Enable me to screen.

So, yeah. And thanks for Medigov too, from for inviting me here. And, just FYI, attention management notice. I there's actually over 200 slides here, so I'm which I have time myself and can do it in 20 in twenty minutes. I'm kinda using the Lawrence Lessig style, which, if you don't know it, is is kind of a fun way to do, presentations. So don't worry about only getting five seconds per slide. Are we ready?

Yes. It says disabled participant screen sharing. Host has disabled. Can you make me owner or something?

Alright. Okay. So let's see. Nope. I might as well do desktop two. Okay. Alright. Everybody seeing that? Yep. Looking good. Alright. So, yeah, thanks for the opportunity to present this here. There we go. Yeah. There's a link in the chat for questions. If anybody wants to ask any questions, just do it there. Almost four years ago, I started this phase of my work with an animating vision I'll talk about in a minute. Medigob's, like, the perfect audience for doing a progress report. So thanks, Val, for making it happen. There's really nothing more critical for humanity right now than rising above our current broken operating system. Right? We all I think we all know that. For, many of you know the concept of the third attractor as, you know, as things break down, the two attractors we're seeing now are chaos and fascism. What's what could be a third attractor that would take us to a more positive place? Maybe a world that works for all as as Bucky put it. We have maybe ten year in my opinion, we have maybe ten years to get there if we're gonna get there at all. And it's not gonna be, you know, the Star Trek Federation of Planets. Right? It's gonna be something something emergent. And in my opinion, it's gonna be citizenries as network topologies, and I'll get into why that is in a minute. And, you know, as Kevin Kelly says, all other topologies limit what can happen. So, you know, network topologies have an innate capacity for coordination and decision making that no other topology has. Quick digression on where I'm coming from. I had in the last millennium, I had a twenty year career in high end computer animation and a bunch of movies. This was kind of Medigov in its day. This millennium has been about social software. In '20 in 02/2004, I did the first public demonstration of liquid democracy. And this was like this is when Facebook was founded two years before Twitter, eight years before the term liquid democracy was actually first used. So a little bit of ahead of its time. I've been I've I've gone from liquid democracy to liquid coordination or and now actually Charles came up with I think the k ordination as a kind of an overall idea for for kind of emergent coordination particularly using network topologies. And also I'm gonna use governance and coordination kind of interchangeably here because I think of governance as kind of a a subset of general coordination. So that's been my hammer for the last twenty years. I built a company to to exploit it. It got bought and and exited last year. And then as I said, four years ago, I started a sabbatical to work on this current stuff and really to focus on the potential of global scale trust networks to kind of move the needle to get good coordination out competing current systems. We called it virtual nations in those days. But it's and actually, for those of you some of you, the Medigov people know the K organizations. Primavera and Jesse Cade are both MediGov people. This paper is awesome in terms of like laying out all the different the idea of you know virtual nations what they call Coordinations. But I mean and I'll let you read it, but all the things they talk about in here are really essentially making real a lot of what I had originally envisioned in terms of what virtual nations could be. It it's really powerful. And how can we move that forward? Well, network cooperatives, in my from my view, are a way to move it forward in a kind of a practical way. It could be kind of the public, the the the citizenry topology of of virtual nations, for instance. Core ideas, it's a common social graph. It's a governance substrate. I won't go into what an exposure is, but there's, they they cover it in their in their paper. It's actionable now. It it is it could be a flywheel for upward spiral fund self funding, but it needs governance, bootstrapping, and evolution. And I'll get into details on that in a minute. This is kind of the graphic visualization of the overall idea. Just kind of where Commons and Trust Networks and Social Graphs and Platform Co ops and DAOs kind of meet. So the work so far has been around infrastructure for experimentation around graph databases, writing to and reading from those, UX for experimentation, proof of personhood for civil resistance and making sure that people who don't vote twice, for instance. Affordable communities, I'll talk about, is a is a core enabling technology. Federated authentication where a lot of as Drummond and others are really in the, identity space. StigMergy, I'll talk about in a minute. We've done a a bunch of proofs of concept. Best of now is a, social bookmarking. GreenCheck is proof of humanity. Who knows? It's people marketing. So the core problem is we need a common social graph. Right? We cannot be limited to what corporation the social graphs that the corporations own. Right? They have great value, but how do we capture that value and allocate it cooperatively? That's that's the core question that net network cooperatives tries to solve. So maybe network cooperatives can do that. So what is it? It's, it's a new organizational form. It's a it's a cooperative whose membership is not just a flat collection of people, but it's it's networks. They're overlapping, and, they have built in governance, and it's evolvable. So it's and it's cooperatively owned and governed, and it's a medium for coordination. It's a shared user community for ecosystems of aligned apps and an engine for value creation. So this is a stack that we've coevolved with several of my friends here from the World Wise Web Group. The basic idea is you have a personal data layer which is self sovereign. I own my data. I own my edges in the graph. I own I control who I point to and who I have respect edges with. I can join communities in the second layer by contributing my my graph, my hub and spokes to that, to a community graph. And then the application layer can access that entire subs the social substrate of the community layer on a community by community basis. So that's the general idea. How's it