Shorttalks Metagov 20230614
Metagovernance Seminar Archive | 2023-06-14 | Unknown
Speaker 1: Hi. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another MediGov seminar. The date is 06/14/2023. And today, we have our monthly short talk series. Are an opportunity for people in the MediGOV community to come together and share some of the work that they're doing, covering a wide range of, areas and disciplines. And I'm really excited to have Steve Vitka, Matt Crittendon, and Nick Kaufman...
Top Keywords
- spectra 0.018
- virtual 0.006
- nick 0.006
- time 0.005
- city 0.005
- community 0.005
- urban 0.005
- spatial 0.005
- matt 0.005
- steve 0.005
- duocracy 0.004
- group 0.004
Transcript
Speaker 1
0:00 – 0:00
Hi. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another MediGov seminar. The date is 06/14/2023. And today, we have our monthly short talk series. Are an opportunity for people in the MediGOV community to come together and share some of the work that they're doing, covering a wide range of, areas and disciplines. And I'm really excited to have Steve Vitka, Matt Crittendon, and Nick Kaufman today, who are gonna present on collective communication currencies for Steve. And then Matt and Nick are gonna present on Spectra, virtual, and urban governance and design. So I think it's gonna be a really rich discussion. We have fifty minutes today. So I think the way that we'll do this is each group will have twenty five minutes. Steve's gonna do a kind of more informal discussion where he'll present some slides, talk, present, talk, present, talk, present. We'll do that for about twenty five minutes. I'll give a five minute warning when that's wrapping up, and then we'll move over to Matt and Nick, who will give a ten minute presentation followed by fifteen minutes of moderated discussion. If you like as well, feel free to say hi in the chat and tell us where you're calling in from and, like, what you're thinking about with governance these days. So with that, I'll pass over to Steve. And then in twenty five minutes, we'll move over to Matt and Nick.
Speaker 2
0:15 – 0:15
All
Speaker 1
0:30 – 0:30
right.
Speaker 2
0:45 – 0:45
All right, now, there we go. Everybody sees that? Alright. So like I was saying beforehand, I kinda just kinda stumbled across this actually, I was talking with, Christine Lemmer, I believe, about this. And, at one point, we're talking about, you know, what we could do with the idea of, modernizing the idea of having to pay postage to send email. You see, back before there were any other spam solutions, people were considering, hey. Well, what if you just had to pay postage to send every email just so that, you know, sending spam be too expensive to do, essentially? So this is kind of that idea writ large, and it's it's just the idea that all of your incoming communications should have a certain amount of currency attached to them to encourage you to open them. So, anyhow, so that's that's the basic idea. Everybody understand what I'm talking about there? Alright. And, feel free. I'm gonna try and just leave space between my sentences every once in a while. And when I do, that's when you interrupt. I care nothing about interruption. You can't interrupt my thoughts. I don't have any. Alright. Next slide. Whoops. Too many. Looking a little crazy. Wow. Alright. One slot. Okay. I'm very having a hard time scrolling my tripod here. Alright. Scroll with my mouse. No. It's very delicate. Alright. So the first thing we have to do is we have to figure out how are we gonna price this attention for our income incoming communications. So the idea is that each user sets an indiscriminate price, and that's the amount of money that they'll take from someone to open any message at all. And when I'm saying you're opening a message, you're opening a message, you're kinda just seeing what it's about. It's just sort of a commitment to just see what it is. You don't have to stay on it. There's no kind of further requirements. It's just like if you want somebody to look at your ad or whatever, you should be able to pay them a price to just look at it. But then if you're hearing from your friends, your coworkers, or, I mean, you probably you might wanna set your price to zero. And then there could be various gradations all the way in between for, you know, essentially filtering how you receive content. Oh, what do you guys think of these ideas? Anything good? All good?
Speaker 3
1:00 – 1:00
Alright. We're writing some stuff in chat. I think it was
Speaker 2
1:15 – 1:15
Oh, you're writing stuff in chat. I gotta get my chat up. That's what I should do. Alright. Thank you for the tip.
Speaker 3
1:30 – 1:30
Maybe some people will summon their voice. There we go. Later to
Speaker 2
1:45 – 1:45
chat there. If I can get my mouse back on the right screen. I should be a saga prototype. Alright. Got it. Now I got the chat up. Okay. So now you could use any type of you could, you know, send Bitcoin to each other attached. I was thinking that the Lightning Network would be really good because they have low low gas fees, so you could, you know, send micro amounts to people to have them open messages and so on and so forth. But I think that online groups should issue their own coin. So I'm gonna go into more about that later. But the main idea is that if I had, if like Medigov, for example, had a coin and I want to support Medigov, what I'm essentially doing is creating value by the Medigov for the Medigov coin by pricing my incoming communications in the Medigov coin. So if I say, you gotta pay 10 Medigov coins if I don't know who the hell you are to talk to me, that's going to naturally, you know, give a use for and increase the value of the MediGov coin. That sound logical? Alright. Any other things and comments here? Nothing relevant. I'm gonna go on to the next slide then. Oh, I'm gonna fail at that because I gotta go back to the screen.
