Thank you, Nathan, for that very kind introduction. Alright. Let me pull those slides up. There it is. And share, and there we go. And let's put that into presenter mode. Alright. Is the is the slide up front and center?

Alright. So the, this talk is called Slackbot Boarding House Applications of Digital Governance to Physical Community. The title is actually a a bit of a joke. I was talking to a friend of mine, Max, who's a data scientist at Facebook, and, you know, he called the the house Slackbot Boarding House. It's kind of a joke, and I was like, oh, it's it seems a little pejorative. But then I thought about it, and I thought, you know what? That's kinda funny. I'm into that. And, broadly, I think that at this point, a little self deprecating humor is probably very protective against the culty tendencies that I'd otherwise be flirting with. So I was happy to name my name my talk Slackbot Boarding House. And so kind of the the the overview is gonna be I'll talk a bit about my background, my intellectual influences, and kind of why this project was of interest to me and kinda how it came together and how I approached it. I'll talk a bit about the problem definition, which I think is mostly economic in nature. Like, what are the economic circumstances that I think create the environment that allow a project like this to be the right fit for the right time? Then some of the design principles that we brought into this project in terms of the design principles for the governance, the design principles for the software. And then I'm gonna talk about three of the mechanisms that we developed, chores, hearts, and things, and kind of how they work, the problems they solve. And then I'm going to talk about the actual launch of the house because not only did we develop governance software, we actually built and opened a coliving house to put it into practice. And that was, you know, a whole another adventure and kinda how that went over, how the launch went over, what we learned. And then I'll talk about kind of the the next steps for the project, how I feel about the launch, what are some interesting takeaways we can learn, and then kind of the future of the the project. So that's kinda what we're what we're gonna do. And so sort of my background, so I went to Berkeley. As it's set a few years before me, I studied political economy and cognitive science. And so that was the first sort of influence, of of political economy, you know, a lot of Hegel, Polanyi, not Ostrom, that came later. But these questions of how do we live together, what are the right laws institutions. I also got involved in the Berkeley Student Cooperative, of which Seth is also a member, which is, the, you know, a large student housing cooperative in Berkeley, the biggest in the country, 20 houses, 1,300 members. And I was super turned on by this organization. I really connected to the, the creativity that I felt people experienced when they were all living together. I was really turned on by the the self governance and the empowerment of that. So I was I was really stoked about the organization. And as part of my role, I facilitated, you know, hundreds of hours of meetings. This is a very meeting heavy organization, which on one hand was very thrilling, but I think also maybe matured me and helped me realize how a lot of these meetings were dead time. And that, you know, having everyone in a room talking over every decision and raising their hands and voting was maybe not the end all and be all of, of governance. And then I moved to New York City. That's when I got into software, you know, went to a boot camp, got a couple jobs, was in kind of the civic tech scene, so exposed to a lot of, we're gonna make health care better. We're gonna make the cities more responsive. That that was sort of my influence at that time. I went to Columbia for a more technical degree. I that's when I got into machine learning, information theory operating systems, voting systems. So a lot of the the the more rigorous math and computer science that would then, you know, come into my later sort of work with with others was developed during this time. And then I went to I I went abroad to Israel. That's when I joined Colony, which Nathan mentioned is is where I that's my full time job. And there's definitely been a really amazing kind of cross influence where, you know, a lot of the idea like, a lot of things that I brought to Colony, you know, predated that involvement, you know, my interest in in these sort of voting and budgeting systems, these interface questions. But also at Colony, I was exposed to a lot of very crypto flavored mechanism design. So there was it was a really nice kind of cross talk and cross influence. While I was at Colony, I helped develop, the budget box algorithm, which I'm still very proud of. It's a budgeting tool, which actually I was able to then take a lot of and use in in the house. So, you know, there had been a lot of cross influences there. And then, you know, 2020, March 2020, right before the pandemic, I, I moved back to California, Los Angeles, my hometown, because I was ready to to take on this housing project. You know, I'd known for years that this was sort of what I wanted to do. And then, you know, kind of I I don't know if it was ironic or or poetic or faithful, but, you know, March 2020 was that I pulled the trigger and then it was immediately COVID. And, you know, that was odd. But I think I think, you know, for that two years, I just, you know, with my dad, we bought this house. He renovated it. Honestly, grateful to have something to do during that time. During that time, I also work with Seth and, my good friend, Joe Desimone, who's kind of a brilliant game designer, and we were sort of the crew that developed the actual software. So I had a lot of ideas going in. Joe and Seth just kinda told me that they were dumb, and we went back and forth like this for, you know, a year solid. And I think we came up with some really good outputs. I think a lot of my initial ideas were rightfully toned down. I think I went into it with a very exceptionalist attitude around mechanism, and they both really encouraged me to to keep it much more culture focused. And I think that was great advice. I think that that dialectical process resulted in, I think, a good product. And then we opened the house in September 2022, just last September, about six months ago, and the house was full January, and we've just been cruising ever since. So it's kinda how we got there. Alright. So kind of the the problem definition, this is why I think housing was a really good place to be working as a governance person, is that, you know, we have these