new? Well as I said, it's not just a collection of, it's a collection of individuals but it's a fractal union of overlapping networks. Thanks to James Weir, who's on the call for this this graphic. So it's grown by invitation and community by community. And the result is that it's really dense in trust and social coherence because everybody who's there is there for a reason that's connected to other people. If it's cooperatively owned, how do we govern it? We don't know yet. But it's a useful sandbox for meta gov. Right? For all kinds of deliberation and coordination tools, and especially ones that are enabled by networks of trust, respect, and delegation. The idea is to start simple, probably be a legal cooperative. We've been talking Nathan Schneider, I'm not sure if he's on the call. He introduced me to Jason Weiner and his legal group. We've been looking and talking to start.coop, etcetera, but probably a legal cooperative with bylaws that are, you know, that fit the legal cooperative but have this this anticipation of evolution or replacement that, you know, event is so we can get creative with the early bylaws but expect to evolve those and and and replace them potentially. So that's one of the things I want to invite people is just let's explore that together. The ecosystems of apps, this is one of the most powerful parts of this is that if you go back to the stack here, the application layer has access to this social substrate which makes it super efficient. I'm going to skip that. Sharing a user community is really the easiest path to interoperability. If you're developing a new app, if you don't have to wonder where your users are going to come from, it makes your life a whole lot easier and you can focus on utility. It saves massively on user acquisition, the risk of not getting users, etcetera, etcetera. It speeds up innovation. It encourages cooperative development as an ecosystem as opposed to just competitors. Value creation. We all know social graphs are valuable. Facebook's Hegemony is built on that. Right? So we we need to figure out how to do that with decentralized trust networks. That's the governance part of this. So there's a bunch of ways we can see to do it. There's an inherent value in the community data. LinkedIn exploits it. What if we could do that as a as a commons? The app ecosystem can generate revenues that it shares with the coop. Entrepreneurial subnetworks can can earn earn money and then and share that with coop, etcetera. Etcetera. There's lots of room for innovation on on on exploiting, on on capturing the value of the collective value of this commons graph. Okay. Network topologies. Where the edges come from? Well, primarily, in our view, anyway, it's from invitation and stigmergy. I'll talk about stigmergy in a minute. Invitation means that you're you're there's you ensures accountability because I'm accountable to whoever invited me, and they're accountable to who invited them. And that ensures trust density in in the graph itself. And the creates is the edges in the graph. And it starts from founding kernels, like, if MetaGov wanted to and could start one and invite its its its penumbra of allies, etcetera. Stigmergy is the process whereby ants mark the landscape to tell their other ants where to find food. So you have a landscape and you have agents and then and marks in the landscape and that are interpretable in non real time by other agents. So in in this case, the landscape is people and we're all the agents that are marking each other and to lead each other to the good stuff in the landscape. Right? Who are the great who are the great people who know x, y, or z? So and this is one of the key value propositions actually is the knowledge we have of each other has real value but most of it's in our heads. And making that accessible to software is a huge value proposition. So there's a there's a business concept called excess capacity or resource underutilization. So a good a good example of that is wastewater. Right? Here in Sonoma County, we have a wastewater treatment plant. They had all this water they had they were pumping out. Where is it gonna go? They offered it to the Vineyards, but the Vineyards said, we don't want that. It comes from shit. So but then the Sonoma Clean Power in Geyserville with the geothermal said, we'll take that water and turn it into steam. So so you're taking this underutilized resource that has no value without exploitation, and you find a way to exploit it. And empty airline seats is another classic example. Well, our knowledge of each other is is is one of those things. It's in our heads. How can we make it accessible to software and and and and create a large collective value? So let's make it fun and useful. Bootstrap it from corporate data. LinkedIn, etcetera are legally required to let you export your data. So we can we can do a lot of bootstrap a lot of this with with data exported from LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. We can propagate rich graphs of respect from that. This is a this this is a respect vector from our GreenCheck praising app where the blue is my is the dimensions of respect that I have for Daniel Friedman. The gray is what other people have. So this is kind of like the union of all the respect vectors from me from me to Daniel or other people to Daniel. And so you can slice the slice the network by by any domain of expertise. I mentioned hubs and spokes. So the idea is that my self sovereign control is over myself in the center and all the people that I'm connected to that I'm pointing out. They're one way edges. If you compose two of them, the second one is that small one on the left. This diagram on the right is the union of the two hubs and spokes and the one on the left is the intersection. So I could say, I'm gonna join this community, but you only get to see my edges to other people in the community. You don't get to see the edges that are outside the community or you do. So that's that essentially that's the the concept is that the union of these pubs and spokes is a community. This is a this is Seth Fry's LinkedIn. Let me see. Can I can you guys see this? So this is we scraped LinkedIn for Seth's connections. Okay? And it's interesting because the cloud in the middle are the people who aren't interconnected among each other. So you could think of them as, like, an example of a hub hubs and spokes. The people on the outside are people who are interconnected in some way. So if I go I'd mouse over Christina. You can see who she's interconnected with. And so the just the