The cultural implications of decentralised communities

Webinar Recording and Transcript

Date: 25/07/2024

Host: Kevin Whitmore, Business Innovation Advisor at Callaghan Innovation

Guests: Siddharth Sthalekar - Founder Neighbourhoods

Webinar Length: 49.07

The cultural implications of decentralised communities

[00:00:00] Introduction and Housekeeping

Kevin: Okay. So morning everybody welcome to today's web 3 learning series event. Today we've got Sid from Neighborhoods, who's going to talk to us about the cultural implications of decentralized communities. If you've got any questions, please put them into the chat function.

We're going to try and make today somewhat interactive. So there'll be some pauses to ask questions and, and go through that, that process. Otherwise we'll do a more formal Q& A session at the end. The session is being recorded and at the end, we're just going to do a quick survey just so that we can get feedback on today's topic, but also any other topics that you want to see run in the future.

Sid: Awesome.

[00:00:43] Introduction to Neighborhoods and Social Currencies

Sid: Yeah, thanks everyone for joining. And I think like, as Kevin suggested, it would be great to have a really interactive conversation. So if questions or thoughts do come up, just drop them in the chat or even raise your hand. And I'll also pause at various points to invite some questions. I think that'll just help to engage what kinds of themes people are interested in, and I could probably direct the conversation accordingly. So yeah, as the invite suggested, neighborhoods enables the generation of social currencies for social coordination at scale as, as this title suggests. And I think it might be interesting for people in blockchain or DAO space for this particular reason. Because our belief has always been web3 or peer to peer technologies can enable the storage and validation of not just the monetarily critical, but also the contextually relevant. This is, I guess, fancy language and, you know, and I can break that down a bit, but effectively what we're saying is most blockchains or traditional technologies for maintaining records have been great at being able to record very universal or oftentimes expensive information.

And so think about a blockchain where that's, that's so exceptionally efficient at storing data. Currencies or monetary currencies that we're all familiar with. And we all know the cost associated with storing these monetary currencies. And even though layer technology, layer two technologies have brought them down quite a bit, the point we're making, is it isn't fully enabling the kinds of social coordination we'd like to see because it's not really act enabling or activating social currencies and so we make this strong distinction between monetary currencies and social currencies an example of a social currency might be some kind of time contribution you make to your local community or the number of blogs that you might publish or let's say, you know, some sort of record of transactions and credit limits extended towards on the basis of those transactions.

The list is pretty endless. But as you can see, there is this distinction between social currencies and monetary currencies because social currencies represent some kind of contribution or indication of an individual in a community that might not always have a monetary footprint. It might be used for different purposes.

different purposes. So my contributions to a community garden in my local community might be extremely useful for some kind of social signal or governance related rights within that community. It's not always, it doesn't always translate to monetary impact. Of course, I might own a livelihood from those contributions, but there's not always a direct correlation.

And so what we're trying to say is by enabling social currencies, or to enable social currencies, we really need to drop the costs associated with recording and storing them, and also reducing the friction involved with recording and storing them. And that's kind of what we'll, what I'll touch on through this presentation, how Neighborhoods does it, and what the possibilities that it enables through this process.

[00:04:19] How Neighborhoods Framework Works

Sid: So effectively. Neighborhoods create has created these group coordination tools through which we enable three kinds of things like it allows communities or groups or micro networks to articulate what they value and how they share it. So a group might say we value time contributed to a community garden, or a group might say we value blogs or memes shared in our network, or a group might say we share and, and trade resources within this group. And we value transactions fulfilled all loans repaid. And so that's the base level for them to articulate what they value. The next level is how they might express preferences and prioritize action. And by that, we mean, how do we enable visibility for certain kinds of activities and contributions over others?

So maybe a group values trade and commerce, maybe another group values contributions to the garden, maybe another group values online contributions. And on the basis of that, enabling groups to define what kind of Contributions are more important in contrast to others and lastly enabling some sort of a governance layer, which allows a group to articulate, articulate its rules.

So people who, who contribute in a certain way might have a better say or a stronger say in how the group evolves and articulates its rules. So, these three aspects are what Neighborhoods is best designed to do. And we can dive deeper into this, but effectively allowing groups to express coordination questions and experiment with new actions.

