Thanks, Nathan. And thank you so much for having me. So I'll do the screen share thing. There we go. Oh, does that work? Yeah. Thumbs up. Awesome. Great. So I guess I start with the disclaimer. Seth Fry made the observation in another session that these social scientists, they always leave us with more questions than answers, which is exactly what I intend to do today because I'm presenting ideas in kind of test mode, I guess. I'm really curious to discuss these ideas with you and hear your feedback from your various kind of experiences and disciplinary backgrounds. This comes out of my PhD research, which is underway and the data collection has just begun. So I don't pretend to come with fully formed revelatory answers, but I'm really interested in the discussion and in testing some ideas through this through this mode. So I guess to introduce myself, as Nathan said, my name's Kelsey, I guess the best way to describe kind of what I do is maybe, through the research centers that my, candidature is connected with. So the first is the RMIT blockchain innovation hub. So I'm surrounded by economists, lawyers, and tax accountants there. The second is the digital ethnography research Centre. So my actual research is enrolled through the School of Media and Communication. So that sort of sits in the social science of kind of the art of observation and draws on a lot of creative and digital methodologies around, around that. And then the third is the Center for Automated Decision Making and Society. So big multidisciplinary again, center, that's looking at not just the technical elements of automated systems, but the sort of implications around, people and trust and a lot of these sorts of factors, infrastructure as well. So you'll sort of see these themes, coming through and I'm happy to, to chat about about any of those when I kind of open up for thoughts. I'll do my best to maybe track the chat along the way, but it might be better just to get through some sort of pillars and then see what's most interesting. So I also come out of the space. So I was working in blockchain projects, both in Australia and overseas. I was quite involved in the Ethereum community and on the road traveling for a lot of that. So yeah, I guess that surfaced some of the questions that I wanted to continue investigating and timing worked well with a global pandemic and entering into kind of PhD mode. So why decentralized technology and resilience? What I intend to do is to seek evidence for the opportunities and limitations of decentralized technology as resilient digital infrastructure. So I guess there's a lot of promise and a lot of ideology that comes through in this space. But what I'm interested in is using ethnographic methods to observe real world implications and social outcomes. So it's quite an ambitious project, but I'll sort of bring in some focus as I explain. I also, as you can see by this little kind of publication history, I had somewhat of a panic attack in the fall of COVID because while I was writing about digital solutions and watching a lot of the digital responses, I did a number of pieces on digital contact tracing, a number on data storage and kind of centralized sort of national contact tracing data becoming sort of a geopolitical risk. I wanted to advocate for decentralized solutions, and I wanted a stronger evidence base for that as well around the contexts and sort of promises. And I guess privacy often sits at a sort of principles level and is quite broad and loose, but I was interested in how do you embed resilient properties in the infrastructure that people use. So that sort of grounds, I guess, my thinking. So starting, what is decentralized technology? You can tell my old school slides that some of the commas are facing my way. Apologies. So I draw my understanding of what decentralized technology is from historical research. So what I've done is go back through the sort of early records and I've tried to combine cultures. So I've looked at the culture of open source software and free software, which sort of precedes that, the culture of cryptographers and the culture of the early internet and sort of found an era in time where those cultures culminate around the cypherpunk community, to some of the foundational ideas that I guess I see carry through decentralized technology communities today. So that's how I'm bounding my definition, I guess, and drawing out some of these essential elements to defining what a decentralized technology is. So there's an early piece where I share some of those characteristics that's on SSRN, and I'm working on the publication of the sort of fuller version. One of the most interesting things around this process has been defining those words. So actually recently collaborated with Zagham on a definition of permissionless in a glossary by internet