Speaker 1
2:00 – 2:00
Nothing relevant, Steve. I mean, that's a that's a big question. What's the name of the coin? You know, that that's a big factor in the attention vector.
Speaker 2
2:15 – 2:15
Alright. I guess I didn't see. Oh, is it oh, maybe I missed some of the other. You you might alright. I must have missed your thing. I gotta make my chat window bigger. But, anyway, okay. I'm having a little problem with my scrolling. Alright. So right now, there's also another cofactor going on here. That AI is eroding the advertiser model that they currently have, which is that they, you know, have a lot of ads kinda interjected into, you know, the results that you get or the, you know, the scroll or the feed that you see. But there's not gonna be space for those ads when content is delivered conversationally. So, generally, AI is gonna start now to compete over correctness, and any perception of being distorted by commercial interests will make users flock to the alternatives. So in other words, advertising or anything where the AI redirects you towards, you know, this site over here because it wants to sell you something is going to be, you know, considered less desirable. In fact, I think that people will prefer to use a more trustworthy open source AI to make virtual assistants to live on their own machines, which, like, rewind.ai, you can already do this on a Mac, for example. It it has it's sort of, you know, sort of a self sovereign AI that lives on your machine and can, as far as I know, do a number of functions, mostly controlling your own data and and dealing with it and always having the ability to sort of, you know, hey. Do you remember the time AI when I was doing this? But it also has this, beginning to have this sort of virtual assistant quality where it interacts with the world. And any case, so that will that kinda brings us to the next thing here, which is that I think we're going to have to have a sort of, unified universal feed, where we get all our stuff. Right? Hassan Minaj said, I have a 100 apps to stay in contact with the same eight people. So, you know, that we're gonna have to have some sort of application, which, you know, takes all these different streams of content and then will allow us to, choose through this pricing structure which stuff that we wanna open. And as a result, I don't think that people are going to even be going to, you know, traditional social media sites or Discord slides. You know? It's all gonna happen within this universal feed. And, you know, I know, for example, we're building that over at dazzle.town. That's one project I I'm involved in is the, the universal feed, construction that we have as part of our data palace infrastructure that we're building over there. So all right. And, you could see so you take some time to read the rest of that slide, but the, I'm not gonna talk too much about the social graph stuff because I think you guys would get that if you thought about it. And I wanna get into discussion as soon as possible since that doesn't seem to be happening as yet. So I will flip to my next slide. Yeah. So the end of this is that the customer is essentially gonna be paid to open ads. You're gonna essentially wanna share your data with companies so that they are then incentivized to pay you to open their ads. So if you can prove that you're a big, you know, ski buyer or something like that, then you're gonna be able to get the the, you know, the companies that sell ski stuff to pay you to look at their ski ads. But the because companies no longer have to split their ad revenue with the platforms anymore, they're actually going to be able to sort of reinvest this, you know, energy and and funds into providing, essentially, portals to, like, an online experience. So you may be able to, for example, click on an ad and then go and, you know, customize your own shoe, your ski, or whatever that we're talking about. And there's gonna be sort of a more, I think, honest interaction between companies because you'll be soliciting advertising for for particular companies and actually people be seeking relationships with companies. And companies will, you know, in the future, want to treat those customers well so that they lower their ad prices towards them and so on and so forth. And so I think it will generally improve the relationships of businesses, with customers. Alright. Okay. Now we get into some kind of interesting stuff. So going back to our meta gov point or whatever we call it. What you can do is if someone is a member of a number of different groups, each of which has their own coin, each of those groups can essentially do a redistribution scheme in their own coin. And what I'm suggesting is that you just take approximately 1% of daily accounts and then redistribute that as a as a UBI. So let's say I had 10,000 Medigov coins in my account. That means 1% of that a 100 coins would be removed from my account that day and then go towards a sort of UBI fund for distribution that day to all the different members. So say there's a 100 members in the group, that 100 coins that would be taken out of my account, 1 coin would go back to each member of that group, including myself. So this will sort of make it so there's not sort of a runaway leader problem too much with the communication because within any group, you're gonna have some people who are higher status than others, and therefore, the higher status people are gonna be tend to have to pay more coins to communicate. Okay? And will be paid more coins when people communicate to them. So this sort of makes things more egalitarian, and you can change this rate of the UBI within the group to change the feel of of how you want the group to be, whether you want it to have sort of a more hierarchical, you know and now it could be a hierarchy based upon, you know, actual merit. But the point is