Awesome. Thank you so much for the great introduction, Lee. And it's been awesome to be in conversation with you, and it's really helped push me to, yeah, put down in a presentation some of the governance thinking in addition to the systems thinking that we've been doing because I have been sharing that part of the infrastructure. But this is the first time I'm really sharing the governance and all of the work we've done to articulate that. So I really appreciate this space. Thank you so much, Val, also for opening the space. It's great to cross paths with you again online. I am going to actually start my presentation today with a quick nod to the kind of catalyst behind this project was actually the MediGov tent at DWebCamp a few years back. So I had attended it was my first time attending DWebCamp. This is an image from that year. And I had the opportunity to present this idea I had for how transfer might evolve into what I'm essentially presenting today. And that opportunity connected me with so many interesting folks in this space. It was the first time I met in person the developers who have been building out this vision alongside me. It was the first time I met in person some of the members of Haifa coop who which that project has been so important also in understanding new ways of working and thinking about, you know, ownership in a cooperative structure alongside tech work and knowledge work and and intellectual property. So, yeah, MediGov has kind of been, from the very start, a a really special catalyst for us. So thank you for all the work you do and for for bringing these seminars together. I'm really excited to share today, the details of this project, and I'm hoping that this can also be somewhat of an interactive conversation. If questions come up, as I'm presenting, please do share them in the chat, and, I will try to address them as we go. Otherwise, definitely will be time towards the end for us to have, a more thorough discussion if interested. So with that, I wanna just share the look at our team. So we are a distributed team. For many, many years, transfer has really just been myself and Wade Wallerstein who has been, doing curatorial work and care work alongside side me for many years. But, starting actually last year, a year ago now, we received support from the Knight Foundation, and that was matched by the Filecoin Foundation and the Filecoin Foundation for the decentralized web. And we were able to hire a team of people. And so together, we have built out something really, really special. So our founding members are the artists. You see their names here and their locations. Located really international group of folks, really only two within the The US. And then myself and Regina Harsany and Wade Wallerstein are what we call caretaker members. Then we also have our care team, and these are conservation specialists who work primarily within institutions. Some of them are also independent conservators. But they joined the team with that support from the Knight Foundation to really give us the grounding in their expertise to sort of drive our r and d process as we built out the speculative system with the view of how do we make something that will last a 100 years, so this museological time frame. Right? And so these folks, you know, were were really generous in joining our project on a part time basis to really help us structure that out. And then the dev team, so Ryan and Andrew, came from a organization called Fission. That's where they were working when I met them back in the woods at dWebCamp and since have continued on this project, and we're about to go into a new iteration. They're still really the cornerstone of the back end architecture and a lot of the systems thinking. And then I've been really, really lucky to have, Lulu and Matania to help bring the front end experiences of this to life. And what this dev team has done is really architected an open source software and distributed storage protocol by weaving together existing technologies. And the idea is that these run with simple self hosted interfaces in the browser. And so I'm gonna get more into what that technology stack involves shortly here in the presentation. Also, just, you know, a quick thanks to all these folks who have been advisors, inspiration. MediGov community, so you might recognize some of these names if you're dialing in from from the community. These folks have really, been so generous with their time to share expertise and thinking with me through this project. So with that, to start the presentation today, I'd like to zoom out and share some framing for what we're doing with the Transfer Data Trust. So there are three core aspects of this initiative. The first is conservation and care of time based media art, which I believe is the defining artistic moment of our time. The majority of our work in phase one has been focused around the opportunities that we see in this space. That's our niche. The second aspect of this initiative is the economics of contemporary art and creative practice more broadly, which has been upended by the emergence of artificial intelligence and crypto. And the third aspect of this initiative is the infrastructure and governance of data, which Lee set up really nicely at the beginning of the talk, and I believe this is intricately tied to the previous two also. It's an issue that has become increasingly urgent as we witness our cultural legacy being erased. So the hypothesis of this project