policy review. And it was fascinating, this kind of throwaway word that we all use and we all know what it means and we all agree, but actually finding where that came from. And then what that means across, sort of different schools of thought was, was really interesting. So more foundational principles of my work in this area. One is the idea of digital systems as infrastructure. So Susan Lestar is a favorite in the kind of infrastructure studies, but there is a number of thinkers in this space that really started doing the sociology of digital infrastructures around the emergence of the internet. So it's looking at the people, the processes, the institutions, the kind of assemblages of the technical and the non technical to see how these elements come together to form an infrastructural base, which then becomes something that is invisible or taken for granted, I guess. Something that is mundane is kind of the language used. So it operates in the background, but really it's made of all these decisions. Another element here which I've included is actors and networks. So observing the relational aspects between physical and non physical actants, some interesting discussions with kind of computer engineers about that school of thought being a potential bridge between those two worlds of kind of the engineering side and the more sort of social sciences side is in you can program and model and test for actors and networks, and you can also observe them. The missing masses points to hardware as well. So I didn't want to just look into blockchains as interesting as they are as kind of, crypto economic systems and socio technical sort of infrastructures. But this kind of idea around, decentralized technologies and resilience really harks all the way down to the hardware level. And there's a bunch of very interesting projects that kind of deserve investigation on that front as well. That was one. Yes, here we go. So the next question, which I always get in interviews, which is so lovely when there's some sense of shared understanding is what do you mean by resilience? So I'm drawing on a definition that comes out of really sort of the modeling and kind of risk studies space, but it is related directly to socio technical resilience. So wanting to observe adaptability and transform mobility of a system in response to threat or crisis. In this fantastic book about vulnerability in technological cultures, which I'll refer to a number of times in this conversation is the idea of observing vulnerability as a relational notion to resilience. So resilience is kind of the positive aspect of vulnerability. And these authors argue that rather than looking at risk, which is kind of this hard, very institutional, very process oriented way of looking at systems, vulnerability is a way of looking at the kind of human aspects in the system as well. So that, I guess, starts to draw out that social science element of when you look at a community, you can observe or you can ask, what are your vulnerabilities? So what are the things that you view as a threat and want to protect against, and then start to see how tools kind of assemble to form infrastructures in response to that. A really concrete example, actually in this broader book in the middle dot point there, is looking at walls in The Netherlands because they stop a low city from being flooded. So there you start to see how resilience is formed through the walls that are built around the city and how that infrastructure is generated as a response, as a response to a communal kind of vulnerability. And so that kind of brings us to the idea that you can govern vulnerability, or you can start to think about defense strategies against these perceived risks or vulnerabilities. So a note on ethnography as well, I've mentioned observation a number of times. Really it's a method that works hand in hand with other methods. So often case studies, discourse analysis. It's a very creative methodology. So one thing I enjoy about it is there's a bunch of stuff in terms of thinking about futures, imagining digital futures or cyber physical kind of futures, but it's inherently about people and writing or kind of communicating that observation of people. So this is a model that I am working on about observing resilience. And I'm interested to hear kind of your thoughts on this. So I'll come back to these decentralized technology themes, but pretty much what I'm interested in doing through my data collection and my research is taking a kind of a theme, identifying some key projects within that theme, and then really observing how both the technology and the social system adapts or doesn't adapt in response to a threat or a crisis. So I've got micro, meso and macro as the kind of levels in a socio technical system. And by tracking what changes occur at what levels