that I would probably have this this this rate of demurrage, as I call it, controlled by the group as a whole. Alright. And now and I call it a reliable UBI because the problem is that if we get a government UBI, right, they can sort of hold that over our heads. Like, oh, watch out. We we can always we'll take away the UBI if you misbehave by having UBIs come from our own social capital. So in other words, we're essentially getting paid funds. And remember, I could sell these these these points for real money for anyone who wants to advertise to my group. Right? So essentially, for real money. You know, by by by being included in a number of exclusive groups, I essentially have an income that comes from many sources and therefore can be more reliable over time. Okay. Any any disputes as yet from anyone? Alright. Not much longer. Alright. What? Two more slides. Come on. Alright. Use the mouse wheel. One click. One click, baby. Alright. Alright. Also, groups can self monetize for expenses. So not all that money that's taken away in this daily tax on accounts needs to go as a UBI. Some of it can be used by the group itself to directly, once you get sell to advertisers or other people who wanna talk to people in the group. And then use that fund to actually, you know, pay the costs of running the group. There's also uses of CC within the group, and I think I have a couple more in my main paper. But the main one is that you can moderate group conversation without moderators. So whenever you have a post thread, people can essentially burn a cc to prioritize a post. So, you know, if you burn a 100 cc, that'll put you above posts that only burned, you know, 99 cc and less than posts that burned a 150 cc. And then that that cc that you burned just goes right back, you know, to fund the UBI more. So it actually can actually increase the native rate of the UBI, or you can have it where if people do a lot of posting, then there's less taxation to the accounts automatically. You could set it up so it's a steady state or variable as you like. The last thing is that this kind of goes into this whole idea that I think in the future, rather than looking at so many posts by individuals, we're gonna be much more interested in posts that have been curated by a certain group. That is a group has looked at a post. They've all contributed to it. They've all said, okay. This is representation of what we want our group to be communicating, and we think it's really high quality, entertaining, whatever else. Okay. So the idea is this collective curation of posts and making them into group posts even when it's just retweets. Like, you know, okay. At least the whole group, you know, agrees this is a misinformation or whatever else. So and, ultimately, this might accumulate really, you know, having a subscription model essentially to the now individuals can also have a subscription model. You know, I can subscribe to your content. This is all And instead of every time I receive something from you, you pay me, I can pay you. They I mean, it can work both ways. Alright. Okay. So this is the last slide. So why we wanna do this? Because I don't know. But I think when people communicate asynchronously, you know, there can be all sorts of problems, where people talking by each other that can happen in real life too. But the main thing is we're just, you know, got too much head time heads down time trying to react to each other in this weird, you know, way. So by having a prioritized, unified feed, hopefully, we can all just be less nuts in the attention economy that we're in, and we can tame it just a little bit.
Speaker 3
2:30 – 2:30
Okay. Steve, you asked for some push, so let me push you. So a lot of folks have been talking about wanting more asynchronous time versus less in terms I'm reading, you know, posts about remote workers and LinkedIn and, you know, people wanting to to get out of meetings because they feel like meetings are, you know, 3% of people contributing and all these other people wasting their time. So what is the problem with asynchronous communication right now, and do you think it what is this hidden value that you that you see?
Speaker 2
2:45 – 2:45
Okay. So the problem with asynchronous communication So that rather synchronous communication. For too many channels is that once again, we don't have any way to prioritize it over all those different channels. So even if you like asynchronous communication, you still wanna prioritize your asynchronous communication, and that's gonna make you be able to endure it perhaps even longer if you do like it. So, I think that, you know, it is an incredible opportunity for people to, you know, control their in feed too and not have their scrolls or social media feeds or whatever dictated by the filtration of the platforms. Alright.
Speaker 1
3:00 – 3:00
How does your,
Speaker 2
3:15 – 3:15
Now, Daniel Daniel, you have you wrote something there. I do have, like I said, just just one moment, sort of, technologies that I have in co development with this. One of them is this is called talk time. And it essentially is when you have a meeting, you split up the time that people have to talk in the meeting between those people, and they can use their time either to talk or to give their time to other people if they wanna hear more from them. Or if they just like, oh, I really like what you just said there. Here's a little talk time. So, you know, like I said, I think the tools the Zoom tool is an absolute piece of, you know, version zero point o one garbage. And I have no idea who the product developers are, but they don't have I I don't know who they I think they're monkey flipping switches as far as I could tell. So, yeah. No. I agree. People really, you know, claim case secrets because I agree most online meeting experiences are terrible. Sent, you were you saying something?
