really cool. Thanks for the demo. Fun to see. Like, it's it's just, yeah, really neat idea. And it reminded me of, something called policy kit, which I I don't know if you're familiar with. I just wanted to I dropped it in the"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 600.0,
        "end": 600.0,
        "transcript": "chat"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 615.0,
        "end": 615.0,
        "transcript": "too, but just to say that, like, sort of this idea of adding policy over things that I think in, like, classic software are more, like, permission based. So they added kind of the ability to make it into a process rather than just, like, you have the permissions or don't have the permissions to accept an edit or make an edit. And not because of process. So here there's, like, some voting going on. And they give you example on policy kit, I think of, like, you know, renaming a Slack channel. Instead of having permissions to rename a Slack channel or not having permissions, it becomes kind of, you know, there's a jury and then the vote, and then you do it. So it kind of feels like it fits in that same general framework, and I don't know. Maybe are you thinking of, like, open sourcing this or, like, making it, like, connect to different projects like that?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 630.0,
        "end": 630.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. To be honest, I I don't know yet. I mean, I've I've just been working on it for about a month or or two, and I'm still kinda thinking about what direction you're going. But but, yeah, I've been really impressed with with PolicyKit and and just introducing those kinds of mechanics into spaces like Slack or spaces like F one. I think it's really cool."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 645.0,
        "end": 645.0,
        "transcript": "And maybe one other yeah. I guess this is a I I just a different kind of question, but suggestions that are sort of not within edit. Like, have you thought about that? I was just thinking of, like, you know, change of style, but not having extra something concrete that you've written, which is, like, change of style as paragraph to whatever. It's sort of not an edit that can be replaced, but rather a suggestion that's sort of more, I guess, amorphous or something like that."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 660.0,
        "end": 660.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So change where somebody's saying, you know, maybe that's should be a heading one, for instance."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 675.0,
        "end": 675.0,
        "transcript": "Well, that one is, like, pretty"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 7",
        "start": 690.0,
        "end": 690.0,
        "transcript": "like, that's concrete because you"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 705.0,
        "end": 705.0,
        "transcript": "can just suggest I mean, I was talking more about, like, this should be more formal language or something like that, but then not actually doing the wording."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 720.0,
        "end": 720.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've definitely definitely interested in in adding kind of a comment there for for just discussion that doesn't involve a change. But, yeah, just not not yet there, but but, yeah, definitely something something something to to pursue. Cool. Thanks."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 735.0,
        "end": 735.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna just build on this conversation really quickly and then pass over to Nicholas. I mean, what what I'm sort of hearing in in Rodan's suggestion is, you know, potentially having something like something like an NLP, like GPT or something like these websites that kind of, like, give you a sense for, like, at what, like, level of leadership you're you're targeted at, and having that kind of integrated. So that you could sort of see, like, what the change would be, and, like, you can just get more qualitative information about why you're making that change. Maybe you're you're trying to change it so that it's more readable to whatever audience you're trying to target, or maybe you're trying to kind of introduce some stochastic qualities by introducing, automatically generated language. So I think that's kind of where my mind goes when I hear the the discussion that you two are having there. I wanna I wanna pass to Nicholas at this point."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 7",
        "start": 750.0,
        "end": 750.0,
        "transcript": "Cool. Yeah. This is this is super exciting. I especially I I loved I felt the examples of GitHub and and Wikipedia and Reddit were were really compelling, and I could see, like, tons of I I feel like people would wanna try this out, like, play with this, you know, in the very, very short term in all of those contexts. One thing I was curious about the park example. I often find myself using parks as an example when I'm, like, trying to just, like, you know, talk to my parents about public goods problems and collective action and things of this nature as, like, a, you know, go to example. But then, like I I found that it sometimes causes confusion with this like really intense spatial component where, like lots of people for a given park, there's like a really low propensity that most people on the planet will ever go to that park. And so I guess, yeah, my my first question is just like I'm wondering if this is related this is sparked by the HR question. Kind of like, what are the ways that it might might be possible to, like, wait people's votes differently or something like that? Could you give a two x credit to people who actually visited the park, you know, via some kind of affirmation method? Or maybe, you know, the park is just an example, and the the Wikipedia context is actually the much more practical starting point. And then my second really quick question was just where could we go to find out more about this? Is is it just the crowdright.xyz, or is there, like, other other things that I should follow and look at?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 765.0,
        "end": 765.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. At the moment at the moment, it's crowdright.xyz, and there's a very inactive Twitter account that's just crowdwrite, but I'll use that more in the future. So thank you. And, yeah, in terms of in terms of waiting, I totally think, like, it it is really fun to to think about how you could develop kind of editing protocols and governance that does account for there's this there's this phrase from this writer named Sherry passed an act that I really appreciate, which is jurisdiction as a legal order of care. And I think it's just a really lovely way to to to get at, you know, that that those who give more care to this this thing, whether it's a park or what have you, maybe maybe you should have, yeah, like, more of a voting rate. So I'd I'd love to kind of find ways to sort of incorporate that into that. And then the other thing that I'll say about parks is that, you know, one of the things that kinda happened in in Toronto, and, you know, I may may well have happened in places where you are too over the pandemic. It's just that there were a lot of people camping in in parks because they were, you know, experiencing homelessness. And it is, you know, in Toronto at least, illegal to camp in parks. And yet there was a lot of support for people to do that, and and it became quite a contentious thing, and then then we had police clearing parks of of people that had quite quite civil that were, you know, better for them than than shelter systems and whatnot. And so, you know, I I am, you know, interested in in sort of the way that conversations of that nature can happen on Twitter in kind of an effective way and how it could be really interesting if if you could have, you know, an effective discussion, in the context of, like, the city bylaws on parks to say, no. Actually, like, the the population of the city thinks that this, like, textual change should be made. So, definitely, that's that's that's something on my mind as well."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 780.0,
