Okay.

Okay. I'm unmuted. So I guess my time starts now. Right? Alright. So I'm gonna talk about decentralized governance of meta organizations. Right? And I guess everyone can see my screen, hopefully, my presentation. Okay. There we go. I mean, this is just a bit of a bio. Just to summarize quickly, I mean, I have a I combine a lot of streams of experience and expertise, both in terms of research and industry. I've spent most most of my time in industry, however. And what I'm doing now with Cyberium, you know, combines all of these things. Right? So now let's get into what meta organizations are. The the definition by the people who put it together, right, there were three people who came together, a couple from the Harvard Business School, one from LBS. So they defined meta organizations as, you know, a a collective entity of autonomous firms that are coming together for a system level goal. Right? So this is essentially autonomous organizations that are coming together for a certain goal for a certain period of time. And the examples of meta organizations are, you know, the two big buckets of mega projects, major projects, and of supply chains. Right? Both of which are extremely important in many ways to both, you know, economic systems and social systems. Right? Now why is this important? I mean, decentralized this is a problem in decentralized governance. Right? Because you have a bunch of autonomous firms with conflicting interests, and they do have conflicting interests because everyone is essentially there to make a profit to kind of get, you know, their slice of the value that is being created. You have very complex workflows, multi party workflows. You have disconnected relationships. You know, everyone has a party with the bilateral contracts disconnected from other bilateral contracts on the same project or the same supply chain. There is no trusted source of truth, you know, that can be shared across all of these parties. The actual systems that are used, like, SAP or project management software, like MS projects are disconnected across all of these parties. And there is no universal identifiers of companies, you know, and then this goes back to the dead and the VC question on web web three. Right? Which will allow people to synchronize across systems. So this is the world in which this is happening. And, obviously, the supply chains and big projects have very large social consequences. Right? I'm gonna focus more on projects. So projects, of course, are bringing together a group or network of entities to build something in a fixed period of time. So these are temporary organizations, temporary met organizations, right, which are focused on creating some kind of a unique result. And the track record is is pretty unfortunate because, again, the problem is decentralized governance is not very efficient with today's technology. Right? The size of the problem is massive. We spend about $10,000,000,000,000 in capital projects alone. We need about 3 plus trillion dollars per year just to meet climate goals, which we don't have. And if you look at this track record, which I will summarize in this chart here, you you see why, you know, project performance is extremely important. You know, most of these project sectors have very significant cost and schedule overrun. So if you're talking about $10,000,000,000,000 being spent, you know, you're probably gonna end up spending double that amount, right, to deliver the same scope. And so this is a enormous economic issue, but it's a it's also a huge social issue. And if it comes to things like climate goals, right, which are time relevant and also cost relevant, we we don't have the money to build the projects to meet net carbon goals at this time. And on top of it, you have these enormous cost overruns that are wasting trillions of dollars per year, and you're not completing these projects in time either. So this is a massive problem, you know, and this is something that goes to the heart of, you know, decentralized governance. Right? How do you get all of all of these, you know, complex organizations constituted by independent companies with conflicting interests to work together efficiently? So that is the crux of the problem that we need to solve to make a difference to this track record. Right? I'm gonna get a bit bit more into detail. The only thing in this slide that I'll say is that, you know, IT projects, which are not in that chart, also have very high overruns. Average cost overruns a 100% in IT projects. Right? So it's projects of every kind, not just bridges, railways, and power plants that have this problem. Right? Now this is a chart from my paper on offshore oil and gas projects. You know? So what you see here is, you know, overruns, you know, cost and schedule overruns. So that's what you see on the x axis. And this chart is something that you see in every project sector, whether it's IT or bridges or power plants or whatever it is. Right? You see this chart. So this is not a normal distribution. This is a flat tail distribution. And, also, you you can see that the the the chart itself is, you know, shifted, you know, towards the right, towards overrun. Right? So the average overruns in the sector is up 30 plus percent, you know, which is not too bad compared to some other sectors, but also important to note is the size of the fat tail. So there's a significant number of projects that are extremely, you know, high in terms of overruns. Right? And this is something that comes from because of complexity, because of the vicious cycles, you know, that emerge when emerging when when you have emergent issues and the form of vicious cycles that leads to these black swans and dragon kings in the flat tier. Right? So it's not only the high average overruns, it's also the extreme overruns, the significant number of extreme overruns that are a problem in big projects. Right? The issue, like I was saying, is again related to decentralized governance. I mean, principal agent issues in, you know, supply chains and projects have been studied quite a bit. The principal agent issues is, of course, is across every contractual relationship. You have a principal and an agent, and agent is always looking for their own interest as well. So every contractor on a project is going to understate the cost and schedule to get a job, but they're also incentivized to make the most profit and stretch out the work as much as possible. So you have this fundamentally misaligned incentives, biases. I mean, cognitive issues are a huge thing in complex systems. I mean, humans are not able to process the amount of information that's generated. You don't have a trusted source of truth. And, you know, you also have things like optimism biases and so on, right, that make it even more complex to manage these projects. Complexity when you have emergent outcomes that cannot be forecasted and when you have these disconnected temporary organizations, you know, with these incentive issues, principal agent issues, they're not able to collectively react to emergent issues, you know, which again leads to the huge problems downstream. Right? And this is essentially what we're trying to solve. I'm not gonna dwell on these slides because of time. But that's essentially what we are trying to solve. Right? And this is essentially what my focus is both in terms of research and in terms of what I'm doing with Siberian, which is my company, you know, to be to build a project governance tool, which recognizes the fact that projects big projects are made up of networks of entities. Right? So how do you how do you enable participatory governance? You know, how how can everyone participate in setting goals in in planning a project? How can they have a trusted source of truth, you know, for the entire project network? How do you have verifiable consensus on anything? Right? And how how do you collectively you know, the the issues in a project often happen at the edges. Right? So when something happened at the edge happens at the edge, how do you track that information to everyone else that is involved, everyone else that is affected in that project. Right? So these are the specifically speaking, the type of issues that I'm trying to solve with Cyberium. Right? And in terms of the technical kind of inputs from the Web three world, since we're coming from that world, definitely, like, some of the things like smart contracts, I mean, and DLT technology in general is pretty critical. Zero knowledge proofs are quite important because you're talking about trustless ecosystems. Right? Because these are independent companies with their own interests. And coordination under zero knowledge proof is something that will really help with synchronizing all the costs and the schedules, payment systems, etcetera, etcetera across this complex network of stakeholders in a project. Right? The other kind of things that are coming together, like, you know, with this community. Right? I mean, I've seen a lot of people with backgrounds and complexity theory. I I heard something about executional theory. Right? I mean, and so on. So these these bodies of theory are also extremely relevant to the problem that I'm trying to solve. So what I'm trying to do, right, what I want to kind of collaborate with with the community is, one, in terms of the research, I want to, you know, look more into the application of complexity theory and so on into project performance research and into, you know, resolving some of these issues with complex projects. I have a very specific kind of stream of research in mind. And if someone is interested in the research side, please do get in touch with me. And if someone is interested in working with us on Siberian on the project governance platform that is bringing together all this technology to resolve this complex problem in multi party governance, decentralized multi party governance, do get in touch with me as well. Right? And if you scan the QR code, you will you will get my contact details on your phone. Alright. So now, I guess, we get into the questions. Right? Sent.