Speaker 1
3:30 – 3:30
Yeah. Well, I mean, a, I think I mean, it would be fun to do, like, a talk talk meeting. I'd be curious to see what that dynamic is like. I think Case is working on the comm technology department at MediGoF has done some meetings where the way that they structure it is, like, they'll they'll work with a a group and have them do two meetings. The first time, they they they just have an unstructured regular meeting, and they use Otter or some Otter AR or some other speech transcription tool to just track how many minutes each person spoke. And then they'll have a meeting where they use Robert's Rules of Order, which has its own set of constraints and affordances, and then show them the difference of, like, the speaking time between their two meetings, and then use that as a way of kind of getting them to adopt a more formalized speaking structure Just give
Speaker 2
3:45 – 3:45
Right. AB testing.
Speaker 1
4:00 – 4:00
Exactly. Yeah. Meeting AB testing. Yeah. My question, though, was I mean, how does, like so I'm assuming that, like, there will still be asynchronous communication, and there and there will be communication that's not in the in the kind of public or community context. I'm thinking of, like, direct messages. And so how do you account for those kinds of one to one communications with your your model here?
Speaker 2
4:15 – 4:15
Well, like I said, if you have, like, a work group, you just set their incoming price to zero. If you have to hear everybody's communications, then, you know, there's no impediment to to them sending it to you if you're not charging them anything. Same thing with any of your friends or anybody else. So the indiscriminate price is really about giving a communication channel. Let's say, you know, someone is trying to build a, you know, you you wanna subscribe to a to an email list, but you only wanna get the most important emails. What you wanna do then is you don't wanna set, that list price to zero. You wanna set it a little bit higher so that they'll only send you the stuff that they think is is most relevant to you that they actually wanna pay to send to you, for example. Mhmm. So it also allows us, you know, strangers to contact other strangers by just paying their indiscriminate price. They're sure people will perhaps do things like pool their funds together to contact celebrities. Okay? But when you really want to contact somebody, you know, you've got something good to say to them, and you don't want to deal with a bunch of intermediaries to to get the message to them because everyone's attention is flying in 12,000 different directions. What you do is you have, essentially, you have your virtual assistant contact their virtual assistant and negotiate a price that's gonna put your message at the top of their inbox. And it's going to keep putting it there until they say, oh, I don't want this anymore. In which case the funds get sent back to you. If someone refuses to open something, you know, they're like, oh, this guy looks like a jerk. They can just send the funds back to you. And they, and, and then, you know, you know that that happened.
Speaker 1
4:30 – 4:30
Great. Well, maybe one more question, and then we'll move over to Matt and Nick. I think I see Daniel kind of making a motion there.
Speaker 2
4:45 – 4:45
Oh, yeah. So the I I
Speaker 4
5:00 – 5:00
I had a thought. Maybe this is, like, off topic or better for later, but, you know, I I feel like there's this often I see these, like, this push and pull in this conversation forwards more system systematization. And then there's, like, a counter pull to, like, less and to say, actually, it should be more real relational. And I I just I'm curious because it seems like you're clearly saying, like, I think that more systemization and and more measurement and accounting to solve social problems in a large society is the move. But I I feel like the conversation will often go one way or then the other, and I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that or or or what motivated I mean, this is, I think, too broad, but I think if you have any thoughts on that, the the idea of there's a sort of dual conversation that I see occurring, I think is my question. How you feel like you fit into
Speaker 2
5:15 – 5:15
that? Well, I think it's dual modes. I think what what I'm doing here is I'm trying to create a sort of formal first layer filter that then allows more spontaneous, you know, follow-up conversations to happen. In other words, like, the first time I communicate to you, I'm gonna pay your full indiscriminate price. But then if you like what I said to you, you're you're going to lower your price and be like, oh, this guy, let's say if he sends me something else, I'm not going to charge him so much for it. Maybe the third time you lower your price to zero and we're actually quote unquote friends now. So the idea is by actually formalizing it into this sort of just little bar that you can drag instead of being like friend or not friend and introducing that granularity, I'm actually providing personal expressiveness.
Speaker 1
5:30 – 5:30
Yeah. Great. I think that's a good place to leave it. Maybe you can carry on the conversation in the chat. There's an interesting comment here from Val. But in the interest of time, thank you very much, Steve. Very interesting presentation and discussion. And we'll go to Matt and Nick now. Great.
Speaker 5
5:45 – 5:45
Thank you, Sun. Thank you, Steve.