simple act of moving, you know, a a flat list of his connections into a network, you get a lot of interesting, you usable and, you know, analytics and data, etcetera. But you could also think of this as his these are are the people he might wanna invite and expand the network that way. Let's see if I okay. So it creates these subnetworks of domain expertise. Okay. Quick word about communities and networks. Most of them are really either siloed, like Facebook, Discord, Slack, etcetera, or ephemeral like this call. Like, there this call is a community, but, yeah, it's not gonna be persistent. I'm not I don't know. I'm not gonna have any record record record of it as a community, and they're mostly flat. They come from mailing lists or member databases or whatever. They don't have relationship data. So what is a community? It's people plus relationships, aka nodes and edges in a graph. And so we need a portable communities interchange. So this is something that I'm I'm, gonna be, submitting to the RFP, the Interop RFP. You mentioned Val. But basically the idea is like a simple expressive graph representation of a community with flexible metadata around it, unambiguous civil resistant IDs, and the ability to export and import as JSON or whatever or other standard format. And and what that means is we've had this concept of what we've called SADI, simple architecture for deliberation, interoperability. So this is a kind of not so great diagram, but but the idea is that portable communities, because they're portable, they go through this interchange. They can be used in any UX. So Polis or Polocracy or any new app like, Scott, you were talking about. Any new app could could use the same app same community without having to figure out where their community is coming from, and you can actually do AB testing and stuff because you're using the same data. And the same is true with the decision tree exchange is the idea is if we could each if we could represent what we're trying to what we're deliberating on. The decision trees don't work for everything in terms of deliberation, but they can encompass a whole bunch of different ways of of things that you're work you're deliberating on. And so and then those two things would allow you to to use them in any application that creates a state over time. Then you have tallying algorithms, which can also be, iter tried out and and and experimented with. So you take the state and you say, what how do I given the interactions of this set of users, how can we tally it? It could be one person, one vote, quadratic, you know, liquid democracy, whatever, and then you get different outcomes. So that's so portable communities is kind of an input into this that architecture. Maybe we could do a Medigov portable community. We've got I've got a little proposal on that. This is, you know, this is just a screen grab of the of the I took the names of all the people on the what Medigod website and and basically, we have a large database of LinkedIn connections. So these are all those are all the people that well, actually, I can show it to you here. So the no. It doesn't look so good there. Never mind. Okay. Example apps. Lots of apps that we that are enabled by this model, multiscale American governance, of course, resource allocation. There's a huge opportunity here to do to do, you know, really efficient distribution of resources, collective sense making, news. I mean, there's so much that we could, you know, affect the the broken news system with. Bioregion of Mycelia is another one where we're looking at connecting the North and the South through through connections of trust, global citizen assemblies, lots of things you can run ML on, political parties, coordinations. That's back to the virtual nations thing. Yeah. Lots more. Scaling. We're thinking about starting with sandbox communities like MediGov, IIW. Drummond's a founder of IIW, etcetera. That's, like, hundreds of people. So you can think of these as composed, you know, port portable communities of each of those composed into a federation broader than that to the all the tech for good communities. The regenerative movement gets bigger and bigger, allies of that, virtual nations, etcetera. So we we see a path for going from working at a small scale to to large scale. Funding, I'm bullish on crowdfunding as a prepayment of dues. If you can make a good case for why you should be part of of a of a coop, why not pay some dues as a as a rewards based crowdfund? And also, you know, hope maybe it gets easier to attract grants as you grow. There's lots of other funding mechanisms, but those are two that make sense to me. What's most needed is is MVP governance on how do you govern, you know, a network co op. So that's what we're gonna be working on and how to bootstrap it in in a way that it can evolve and, you know, solving it one community at a time is a good good way to go, then those that suite of tools can apply to others. I'm gonna skip over what's next so I can stay within my time limit. What is our so network cooperatives as autopoetics citizenry for coordinations. Let's figure out how to make them work. So one final prediction is virtual nations will become obligate. What does that mean? Many of you know Daniel Schmachtenberger. He does this riff in this video here where he talks about how tech transforms society. And so his example is the plow. Right? So the plow wins over the digging stick because of caloric surplus. Right? And then once you have the plow, it becomes not optional. Any any tribe that doesn't use the plow is gonna lose out to the ones that do because they have lower caloric surplus. And so it becomes obligate. That's the the term he uses that that you know, because it confers more power. And it also changes psyches and the and the way that, you know, cultures and people and and patterns of human behavior. So so the plow took us from animism where we we, idolized animals and and and treated them as as allies and and equals into an agrarian mythos where animals were just things to be used. So virtual nations will become obligate, I predict, because they confer power and, by out competing that coordination. And so our job is to get there first with a worldview that works for all. Thank you very much. Here's some acknowledgments. Charles has been great. World Wise Web folks are and these are all good people I've been working with a lot, Drummond and Aliyah on the identity side in particular, Steve Vitca, and a bunch of other front good people. So I'll leave it there. Did I get in under twenty minutes?