is that by starting small at the scale of trust, we can demonstrate a viable alternative and help imagine a different way forward. Some quick background for those of you who might not know my work, and what we have been doing at transfer. I wanted to share some of the iterations on networks of care that preceded this project to kind of set the stage for what we've built. I've been working with the artists involved in this project for more than a decade at transfer, showing and placing their works at great media art institutions all over the world, like the Thoma Foundation collection, the House of Electronic Kunst and Basel, the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. And I've worked alongside conservators and archivists on acquisitions and facilitated custom contract development with attorneys and art and law specialists to really support what it means to place emerging variable media art formats like VR, AR, and video games into collections. And although Transfer presented as a gallery since 2013, our founding, it really functioned more as a network of care, which was operating on principles of mutual exchange and generosity, and it resulted in a really close knit collaborative roster of artists. The challenges we encountered at transfer allowed us to do sort of different experiments in distributed cultural infrastructure and sustainable funding models and explore alternative institutional formats. And one of those was the current museum. So this was an experiment in data stewardship that ran from 2016 to 2020 in New York City. And this initiative is when Regina Harsanyi and I started working together. She's one of the, folks who's instrumental in the preservation considerations for this project. The collection which you see here was redundantly stored across a network of NAS drives, and the acquisitions, funding, and care work was distributed across a community of patrons. In addition to experimenting with new forms of collecting and preserving variable media artworks, our motivation was to invest in conservation and care as we built the collection and make that rigorous care work visible to our audience. More recently, Regina and I collaborated on a sprawling virtual exhibition and ambitious distributed conservation effort called Pieces of Me, which was presented online during the pandemic. You can still see this online at piecesofme.online. The experiment brought together 50 artists to make a collective offering of solidarity as a much needed antidote to the hyper capitalist NFT boom, which we found did not really consider the long term conservation needs of digital art whatsoever. The exhibition was received with critical acclaim with features in Artforum and The New York Times, among others, and Pieces of Me taught us important lessons about scale and the urgent need for distributed financial resources in contemporary art. So these iterations on Networks of Care gave us the hands on experience and insight into challenges and opportunities in the field of time based media art. And so equipped with these learnings, we set out to tackle the persistence problems, which are obsolescence and long term sustainability, with a focus on the opportunities presented by distributed storage and encryption. So this was our overarching goal, and it really addresses the urgent need for innovative care strategies outside of museums and centralized institutions. So our guiding motivations were to bring together the knowledge of conservators and technologists to codesign an infrastructure that addresses pain points of existing systems. Many of those existing systems are platforms. This is not a platform. I'm going to be saying that a lot. This is not a platform. It's a new way of thinking about data ownership and data stewardship. Our other guiding motivations were to reimagine the relationships of stewardship and the funding models for ongoing care of variable media art by creating a peer network for conservation backed by a sustainable cooperative business entity and to involve artist studios directly in conservation and preservation by giving them tools to collaborate with trained conservators and start the documentation process much earlier in the life cycle of a work. And most importantly, our goal was to ensure that all of these tools are free of dependencies on big tech corporate platforms and that they generate minimal technical debt so they can continue to be migrated properly and accessed decades into the future. We imagine all the time someone finding this data a hundred years from now, and how might they approach it? How might they understand it? So this pilot was possible, again, because our collaborations are grounded in this network of artist studios who've committed to supporting one another. Each studio acts as a local node, storing not only its own work but redundant copies of others, creating a peer to peer redundancy built on proximity and trust. And really sharing these preventative conservation responsibilities across the network is the key, and that means that conservation can take place within and across studios. It creates efficiency, and it opens up a model of care that isn't dependent on any single artist or institution acting alone. So now we're gonna get into some of the tech infrastructure part. So, this is this is the the nerd section here. If you're not a developer, please bear with me. I won't get into too much detail, but, hopefully, it will share some of the architecture and thinking