Right. So I problems. Yeah. I I I have I mean, there there's more specifics in terms of the research into the the the system. Right? I mean, into the the architecture of the platform, I do have a paper. I mean, if you go to the website, I think on the first page, you can kind of download that paper, which gets into a lot more details about this. Right? But, essentially, I mean, we're looking at a, you know, modeling, you know, projects as DAGs. I mean, projects are DAGs, basically. You know, if you look at a project a project diagram, a project network, right, that's basically a DAG that goes from the beginning to an end. So we're looking at spot contracts, you know, to, you know, align in the, you know, the the schedules and the project contracts. Right? I mean and the payment systems across all the stakeholders. We are connecting the smart contracts together so that, if something happens at, you know, any part of the project, I mean, that is that information is transmitted to all the other milestones that are affected, which could involve other stakeholders. Right? And, also, they another key part of this is the verify the credential thing, because you need to have a universal kind of verified credential architecture in order for people to be able to use their identities, you know, for companies to be able to use their identities on more than one project. So, basically, I mean, in terms of the broad architecture, there is a lot of specific, you know, detail in in terms of where, you know, what we've sketched out. Some of the problems have to do with the maturity of some of the technology in the web three world. Like, VCs are not mature yet. Right? Smart contracts are not ready for deployment yet in real time. I mean, the Oracle systems that we will rely on are also not something that companies would be ready to rely on to execute real, you know, x you know, these b to b business flows. Right? So part of the thing in fact, the biggest thing that's holding us back is the maturity of some of the technical components in general. Thank you.