And while I know a lot of the audience here is Web3 or blockchain focused, we've all had that experience where to take on anything community oriented, we've kind of had to Work with, with this complicated maze of web 2 platforms that currently exist. The, the point we're making though, is that most of these platforms, like let's say we want to start, you want to start a group for some kind of coordinated activity locally or globally or geographically dispersed.

You're kind of forced to operate within the cultural norms of the platform. And so. You might start a Facebook group, but clearly a Facebook group isn't best designed or isn't designed specifically for a group's cultural norms, right? And, or, and so most groups are almost forced to work with the algorithms or the technological restraints that platforms have already pre designed.

And so if we were Facebook group, we are forced almost to. So, to communicate in that format that Facebook prescribes, you can't choose to start playing a game with each other or choose to start lending money to each other because you think it's appropriate. Like, that's something Facebook hasn't enabled.

And so, one of the big parts of Neighborhoods work is to, Over the last few years has been reducing this friction and I'll get more into that as well.

[00:07:43] Community and Technology Relationship

Sid: But effectively, there is this beautiful conversation we think is really important between communities and their relationship with tech. And so our work has focused on Ensuring tech is generic and modular enough to slot into the needs of the community and almost being in service to the community as opposed to overriding a group's cultural sovereignty.

And so think of it as Lego pieces for a group to be able to assemble and create and design their own space that is important to them, which is where this notion of a neighborhood and so there isn't really this conversation of, well, what can I do with my group with the neighborhoods platform? One, it's not a platform.

It's a framework, which allows groups to slot in modules and coordinate themselves better. And if. And I think sometimes best explained through visuals which I could get into but effectively allowing groups to store and compute data locally and add in modules from our marketplace. And designing these spaces without any coding know how of access to capital.

So effectively, if you were to create a group where you want to keep track of simple tasks, simple time contributions, simple records of transactions simple resource sharing, modules where you might want to exchange goods or services with one another take on various kinds of logistical or e commerce related activities, or even social, even playful activities.

All you need to do is assemble Lego bricks that are best suited to you. And so there's a very interesting conversation around this relationship between communities and tech, which I would urge people here to go out and listen to as well. There's a few conversations we've had in the past around this theme, but kind of reversing this bad habit we've gotten into over the last 20 years or so, where we almost believe or assume that tech must be rigid or universal and built in a certain way which restricts how we interact with one another.

And so there's, I think, an interesting conversation on reclaiming. cultural spaces, both online and offline through technology like this.

[00:10:16] Open Source Framework and Customization

Sid: So as mentioned earlier, the basis of a lot of what we're building is an open source framework called the Neighbourhoods Framework. But effectively, it has a few simple layers to it.

The most basic one is resources, like a group articulating what's important to the group. So it might be Online social contributions. It might be in person human hour contributions to a local community. It might be transactional. But that group, the group gets to almost build its base layer upon which its culture is built.

It then is, is enabled to create its own spaces and so a group can say these resources need to show up in these views or spaces in a particular way. And so there's complete freedom in the way in which you'd want stuff to show up. So if it's memes you're sharing and basing your community around, you have, would have the freedom to articulate how it shows up on people's screens.

If it's if it's. In person contributions, again, there would be that freedom. And lastly, sovereignty around algorithms. So as your group grows from I don't know, 50 to 100 to 1000 people, maybe 50, 000 people and into the hundreds of thousands and even the millions instead of centralized platforms, controlling visibility, a group also gets to articulate what, how algorithms in that space move.

And so effectively, what we're saying is the neighborhoods framework allows groups to use genetic tools to. to define specific cultures that are important to them. And in this process there's, there's various kinds of activities that are coordinated through this. I'll kind of pause here if there's any questions coming up because I feel like I've thrown out quite a bit before we go in a particular direction with this.

I wonder if I'm being too abstract, if people would like, probably like to see what this sort of looks like and there's. Screenshots of mock ups out there that people can go and have a look at, but yeah, effectively, this is, I would say, a good foundation for what Neighborhoods is building, has been building over the last few years.