Speaker 3
6:00 – 6:00
Cool. How should we do this? Matt, do you wanna bring up your slides? And I'll talk over them first? Or I mean, I'll talk I'll do the intro while your screen is up, or should I put a video up
Speaker 5
6:15 – 6:15
for that? Yes. I'm just waiting on Steve, if you could please go ahead to stop sharing your screen so I can share mine.
Speaker 2
6:30 – 6:30
Stop sharing a bit.
Speaker 3
6:45 – 6:45
I will I will post a link in the chat. We're just about to publish an event that we're hosting on the twenty ninth, and it's going up right now. We're hosting our first workshop, so it's kind of a big deal for us, and I wanted to invite everyone first before we announce it. And let's see. The post is here.
Speaker 5
7:00 – 7:00
So All the way down there?
Speaker 3
7:15 – 7:15
It's in the chat. Yes. Yeah. We're our the inspector architecture of Spectre. So, I mean, I'll I'll tell you a little bit about Spectre. I'm gonna talk about Spectra as a community. For me, this is first and foremost, Spectra is a community. But Spectra is also a city. It's a plausible, buildable city that was designed by Andre Acucarco, an architect from the firm Numina, for Spectra LLC founded by Ryan Topescu, founded Spectra. It's essentially a car free city for the future, and we're building a community around the city. We've we've also released segments of the city as a asset pack. That's Creative Commons Zero in the hopes that people are will start to remix this and start to use it as a way to prototype sort of urban futures and also, like, cocreation, collaborative city building methods. To explore this, we've been hosting meetups once a week where people can come in to the virtual space, explore, and start to discuss how the virtual world might inspire real world urban designs. This is our first attempt at a formal placemaking workshop, and we're a community that's trying to bring together knowledge from physical placemakers, urban designers, architects, and virtual world builders, people, game designers, level designers, people who are experienced in virtual space. The title of the workshop is Urban Stories and Rituals. It's free, it's going to be on the twenty ninth at our noontime slot when we do our meetups. You don't need VR to attend. It is capable of VR. You can attend it using a spatial platform, but you can also use your browser or your mobile device as well. And we live stream and record all of our meetups. I'm very excited for this. Joseph Conning is a placemaker that uses a narrative method, and we're exploring the theme of stories and rituals. It should be very interesting. So that's my open invitation to everyone to join the community. I'll also drop a link to our Discord channel. And I don't wanna take up any more of Matt's time and because Matt's done a lot of work with governance at Spectra. And I'll let you continue, Matt.
Speaker 5
7:30 – 7:30
Thanks, Nick. Since this is, I think the first seminar that I've attended with MediGov since joining, I'll just start with a quick intro. So like Nick, first, thank you for organizing and Steve for your presentation first. But, so like Nick, I wear many hats at Spectra Cities. Before Spectra, I worked in foreign policy and global development in a couple of different countries with a mix of civil society orgs, research teams, governments, And then in 2021, graduated from William and Mary with degrees in data science and international relations. From there, I was with the civic innovation core at the New York city department of city planning. And now I live in New York and work remotely on Spectra Cities and or not. Yeah. I live in Tokyo. Live in Tokyo. And that's part of the reason why, yeah, it's it's almost 02:00 in the morning here. So that's why I'm usually, not always at these events. But on that note, what is Vector Cities? It is a cross platform open source community where physical place makers and virtual world builders come together to build ideas from pixels to bricks, creating sustainable human centered and technologically progressive urbanization. Whether that means supporting existing communities in designing small scale IRL projects, or eventually bringing together a broader network, to build new sustainable, livable, and affordable cities and villages. So our idea is that individuals and groups who are working on similar urban development projects, or might just want to live in this type of city can use extended reality and spatial computing tools to support their conversations and prototype better urban environments and lifestyles because prototyping in the virtual is much faster and cheaper than in the physical. It also allows us to iterate and modify things as we learn. And that's just much easier to do when you're handling pixels compared to bricks. So, last point on this slide, we believe that collaborative spatial design and these of other technologies such as blockchain can facilitate a new type of cooperative network, which has smaller place based communities and other skills based communities working together to address both localised and global needs. Okay. So drawing inspiration from Elinor Ostrom, Leslie Kern, Mariana Lazcato, Jane Jacobs, Per Espin Stoknes, Henry George, and so on. We've drafted some proposals to get a general trajectory for Spectra, but we can only go so far in designing the specifics of an ecosystem that doesn't exist yet. And, we definitely can't do it by ourselves because shockingly as a three person full time team, we are not a representative sample of society. So we're going to try and hold back from speculating too much about the future and instead focus on two key concepts, city modding and layered cooperativism, where the project is today, and our anticipated next steps. Okay. So just a show of hand or hand emojis, how many or how have any of you experienced some type of extended reality or, like, a