Right. So in terms of complexity. Right? And this is one of one of the specific kind of research agendas that I have in mind. In terms of, you know, complexity, I I want to apply complexity theory to, you know, projects in a more systematic way. Now it's it's quite well recognized that projects are complex systems. Right? There's a lot of researchers who state that. Right? But I want to I want to show demonstrate that using a quantitative approach, for instance, which is something that is lacking in the product performance literature. Right? For instance, like, give me an give to give you an example, if you look at this chart, if you look at that dragon, right, I mean, the that stands for Dragon Kings in some statistical papers. These extreme outliers are called Dragon Kings, right, because of the rarity and impact. Now I've seen I have been part of projects that have seen this 200 something percent overruns. Right? So on the x axis, one is 100, two is 200, three is 300. Right? So one 300% overrun means $1,000,000,000 project is not $3,000,000,000. Right? So I've what what this essentially the the generating factors come from complexity. Right? Because you have emergent outcomes that cannot be predicted. Right? So some of these emergent outcomes react to each other in and they form these vicious cycles. For instance, the 300% overrun that you see there was this BP oil platform. You know, in 02/2008, what happened was that it was they were about to tow it out to get it to install it in the Gulf Of Mexico, and it was sitting in a yard in Texas. So that was a freak hurricane that, you know, people didn't, like, forecast. Right? That's the platform was designed to withstand even though it wasn't moved yet. So that happened, and then that that itself would not have been a problem, but someone had installed the ballast control wall backwards. So instead of pumping water out, it was pumping water in. Right? So you have, like, this series of emergent events that cannot be forecast, but in some cases, you know, they they kind of form a vicious cycle that leads to these kind of extreme overruns. And these sort of things are the things that I want to kind of demonstrate in a quantitative way using agent based modeling techniques. Right? Now for for this to happen, I need to bring together streams of researchers from across the project there. From not just in the project, you know, the the project performance research world, but people who are applying complexity or in a quantitative way. For instance, biologists, for instance, are very active in agent based modeling. Right? I know I know I know that some of them are in the Meta Gal community. So in order to drive, like, you know, complexity, the application more rigorous application of of complexity theory to, you know, these outcomes in these big projects. I want to put together, like, a stream of researchers and, you know, I can definitely share more details. And I've got a few more things on the agenda as well. I mean, when it comes to Web three, for instance, right, like, there's a very specific agenda that I have identified as well. You know, this is a game, like, even if you take it out of projects, I mean, this is essentially about commercial meta organizations. Right? Decentralized governance of meta organizations in the b to b world is is the research question. And I've got quite a few things on that agenda as well. So, basically, I want to bridge the gap. I mean, most so much discussion in the Meta Gal community has to do with DAOs, but these are in a way decentralized autonomous organizations. But these are coming from the commercial world and these are very compelling use cases with enormous implications. Right?

No.

I I do have thoughts, actually. I'm I'm I was just in a very noisy place, so I didn't want to bother everyone with with my background noise. No. It's it's it's very cool. And I I can sort of see how I can see how coming from the, you know, mega projects and complexity and kind of the more more modern more modern versions of systems thinking and systems engineering that would be relevant to kind of systems of systems and these kind of, you know, network situations. It is it does it does all feel somewhat similar to to the Web three say space. But I guess I'm also yeah. I'm interested to know how close how close it really is. Like, I, you know, I can accept a point, say, you know, zero knowledge proofs. In theory, you can see how that might there might be application for that. Because as you say, there are, you know, potentially, you know, distinct corporate or commercial entities with their distinct interests, and they may well not want to fully share information. And that that's but it yeah. It still feels quite theoretical to me how any of the technology in this space can really help with with with these kind of mega mega project issues.

Right. I mean, there is there is a theoretical aspect. I'm I'm sorry, Chris. I I I guess I'll just wait for you to finish.