kind of two problems. Housing is expensive. We're in a housing crisis. That's not a secret. People are also very lonely. They're atomized. They they lack meaningful connection. I think these are two things that are present as are are given. And then the next step is sort of saying, well, if we put people in higher density, we can lower housing costs. You know, people are doing co living, people are doing micro apartments. You know, like, this is something that other people are also figuring out, but it creates coordination problems. People are gonna be at each other's throats. They're gonna be fighting. It's gonna be noise, whatever, whatever. Most people reach for management as a solution. Oh, well, we're gonna have co living. We have to have a community manager. People this is just most people are just that that's a non even a question. And like I've lived in a lot of places that had managers and they're expensive. So I think a lot of the cost benefit that you get from density, you lose through management costs. So that's almost like a net zero there, and they're of inconsistent quality. And that's sort of a personal point. I think even when I was an undergrad, I think maybe it was because I was in this sort of radical community. I just sort of made it my project to, like, remove the the leader as a as as an input. I I don't know exactly where that became my thing, but it was and I think, you know, as I think we are well aware, you know, relying on entrenched systemic, systemically entrenched leadership is a double edged sword. And so I kind of intellectually, I thought, well, in what ways can we remove this what I think systemic weakness? And so then we move on to kind of, okay, well, self governance can replace management in many cases. We can get a we can get rid of this expensive and unreliable input, get the benefit of density without the risk of management, and also self governance facilitates community. And this is something that people see when they work with others on projects. Activists experience this quite a bit. You you you feel a sense of bond to the people you're working with. So it actually not only does it lower cost, but it also creates that closeness that makes the place better to live. And so the result is you get this lower cost, higher quality housing. And I think that that key insight that the density or the the the cost and the loneliness are not two problems to be solved separately. They are in fact each other's solution. You can point these two problems at each other, and they're both addressed. I think that is a key insight that I want people to take away is that we have two problems, which instead of solving separately, we can point them at each other and they are simultaneously solved for free. Not quite for free, but I think I think that's the essential economic sort of understanding I want to to communicate with this slide. And then the last thing, and Seth encouraged me to to to emphasize this, is that, you know, a lot of this project is about managing the day to day, But ultimately, you know, people say, is this really a coop? And I say, no, because I own the house. You know, my father and I have our house that people rent to live in. And so at the end of the day, you know, I'm renting a house out. And that was a choice that I made because and and I've seen this over and over again. I know a lot of groups of people who have said, well, it would be so nice if we all just like bought a house together. And they never got off the ground because coordinating six to 10 people, you know, with 100,000, you know, 6 figure investments is very challenging. And I think that And I think that ultimately the amount of people who wanna live in community is much larger than the amount of people who wanna live in community and have 6 figures of cash burning a hole in their pocket. So I just didn't go there. I think in the future, we can talk about ways to actually distribute the ownership, but that's not what this project was about. And so then I'll kind of move on to the, design principles for the software. And I I'm really proud of these. I think that they they've gotten us pretty far. So the first one is no manager or privileged or privileged administrative roles. And this is, again, kind of like my position going into this. Right? I don't want to systemically entrench a manager or have someone I don't want to I don't want to elect a president. I don't wanna elect a manager and give them special powers. I want everyone to be kind of an equal player, and design with that assumption in mind. I put an asterisk because I put an asterisk throughout this talk because the truth is at many points, I have reserved some administrative power for myself, and that was something that was done out of expediency. And I've done it very sort of thoughtfully. And I'd like to think that over time, I can remove those dependencies. But at the beginning, I did have a role to play and I and I can acknowledge it. And I I am working to remove that as much as possible. So didn't quite achieve that ideal, but got pretty close. I linked to, this article by Raph Koster, who's a game designer who Joe introduced me to, who I think is quite brilliant. And he has a really great essay. He has a lot of great essays about game design, which influenced a lot of what we did here. And, he has one called the trust spectrum, which talks about different game designs, different levels of specificity among the players. You know, it's like the the, you know, you know, soccer where everyone's kind of the same, and then basketball people have anyway, it's a great article, but the point is I think for this setting where I wanted people to be able to come and go, and enter into something as an as a peer, I wanted to have no managers as as as a as a systemic sort of requirement. That was the first thing. Second thing, was I wanted there to be simple and intuitive inputs. And and kind of what what I mean by that is I think when I was, you know, doing the Berkeley co op, something that I realized was that a lot of people were sitting there nodding their head and raising their hands, but they weren't really they weren't really governing because they didn't have the context. Right? Decisions are too complex. People can raise their hand and vote yes, but they're not actually meaningfully providing input because the decisions are too complex. And so if I want if I if I wanted to achieve meaningful self government, the decisions had to be boiled down to their essential like, to to be as simple as possible. You know? And I think that this is kind of what we did also with with BudgetBox was how can we make these decisions which appear complex to