VR headset before? I'll try and switch through this thing. Okay. I see sent. Okay, we sent. Cool. So currently we are investing most of our time in expanding Specter's virtual spaces, both ones which are accessible through VR headset, but as Nick said on spatial IO, one which is accessible on mobile and desktop as well. And then also our open source assets and the collaborators that we're working with. And in doing so, our goal is to connect various online communities dedicated to urban planning, civic tech, extended reality, co living, and so on, and promote Spectra as a shared hub for co designing their placemaking projects. Because as we all know, designing is not a solitary activity. It is part of a larger social community of discourse. And this gets at what we mean when we say city modding. It's the physical and virtual place making that shapes the spatial environment or container of a community and therefore the community membership itself and its forms of self government or self governance. So one of our first like mini workshops several months ago, to discuss the design of bike paths throughout the virtual city, that was actually an act of city modding because how we shape our cities is how we shape our communities, our governance, and our lifestyles. City modding interprets Henry Laferbes, sorry, if I mispronounced the name, claim for a right to the city as a claim to take part in and co produce the city. Urban spaces are not just the settings of democracy, but rather the medium through which we identify, understand, and practice self governance. So one other strain of thinking that this builds on is from Eric Klingenberg's social infrastructure and Bob Putnam's social capital, wherein the built environment of a community, for example, the presence or lack of libraries, pubs, cafes, parks, barbershops, places of worship, and so on influences that community social capital and the glue that holds society together, which is the glue that holds society together and enables mutually beneficial cooperation. So because these places, the reference list is in the papers, but yeah, because these places are so important to fostering a community's capacity to govern itself, we should make them like much easier to build and lift them up instead of letting them fall into disrepair as they have been for the past several decades. So as online communities move to building in physical places, Spectra aims to support that process in virtual space by helping them iterate on designs, which will meet the needs of their residents. So these are some pictures of what I think are social infrastructure in Japan on the left and then pictures from some of our past meetups on the right. Good. So in part, this requires a programming co design workshops, guest talks, and educational materials for the spectre community. One of the things that we keep being asked for recently is more learning resources for how to create in XR. And to us opening up this technology to more people and demystifying what it can and cannot do is really important. So over the past few weeks, I've also started developing or devoting more of my time to developing in Unity so that I can help ask, answer questions as they come up. And where we are so far, our Discord has over 300 members, including a couple of regular posters and importantly instances of members with similar project ideas actually talking to each other and hopping into their own side conversations. I think I'll throw Steve under the bus. I think Steve may have done this before where he had an idea of which another person in the community also did, and they had some conversations on the side. So we also host our weekly Spectra Talks with guest speakers and occasional co design workshops. We've had a couple of in person events at New York City, South by Southwest, and we're collaborating with researchers at the Technical University at Armstaedt and our architectural partners at Numena on an ERC funded research project. And we have our first permanent IRL community starting to get designed in Puerto Rico. And that's the picture in the bottom right. But really where this leads us to, for MediGov is layered cooperativism. As Spectra grows, we will decentralize more decision making for the project and the community, and this will require designing governance protocols and financial mechanisms. And on the one hand, there will be these externally formed communities that partner with Spectra to help develop their sites and coordinate resources. And on the other hand, there will be these communities that formed from within Spectra, starting with those people who shared common interests and branched off and had their own conversations. And not all of these groups may be interested in urban planning or have a desire to live in a new city, but they can operate in the same ecosystem. If we organize, spectra into a, like a place and space based groups, meaning the blocks, clusters and cities, as well as skills and interest based groups, meaning the guilds, which operate across those layers. And within each of these groups, they can follow their own governance protocols, while still coordinating with the other groups in Spectra. So in other words, a bunch of Spectrans can form a block around making music and art and want to build like an artist neighbourhood in a city and run it via like a consensus model. But then they could also go and cluster up with other blocks to pool their finances while still maintaining like their social cultural governance differences. So like another block could in that same cluster could be focused on permaculture and operate through an elected board, but they can still talk to each other and cooperate. And when several of those clusters work together, they can get the resources to actually purchase land and start building a city at some scale.
Speaker 2
7:45 – 7:45
Okay.