Kevin, what do you think? Should I keep going?

Kevin: Yeah, maybe just a quick question. So I think we've got Sally on the call as well, but this is kind of reminding me, parts of this are reminding me a little bit of what sort of the positive sum DAO and what Dan Kahn and, and Sally and others were sort of working on as well around sort of including that concept of value exchange.

Is that kind of sort of at the core of what Neighborhoods is trying to achieve is take, I think you mentioned moving it away from necessarily a monetary system around, I don't know if you call it barter, but it's sort of, it's sort of, this is our culture. This is what we're doing. I'll give you this. If you give me that, and we kind of have a sort of a community around agreement of what that, that transaction is.

Sid: Yeah, I would say broadening the feedback loops that we use to coordinate ourselves. So, instead of limiting ourselves to just formalize monetary networks, we're saying actually groups could start formalizing and creating all kinds of feedback loops.

Maybe there's groups that have no monetary footprint at all. Like, they're pretty weak. Purely volunteer run and, and take on some kind of activity. It might be mission oriented, like something like combating climate change. It might be social and playful. It's, it's a pretty broad spectrum. It might be e-commerce communities, but again, instead of.

Limiting e commerce or using platforms like, let's say, Amazon, to coordinate e commerce. You could start seeing communitarian e commerce models emerge. So you might have well being and wholesome, food oriented communities starting to manufacture and, and, and, Reduce food for each other. You might have beauty oriented influences and communities start to create products of their own.

And so that all kinds of, like I would say, it's, it's broadening the spectrum or of how we can formally coordinate and play with each other. Peter, you have, it seems like you might have a related question.

Peter: Yes. Hello. Yes. My question is. What is when the, you said about values we share, what is when the value is knowledge?

And to talk about the idea is to build a text corpus that we share with a collective, and everyone can add some text to this knowledge base. And what happens if this It's because when you talk about monetary value, this is just not so big volumes of data, but what happens if you have, uh, gigabytes of, of text data, is this also Can this handle also this?

Sid: Yeah, so at this point Neighborhoods uses an underlying technology called Holochain, which is agent centric in that every agent in this little micro network created by a community. So in contrast to a blockchain, information is not stored on a universal blockchain. It's, it's almost held. The agency for this information lies with individual members in the community, they might hold it on in on their own PCs at their own end or might use a hosting network. But again, the agency lies with these members. And so these are interesting questions we are answering with pilot communities, like what in, in the first few months and years, like. What are the volumes of data that they're looking at? And so hosting solutions are being answered accordingly.

But what do you suggest? It sounds very similar to another pilot project we're speaking with in India that is using peer to peer technology to keep records of cultural artifacts and this includes, you know, everything from stories to media that rural and indigenous community in India is, is, is, is is holding, and they would use peer to peer technology to keep track of, you know, Annotations and contributions by various members in this group.

And at a later stage, they would try and include various kinds of benefits, which might be visibility oriented. Maybe they want to include ecotourism in their community, and they would use this data of who's been the best, you know, the most significant contributor in the community to, to, but I think we need to provide more visibility, let's ecotourism perspective, or maybe offering greater credit limits to such individuals or maybe giving them governance benefits.

But yeah, if I were to answer your specific question around sizes of data handle, like that's something where. We will be actively answering over the next six months, so if you have specific use cases in mind, I would definitely recommend reaching out to us, because some of the early partnerships with hosting networks would be defined based on requirements from user groups like yours.

Peter: Okay. So. If you can write me in the chat, then some points where I can get in contact to, or to you, to you. Oh, yeah.

Sid: Yeah. So if you go to our website, there's a discord, a link to the discord server that you're welcome to join and reach out to one of us, reach out to me as well. We, we basically create channels for projects, for pilot projects, who are keen on building and designing at this stage.

And we, we'd love to sketch some of this out and, and. I'll answer some of these questions with you.

Yeah, sure. So these are just a few snapshots of what community spaces could look like.