we've done here. So our hardware infrastructure is powered by QNAP in Kingston who have generously provided these network attached storage drives or NAS drives for short. You're gonna hear that a lot in this presentation. And each of these drives is currently equipped with five bays of four terabyte SSD storage. Right now, we have six nodes deployed and more coming online. Each founding member is a node in the network. That means they host their data locally in their studio. There's no server involved. And they are linked together through a private IPFS network for data sharing. For those of you who don't know that term, IPFS is the interplanetary file system. It's a decentralized storage protocol built by Protocol Labs and closely tied into Filecoin. So each node stores encrypted copies of each other's archives. If one node goes down, it can be restored from the network. And this software infrastructure runs locally on the NAS drive. It consists of two parts, which are called the archive engine and the trust client. The archive engine has a very intuitive workflow, which really creates a seamless way for artists to manage their data. And this is based on ten years of collaboration with huge data files and this community of artists. We've been sharing files for production of shows all over the world in that time and exchanging documentation, contracts, and relationships. And together we've built cultural value around this data. So we have a practice that we've modeled this system around. I won't get too technical today, but if there are any developer minded folks in the group, the system runs entirely on existing open source software and open protocols. At the core is something called WinFS, which a proto is a protocol for encryption at rest, and Filecoin, which is a decentralized storage network, which is the foundation of security for the trust. At the next layer up, we are deploying a private IPFS network on the NAS drives. We're then leveraging Tailscale to manage a wider network of collaborators and devices. And to make the files accessible to the public, we are currently using a pinata gateway. And at every layer of that system, the artist has full agency and control about what they share with whom. This is a diagram of our system architecture, which really just illustrates how peers in the Trust are connected with a Tailscale sidecar, shows how the artist computer and the QNAP device are related to each other, and we're running container based applications on the QNAP device to deploy these. All that's to say is it's really easy to actually plug in this device, boot up a container, and we have a GUI for installing this thing. So it's three simple steps. You get all the right variables in place and you're up and running with the archive engine. So that part is completely, you know, again, open source technologies that existed before us, just woven together in a very smart way to do this thing we've been doing as creative practitioners for a decade now. And then on top of that, gives us a shared file system, right, then what we're able to do is deploy our local first trust client. So archiving, it's a very lonely activity, and this client is designed to support collaboration and new social behaviors around data stewardship. So it's a set of lightweight interfaces that allows contributors to collaboratively manage data. At first glance, it kinda looks like content management and collection management systems that you're familiar with, and it is similar. You access it in a web browser. It's very easy to use, does a lot of the same things, but it's also fundamentally different under the hood. And it this has significant implications for what it means to fully own the content managed in this system. These interfaces run HTML, CSS, and JavaScript locally in the browser right from your NAS drive. There are no third party service or service providers. The solution is completely free of reliance on big tech. There's no Amazon Web Server, no Google Cloud. It cannot be censored or taken down. The data that's contributed through the client is stored locally on your NAS drive in JSON files with well structured metadata, and that's really the secret of the system. Metadata is everything. And we are leveraging a linked open data model called linked.art. You can find it online at linked.art. And that is being developed by an impressive consortium of institutions, which includes the Getty, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, among others. And so this lightweight implementation ensures that there is very little technical debt for a conservator a hundred years into the future trying to reconstruct the archives. They would simply open the drive and find a bunch of files and folders with well structured, human readable files, and they can also, by the way, be easily parsed by AI, thanks to the semantic structures of the link. Art metadata model. And this client will continue to grow iteratively. The first version is centered on use cases for the artist studios. It's easily adapted to meet the needs of collections and institutional workflows, and our aim is not to automate this kind of specialized knowledge, but instead to boost collaboration between conservators and artists. I'm really happy to share that this concept is now patent pending. We have filed a patent application on this. It is something that is also developing in all sorts of different use cases and is something that we're going to be releasing to a