Speaker 5
8:00 – 8:00
And ultimately the goal is that these groups operate as cooperatives, which share resources and are owned by their respective members. Okay. So what is the development of Spectra's layered cooperativism look like over time? It starts out similar to a lot of other organizations as the classic benevolent dictatorship, which continuously seeds more and more authority. And for us, this was phase one where Spectra Studio's founder, Ryan Chapecki hired myself and Nick, as well as the new Mina architecture firm to help co design some of the very first assets, white papers and community guidelines. And now in phase two, we're moving closer to, a little closer to a duocracy where Spectra Studios is still hiring Numenta to design sites, including the property in Puerto Rico, but all of our creations are, the virtual creations are open source and many people from outside of the Spectra community can go ahead and use them. And from there, joined the discord, attended events, and found other ways to participate and make the project their own. So our next goal here is to roll out some type of non financial token for active members to hold onto, to participate in future votes about like where the project heads. From there, and presentation's almost done. From there, we'll look to enable that voting process as well as establish some type of cooperatives for Spectra's global layer, and a way for our members to be part owners of that. And at this point, the direct influence of the founder and, the rest of us at Spectra Studios will be like far more diminished. And that diminishing trend will continue, until Spectra Studios operates more as a guild providing services and Spectrans are instead the owners making the decisions. And after many, many years, that multilayer structure will exist. And at least we hope it's that easy. So to start testing some of these token mechanics out and also put Spectra's virtual assets to use, we're currently prototyping a simple VR game, which ties in Spectra's urban planning ideas with community based decision making. So once we figure out how that workflow, works in like this lower stakes scenario, then we can move toward implementing it with the rest of the project. And, I know we covered a lot, but with that, try to reel in the conversation, from all of the directions, the past ten ish minutes. And, yeah, we we have a few questions for discussion. So if you could redesign your city or space, what would you change? And if you could build a new place, what would you create? Okay. And
Speaker 1
8:15 – 8:15
Nick, if you wanna take a look. Thank you so much, Matt and Nick.
Speaker 3
8:30 – 8:30
Thanks, Matt, for keeping the midnight oil burning.
Speaker 1
8:45 – 8:45
This this comment by Daniel is hilarious. Cool. Anyone with questions or comments around these discussion points that that have been raised?
Speaker 2
9:00 – 9:00
I'm
Speaker 3
9:15 – 9:15
curious. I have a question for for everyone. Like, I when I started to work on this project, I was aware of a lot of similar ideas actually, like, going back quite a ways. And so I'm curious, people have been so good at pointing out other resources. So and I know Stent just shared something asynchronous reality. But if the idea of urban simulation is deeply fascinating to me and I think our whole team. And so I'm curious if you've this sort of rings any bells for anyone else because I feel like it's it's been a compelling idea for some time, but we've never quite had the mix of technology we do today to explore it. There was something I heard about in 2011 that was called, like, Betavilles. That was also, like, an urban planning platform for proposing future projects and stuff. It's kind of interesting.
Speaker 5
9:30 – 9:30
The
Speaker 1
9:45 – 9:45
it's not really related to urban design, but Croquet, which is a a browser OS type project, which has a lot of, like, simultaneous views onto a virtual environment through, like, relays and stuff is really interesting. And I think it raises interesting questions about, like, what simultaneous multiplayer virtual governance starts to look like. I think you and I talked about this a little bit directly, Nick. But those kinds of things I think are super interesting. And I also think like the
Speaker 3
10:00 – 10:00
That's David A. Smith's project,
Speaker 1
10:15 – 10:15
I think so. I can't remember then whose project it is. But it's Botox.
Speaker 3
10:30 – 10:30
One of the first three d Botox. Games or three d shooting games, I think. Anyway, yeah, that's really interesting. I also noticed on your Slack channel that in those various subjects that people are voting, casting votes of interest, one of them is, like, how to integrate online and offline governance. And so I wonder if that also could be reframed now as spatial. What is spatial governance or Apple to, you know, to borrow Vision Pro or Apple's new spatial computing marketing language, which I quite like actually. Like, yeah, what what happens to governance out in space versus in digital form. Anyone have work on that or any resources?
Speaker 1
10:45 – 10:45
There's a really good arena board for that creative software. I'm gonna see if I can find it while putting together ideas.
Speaker 4
11:00 – 11:00
Are are you
Speaker 2
11:15 – 11:15
speaking of things like actually governing physical cities, you know, in an in an egalitarian manner? Because I do have equivalent stuff that I'm working on that has that's like the layered cooperativism, but within the physical context. In other words, my actual apartment buildings are cooperatives. And then I really don't have the block structure, but I sort of have the cluster, the superblock. In other words, in in my universal urban planning platform, my structures are my superblocks are the same size as the superblocks in Barcelona, which is to say a quarter mile on a stop.
Speaker 3
11:30 – 11:30
It's a popular, in source of inspiration for us too, Barcelona. Yeah. I think
Speaker 2
11:45 – 11:45
I was wondering, yeah, too, why you use
Speaker 3
12:00 – 12:00
So modular. Yeah.
Speaker 2
12:15 – 12:15
Of cluster instead of super block because I do find super block to be a good term.