in fact be simple such that every decision provides essentially its own context, and people can just go through making a lot of micro decisions that are then aggregated afterwards. So that was a goal. The third goal, was humans for sensing, machines for bookkeeping. And I think this came out of my background in data science and machine learning, where I just spent so much time, and I worked as a data scientist after grad school. And I was just like, all this data's crap. You know, it's all noisy. No one knows what it means. There's no cleaning. Like, I just I developed I had, like, a real crisis of faith where I was like, I don't trust any of these models because I feel like all the data coming into them is inaccurate. And I just this is this is a crisis. I'm being a little dramatic, but I think that, and I think that, you know, a big part of this project was there there are no and no point are models, like, fitting to data. Right? There's no cameras. All of the sensory inputs, all the subjective inputs are generated by humans. And then the machine's job is to do the bookkeeping. So So you make sure that the vote to count the votes, to to to to to update the numbers. All the things that are are automatic are done by machines, but all the things that are are are are subjective are done by humans. And so at no point is the system state ever invalid. And that was important. I didn't want anyone to be able to say, oh, you know, like, these results are wrong or, like, the algorithm is wrong or, like, whatever. I didn't want that. And I think that, you know, looking at kind of the larger critique of technology that we're seeing now where it's like, oh, the algorithms are racist, the algorithms are biased. I think really trying to get ahead of that was, was was a big goal for us. And the last thing was, have these continuously available processes where it's not like, oh, we have a meeting on Sunday. That's where we make our decisions the rest of the time. You know, there's no meeting. It's everything is always available. Everything is always happening. You know, votes are always ongoing. Everyone always has their phone. And so the governance is not something that occurs at a meeting once a week or once a month. It's something that is constantly happening that everyone is always having access to, if you want to engage. And, you know, everything is lazy consensus. So if people don't want to vote, they don't have to, and the process moves on. So those were kind of our design principles. And then I kind of we're not gonna read this. It's basically a summary of a lot of things that I've talked about. I put it here because for completeness, I think it makes the slide deck more of a standalone. The one thing that I will say is that I think that the the the choice of housing, was valuable because a lot of the work there is repetitious by nature, and I think it makes it an easier setting for these kind of algorithmic interventions. I think that in, like, a workplace, which requires more novel ideation, these interventions would be less effective. And, yes, but I think I think that that's basically what I have to say about this slide. It's you go over the slides again, you can take a look, but I'm not gonna spend more time on it right now. Alright. So I'm gonna go kind of over the three mechanisms now and talk about how they work. So the first one is chores, and I'm very proud of chores. I think it's I think it's kind of like the crown jewel, so to speak, of this whole project. And the kind of the setup is, you know, this is there's an Ostrom influence here very heavily. There's an Ostrom influence everywhere. But the idea is, you know, when you're living in a house, you, you know, you're sharing a resource. You know, in this case, it's not a forest or a fishery, but it's order. Right? People get up and they consume a clean house. Right? They consume it throughout the day and they produce disorder. And that's that's the resource that we have to manage as a group of people. And so it's consumed. It must be renewed. And so as entropy, you know, I'm just kinda flexing with this line, but it increases over time. We must apply energy to maintain equilibrium, and that's sort of the setup. Right? So we can put it into kind of an Austrian framework. We can analyze it that way. This is this is the setup that that I've chosen. And then the you know, as a contrast, the intervention that is the most common, which is a schedule, I think is limited. I think it's it's not a bad intervention. It's just too simple, and this is a better one. You know? Schedules are inflexible, and they require a schedule maker. So already there's an admin input that I don't want, and they're inflexible. It's, oh, you know, it's Thursday night. I have to do the dishes. I wanna go out with my friends. This sucks. Or, like, now I feel like the system is imposing upon me or restricting my freedom and autonomy. And I just no one likes that. And it's just that we can we can do better. And so I think instead of this sort of inflexible schedule, use a structured task specific mechanism. And this is a kind of the the this is what it looks like. Basically, the idea behind chores is, instead of, you know, having a schedule or, you know, in the Berkeley Co Ops, everyone owed five hours a week. So twenty hours a month of chores, which I think is a lot, people owe a 100 points. So every month everyone owes 100 points worth of chores. And then every chore is worth points to do. But and I think this is like the first thing that's interesting is that the amount of points and chores worth is not fixed. It increases over time until the chore is done. And so you can think of every chore as being kind of continuously auctioned off to the house where, okay, it's been, you know, every day or every couple hours, say, you know, dishes haven't been done in a couple hours, they're worth five points. You know, eight hours later, they're worth 10 points. You know? And the idea is, well, people are all going around. There's no schedule. People need to get a 100 points. So everyone is looking for opportunities to get points, I would say, efficiently. They wanna find chores that are overvalued. They wanna do chores that they enjoy. And there's no real restriction or structure except that more popular chores will be done for fewer points because more people wanna do them. Less popular chores will be done for more points. So say, you know, no one wants to do the bathroom. I don't mind doing the bathroom. I do bathrooms for 50 points. I do two bathrooms a month. I'm all I'm done. Someone else says, I love the dishes. Maybe you have to do the dishes 20 times a month to get your points. So you