you start to sort of hopefully surface surface patterns across these or emphasize highlight what's important and perhaps what is not. And so that comes through as a really helpful tool when certain kind of cases or crisis arise. And I can link you to a medium post on Gitcoin around a governance framework for adversarial behavior that was co written with Jeff Emmett and Danilo and Zargam from Block Science. What's interesting about that case is that in response to spam bots in Gitcoin grants round nine, there was all these human kind of governance responses around bringing together a council that's documented in this piece, communicating to the broader community, as well as thinking about technical fixes to that concern. So that's just an example of how you might start to observe resilience in place, is kind of communal technical social response to a threat or a crisis. So the cases that I've chosen, as you saw in the previous table, are ones that carry over those themes from that definition of what is decentralized technology. And I've tried to stay true to the cypherpunk themes from that historical research. So looking at what has carried over in the sense of cryptocurrencies, in the sense of kind of a mutable or resilient or decentralized data storage, encrypted communication, DAOs as a reach to autonomy, kind of throwing back to the idea of, temporary autonomous zones, and that sort of self, self governance, structures and then secure open source hardware as like, well, you can make it as resilient as you want in whatever definition that is. But it kind of comes back to that full stack. So here's the interesting bit, and I'm trying to keep track of time. Yeah. We're good. We've got heaps of time for discussion. So early hypotheses, and these are just kind of thought bubbles at the moment. Again, if anything jumps out to you, I'd love to kind of discuss. So I guess, first of all, a helpful definition of resilience is a community one and the one of socio technical resilience I found I lack because it draws out of kind of computational modeling, but really it's close to community development definitions. And you'll hear again and again and again, if you do anything that's sort of in the humanitarian or humanitarian technology space, they're using technology to build capabilities of resilience within a community rather than vice versa. I also really like this idea that socio technical systems are sort of a shared history and thinking about data as, or data records or data storage or, you know, addresses in a DAO or addresses in a blockchain as, as kind of this communal assemblage around, a common goal. And I can link you to a podcast recording where that idea is sort of discussed with a couple of colleagues. I can't claim full credit there. I'm not talking about the centrally issued, but decentralized cases. So again, I wanted to continue in the tradition of the Cypherplunks, whereas I think a lot of human focused decentralized systems or blockchain for social good or these sorts of things are an attempt at exploring the technology, but they're still centralized systems and not apologetic for that or not trying to be something else. But that's, I guess, a different bucket, which I write about in the piece Lynch there. Also highlighting the need for on the ground evidence about what those systems actually mean for the people that use them. A lot of talk about trustless infrastructures. I was on a lovely call the other day where people were arguing that a blockchain is trustless. Nick Szabo says that blockchain is a trust minimizing. I prefer to think about it as a transition in trust. So trust is not gone and trust is not necessarily minimized, but it's transferred from, I guess, existing sort of centralized third parties, to this new kind of community of developers of the people that are making design decisions, the people that are communicating the sort of promise of these systems, are sort of responsible in many ways. And I guess that's the ethics of these systems as much as we probably don't like those soft ephemeral kind of words, but responsibility, accountability, and recourse in these systems becomes major areas of consideration because you cannot say that no one was trusted in the process of creating or sort of releasing them. Oh, we don't want to do that. A lack of feedback loops. So in some conversations I've had, especially around the the very kind of sort of hyper privacy end of these things is that I I built the app that I wanted. I don't know who uses it. I don't know what they think about it. I don't know what they use it for. Yeah. Over to you, I guess, in terms of your perspective on if you think that's good enough to to release a thing in the world that you know nothing about and know nothing about the consequence. Moving on, perhaps. One Internet somewhere