Speaker 3
12:30 – 12:30
Mhmm. I I I'm not sure. But yeah. I I think so. Yeah. But we're keen to keep in touch if anyone, you know, does ring a bell for you or you think of something. You know, it it's always great to get more ideas. And, yeah, we hope to hope to see everyone in the in the community. We dropped a Discord link and and the LinkedIn to our the upcoming event. Andrea, the Browning Architecture Specter, super interesting person exploring the frontiers of architecture, so it's a really great chance to to meet her as well. Yeah. I would hope to hope to see everyone. Thanks for for giving us the time at the at the seminar, and I'm excited to to hear more in the upcoming weeks from other Thanks.
Speaker 5
12:45 – 12:45
Daniel has something to say too.
Speaker 3
13:00 – 13:00
Oh, yeah. Alright.
Speaker 4
13:15 – 13:15
I did have another I I I had one kind of casual thought and then another question. In terms of the spatial governance is, what if your voting power dropped off as a function of distance from your house to, like, the the actual, like like, schools, like, five blocks away versus, like, schools across town? You just have, like, a Gaussian over your residence, and, like, your vote would actually just be scaled down based on how far it was. I don't know. I just thought of that. I had I had another thought or question rather, like, in your sort of, like, a governance development arc, you had duocracy as sort of, like, a it's, like, a semi primitive stage and, like, more, like, complete unstructured inner interface as being, like, a higher stage. Like, I kinda wanna interrogate that or push back on that because
Speaker 1
13:30 – 13:30
I think in
Speaker 4
13:45 – 13:45
many ways, duocracy represents, like, a very high functioning form in that you're actually able to get by with much less process. Mhmm. And you have people that are inherently motivated, the ones that are taking and and have power. So I I I'm curious, like, can we even say that duarch represents, in some ways, like, a very advanced form compared to these others, which I assume involve more structure and process.
Speaker 3
14:00 – 14:00
Yeah. I'm curious, Matt. Do you think that it's on this road map particularly in connection with, like, the assumed scale of the community at that point? So, like, a small I think I've heard of duocracy mostly in the context of co living and sort of have this impression that it's sort of a small scale structure. But have you ever thought about it as something that could scale?
Speaker 5
14:15 – 14:15
Yeah. Thank you, Daniel. I think that's a soup a very valid point, which I didn't do a good job of conveying on this slide. I think the best way to understand this slide is Spectra is like global layer, where as Nick pointed out, as the project grows, it would a duocracy might make less sense for a community of many, many people, but then this the smaller groups within Spectra, those blocks and those clusters still could absolutely operate as a duocracy. So it's more like in this curve that we have going here, the different levels of democracy are, like, applied they build onto duocracy as opposed to replacing it. So that culture can definitely still exist in other parts of the project, but they just take it's more like if this is a timeline of what we can do now versus what we want to be able to accomplish ten years from now when we're building something more massive. We can't get to a layered democracy until a long time from now, but we can get to a duocracy sooner and we already have that type of activity starting to prop up. Thank you
Speaker 2
14:30 – 14:30
for that.
Speaker 1
14:45 – 14:45
Yeah. Thank you for the question. And I also shared a couple links in the the chat. The kind of thing that Daniel was talking about reminded me a little bit of how, like, space is managed in social VR contexts where, like, depending on how close you are to another user, there are different kinds of user interface or user interaction affordances that become more or less finely grained based on the distance. And a lot of that research is based around the the concept of proxemics that Edward T. Hall has developed. Yeah. There's, like, some interesting discussion about how that relates to the things like harassment and other kinds of, like, social maladaptive behaviors in VR spaces. So thinking about, like, governance along a spatial axis, I think, is a super interesting vector to explore. I wish I had so much more time to talk about this and what Steve presented. Okay. But thank you for giving us We
Speaker 3
15:00 – 15:00
have every Thursday at our meetup. If anyone wants to talk more, we come to Spectre meetup. Yeah. That's a really and I'll put the website as well. The website's interesting, but, you know, the meetup is where you really can see where our hearts are right now for sure.
Speaker 1
15:15 – 15:15
Amazing. But, yes, thank you for giving us these tastes, and samples of the work that you're doing. And let's briefly go off mute and give a round of applause to our presenters from the community today. Three, two, one. Yes. Very, very good.
Speaker 3
15:30 – 15:30
Get a little filter threshold off your mic.
Speaker 1
15:45 – 15:45
Yes. Everyone, please turn off the threshold. Exactly. Go into audio mode. Stream your favorite Original Center for Musicians mode. Okay. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. Thanks, sir. Yeah. Thank you so much, everybody. And come back next month for another short talk and next week for Griff. Okay. Bye, everybody. Bye bye. Thank you,
Speaker 2
16:00 – 16:00
Will. Bye.