have a lot of these very desirable coordinating, activity that is occurring, while preserving a lot of people's autonomy, while also keeping the house quite clean. So there's a there's a lot of nice outcomes of of this setup. And you can see on the third kind of screenshot, all the verification is is is is is pure based. Right? So whenever people do a chore, it gets posted in in the in the law of chores channel. You know, it's so and so did the chore for this many points. I have a little bit of a, you know, like an emoji achievement system just for flavor just for flavor. I like I'm trying not to go too hard on it because people roll their eyes. I think a little bit of it people got a kick out of. And then it's basically house verification. So there's no one whose job is to go around and check. It's thumbs up, thumbs down. I've I've encouraged people to post pictures. So a lot of people are will post pictures in the comments, and that that's kind of been the rhythm. There's there's a second aspect to it, which I'm not really gonna go into so much in this talk, but I I think that there's a whole another much more technical talk about this, which maybe we can do sometime because it'd be a lot of fun. You can also adjust the speeds of the chores, and this is, like, kind of, like, a one level higher. If you think of the Ostrom three layer framework, doing the chores is the, I forget the terminology, but there's, like, like, maybe operational where it's people are individually doing chores. But going one level up, people are actually able to to to to set the the parameters of which chores are worth the most. So chores don't all gain points at the same speed. It could be the dishes gain points at twice the speed of cooking because people want dishes to be done twice as often. So there's a whole second layer of calibrating that the house can do to ensure that things are being done in a balanced way. And and we can talk about more of this afterwards and maybe in another another talk, but there there's a whole mechanism there. It's actually the same algorithm that we used for BudgetBox applied to this to allow the house to kind of calibrate. You could say, like, fit maybe where they're fitting a curve manually that's such that every chore is given enough points to ensure that it's done at at the right frequency. And that's been that was another mechanism that I think has been really fun. And I really felt I think helps round out this this sort of intervention. So that's chores. It's gone it's it's been working really well. Two things I wanna say about it. People initially are sort of skeptical. They're like, points. That's I don't know. What is that? And then, you know, I get, like, black mirror comments, but after a week, people say, you know, wow. Like, once I did it three or four times, I totally got it. And I'm just so much happier with this than, like, leaving passive aggressive post it notes on the fridge, you know? So that's something I'm very proud of. Also, something else I'm really proud of so at the Berkeley co ops, as I said, people did twenty hours a month of, of chores. I would say here, people are doing an average of two hours a month. So, you know, we've reduced the actual amount of time spent on chores by a fact by an order of magnitude through this intervention, and I'm very proud of that. So I I think that's something that I I think is actually very cool. Alright. So the next mechanism I wanna talk about is called hearts. HEARTs is the, general purpose dispute resolution system. And and and I think what what what I what I mean by that is, you know, and I think I think that ultimately, and this is something I took from my kind of my my my math education, is that the more general a problem, the less specific your solutions, the more specific your problem, the more specific your solutions. Right? So chores was a very specific mechanism to solve a very specific problem with a lot of constraints. But, you know, there's gonna be other issues that are not so constrained that need addressing, and a system that can incorporate all of those was essential. Right? I think ultimately, we ask ourselves, you know, why does pass fail voting Why is pass fail voting still what we do even though it sucks? It's because you can pass fail vote on anything. Right? You can pass fail vote on an arbitrary string. It's it's sort of it it's never not It never doesn't work. It sucks, but it works, and that's how people do it. And so I think having some sort of general purpose mechanism here was also important. Right? Say, you know, someone, like, four in the morning, gets home drunk, screams at me. That's a problem that needs to be addressed. Right? So this is how we address that. It also doubles as a clearing house where every mechanism now can basically drop its result into hearts, which is sort of our reputation system. And so, you know, if we go from, you know, say we build the suite out into five or 10 different mechanisms, they can all use parts as sort of a backstop. Right? And so every mechanism can express its output in terms of parts, and it acts as a really nice coordinating concept. Something it also does that I'm pretty happy about is it allows for graduated sanctions. This is another Ostrom concept. You know, the idea is that, you know, people are living their day to day and happens. Someone does do their chores one month. Someone having, like is playing music late at night. It's like, okay. Well, this behavior needs to stop. We're gonna take away a heart. You know, losing one heart means nothing. And and Seth and I and Joe spent a lot of time talk spent a lot of time talking about what it means to lose hearts. But the idea our hope is that, you know, losing a heart doesn't mean that much. Losing all your hearts is bad. Right? So, like, losing one heart is a signpost. Losing two hearts is a signpost. It's this behavior is problematic. You should address it, but, you know, it's all forgiven. Losing all your hearts is okay. Now there's a big problem, and we have to figure out whether you belong here, you know, but it doesn't but people it's never a surprise. I think that was important that people aren't sort of anxious about, oh, gosh, like, are people judging me? Do they not like me? Am I not fitting in? Are they gonna kick me out? It's very explicit. I think that's very important for safety. And it also and this is something else I'm quite proud of is, it includes time based forgiveness. So when I was at Colony kinda pre pandemic going to a lot of crypto conferences, I got really into reputation systems as a as a kind of a concept. And one thing about them that I I kinda I kinda came away with really thinking