We? Okay. And anybody who wants to just raise their hands and just respond or or or ask questions, if you please feel free. Arno says decentralized social media will need interoperability with existing social networks to combat the network effect first mover advantage. How is this possible? That's a good question. I think the the lowest hanging fruit for it's what I call kleptoparasitism. We need to steal from them in order in order to build up from there. I think LinkedIn is the is the best one the best candidate for that because the important stuff on LinkedIn is your connections. The content is pretty good, but it's not anywhere near as universal as Facebook. And we can easily we have this right now. You can go and export your connections on LinkedIn, and you can import them into a graph on our system. So I think LinkedIn is probably the the easiest way to to bootstrap things. Facebook, I don't know. Ultimately, I believe that a million person social graph, which I think this community, the the community the scaling I talked about has can easily reach, and especially if you go to the region community, which is is very large. If you if you if you do the right marketing to to that community, you could get to a million person social graph very quickly. And I and a million person social graph isn't Facebook, but it's still really valuable and a really good platform for for application development. Oh, yeah. Somebody asked about the network state movement. Yes. In fact, the virtual nation idea that that started the that animated this four years ago was two years before network state. And the k ordinations thing that I that I pointed to a minute at the beginning with Primavera's and Jesse Kate's, paper, that was response to the network state. So, yes, it's very much you know, network state has a lot of problems and they go they go into what, you know, what's wrong with it in that paper. It's very good. But I think that the ultimately, that is that that's a a, as I said earlier, virtual nations are gonna become obligate. They will form and, you know, how they form and who forms them and and how, how they overlap is gonna be really interesting to see. The yeah. Charles, I don't know if anybody can I can do it? I can give you links. I'll give you the link to the the k ordinations paper in the in the chat because that's probably easiest too. I just wanted to chime in maybe real quick about you said about the overlapping between the the virtual nations. I think it's more so on the interoperability between them and the connectivity, the weaving, the the the coordination between the the networks as well. Yeah. Ecosystem. Somewhere in there, I've got the the the anybody else have a comment or question while I could find this? There we go.