wider community of supporters this fall, to join our network and start to experiment with some of these interfaces to manage your data. So with that, I would like to get into some of the data governance layers of this project. I think that's really the interest of this group. So we have the system. We have all these ideas about preservation. How do we make this last? How do we ensure that it is maintained? So to start, I wanted to share some of the themes that our data coop is structured around. You see them here. We are really interested in thinking about distributive justice and how this can serve as a way to support many, many artists, we are also really, really focused on what artist ownership means in the age of AI. And we are doing that by owning our own data first and foremost, but also thinking about training our own large language models and owning that fully. We are also doing cooperative data preservation. As I mentioned previously, doing this alone is really next to impossible because of the amount of time it takes to care for these kinds of works and the amount of labor it will take us all to extract our data from big tech. So doing this cooperatively, I think, is really key, having that support system and having that kind of mutual exchange around this kind of activity. We're also doing something very interesting with the valuation of data, and that means both financial value, but also cultural value and how we're thinking about that. We have developed a sustainable co op business model, and that, I think, is really crucial. We are launching that business model right now, so time will tell how sustainable it actually is. But we are optimistic as we've been working together for so long now with many lessons about what is and isn't sustainable in that kind of cooperative work. And we are making all of this available as an open toolkit. So if others are interested in forming data co ops, they can pick up our bylaws, our member agreements. Not all of it will likely apply to you or your organization, but it serves as a template. And also, you know, sharing openly our resources and our process, which is on the next slide. So I wanted to walk through kind of how this evolved with you all as an illustration of how our governance model came into view. So we started, obviously, with some amazing sources of inspiration, which I'm sure are familiar to many of you in the meta gov community. Exit to Community is, one of the best resources online about this kind of thinking, how, an organization can give ownership to its members. The distributed co op or DISCO for short, DISCO manifesto, also was a huge source of inspiration in thinking about what a virtual cooperative looks like. Art.coop and platform.coop are two of the best resources for thinking from the art side and from the digital platform coop side. Tons and tons of posts, reports from both of those. Haifa is an incredible model of a tech workers' cooperative. They make all of their documents also fully transparent, which has served as a huge source of inspiration for how we're thinking about structuring our own organization. And then there is, a really interesting, example called The Walker Group, which is a tech company that exited to a perpetual purpose trust. It's a model I'm super, super jazzed about and hope we can evolve into as as transfer grows. And then just looking at the history of cooperatives, there are so many incredible examples out there for decades and decades about how individuals have coordinated through cooperative structures to do everything from, you know, eat healthier food and source their own food to manage energy, to sell goods and services. So that early inspiration and research was a really important part of laying the groundwork for where we wanted to go. We then spent about a year researching different entity types. And so this looked like comparing the pros and cons of these different business models, starting with the idea of the perpetual purpose trust, which is something that in the art world is typically how estates are managed, posthumously. So we started with looking at that model, and, of course, we're called the transfer data trust, and we hope to move into a trust. But as we started to dig more into that and legacy planning, we found it a really complex space, and it's also very costly to form a trust. And so as we looked into different models of B Corp, you know, social good corporations, LLCs, nonprofits versus not for profits, what we really landed on was cooperative as a very, accessible and easy way to start. We also, simultaneously, to researching these entity types, were doing what a couple of experts referred to as jurisdiction shopping. So, obviously, the legal codes in different geographies govern the business structures and how they are, run, reporting, things like taxes, ownership liability, and insurance. So, we were really keen on looking at the Colorado Cooperative Code, which is, as one person referred to, the sort of Delaware of cooperatives. So if you're familiar with LLC foundations in The US, many people go in the jurisdiction of Delaware because it's so simple to do that. And Colorado is actually very lenient for, forming cooperatives, and they have a really, really interesting cooperative code with many different structures. And so we landed on what's called a promotional cooperative in the jurisdiction of Colorado. All of our members are virtual. We don't currently have anyone physically located there, but