was important was including the idea of forgiveness as a core concept. You know, if you're gonna have, you know, some sort of score that goes down, it should also go up. And so hearts are regenerated every month. I think that that's important because it'll it it provides a bit of a tolerance against losing hearts or certain mechanics being incorrectly calibrated is okay. Like you lose hearts, but as long as you just chill, you know, over time, it'll leave forgotten and you don't have to earn hearts back. You just get them back for free. And I think that that was a very important intervention as well. And the last thing I'll say is that, you know, hearts clearly has kind of like a legend of Zelda sort of a feel to it, which is very intentional. People say, oh, gamification, gamification. I'm like, yeah. I mean, I have a lot to say about that. I don't like that term because I think that the way it's being used now, it's, like, not really being engaged with critically enough. I think that, you know, it's a very deep question. I think that, you know, gamification goes far beyond points. And, I think a lot of practitioners aren't really giving it the depth that it sort of do. And this is one of the reasons why I like Rap Koster so much because I think he writes about games very deeply. And I think the one thing I would say about games is, you know, they really do facilitate understanding. I remember I went to a talk once by some some folks at a at a crypto conference, I think, and they basically they did a study where they presented a mechanism totally abstractly. Like, there's 20 agents and whatever whatever, and people just didn't get it. They presented the same exact mechanism using a Pokemon metaphor, and people got it immediately. So I think, you know, gaming gaming metaphors to communicate mechanisms is actually, like, a very defensible thing on the ground that increases comprehension very rapidly. So that was sort of one thing that I thought was neat about it. Anyway, this is what it looks like. You know, people have hearts. There's a you have your own board. You can see the house board. And, initially, you know, something that we went back and forth about was how granular to present this information. And I think, ultimately, like, this level of granularity was what we ended up at, you know, but I think a question that we went back and forth over was how much should be private and how much should be public. And this is, I think, an important question when you're designing a system like this as well. Should everyone be able to see everyone's points? Should points be hidden? You know? What and I I think that one of the interesting things was that, you know, the the the addictiveness of of a product, you know, it it obviously is a choice and making the information lower and lower resolution will actually make it less addictive. Right? You could choose to display information in real time. You could display it weekly or monthly, and the same information presented at different levels of granularity really affect the experience. So that was something else that that was something that was kind of interesting. Yes. You could see people have kind of their hearts. People earn karma hearts. There's a karma system kind of wrapped up in hearts where you give someone a little plus plus, you know, the bot logs it with an emoji. Then every month, people get extra hearts. Right? So there's, like, you know, now we're getting into sort of these interactions where, well, you can lose hearts, but there's also ways to gain hearts. So you've got a couple of mechanisms that are pushing you one way, some another way. And overall, we're getting kind of an interesting and somewhat dynamic system that is that is really coming together. No one has used the dispute mechanism so far. It's never come up. Whether that's because everyone's so well behaved or they don't don't know how to use it or they're afraid to use it is a question that will be resolved in time. You know, so far, it has not yet been used. Are they gonna be grateful for it when they need it? Maybe. TBD. We'll find out. The last mechanism, and this one's much simpler, but I think does a nice job of illustrating how the kind of core design principles are fairly generative and allow you to do a lot of different things. So, this one is really just about having a house account, buying things in bulk. You know? We're a house of nine people. Buying Costco size orders saves everyone money. It saves time because it gets delivered to the house, saves space. Great idea. Right? You know, in in in the Berkeley cops, there was a kitchen manager. They had a budget. Here, anyone proposes purchases. Someone's like, oh, I just took the last toilet paper. Let me hit the button for toilet paper. Oh, like, we're out of honey. Let me hit the button for honey. Right? So instead of one person running around, one manager running around, checking inventory, you have inventory management basically for free. And then, you know, another asterisk fulfillment is that I put in the Costco orders, but, you know, if I lie, it's pretty obvious. So I think that an example of a time where I do reserve some administrative power, but in such a constrained way that there's very little advantage that I can extract for myself. You know, I could lie. I could order things for myself. But I think to carry that on for a long period of time would be difficult. And so that's that's a level of trust that at this point, I just accept. But I I do call it out because I do think it is inconsistent with the design principles. And here you can see how it works, you know, very you can see there's a there's kind of a coherent aesthetic now in all these mechanisms. Right? There's, like, a cutesy name. There's, like, a little bit of a blurb. Got a couple buttons. You know? Everything ends up being this sort of, like, lazy consensus verification system in the end, you know, some sort of interaction, some sort of model. This is kind of the flow that we're using to to to tie together all of these different mechanisms. And, yeah, and, you know, most of the things you can buy, the price, and that's that. You know, there's every month there's a budget. People kind of spend it at at this point, I think people are sending it, like, with one week to go, so they're figuring out how to kinda do that. But, yeah, it's going well. Yeah. Well, I'm just I'm just looking at the chat, but I'm gonna not do the chat until I'm done with the presentation. Alright. So kind of the the launch and the lessons. So one thing I'll say is that the first few months were a huge leap of faith. I think that, you know, designing a system that no one's ever really