No. No. No. No. I mean, by by all means, comment on that if you want. I I I was I'll I'll come to a sort of another more standard point, but I'm pleased to to give give give give you give you

There there is a theoretical aspect to it, right, which which, you know, is essentially, like, what I was highlighting as a research agenda. But there's also a very practical aspect to it. I mean, essentially, you're trying to synchronize across different systems in different companies. Right? For instance, you want to synchronize the schedules across every one of these companies at the milestones without sharing details of the activities that are getting into the schedules. You know, right now, of course, everyone just reports something every week and through an email or something like that, and someone sticks them in as Excel spreadsheet. That's how it's done. So now we're trying to synchronize the system payment systems. Right? If you're trying to synchronize schedules or the milestones without sharing activities, you know, that's kind of when your zero knowledge proof, you know, comes in. Right? In terms of the architecture, like, you know, I've got a pretty specific architecture that I've sketched on in one of my papers. You know, some of these aspects could change and so on. Right? In terms of the practicality of it, I think the the the deterrent I mean, or the stumbling block or rather the roadblock, right, has to do with the maturity of some of the things. It's not in terms of the overall architecture that wants to make use of things like zero knowledge proofs. It's about the readiness of, you know, of the, you know, things like, you know, smart contracts and their relationship with legal contracts, all of the which thing all of these things are not just a technical thing, but also a kind of sense making thing, right, which which researchers still are still trying to figure out. I mean, how do you interpret something that has been like if you have a smart contract where a bunch of companies have agreed to do certain certain things, how will a court of law in a common law system interpret that? Right? So what does that mean for your commercial kind of agreements? Right? How how do you refer to that? So these are the kind of things when it comes to making this practical. Right? In terms of, like, architecture, I'm quite confident that the architecture that I'll describe, you know, is something that would be very applicable to this problem area. Right? And and, again, like, we can definitely talk about these things in more detail because, I mean, obviously, time is a constraint here. And, you know, also got a couple of papers that I can share. But, yeah, in terms of, like, the the practicality, the thing is, like, the the maturity of things like zero knowledge proofs. I mean, how many projects really are relying on zero knowledge proofs in a commercial workflow at this time, even if you take a survey of every project that's out there? How many business to business workflows can have really deployed something like small contracts, right, which has to do with not just the technical, you know, aspects of smart contracts, but also, like, things like, you know, the, you know, the interpretations, you know, which is still an evolving thing, you know, with in course of law and things like that. So this is also why this, you know, a community like MetaGo is really interesting because it brings together people who are looking at this from different angles. Right? It would be good to have people who are also looking at this from a legal perspective. I know there are some researchers who are, and I don't know if there's any of them who are part of this community. You know? But this kind of, you know, collective thing is what is needed to remove some of these things and open the way to actually, you know, make this, like, a practical application.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I I don't know if there's time for me to make a further comment.

Yeah. Okay. Then then just briefly so, I mean, this this is very cool. My my own interest personally is is specifically in DAG like structures. And in particular, where those cross organizational boundaries. So it's it's absolutely to this kind of problem situation. And the question is, what of the, you know, what of the information will be allowed to to kind of permeate those organizational boundaries. And so, obviously, to what extent can you use smart contracts and and all the rest of this technology to to kind of manage manage those those boundaries when you have, you know, a a a system, a a structure of related intents of crossing various scales that that does involve distinct organizations within it. So but I I mean, it just feels like there's way too much detail to even begin to get into it here. So but I'd I'd absolutely love to read your papers on this stuff. So somehow, I will make sure I I get hold of those. I suppose my my last comment now and an interest in your reaction is that my sense is that the the there's something quite different about about a state, about a nation, about governance in the sense of government, the kind of political governance that is often that is often central to to Web three projects on the one hand. And on the other hand, very much the the the important and huge use cases you've you've discussed here, the the, you know, systems of systems, mega projects. There does seem to me to be something quite different about endeavors that are fundamentally political in a way, and that they bring in a different set of problems. But I I I'm just interested if you've got any kind of thoughts on that or insight on that.

Yes. I mean, essentially, I mean, mega projects are in many ways involved, you know, in in political problems. Right? Because these are always cross boundary projects. Right? Every project that I've been part of has been in some other country involved, you know, contractors in a bunch of different countries, suppliers, contractors, etcetera. And they are directly exposed to geopolitical situations, you know, to things like inflation, you know, rates and so on. Right? Because you're talking about yours, and you're you're talking about cross portrait boundary things. In almost every project, I mean, you always choose, like, a place, you know, a jurisdiction. Right? Like, you usually use The UK because contract law is better understood there, for instance. So this this is completely involved in governance and and political systems and social systems beyond the the project itself. And there's a whole thing called, you know, external stakeholder management, which I can get into and also, like, refer to, like, this architecture, how this helps with external stakeholder management as well. But but, yeah, let's I think we should connect offline so we can talk in detail about some of these things. One more thing I'll just say is that I really like, you know, the things when you talk about systems or systems, you know, what projects are SOS, systems of systems. And I do come from a systems point of view, which is, of course, related very much to complexity theory. Right? I mean, I'm I'm basically an engineer. Right? That that's kind of where I come from. But, yeah, I'd I'd like to get in touch with you outside of your address, and let's talk more about this. Right?