And I think what we're really trying to say is tech doesn't need to be overriding. Tech doesn't need to be specific. It should be generic. It should be modular. You as a group should have complete agency. It's almost like if you were to hold a gathering in your home, you want the freedom to arrange the chairs in a pattern that is appropriate for you instead of being forced to use a seating arrangement that has been preordained in Silicon Valley.

And that's kind of that relationship between communities and tech that we're reorienting to. But of course, heavily using Web3 ideologies where recording and storage of information is really shouldn't be orchestrated by middlemen not connected with the community. And so what we're saying is let's not like, can we broaden the use of Web3 not just for monetary currencies, but all of these social signals that communities usually are rich with, and allowing the community to use those social signals to create all kinds of feedback loops that are relevant for them.

And it's, yeah, it's not just the custom community space, but also creating very simple interfaces where communities can articulate algorithms. And a lot of this would be enabled through, so I would say like. Probably the level of skill that require that people run spreadsheets with. So we're not looking at, you know, coding expertise but more people who can drag and drop and, you know, write a simple formula to, to coordinate the group better.

I should say at this point that all groups. We almost think of the originator of any group as a community activator. So similar to, let's say startup entrepreneurs, only in this case, these might be more cultural entrepreneurs. And so people who have a specific notion of what they'd like to do.

process has really shaped what you might expect the group to be doing. Like I said, it might be playful or social or even commercial, but community activators effectively set up the early norms. It might be a person, it might be a group of people. It might be a collective in itself, which start moving forward.

Placing together these pieces, answering questions of what's important and layering amplifying algos or governance norms on the, on, on over that. So while the Neighborhoods Framework is open source and free for any community, we found most communities were looking for something called the neighbor, for, for little modules that they can place in their group, in the, in their custom spaces.

And so we've created something called the Neighborhoods Bazaar. where communities will be able to go and source these generic modules for fairly cheap and get going. With like in the initial days, a lot of these modules will also be free. So if you're, you know, a community with fairly basic needs it's not going to be very costly and might even be free to get going in the early days.

So the bazaar is in a sense, the sustainability engine for this project as a whole. We have a settlement currency called NHD that people use to make payments. There are certain benefits associated with using NHD. But of course, people can, different parts of the world might want to settle in different ways.

But effectively, the bazaar allows for this project to sustain itself. And, and that's how we're orchestrated and organized.

[00:21:56] Pilot Projects and Use Cases

Sid: Yeah, I could even so I'm going to run through some of the pile, a few pilot projects that we're speaking to just for people to have a sense of what the kinds of projects that we're talking about the four, I would say the first category are largely local geographically proximate groups, people in the same, you know, neighborhood as it were physically.

And so these might be groups, you know, for some reason, we've, we definitely seem to be attracting a lot of people interested in climate mitigation, regenerative agriculture practices food security for regions. And so some of them range from small groups of, you know, a few hundred or thousand people to much larger groups.

One of them in Sri Lanka that we're speaking with is upwards of a million people. They are looking at maintaining records of regenerative agriculture practices species biodiversity, so young people in communities. capturing media which might represent whether species diversity is in fact increasing, even something like, you know, seed diversity that's being used.

And so interestingly by recording this in peer to peer ledgers, groups maintain records of who's actually practicing in this way and on the basis of that information they might start making decisions like All right, if people practice in this particular way, they have the force, they have. primary visibility for things like ecotourism in that region, which might be fantastic livelihood opportunities for these people might have governance benefits.

So a way one of these communities that are speaking with wants to reward those who use a diverse range of seeds with governance benefits. So 10x votes for people who practice using a broad range of seeds which I think is interesting benefits that start opening up for. We've already talked about that this very talk is not limited to just people in these groups which are not just limited to monetary benefits.

And so it almost creates this, you know, many more dimensions in which a community can hold and value. And again, because this is. agent centric information. An individual in this group has agency over their contributions. And so as they hop from group to group, you might see what we call cultural bridges being established between groups.

And so your contributions to a group aren't just locked to your community. Potentially they could be rippling out to maybe 50 or 100 other allied groups that you're associated with. And so maybe I'm part of climate related movements, maybe 50 of them, but my contributions in my local community in Christchurch might actually ripple out and provide me benefits both in terms of visibility or livelihood opportunities and in countless other groups.