we do have a registered agent, and we're able to create the entity in that jurisdiction. So this process for us, that's what we landed on. Many people in the space also do LLCs with cooperative bylaws, so that was sort of our next option. We were looking at doing that, but we found it really important to go for a full on cooperative because this experiment is so grounded in member ownership, and I'll get to that in a second, how our cooperative is structured. We also spent a lot of time with expert input. I flashed those names at the beginning of this presentation. Could not have been possible without these folks being so generous with their time to talk through all of these nuances with us. And this was largely a process of myself going into these meetings one on one and then sharing that information back and educating cooperative on our monthly calls. And, we also looked at referrals once we decided on our entity structure and did some governance modeling to actually spend month by month. We met and looked back at our ten year history, talked about what didn't work, what worked well, and really took some time to build accountability with each other and model out our our support practices. I just wanna check. The seminar is an hour long. Right? Just wanna make sure that I'm within the time frame. Okay. Cool. Because I know we're running on already half an hour. So this shows you what the primary functions of the coop are. So this states really simply what we're doing with the transfer data trust. So first and foremost, maintaining this archive of artworks, and this is about both the data governance and the preservation infrastructure. So we're maintaining the infrastructure through this governance model. We're also performing conservation and appraisal on the archive on an ongoing basis, so we're able to actually not only care for the works, but okay. Cool. I'm gonna wrap it up here. I think I have one more slide after this. So we will be getting an appraisal value for the value of the digital artworks as well. We also provide secure access to the artworks and support the artists in managing inventory and IP, as I mentioned previously. We will be supporting the artists to offer their artwork for acquisition. So as a promotional cooperative, we're promoting the works, and then the artists are actually doing the transactions around those works. And that division between promotional activities and the percentage that the co op receives allows us to have very low tax liability, specifically when we're redistributing all our profits to the members. So we enable those transactions through our platform, and we also are looking to manage assets to build wealth. I'll talk more about that in a second. And, yeah, we also have to obviously maintain operations and accounting for the coop, which our automated system through the trust client helps make that a lot more efficient. Also, our small scale and trust network makes that sustainable. So this shows you kind of how our governance runs annually. Artists commit inventory to the trust, and they also, attend a virtual summit. Our community is invited to that virtual summit as well. It's very transparent. And then annually, there is a disbursement for any proceeds that the, cooperative has taken in through their percentage, of support. Quarterly, we do resource allocation as a cooperative. We also do data stewardship and look at member proposals. So each quarter, the caretaker members meet with the artist to talk about their needs, and we model those into proposals to discuss how we're gonna spend our resources. And then each month, everyone who's a member is responsible for committing data. We also look at storage capacity and report our operations and accounting, and that's about increasing the overall value of the co ops holdings. And reporting helps ensure that the decentralized network remains healthy and sustainable. And then biannually, what we're looking to do is appraisal of assets. So every two years, how has the value of the artwork grown in this data cooperative? And after two years of successful operation, we are planning to formalize our trust entity, and the trust will be held by the cooperative and it will ensure the cultural legacy of these work persists beyond the lifetime of the creators. So the cooperative is really the first operationalizing layer, and the trust will ensure the longevity of this data beyond any member, one member, or the cooperative operations. And then, yeah, biannually, we'll also look at modifications to bylaws and membership agreements as needed. And then the last slide here is just showing a little bit more about the value proposition and might answer this question actually in the chat. So the idea is that this is fully a member owned cooperative, one member, one vote, and we really are interesting interested in operating at the scale of trust. So the answer to that question, who can join, no one can really join. We only accept new members annually, and we only accept members who we've been collaborating with for years. So Transfer has been working with about 80 plus international artists for the last few years, and so we're gonna grow very slowly to make sure this is sustainable. That being said, what we encourage everyone to do is to think about forming their own trust network with other artists and picking up this model and, managing your creative practice in that way. There is a distinction between the cooperative and the network. The