Okay. Let me quickly finish the slides, and then we'll head into discussion. Alright. So I think, just a couple of things I wanna say about the launch was, you know, it was kind of a big risk. I think that opening a house, you know, having a system that's never been used before, not having experience running a house, you know, taking people who were nontechnical was kind of a big risk, but, you know, I think it was important. It was important to have a nontechnical cohort because I wanted to demonstrate that these mechanisms could be used by people who weren't technical. A lot of people said, oh, just, like, have tech people move into your house because this is like a tech house. I was like, no. It's not a tech house. Actually, a big part of this is that people without strong technical backgrounds can meaningfully interact. And so I wanted a nontechnical cohort. The first few months were a lot of weeks and and managing and and stressed out, which I we can probably spend time on in the discussion. And then, yeah, over time, I think that at the beginning, I had a very big role to play as kind of the leader who set the tone. But as months pass, I think moving my role to zero where people feel like they have control of the culture, they know what they're doing, it's their house, and I can't just go around telling people what to do, was a transition that I think we've we've been able to execute very successfully. These are some of the things that kind of we had to to to to to to to kind of tinker with over the launch, you know, like calibrating the chores, adding some functionality, you know, mixing the chores, calibrating the hearts mechanism, establishing kind of cultural practices that balance the mechanisms, raw things that the first few months kind of saw. All went pretty well, I would say. So I think kind of the the discussion is, you know, I have these two quotes, one from Whitehead, one from Scott who wrote sing like a state. I think that kind of the the discussion I would have is that I think that, you know, our use of computation to replace managements in very specific ways, I think was important. You know, I think the fact that all the voting takes place online, there's no president, there's no secretary. Right? All of these roles are no longer necessary. You know, like, no one's going around checking the chores. You know, like, the chores are getting value automatically. People get hearts automatically. All of a sudden, you have a system that is essentially running on its own, providing valuable services that prior needed to be done manually by administrators. I think that's a big step. But also I think acknowledging that none of this works unless the house knows how to use it, wants to use it, finds it useful, and relatively enjoys it. Right? I think this was a key takeaway that, as I said at the beginning of the talk, you know, I came into this the very maximalist attitude. And I think that over the course of this project, that was really softened. And now I think recognizing as much more of a dialectic where these are tools are useful, but useful to the extent that people want to use them. And that there's no mechanism that would function if people just hated it. So I think that was kind of an important sort of realization. And then kind of just the last slide, the next steps. I think just keeping the house going, Like, ultimately, you know, six months is a is a long time to not have the house go down in flames, but two years would be better. You know, I think that, I think the longer things go, the more legitimized and well understood everything becomes. So just keep the house going. I think also getting these tools out there to other houses is a big goal for this year. I think there's a lot of communities that would find these things useful, whether it's groups of roommates or larger co ops. And I think that make and miss a product is a a good use of time. You know? And I I think I I I go back and forth because part of me, the idea of charging, like, irks my open source ethos, but also, you know, I think turning this into a revenue stream to support more houses is a valid thing to do. So I'm kind of thinking about how to set that up. And then kind of next year and beyond, there are a lot of old houses out there, and I think a lot more people would enjoy living in this kind of style. And so I think getting getting the getting my business getting my operation together and figuring out how to kind of professionalize this, be a good use of, kind of the next year or so. So that's kind of where I see all this going, you know, get the app out there, get more people using it, not just me, get more houses open. This is and, yeah, and good and good times ahead. So that's kinda how I feel about that. Alright. I'll give it over to Seth for the discussion.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I can go really quick. I guess mine was more of just amusing, which is that I'm I'm curious as to how much do you think that the kind of order, cleanliness, resource framing maps to, I guess, digital shared resources as well. So I was thinking of, like, maps and data commons. It seems like I could actually imagine almost maybe taking this one to one and using it to run, like, a small Wiki, you know, by 20 people or something like that. Just just curious if you got thoughts on that.