Yeah. Hi. Thank you so much for the presentation. One of the questions that I have is whether you've looked at geospatial data in any case and say you're, like, connecting the social data that you are considering aggregating and bringing this geospatial dimension through the data lens into this thinking about social organization. Because in considering, you know, these virtual nations, there's a a complete bypass of the spatial dimension that structures the the project of, like, governance, whether you think about, you know, the multilateral governance, like, national governance with its contiguous area, municipal governance. So geospatial data is, like, more complicated, and it's also more more contestable. Right? Like, because we're all very dependent on our our spaces and very protective of them. So I wonder if if you've given any thought to connecting these data ecosystems.

Yeah. Thank you for asking that because it's really, it's an important one, for us actually. I mentioned the bio bioregional mycelia as a as a an application of this. And the idea is that let me get back to the I'll I'll share my screen in a second. When I talk about people marking, you can also mark people by where they are. Right? And so one of the things that we've done with the LinkedIn data is we've LinkedIn only allows you to choose from a finite set of locations. So you can't say, I I live in the world or I live on planet x. Right? You can say I live in Brazil or I can live in Porto Alegre or I I live in, you know, this little village in this little town. And there's and and from the data we've looked at, there's, like, 15,000 or or so locations that are in in use by the three three hundred thousand people we we have data for. For each one of those, you can do there's public services to do lat long identification of every single one of those. So I can give you the lat long of 300,000 people according to their LinkedIn location. Right? And then you can map that to bio to bio regional and other data. Let me just do a quick screen share if I can go back to that. Yeah. So this is a this is a this is a Mapbox application where I so these are indigenous territories, and you got these are sub realms of the of the one Earth bioregional subrealms. I'll turn the then you got the the bioregions. These are all bioregions so you can map, you know, each of those. So in essence, we can we can take any you we can allow you to say here's where I am, who are the other people in this area. So yes, very much we're super interested in the the the bioregional in particular or and or location based idea. And so the idea is that you that I don't know who I wanna protect the Amazon Estuary, but I don't know anybody there, but I know people who really know the South America, and they know people who who know the Amazon Estuary, and they know the indigenous people who are doing that. So that's a big part of this people marking is creating these chains of trust, from the North to the South in essence. So and also as you do that, you can then invite them to say who are the people that they trust locally and those could be input to citizen assemblies for instance or and the governance you ask about.

Yeah. I mean, I think part of my, well, part of my frustration has been that it it's not hard to form these networks. We all know like, if you think about who would you wanna be in a virtual nation with, I'm sure you'd think of a lot of great people. Right? And if you think about starting from great people and only and expecting them to invite great people, you could easily get to a a graph a social graph with existing technology. There's nothing stopping us from doing that right now. And, you know, I think the what the problem or the the the sort of limiter is it's for most people's point of view is what are you gonna do with it. Right? So so you form it, but so what good is it if you if you don't have any utilities for it? So but I think but I actually argue that you don't actually need any utilities in order for it to be able to prove its value. Just people discovery and, you know, simple things that you can immediately do. We've been prototyping a bunch of this stuff. And and that's in some ways why we're we feel like we're ready to do it is to the the the main limiting thing is the legal structure for it. Right? The piece of the people and and the web three versus web two challenge. Right? Because it's all all everything we're doing now is in, you know, web two, orango DB centralized graph database. So I think it's it's a collective will to start playing with these graphs and doing things with them. And and and I but I do think that what what Medigo is doing with the interoperability, the call for interoperability is is really important because and that's because if we can start to have these shared communities, portable communities, shared social substrates that that applications can iterate on, I think that can things can really start to move fast. I hope that answers your question, Rick.

Well, one way is to attract money because social graphs are worth money. And then once you have money, you have power. And you first, you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women, you know, according to Scarface. But, no, I I think that's a that's a big part of this is that this what what we're talking about should be really valuable and should be really good fertilizer for lots of innovation. I do think I mean, I mentioned global political parties. I mean, you you could easily do a global political party that has real power with the same approach. Charles?