network is something we are going to scale and grow within the next calendar year, so you will be able to join the network. That doesn't mean you're necessarily joining the cooperative. You're just joining our technical infrastructure and experimenting with that on your own. And the idea is if that works for you, you can then kind of fork off with others and form your own cooperative entity. So the way this works within our cooperative structure is we're staking the artist proof. So when an artist makes an annual commitment for an artwork, they're saying that that proof will always be held by the cooperative, and that lets us have a consistent value year by year. If an artist starts working with a new agent, maybe they wanna withdraw an available edition the next year, the proof still stays in the cooperative's assets, but the available edition can go to another agent. We wanna be really fluid and flexible, seeing that that's how artists work intrinsically, especially our artists who are working online. Then each year, we distribute our dividends. This makes us a not for profit. This is a very important distinction which I learned throughout this process. Being a nonprofit, five zero one(three) organization, you have to maintain a board. There's a lot of overhead there. But you can be a not for profit, in other words, enjoy some of the same tax benefits, by redistributing your proceeds each year. And so, that is how we are working with a very interesting CPA who deals with a lot of cooperatives, who is kind of helping us understand, how to minimize the tax burden on the cooperative and on the artist studio. Because right now, it's really, really tough as an artist to deal with taxes and your tax implications. So this model helps solve some of those frustrations in the short term. So together, we're cooperatively growing our value, and this is really about that appraisal and investment. And we're also offering assurance for collectors through this mutual support network. Collectors who invest in this kind of work, it's really risky. It's expensive to maintain. If you buy a VR artwork, that changes every six months to a year. How can you constantly maintain that? So this is a way for collectors to know that, you know, anything that's in the trust, that's held by the trust is being updated and maintained by the trust in perpetuity. If a work you acquire in an edition ever goes out of date, you can come back to the trust for the latest and greatest of the artist proof that we are preserving, and really having that be a network of mutual support. And we're keen to have our collectors also participating in our, data storage infrastructure, as well. So the last slide is just a summary of all of the components. So, again, there's the decentralized conservation network, which will be growing and open for participation, the archive engine, which is currently an open source toolkit that anyone can pick up and use. And in fact, the archive engine is already being used by, a number of other, organizations outside of the space of contemporary art. So there's, a a human rights data analysis group that's interested in thinking about that kind of data sovereignty. Shift Collective is another, the community based archiving initiative that is experimenting with the archive engine. Super flexible for others. If if you have use cases, definitely, let's talk about how you might implement the archive engine. And then the trust client, as I mentioned, runs on that architecture specifically for artists and time based media conservation. That's the part that we'll be opening up through the decentralized conservation network. And then there's our data coop, which is a model for everyone but really is only our members and won't be scaling huge, but instead is meant to be an alternative framework for exploring these new kinds of relationship to data and the value of data. And this is a little look at what's next. I think I'll just pause on that slide as we get into some of the discussion. I see some great questions in the chat, actually, and maybe I can start there.

Yeah. Chase just asked a great question. Who puts in the labor to develop and maintain this system? How is that labor compensated? It is compensated, and this is where we have, acted as a proof of concept. So the transfer data trust is the first proof proof of concept of what this open culture infrastructure can be. So we have fiscal sponsorship through Gray Area to be building out that public good component of this. It is separate from the cooperative business entity itself. And so that network I'm just gonna flip back to the that sort of decentralized conservation network and the two software components, are going to be grant funded work. And so any consultants, technologists, people working on those components are paid hourly for their time. We are looking at a different sort of model for how we release and maintain that. What's really cool about this infrastructure is that it's so minimal and lightweight that it will run for a very, very long time within, you know, a browser interface. So the client itself doesn't need much maintenance, and our hope is that the archive engine is a piece of tooling that is useful to enough different entities that many people are contributing to the ongoing development of that and security of that. It's also, you know, again, weaving together of open source projects that are already, you know, running and supported. So it has also behind it an