Yeah. It's a great question. I I so I I I it's funny because I I I do think simultaneously it's task specific, but also general purpose. I I think that the idea of sort of automatic auctioning of tasks with some calibration tools is general purpose. I think that it applies well to a chore setting. But I think that I think that you could say, well, you know, someone has to go and, like, clean up the typos. Someone has to go and validate the links. Right? Chores. And I think people said, you know, don't call it chores. Everyone hates chores. Call it tasks. And I was like, no. That's not true. Like, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try to people can see that it's these are chores. I'm just gonna call it what it is. You know? But I think I think I think as a system for organizing people to perform tasks they wouldn't wanna do intrinsically, you know, I think I think you could probably set it up to do other kinds of maintenance work. You just have to kind of frame it properly.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thanks.

Yes. Zachary,

That is an excellent question. I don't know the answer, and the answer might just be it doesn't. And that, you know, I I think that I think that an intervention that works for, you know, housing communities of a scale of 10 to 20, and that's all that it does, I still think is in and of itself that I mean, I think I I think I think if if if this project if the end of this project is it allows for 10 to 20 person houses to become a, like, a a viable class of housing, and then that's the end of the story, that I think would be enough of a success. I think that, I think I think that how many people, like, is the number 20? Is it 50 before this starts to kind of fall apart? I don't know the answer. I do think it could handle more than 10. I do think that, I think that I actually expected more incoherence among the residents than I got. I think that I was expecting more conflict intention than I got. People are actually pretty well behaved and seem to like each other. So I think that I think that I think that we could probably handle up to this is these are made up numbers, but I think up to 30 people who are more adversarial, I think, would be maybe the limit of this as I as as I see it now. At that point, I think I I wouldn't be able to confidently say that people wouldn't be able to game it or bring it down. I think, you know, as the as the federalist papers have have accurately reminded us, factionalism is something that, can never really be designed away. Although I did make efforts. One thing I'll say is this I spent a lot of time thinking about this. One thing I did try to do to mitigate factionalism was as people lose hearts, the amount of votes it takes to take away further hearts goes up. So to lose one heart, it's like maybe 40% quorum. To lose your last heart, it's 70%. So as the sanctions get larger, the amount of we approach essentially a consensus, and that was something I was just proud of. Anyway, to answer your question, I don't I don't think it's infinitely scalable. I it wasn't meant to be. I think the specific limits will learn in time, and it may be that there are other mechanisms we can introduce at larger scales to mitigate some of the issues. I don't know the answers to those questions yet.