Oh, sorry. You guys I I wasn't paying attention.

I don't I don't see going mainstream with this for a long time. I think it's I think the the pitch is is community by community. Like, is is is a community network something of value to Medigap? Right? Is there is there something that that we can do that with with graph technology and and utilities built on it that is that is useful to meta gov in ways that it in ways it doesn't have now. And to do that, I IAW, DWeb, or two World Wise Web, those are four. There's many others that I think that's where to start. It's like, okay. The we need I guess the the main pitch is we need to have a cooperatively owned social graph. Right? So we need to start building it. And it's not hard to build, but we as long and I think the pitch really is gonna be how it's governed. Because if we can if you can say this is something that you you wanna be part of, right, and you're you'll actually pay $20 a year to be a member because it's a cooperatively owned social graph, I think and here's how it's governed. I think that to me is how is it is a good it's a good pitch, at least in my opinion. Who's managing the the the

Yes. My question is about human validation. Is that feasible? And a a corollary to that is is it possible, for example, to to filter, for example, content? Like, one thing that you don't wanna happen in a network is somebody log in. That space and, you know, opinion space and and what have you. And could you see, like, large, you know, language models being used in order, for example, to lump similar opinions together? So in which case, they wouldn't take much physical space. It will be kind of like you do a light, but then you lump them. It like minded opinions, you lump them together. So in other words, they don't crowd the visibility of certain opinions, which is what unfortunately happens with the current social media platforms. You know, either one opinion is gonna crowd everybody else, or it's gonna be silent.

then it's not technically feasible to kind of have a more, like, streamlined and rationalize opinion space to avoid echo chambers and to avoid, like, silencing. And then kind of, like, allow a natural cross pollination and a more, like, dialectic exchange between the the the echo chambers that may form either way. Thank you.

Yeah. I think that, absolutely, it's this topology is totally totally facilitates that. I mean, we have a one of the applications we we've developed, greencheck.world when you get a chance to look at it. It's about three friend authentication. Right? So so you so I make claims that that I'm a a single human in this registry. I I and you validate my claim to that. It and and so it's built on webs of trust, the the cryptographic web web of trust concept. So the so validation is definitely, you know, part of that mix. In terms of the of clustering and all that, I think there's well, hey. First of all, the the personal data layer where I control my own hub and spokes means that I can choose who what graph neural networks get to use my data to, as as training data for, you know, for ML. Right? And also, there's all kinds of and graph neural networks is is really basically what LLMs are for text, graph neural networks are for for networks. So if you have these, you know, with large personal networks, you can actually do comparisons and predictions about, you know, who you who you would be interested in meeting based on your your graph, not by the text that you use. So I think I see that a lot of that as part of the application ecosystem. We're not gonna solve it, but the but the topology supports it. Steve has his hand up, Val, but you're in charge.

Who's that?

Yeah. I mean, that that's greencheck. World, I just I just answered to Yanis' question. That's our approach to to doing proof of humanity. It's not perfect, but it actually it it's it's very usable within a community that you that's reasonably trustworthy. But basically, the idea is that you claim, attributes that you can prove you own. Like, this is my LinkedIn account. This is my phone number. This is my email address, and I can prove that I own those. And then you who know me validate that those claims are true, and then you wouldn't validate, then I can't reuse those to create another to another account in that registry because you wouldn't validate it. So the idea behind greencheck.world is I don't have a lot of faith in blockchain at this point. Maybe Holochain, which I'd I'd really think highly of, but but, whatever whatever we needed a way to do civil resistance without Blockchain and and, you know, the sort of web of trust three friend authentication approach makes a lot of sense to us.

Yeah. You can do that, but if you do if you if you do it by starting within by invitation, then you basically have this the network propagates with dense entrust so that when people who are colluding, it can be easily detected because they're not they're they're vastly interconnected from the the the bulk of the community.

think it can. I mean, it I think of the the proof of humanity. It doesn't have to be on off. It can be I have 99.3% confidence that this person that this identity is unique in the in the registry.

Everybody. Great job, Brad. Thanks for the opportunity.

I'll be on the Slack if anybody wants to, like, connect. Thanks.

Thanks so much.