interesting community of developers for those inter individual components. But thank you for asking the question, Chase. The the labor is a a huge part of, you know, making sure that this stays sustainable. And let me see what other questions. How does distribution work when some people likely make much more sales than others? Yeah. So our governance model is based on a sort of very, again, trust based and generous model. And so we have a very simple equation for how disbursements work on our cooperative's annual schedule. And so we use a point based system, and this is articulated in our bylaws. And so when an artist makes a commitment of inventory, regardless of the price, they get one point. The more inventory they commit, the more points they get for the annual disbursement. And, again, this is reviewed each year, and it can be withdrawn or increased. So then the total sum we have to disperse at the end of the year is divided on those points. So one artwork might be $50,000. One artwork might be $5,000. They are each a point in our distributive justice system. So there is very much a leveling out to our co op, and, again, it's because all these artists know each other. Love each other. They have supported each other's work for many, many years, and so we have this sort of system of reciprocity and support built into our model. Given that this is fundamentally a private network, why was IPFS chosen given it's designed predominantly for global accessible public data and is generally rather difficult to stop from broadcasting various metadata? Yeah. You know, so, Peter, this is a new implementation of IPFS, and we were not the first to do it, but we picked up some of that work, from the developers who were doing it. And so we are implementing our own private IPFS network. The reason why is because we find it really, really, efficient for thinking about, this kind of decentralized data storage. We are also invested in using Filecoin for a long term cold storage layer, and it makes sense to be working in the same ecosystem, from a protocol perspective. And, we don't have the issue of, the the metadata being broadcast because everything is secured to these devices. The the actual device itself is the only thing that can actually access the data, and everything is encrypted at rest using WinFS additionally. And that is probably the extent to which I can answer that question from a technical perspective. But if you are curious in more detail, I can certainly, point you to, where you can chime in on our GitHub to chat with the developers in more detail on that. Jonathan asks, say a larger corporation with agentic AI wants to destroy the coop. What are their most likely technical and social attack vectors, and what are the coop's self defense mechanism? Jonathan, that is a great question. We are actually starting in phase two, and we're bringing on a security expert to do a further layer of auditing on what we have developed. I'd say they're gonna have to get through our Tailscale first and foremost, which is an open source software and is a project that is widely developed right now and is used for many, many important secure use cases, so they would have to start there. And beyond that, they're gonna be probably looking at doing some kind of hacking into our Filecoin wallets, which are the next sort of gateway to the system. So in order to access any of your data in the browser, you do connect with a Filecoin wallet as your archive private key. So that's the next layer in. And, yeah, I don't know how easy it is gonna be to spoof either of those things, but, thank you for asking the question. It's something we are keen to have more folks participating in the archive engine and playing with the use case and looking at how it scales, because, yeah, nothing is 100% foolproof, but we are doing what we can to deal with very sophisticated security and encryption protocols. Let me see if there are other questions.

Yeah. So, a couple things we vote on, we vote on our resource allocation. So members can essentially make a proposal for the funds that we have available in our cooperative budget if they need conservation or care work on specific items. We would vote on things like adding members or growth. We would vote also on any changes to our network infrastructure. Say we did have a security vulnerability that came up, we would put a proposal to our group about how we plan to handle that, what the resources are that are necessary to deal with that, and the group would vote on how to allocate those resources. We also vote on different, sort of ways that we're presenting work, that we're sharing work. So it is really a proposal based voting mechanism. Are there any situations where it makes sense to explore different voting mechanisms for one person, one vote? I'm sure there will be in the future if this really grows, beyond our core members. But right now, we are such a tight knit group that that is how we are dealing with our voting, and everything is based on consensus. So these are great questions. Thank you all. I was I was really excited to come into this community to talk about the governance model and see what resonated with folks and what what questions came up. So I really appreciate this engagement.

No. I'm no. Everyone has to sorry. It's majority. Sorry. It's majority consensus. So we do seventy thirty. So we have to have that many of our members actively voting to pass something.

Not unanimous consent. Majority consent.