And so the question isn't so much about how big these groups, groups should be and what kind of benefit like this. There isn't necessarily this pressure on a group to become large in order to provide benefits. You might be a small group of 15 people, but when you formalize in this way, you open up the opportunity of benefits flowing across dozens of other, or maybe hundreds of other groups that are allied and related to these groups.

And so rather than. Even though we're called neighborhoods and we talk about communitarian responses, what we're really talking about is more a cultural mesh, activation of a cultural mesh across groups and not restricting activity to just smaller groups. And that's how we think about scale. Like it's not so much about this community needs to scale into 10 million people or 50 million people.

We're actually saying groups that are good at building allied bridges might end up creating the most social impact or cultural impact. Because their contributions will triple across and influence countless other groups that are allied with them. Another interesting pilot project is called Climap, and that's an initiative through a few of a few Edmonton re fellows.

It's a fellowship here in New Zealand that I'm part of as well. And so it's rethinking the way in which regenerative finance or blended finance interacts with communities on the ground by Encouraging communities that are taking on various climate mitigation related activities to formalize their opening up the opportunity to offer micro grants or micro loans or micro investments to these communities.

And so you might have groups that might need something as little as 10, 000 to install solar panels or build a solar kitchen for their group. And so because this data is maintained on chain, the opportunity to. To fund micro entrepreneurs and micro community starts opening up and something that's not existed prior to this.

Because Global Capital has always looked at this as an informal sector or probably considered too messy in order to fully open up its doorways to communitarian efforts like these.

[00:27:01] Neighborhoods and Global Capital

Sid: And so neighborhoods, we are thinking about it as potentially a bridge between global capital and on ground communitarian efforts.

Which. which allows all of this capital that's rearing to solve some of the massive crises around us. It opens up all of these new dimensions of organizing. And so through this, we're looking at, like I said, Mike, you know, micro grants that might start flowing, micro investments, and even micro loans and offering credit limits to specific people in communities that might be practicing in a certain way.

What is interesting as well is that this, you know, approaches like these drop the bar for several communities. One of the conversations we all, like a refrain that we keep hearing from people at the frontier of this kind of work is that There's often cultural friction between communities that might take on organic farming or regenerative farming, but having to interface with third party European agencies for certifications is often You know, kind of friction or a bar over which many communities aren't able to, to move.

And so by allowing communities to formalize using their own cultural norms, it almost allows groups to say, you don't actually need to interface with the European agency that you might not have full familiarity with but you could enable peer to peer audits or cross community audits, which allows for that authentic chain to be established.

while you stay firmly embedded in your own culture and, and still allow for formalized capital to flow in and out of you in a more wholesome way. Again, this is, I, I don't want to reduce the complexity of this kind of work. It's still early days for funds such as this. But we're very open to people who are interested in this kind of work where we just started incorporating this again out of New Zealand.

And like I said, in early days, but it's kind of exciting to see how various government initiatives in New Zealand interface with projects like these as well. And keep going, there's probably another kind of use case emerging out of India, for example, I'm not sure how many here have followed the conversation, these conversations.

Late last year, India initiated something called the Open Network for Digital Commerce as part of what's known as the India stack. So the base layer of this is an identity layer upon which they build a unified payments interface, which has allowed micro payments to be used. to be done across the country for extremely low costs.

And this network, the open network for digital commerce is this, is the next innovation that's rolled out, which allows for coordination of e commerce using a public blockchain as opposed to relying on large and the rest of these are basically the basic internet platforms like Amazon and Flipkart that operate in the area.

And so effectively the ONDC coordinates this this the, these commercial transactions, but, and so. What we think this does is open up or puts levels, the playing field for smaller groups, like I explained earlier, to operate at the same efficiency as large platforms like Amazon. And so you might see interesting food groups and interesting local groups and interesting hobbyist or interest related groups.

Emerge that can start transacting with one another and across groups. And so creates this new approach for communitarian finance, which could operate at the same scale and efficiency, as what we see with some of the massive e commerce platforms out there. And so, initiatives like these have. kind of catapulted us into a new era where the opportunities could be pretty massive.