Yeah. Let's open it up. This is literally my last slide before thoughts. So yeah, I can come back to any of those remaining points, but I am not familiar with the Walsh piece on feedback loops. So I definitely would love to hear more about that.

And I assume legally as well that the operators are, subject to legal recourse.

Yeah. Great. On that, I guess, something we've discussed as well as Agam is, like second order cybernetics and the idea of, feedback loops on the feedback loops of the system. And I guess that's where ethnography becomes a potentially interesting and and somewhat creative method in these spaces as well.

Yeah. And same with a lot of cybersecurity stuff. So the paper linked in the middle there, yeah, as you can see from the title, blockchain security is people security. It's sort of thinking about what's the actual overall aim of these systems, because it has all these, you know, funky properties that are pretty innovative, but if it's not actually serving the needs of people, then what's the kind of point of the promise? Did anyone else have thoughts on what has been mentioned? Questions? I have. This agreement.

I smile because they're, like, the people that tell me to go do a marketing role instead of doing my PhD because I could earn more in the bull market. That's a really excellent oh, more than once. That's a great point. And actually that when that came up in a discussion that we had the other week with Ellie Reni, who I do thank in my thanks, who's one of my supervisors, who's really brilliant and doing a lot in this space as well. I'm not familiar with the feminist kind of critical literature, but she is, and based on the discussion that we had, we're like, we should write a thing about this because it's a really great point. So maybe we can loop back in with you if you're interested in pursuing that thread as well.

guys. Yeah. That'd be awesome. I'm also and there's a point there, the third point from the bottom around, the context specific outcomes. Some of the cases beyond software developer communities where this stuff is being used are not for persistent infrastructures, but very ephemeral. And the ad hoc stuff comes in there. I have a medium post on it and Eli Reni did a piece on the pop up economy, when burner wallets were kind of a thing. And we went to a party where you kind of bought in and you exchanged in someone's household within this micro economy, and then you cashed out on your way out and it disappears again. So that sense that resilience to people is that having the tool when they need it, having the tool do the thing it says it does, and then no longer needing the tool. And that's the adaptability of the community and kind of nothing to do with the long term sustainability of the infrastructure, which is really interesting to me as well. No comments on that?

I I don't have a comment on that, but I would say the third bullet on sort of there's it it's not a matter of trustless or trust minimizing, but that there's always a transition in trust, I think, is really resonant with me. And, you know, the notion that, you know, blockchain was was sort of, came from an ideology that was distrustful of a certain type of authority or institution, but that doesn't mean that, it doesn't need to trust in certain things. And and I guess I think I'm wondering if at at least for me, what sort of would be most interesting from an ethnographic perspective would be sort of what happens when, you know, folks actually sort of surface and and realize, you know, who they're trusting or what they're placing trust in now versus previously. I think that that could be a really rich sort of perspective in terms of research. So just a thought I had.

Yeah. It's it's something I really grapple with. And some of those thoughts in terms of thinking about how that trust transitions as the ethics of a digital infrastructure, came out of some recent contributions. Australia launched, and this is all public, it's like a national blockchain roadmap. So it was like some high level dot points of like, we're going to explore blockchains and what they mean, in any instantiation, I guess, or kind of develop capability in understanding and navigating the space. And then there was working groups of which I was involved in the cybersecurity one and, and helped contribute to this kind of subcommittee on privacy and ethics. And thinking about those three points, which I mentioned when I was talking to that around responsibility, accountability, and recourse, It's a really, it's a really important question, but I really don't know the answer in terms of like when there are advantages of decentralized systems in certain contexts, How do you ensure responsibility, accountability, and recourse in it? And that comes to like the point of our conversation today around, is participatory governance going to enable more resilience in those cases? So do you want a collective to be responsible and responsible for each layer of that system from the consensus to the code itself, to the kind of operation or governance, even in the social processes of, you know, voting on or off chain or or whatever those things are. So in sum, I told you I would leave you with questions instead of answers for today. But already there's been, yeah, some really helpful engagement on some of these areas and this obvious kind of room for collaboration. Some questions that come out of what I'm curious if people sort of ask themselves or what the kind of response to people is. The first is what do we believe about what we build? And that comes out of a blog post, which I co wrote with Saigon on called techno reflexivity. So it takes this well embedded concept from ethnography of positionality and reflexivity, which looks at, surfacing your subjective assumptions and biases pretty much. And it asks like, what if technologists engaged in this process, would that be helpful? Who is it for? So once you know why you're building what you build, who do you think you're building it for? What kinds of resilience do we need or does the group being built for need? And then at what layers and levels and in what ways does the infrastructure allow participants to govern their vulnerabilities? AKA like who is, who is being trusted in what parts and what is, open and closed. And that brings me to my final bit. So is there any more questions on that? Perhaps I'll come back to

It looks like Vikram had a question in the chat. Vikram, do you wanna

Oh, I can't see the chat. I can stop sharing, though.

What do you mean by friction? Friction equals Slack equals resilience. So I'm just catching up now. I'm kind of backtracking on the the chat here.

I think it was Nathan that made the original Yeah.

alas, he is providing for his family.

So how does decentralization cause friction? You're on mute.