I mean, one last thing I'll say is I did have a thought, you know, assuming that there are more houses, you know, what what does, like, the the federation look like? You know, it's like, does every house now get to vote on something else? Like, again, these are questions for another day, but I've I've thought about them.

I don't have a concrete question, but I I this was absolutely fantastic. So fantastic. So I I I'm sure I will have lots of questions when I think more about this. Thank you very much. Hazel.

Thanks for the presentation. I guess my question is, like, I guess I'm thinking of, we have a friend. Like, her name is Keis. Like, she did this awesome research on, like, comm technology, right, which means, like, technology is meant to, like, take up the least possible amount of attention to be calm. Like, you should be sort of be, like, ambiently aware of it, but it shouldn't just be, like, an alarm clock or, like, a buzzer and scream at your face. Right? I guess, like, I'm I'm, like, I'm trying to apply that to, like, thinking about governance. Like, how aware are people supposed to be of this governance process? Are people supposed to think about it every day because it's on Slack? Are people just, like, only supposed to think about it when they have a task to do? Like, how aware are people of this thing, and how aware are people of, like, doing governance when they're doing governance? Right?

Yeah. It's it's a it's a great question. It's something that I thought a lot about because I think that I think ultimately, if we want broad based engagement, it can't be burdensome, and it can't require significant context. Right? I think I think people like you, voter apathy is something that we talk a lot about at Colony. I think that ultimately, people aren't gonna do something unless they if they don't want to. And so the more the decisions can be made intuitive and and dare I say fun, the more people will naturally wanna participate. I think if if they feel like their inputs make a difference, if they enjoy the process, then I think they'll engage. But if they feel like my vote doesn't matter and I don't know what we're talking about, they're gonna drop off. So I think I think that should be the experience. I think that I think people can engage as much as they want to. I think that I think that if someone, you know, moves into the house, does their chores, never looks at their phone, never votes on anything, that's, you know, go the play styles. That's a play style. If your play style is, I don't really want to be involved in making any of these decisions. I trust the house to do what they want. I mean, I'll do my chores because that's the only requirement. Everything else, whatever, that's a play style. Someone else might say, I really wanna be more engaged in the Slack talking about norm setting, whatever. These are also play styles. I think I think that the fact that, you know, every decision is sort of on the margin, every vote is sort of on the makes difference on the margin, allows people to to incrementally play more or less depending on what they want. Was that a good answer? I feel like I was a little rambling.

No. That's wonderful. I feel like that's something that, like, we should continue to negotiate about. Right? Like, what's political, and what's just logistical, and, like, if people should be just, like, thinking about I'm doing governance when they're, like, doing governance.

I I think I I think they I think they should not think it shouldn't feel like a big deal.

Mhmm. Mhmm. Right. And I think, like, all of these, like, reminds me of another method of projects going on led by Cent, which is designing, like, a governance primer game, which small plug. But thank you.

It's it's an excellent question. I think this is I mean, this is obviously a core question. I think that, I think ultimately the most important thing was to not lose legitimacy. I think that I and I think that in practice, that means we're erring on the side of being too generous. I would rather people don't lose hearts than lose hearts and they feel like it's inappropriate. Because if someone loses all their hearts and the house is like that meant nothing, that that's a that's a crisis type of problem. Right? I think ultimately, I need people to feel like these things are legitimate. And if it's harder to lose hearts than if someone actually does lose hearts, then I feel more comfortable coming in and saying, I have to take action. So that was that's that's the high level thing I would say. So far, I think if you saw from the screenshot, people have people have most people have bonus hearts. Right? Most people have bonus hearts. Two people have lost hearts due to not doing all their chores. I think only half a heart each. And I think I personally took it very bad because I was like, oh, God, like, people are no longer people are disengaging from the system. But I think, I think that I think so far we've had two people lose half hearts. I think people have been very concerned about losing hearts. I think there were some shadow where it's like, oh, god. I'm not gonna get all my chores. I'm gonna lose a heart. What's gonna happen? Like so there's there's been some concern about that. I think by and

Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you. Thank you. My great pleasure. Alright. So oh, I sent it

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