So kind of excited about what these kinds of ideas are throwing up. And we think this, this might be a norm that starts emerging in various other regions. So potentially. if you know, could look at something like this in, in out of New Zealand with Pacific Islands. In order to again, drop the bar for financial inclusion or, you know, almost reducing the cultural pressure on groups.

For financial inclusion, like external cultural pressures. So this is something, again, that's pretty early, and I kind of wanted to put it out there too. highlight that it's not just about small local groups, but you could see some pretty large e commerce possibilities emerge through part through collaboration with technologies like ONDC.

[00:32:05] Q&A and Future Directions

Sid: I'll stop here again because I feel like, you know, some of these like Climap and public infrastructure related projects could open quite a few questions for people again.

Kevin: How much, so how much does this kind of work well with DAOs versus doesn't need to be kind of operated in that kind of context at all. Like it seems to be, there's a, there's sort of a more simpler way of collaborating, working together in a community that doesn't necessarily require a lot of that kind of governance tokens and sort of the implications that come with that.

But it could also. Line up quite well. What have you got to take on that?

Sid: Yeah. I actually think it lines up quite well because DAO infrastructure, you know, most blockchain infrastructure is fantastic with the monetary layer. So you could see groups that have shared digital assets that lack that cultural layer.

So in the past. You know, they've been forced to rely on voting for dispersal of digital assets. And that actually can get really frustrating because it kind of replicates the same patterns of like, okay, whoever campaigns the hottest or you know, screams the loudest ends up getting most access to these funds.

But you could see very cool models emerge where social contributions, like maybe you could see blogging collectives emerge where You know, the blogs that are most validated by the community actually, you know, have the best access to credit limits or access to the digital goods in that, in that DAO.

And all of that could be fluidly coordinated with, with, you know, interfaces with neighborhoods. Yeah, so I'm personally quite excited about the possibilities there. I actually didn't put up a slide because I think that's, you know, Yeah, especially for Web 3. 0 communities, that's immediately where the mind goes and I feel like that's pretty low hanging fruit.

So everything from sharing of digital assets You the DOW do new models for DFI trading even, you know you could have interesting social related trading models emerge where access to trades could be the basis on the basis of socio cultural capital in the group. Yeah, all of that starts to be very exciting.

I'm particularly excited about how social contributions could, could attract dynamic credit limits, for example. And so very valued members of a group immediately, you know, on, on, almost algorithmically have a credit limits that are, that is generated for them, which creates fascinating new models for, employment generation, livelihood generation and kind of catapults groups into this new era where it's not like you could start looking at yourself as very real living organisms as a collective, as opposed to, you know, just some place where you go to put in a vote and get access to assets.

So yeah. If there is, you know, if you are DAO or a, or a Web3 collective that primarily is relied on voting and blockchain infrastructure, like this would be a very cool integration we could explore. And honestly, I think it's, it's quite easy.

Kevin: Any other questions? Otherwise, I'm going to keep going. I've got a few, but yeah, just stick your hand up if you've got any questions maybe just understanding where Neighborhoods is at. I know you're, you're kind of doing some cool things at the moment in terms of launching different things and raises and bits and pieces. Maybe you want to give us a bit of speak about where the project's at.

Sid: Yeah, sure. And so earlier this year, we our core infrastructure sort of stabilized. And so we put word out inviting pilot communities to come in and build the next layer of feature sets with us. And so, you know, earlier we had this question around hosting infrastructure. So things like that, or even identity integrations with DAOs, like all of this.

This is what we're exploring, even questions about whether, you know, communities would want mobile first or desktop first or browser. All of these are, you know, aspects we're trying to answer. And again, trying to land this product in a more organic way rather than, you know, building in the lab and suddenly releasing it to realize, you know, people didn't exactly want these features.

So this kind of lets us, build out a much more evolved project with the, with the help of our community. And we, and we think this is really critical for, you know, distributed infrastructure like ours because there are certain problems that only emerge when we're actually running that we can't always simulate for.