Yeah. So I mean, without that being able to define necessarily what Nathan meant by friction, if you're talking about efficiency, the, I mean, the literature on disaster response and technology and disaster response or disaster response communications is like, do it centralized. It's way more efficient. So in, if there's an earthquake, we're not going to sit around to form a panel and vote on how we all feel. It's like, do you just need a big central authority that everyone recognizes the authority to come in and deploy the plan, which kind of, yeah, I guess it comes back to that real context specific kind of thing, where you could look at it in the antithesis is some of the encrypted communication networks and civil society action or protest, whereas like, you know, efficient communication in that sense or resilient communication is, the complete opposite. It's not having a big centralised authority involved in the coordination of a collective. Jack, were you going to say something?

Yeah. I had a a thought on the topic of, you know, what types of resilience are needed, and then you also had a bullet on sort of immutability and human system, like, humans kind of being interested in breaking down what's what appear to be immutable systems. And, you know, I'm still getting up to speed with the terminology in this group, and I'm coming from a completely different academic, you know, frame. But in climate change research, they talk about political institutions and policy making institutions requiring plasticity and this ability to adapt and to change sort of on the fly. And I was wondering if that might be, you know, potentially a type of resilience that could exist. But also, like, a a step further from you know, like, so plasticity could mean adaptability, repurposing existing parts in new directions. You know, that could kind of go along with modularity as well. But to be honest, you know, I was reading this idea of plasticity of institutions being important. And I found the term a little bit vacuous. Like, how could what what does a country's you know, it's what makes one country's institutions more plastic than another? How would you, in fact, measure the plasticity of a set of decision making structures or institutions? So just an idea to to kind of maybe get some discussion on.

And I guess it's that mind shift as well, like plasticity of an organization. I'm assuming that the goal would be for the organization to persist. Whereas, I mean, one of those sort of hypothesis was like one world, many communities, which is like multiple organizations exist. And as you have a different kind of goal or as you don't like the rules or who is trusted in that particular system or whatever, it's the people that are plastic, I guess, or are adaptable in that they are the ones continuing to sort of form society and the institutions can come and go.

Yeah. That's a great point. I think, you know, the levels of analysis sort of part of it, you know, whether it's an individual, you know, how to trace continuity. You know, I was also looking for sort of, like, analogies and, like, brain plasticity and then, like, networks. Like, what does a plastic network look like in, you know, sort of, like, a neuroscientific side of sense? And then how could you sort of look for similar forms of plasticity in social networks or technological networks that might, you know, be somewhat measurable in in some sense?

Yeah. So so I'm actually not in the Slack, but if I could, like, email somebody about getting in there, I'd very much appreciate being included on that.

Cool. I don't wanna detract too much from, Kelsey, your presentation.

Oh, no. This is this is the point, right, to have a discussion. I guess most of the stuff that you do from like a pulse side perspective will be at that, like, you know, the macro kind of level as well. Like you're looking at, you know, power and institutions and kind of politics and stuff. When it comes to networks and adaptability, another interesting area, but kind of a rabbit hole that I resisted going too far down was in animals like ants and bees and stuff. Yeah. In terms of adaptability and resilience of networked communities. I'm aware of the time and I know it's all of your evenings. So I guess by way of next steps, my email was in the final slide, but I'll share it again now. I would really love to keep in touch or follow-up with any or all of you. And it seems like there was a few points just from, from the intros of, of kind of common areas of interest, as well as, some jumping off points from the discussion. I guess it's been great to hear your thoughts. If you have any more about any of those definitions or the frameworks or those gaping holes in perhaps the way I'm approaching this, I would love to hear. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining.

And it would it'll also be great, you know, feel free to reach out. Once you've, you know, sort of gotten a little further along and and you have an update, I think we'd be really interested in hearing about the developments in terms of your research. So that'd be great. So so we'll do what we usually do at the end, which is if everybody could unmute and just recognize Kelsey for a wonderful presentation. So

three, two, one. So honored. Thanks so much, guys. Thanks.