        "end": 780.0,
        "transcript": "I see that we have a comment here from Kishore. Would you like to jump in and and give some voice to this, Kishore? Would you like maybe to read it aloud?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 8",
        "start": 795.0,
        "end": 795.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I mean, I didn't want it to take up a lot of time, but I was just thinking, like, a best way to get people to use this tool for policy issues would be probably at model UNs where they actually develop policies. Right? So I was just thinking, like, this would be great because when I was doing model UN, we always just crowd into one laptop and then say, hey. Can you make this edit and suggestion and stuff? But here, it's it'll be more documented. Alright."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 810.0,
        "end": 810.0,
        "transcript": "That's a great idea. Thank you. Yeah. What do you have any thoughts on how to how to approach model UN people? I haven't I haven't been involved in that space."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 8",
        "start": 825.0,
        "end": 825.0,
        "transcript": "Even even I haven't, but I don't I don't know where you would start. But I think the the interesting part is it's well documented on how the structure should be with, like, clauses, subclasses, and stuff. So you could easily open source it with the structure and and then have have communities opt in. So it's not it's specific to a particular conference here."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 840.0,
        "end": 840.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Sweet."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 855.0,
        "end": 855.0,
        "transcript": "Maybe maybe sort of in that that line of thinking, I'm curious if you have some other kinds of example cases that you might sort of like, if people were to, like, want to experiment or play with this, like, what are some kind of templates or models or spear like, potential use cases that you have in mind?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 870.0,
        "end": 870.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. To be honest, I mean, I I the the starting point for it really was kind of policy documents. So it's it's something where I I I think that's something that I need to work on now is is sort of framing it with with templates and starting points. I I don't have I don't have looking great answer."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 885.0,
        "end": 885.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. One thing that comes to mind is I know that, like, there's a network of documenters who work in different cities across the states. I think if you go to documenters.org, you can kind of look into that. And basically, they send two people to public government meetings and take notes. And then they kind of create a repository where people can come in and and review those notes. It would might be interesting thing about, like I mean, I don't know exactly, like, how you would kind of integrate, you know, governance mechanisms in there. But it does seem like it would be interesting to sort of have those notes being taken and then have a way for the public to come in and kind of provide some kind of meaningful, like, decision making that is then in some ways fed back to the the decision makers who are being documented. That's one kind of immediate thought."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 900.0,
        "end": 900.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. That's what's what was the name of that that group? I'll"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 915.0,
        "end": 915.0,
        "transcript": "I'll I'll I'll put a link in the the chat. Okay. It's documenters.org. Awesome. I also we yeah. We have a couple minutes left. Nathan has has even even posted a little bit in the the chat. Is there anything that you're interested in adding to the conversation?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 9",
        "start": 930.0,
        "end": 930.0,
        "transcript": "Thanks. I I just think it's a really neat project. And, you know, for instance, it could fit with, an experiment that some of us have been exploring around trying to do a crowdsourcing rewriting of the Twitter rules. So it's been very much on my mind. And, and I think the question about, about adding other kind of functionalities, having, like, particular people with veto power or something like that is is really interesting. And certainly PolicyKit, you know, could interact with that. The question is whether you wanna lose the relative simplicity and intuitiveness of the current approach, in exchange for the more the greater complexity and and and opportunity you could have from having Python scripts. Right? Do you want users dealing with Python scripts? Maybe it could be a drop down of options. It whatever. It's you know, you you you'd lose some of that simplicity and beauty of this of the current user experience in that. And so I'm I'm torn. But, generally, like, Tucker, I'm just really excited about what what you're doing here. It's please keep keep sharing updates with us because I'd love to, you know, help find some use cases and and opportunities to play."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 945.0,
        "end": 945.0,
        "transcript": "Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much, and thanks everybody for the the conversational ambiance. I really appreciate it."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 960.0,
        "end": 960.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. We we are at time. So if people need to go, we can go. But, technically, there's another two minutes for discussion, so I'm happy to stay on for just a minute and chat. Speaking of, like, what Nathan's talking about, I mean yeah. If you do have ideas for things that you would like to explore, please reach out. Always happy to set up kind of more practical hands on experiments with tools and get the community involved to actually play with this. So really keen to do that. Does anyone else have anything that they wanna add before we close out? Okay. Perfect. Yeah. I personally have, like, some other side interests. So, like, I I messaged you about this, but, like, croquet.i0 and, like, kind of multiplayer browsing and sort of, like, community cross portal kind of connections and, like, how you're gonna bring these things in the community self governance. Like, So I I think there's a lot of interesting discussions to carry on after this this talk, and I hope you'll be present to to engage with those and looking forward to seeing how everything develops."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 975.0,
        "end": 975.0,
        "transcript": "That's fine. Definitely looking forward to it. Thanks."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 990.0,
        "end": 990.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. Well, thanks everyone for coming. We'll close it there. And we typically do an applause at the end. I'm always really bad about remembering this. But if any if everyone would like to unmute and give a round of applause for the two speakers that we had today, we'll do that on two, one. Super. Thank you all so much."
      }
    ],
    "summary": null
  }
}