And so, The Neighborhoods Foundation, that's, you know, a charitable organization incorporated in New Zealand oversees a lot of this work, oversees a lot of this work. We've launched the marketplace, the bazaar, which would be the business or sustainability engine. And we're thinking about how this can also evolve into a more community owned market project.

And so really excited with some of the regulations in New Zealand. And we're. exploring a listing on Catalyst, which is an exchange almost designed for projects at our stage. And so this would be a very interesting opportunity for existing community members to deepen their relationship with us and start moving into more governance related questions.

And so we think that's also new and exciting for Web3 projects, because typically most crypto tokens haven't allowed those benefits, or like allowed people to input on decisions that projects like ours usually take. And apart from this, we are, we've been funded over the years through the issues of Neighborhood Stoken and, Very consciously thinking about more interesting use cases for the neighborhoods tokens apart from just settlement We're thinking about how people with the token could start Staking in order to request various features could start core risking together as communities.

Maybe even using the token to package various kinds of information that could be sent across communities like flags or badges. So all of that is in the works. Yeah. And, and I think over the next few months, people will see a lot of announcements on both fronts for, for the token as well as for ownership in the bazaar.

Kevin: Awesome. And I know we're doing this a little bit backwards, but I might put you on the spot a little bit. What was your journey to kind of get to neighborhoods? Because when I put your name into, into Google the first thing that comes up is what's the article? The incredible story of how Gandhi Ashram changed the life of a stock market.

Sid: Yeah, I guess, I, I think I would say You know, if anyone is listening, I would definitely recommend checking out the journeys of most neighborhoods team members. They come at this from different perspectives, some of them designers, some of them technologists, some of them psychologists who've been studying the relationship between technology and group culture.

For me personally, it's more from an economics lens. So I've, I've had an exposure to pretty, what do you would call mainstream financial finance and financial thinking was the head of a pretty large equity derivatives and algorithmic trading desk. And, But about four or five years that I spent in a community founded by Gandhi exposed me to economics without the help of overarching governance or overarching structures like governments or, or, you know, in today's day and age, you know, cloud hosting services that hold information for us.

So in the absence of that, how can you know, how do communities articulate what's important to them? How do they coordinate across groups to, to mitigate some of the tribal effects that exist with any kind of community and organization. And so there's this entire stream of economics that you could call distributed economics or, you know, Gandhi economics that I got excited about and really into.

And I was kind of annoyed that. I hadn't been exposed to earlier. So contrasting this stream of economics with mainstream economics, I think this allows a community, like it almost flips that question of financial inclusion or livelihood generation or economic empowerment on its head, because in, in this, in the previous conversation, there's always this notion of government must include communities and that raises all kinds of concerns in itself.

But through this approach, what we're saying is communities. are rich with various kinds of potential and capacities in themselves. And if we provide tools with which they can formalize based on their cultural norms, it allows them to unlock these capacities and this potential. And so communities that would use these tools could formalize and through the benefit of formalization, start interacting with each other and start generating output of all kinds.

It might be monetary, it might be just sociocultural, but like I said, flip some of these questions on the on its head. And even for, you know, some of the global crises that we're facing today, instead of Thinking about scale as, you know, if, if we're trying to mitigate the climate crisis, we need at least 5 billion people to participate what this, and then, you know, reverse engineering to say, like, how do we force people to move in a certain way, it actually, it flips things around where it says, like, people are more, are inclined to operate towards climate mitigation, but creates patterns with which scale develops through these cultural bridges and not through, you know, a global coordination layer, like the United Nations, for example.

So allows for communitarian contributions, so it might be a group of students in the local community cleaning a beach or starting some kind of social enterprise, but allows for validation of those contributions and recognition of those contributions by global capital, for example. And so it actually allows, you know, every small contribution to be part of some kind of aggregation, which then makes, you know.

impactful, more visible, and validated, which collectively might move us in the kind of direction that are useful for us. So I would say that's sort of my background and perspective on this. It's more how do we push more ground up you know, bottom up approaches, not that those should be the only ones, but I'd feel like we're so lopsided in the, in the sense like there's so much infrastructure for top down initiatives to actually have more initiative for more infrastructure for bottom up approaches might actually balance things and, you know, almost double the efficiency with which we do things.