But we are only eight members to begin with, so, we're typically very much in alignment. But, of course, as things evolve and as, ideally, more and more sums of money become involved, that may change, which is something that a lot of the specialists I talked to in governance were warning me of. And we also wrote we are we architected our our co op documents in such a way that the bylaws are separate from the membership agreements and then a set of policies. So it's actually very easy for us to make modifications to the policies if our members were to vote to want to change any of the specific policies around how money is handling, how our distribution points distribution system works, things of that nature. Can I ask a little more on how a promotion co op differs from a producer and or a worker coop? Sure. I'm I you know, worker coops, for example, might be very similar in some regards. But for us, the the promotion coop is not requiring labor from any of the participating artist members. So for a worker coop, you are very much an employee of that cooperative. Labor laws apply to you. The way you're taxed around your labor is how the cooperative is structured. I'm not an expert in worker co ops. I've only gone all the way down the rabbit hole of the promotional co op, but it allows us to, offer a sort of high level knowledge, education, and exposure service to the artists without considering them employee owners of the, coop. And it is similar to a producer coop in some ways, but again, I think that the distinction there is, we did look at producer co ops because that's another model within the jurisdiction of Colorado, and I believe that's related to goods and services exchanging hands. So on our model, the artist retains ownership of their artwork. We help them, we provide them tools to manage their IP, but they actually retain ownership of that work and it is transacted directly through the artist studio. So we do not take those goods on as on our coop, as resources in our coop. How is redistribution weighted and determined? So that's the point system I was mentioning earlier. So annually, an artist has an opportunity to commit available additions to the cooperative. And so if you, in a year, commit five editions of five different works, one edition of each of five works, you then have five points. So at the end of the year, whatever the total amount is, you are distributed that percentage, from the pool of redistribution.

Yeah. I mean, that that's a great question. And I think what we're doing is applying a, again, like, a business entity, which exists within a legal system in a world where, you know, a physical jurisdiction is still the primary governing consideration, and we're applying that to data, which is a totally ephemeral location list. Like, this is an international group of collaborators. Also, what does it mean to choose a jurisdiction when no one is in any one place? Where is this business quote unquote located? So, you know, this is the part where it is a speculative model where we're saying, hey, our bylaws are about governing data. That is the stuff that we are promoting through this promotional cooperative model. But I think this is one of those places where, where we're going in the future with these kinds of concepts of ownership still don't match well to the way that legislation works and the way that, you know, our, our systems of of doing business and financial models function. So, it is very much a bridge in between those two kinds of ways of thinking. Is there grading or weighting of contributions to reflect the quality of contributions? So that I mean, yeah, that's a a great question. Really, again, we are a a group of people that have been working together for a decade, and we know and trust the quality of work, and it has been vetted. It has been shown. It has been vetted by great institutions. So this isn't a DAO. This isn't open to anyone. This isn't open to someone who we wouldn't know and we would need to verify the quality of their works, for example. So it's highly curated and trust based and based on years and years of scholarship. But to answer your question, that is not formalized in the bylaws other than that it does state that a member is not eligible for consideration unless they have been collaborating with the group for at least two years. Again, operating at the scale of trust and and how we know we we vet and trust those folks who we are allowing into the cooperative. What gets people kicked out? Yeah. So the policies state that, if your note goes offline without notice for three consecutive months, you are your membership is up to vote if we want to continue to have you for a member, for example. So maintaining that note is a core tenant of what it means to be a member. Other policies include things like meeting attendance and vote attendance. So, again, totally understand as an artist, you might wanna go offline for six months and do some kind of residency out in the middle of nowhere. Totally fine. Give us notice. You're not gonna be in participation for those months, but if you don't get give notice. Also, there are, specifications in the bylaws about, harming the intent of the cooperative for bad actors, so things like that would also get you kicked out. And likewise, artists can choose to withdraw. So say they are not finding value in this model, say, they have an agent who wants to take ownership of all of their work and they want to withdraw, there is a way that they can do that as well. So, yes. I'm happy to share the link for the presentation for sure. Cool. I realize we're at time now. So thank you all so much for your time and great questions. Would love to continue the conversation. I'm also in the MediGov Slack, so feel free to DM or pick up a thread there. Would love to chat more.

Thank you so much. It's great to connect with you all today. Enjoy the rest of your week.