Cool. Cool. I'd I'd absolutely love to. I will I will read all your papers first, and then, yeah, we'd love to have a conversation.

Alright. Great. Sounds great. Thank you. Perfect.

Yeah. I'm just trying to do that now. Okay. I think I've stopped or paused.

Okay. You still see the screen. What's going on here? You know what? I'm just gonna exit and come back to the meeting if Okay. Or actually, can can you cut me off, Santo, and I'll just go I'm

Oh, you're not?

Thanks. Yeah. This is this is really cool. Thanks for the demo. Fun to see. Like, it's it's just, yeah, really neat idea. And it reminded me of, something called policy kit, which I I don't know if you're familiar with. I just wanted to I dropped it in the

too, but just to say that, like, sort of this idea of adding policy over things that I think in, like, classic software are more, like, permission based. So they added kind of the ability to make it into a process rather than just, like, you have the permissions or don't have the permissions to accept an edit or make an edit. And not because of process. So here there's, like, some voting going on. And they give you example on policy kit, I think of, like, you know, renaming a Slack channel. Instead of having permissions to rename a Slack channel or not having permissions, it becomes kind of, you know, there's a jury and then the vote, and then you do it. So it kind of feels like it fits in that same general framework, and I don't know. Maybe are you thinking of, like, open sourcing this or, like, making it, like, connect to different projects like that?

And maybe one other yeah. I guess this is a I I just a different kind of question, but suggestions that are sort of not within edit. Like, have you thought about that? I was just thinking of, like, you know, change of style, but not having extra something concrete that you've written, which is, like, change of style as paragraph to whatever. It's sort of not an edit that can be replaced, but rather a suggestion that's sort of more, I guess, amorphous or something like that.

Well, that one is, like, pretty

like, that's concrete because you

can just suggest I mean, I was talking more about, like, this should be more formal language or something like that, but then not actually doing the wording.

Cool. Yeah. This is this is super exciting. I especially I I loved I felt the examples of GitHub and and Wikipedia and Reddit were were really compelling, and I could see, like, tons of I I feel like people would wanna try this out, like, play with this, you know, in the very, very short term in all of those contexts. One thing I was curious about the park example. I often find myself using parks as an example when I'm, like, trying to just, like, you know, talk to my parents about public goods problems and collective action and things of this nature as, like, a, you know, go to example. But then, like I I found that it sometimes causes confusion with this like really intense spatial component where, like lots of people for a given park, there's like a really low propensity that most people on the planet will ever go to that park. And so I guess, yeah, my my first question is just like I'm wondering if this is related this is sparked by the HR question. Kind of like, what are the ways that it might might be possible to, like, wait people's votes differently or something like that? Could you give a two x credit to people who actually visited the park, you know, via some kind of affirmation method? Or maybe, you know, the park is just an example, and the the Wikipedia context is actually the much more practical starting point. And then my second really quick question was just where could we go to find out more about this? Is is it just the crowdright.xyz, or is there, like, other other things that I should follow and look at?

Thanks. I I just think it's a really neat project. And, you know, for instance, it could fit with, an experiment that some of us have been exploring around trying to do a crowdsourcing rewriting of the Twitter rules. So it's been very much on my mind. And, and I think the question about, about adding other kind of functionalities, having, like, particular people with veto power or something like that is is really interesting. And certainly PolicyKit, you know, could interact with that. The question is whether you wanna lose the relative simplicity and intuitiveness of the current approach, in exchange for the more the greater complexity and and and opportunity you could have from having Python scripts. Right? Do you want users dealing with Python scripts? Maybe it could be a drop down of options. It whatever. It's you know, you you you'd lose some of that simplicity and beauty of this of the current user experience in that. And so I'm I'm torn. But, generally, like, Tucker, I'm just really excited about what what you're doing here. It's please keep keep sharing updates with us because I'd love to, you know, help find some use cases and and opportunities to play.