Speaker 1: Hi, taking an example for Web3NZ community what could this community use neighborhoods for?

Sid: Yeah. The first question we ask pilot projects to think through is whether the, whether formalization of the cultural norms is relevant and interesting for them. I'm personally part of multiple groups where it would be a really bad idea to formalize.

Like, there's so many groups that hold culture and social norms informally, and I think that's a good thing, and I think there's a place for that. An interesting question for Web3NZ might be what kinds of, you know, benefits could accrue to the group if we articulate what is important to us and what contributions we want to record.

And so they might be hosting local events, they might be participating in local events, they might be, you know, Activating and starting your own ventures and projects or helping each other and on the basis of that, bringing in various kinds of visibility, so it might translate into more access to capital.

If we want to go in that way, it might be more social. So maybe your comments are just heard more within the platform. If you have been contributing for a long time and maybe even eventually governance. And so, People who are active contributors could potentially require, you know, be gifted with a much heavier weight in decisions.

But again, these are questions for the community to answer, which I think you know, we're always happy to dive into. And so if there's enough interest for this, we could totally open up a little canvas and order a little document and sketch out what this looks like.

Kevin: Yeah. And maybe it's not at that collective web three level if it's not a shared norm, but it could be at a women in web three or an Ethereum or a Solana or whatever community that does align around a set of norms or whatever.

Sid: Well, yeah, that would be, that's, that's a very relevant point. And maybe, yeah, the role of Web3NZ is actually enabling multiple other Related communities to formalize and take off. And so it's raises interesting conversation though, and perhaps this is the kind of incubation that we could be thinking about for the future.

It's not just, you know, commercial enterprises or startups or businesses, but also collectives and networks of people. Yeah, but potentially like working towards various missions or social impact causes through collectives and cultural entrepreneurship could be an interesting. Dimension to start exploring.

Kevin: Cool. I'm also hearing sort of maybe a bit of overlap with the network state concept and kind of push there. I don't know what level that would kind of plug into, but potentially that's a, another avenue there as well.

Sid: I would say more complimentary. Like I think what the network state con conversation isn't entirely, like isn't entirely focused on is.

I think network states would be great at building the monetary layer, but almost don't want, it's almost dystopian to think of that network state articulating cultural norms, like it goes against the face of, you know, what a lot of these groups represent. But Facilitating groups to start articulating their own cultural norms and start interacting with each other.

And so you could see groups emerge within the nation state, within the network state which use neighborhood's infrastructure and benefit from the, you know, hyper efficiency of a network state. Which I actually think the network state conversation is lacking at this moment. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of complimentary, interesting intersections there.

Kevin: Awesome. All right.

[00:47:21] Closing Remarks and Feedback

Kevin: I'm just conscious of time. So maybe we will look to wrap things up there. I'm just going to quickly put the link for the feedback in the survey. into the chat. I'll also just share a screen. This one, hopefully you can just scan that on your phone as well. Did I get that wrong? Yep.

Got the right ones. Yep. That's it. So please, yeah, do feedback. Any thoughts on today's session, but any future sessions that you're interested in as well and thank you to Sid for taking the time. Hope you make it back to New Zealand safely.

I had another question around, I guess, the how the peer to peer consensus mechanism works for that, but we can maybe save that for another session because I'm quite interested in that and just conscious of time, but Maybe in a follow up session, we can go into a little bit more detail on how things work from a technical.

Sid: absolutely. Yeah. And I think we could complement with some of the work we've done on the front end side as well. So effectively spinning up these modules is extremely light. And so it doesn't even require knowledge of Web3 languages, which, This has been a massive source of friction, this is something we've spoken about in the past, so you just need to be a web 2 developer to create modules for the neighborhoods marketplace, which is pretty amazing.

I think super cool.

Kevin: No, that's awesome. All right. Well, thank you for taking the time. Thank you everybody for attending today. Hope the, hopefully this was useful. And if you've got any questions as per what Sid mentioned before, there's some links there to both the website for follow up and contact details and the discord for nebulance as well.

Otherwise have a great day and we'll speak to you on the next session.