Layer 1 Stage | What 2024 Looks Like for Decentralized Democracy

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   you hey everyone you ready to talk about decentralized democratization awesome well I am eer blocker I am head of events at nearer Foundation we have ab and we have Blaze so oh Martin Martin Martin can Martin developers developers developers actually while I'm running and grabbing something do you guys want to introduce yourself yes sure yeah hey everyone I'm blae been with the ecosystem since before mainnet a validator uh helped organize the validators of mainnet with

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   the open Shard Alliance uh co-founder of cheddar and also champion of the NDC so governance for the ecosystem thank you bla my name is IB um I've been in the new ecosystem since 2021 I've seen a long evolu ution of governance from the first guilds to the marketing Dow and everything in between recently got elected into the transparency commission for the NDC and uh yeah that's got a

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   podcast awesome all right so what does 2024 look like for decentralized democracy um let's start with first defining what democracy is and why it matters yeah so democracy generally is really about representation of a collective of people and so the NDC near digital Collective is about the representation of the near ecosystem we have a lot of different audiences that are part of that so we've got stakeholders that are the backers of our ecosystem uh

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   validators developers are users content creators so there's a lot of different uh you know factions within the ecosystem and really governance is designed to be representative of those to ensure that the ecosystem grows and is sustained over time I think that the core you have participation and decision making then you're going to start adding as many qualifiers it could be direct democracy delegated democracy prent democracy but

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   as a whole you'd be looking at how people engage with each other to make decisions that concern them amazing um so both you blae and ab you've been with the near ecosystem for as long as I can remember I joined back in January 2021 um and I just remember seeing you both contributing being a part of it the NDC has existed for just over a year now it was one of near con's biggest announcements last year coin us covered it it really seemed like things were

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   moving towards the right direction for what decentralization looks like for near protocol now looking at the last year there's been there's been a lot of activity when we're talking The Good the Bad the Ugly all of it now what the NDC is trying to accomplish is super hard so tell me what are some of the biggest accomplishment accomplishments in your viewpoints yeah so I think the big accomplishment that we did uh really

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   over this last year was number one establish a governance framework so we looked at a lot of governance across many ecosystems and then you know from there decided what really would be representative of the near ecosystem so we created three governing bodies which now are happy to announce that we have the first elected Congress members to that governance framework so 29 elected members uh elected by the community now operating within that governance

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   framework so that was a big one the second thing we did was it's very difficult governance in general is difficult we know that in real world governance it's not quite uh you know what what we want so trying to design systems that are new and improve upon what we have is is interesting but in web 3 that we have a primary Challenge and that is like who is the community who are the members that should have voting power what we've traditionally we

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   seen a stake way to voting where you know the founders the backers the VCS the whales come in and they have most of the voting power and most voting mechanisms well we decided to turn that upside down because what we looked at was that most of our active contributors in the ecosystem didn't have necessarily a ton of near so what we did instead was created proof of personhood where you could really register to become a human of near and then if you were human then

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    you could vote the the other thing that we did to make sure that the members that were going to be elected to congress had some vested interest uh in the ecosystem is we created a OG SBT so we created a soulbound token standard for the ecosystem so soulbound tokens are something that tied to a soul and we knew that was really important so proof of personhood with uh sbts allowed you

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    to become an OG allowed you to declare your your nomination and then to be elected by the community uh the third thing that we did was then we took this proof of personhood and we had a one person one vote uh election process so that's what elected uh the you know the current Congress and we had about 892 or so you know folks show up to vote so that was quite interesting so it is definitely a social experiment that we really haven't seen in web 3 uh yet so

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    we've got a new experiment underway here so actually let's let's talk a bit about the elections sorry Alejandro um but tell me more about like the various houses how often are you planning these elections this was obviously the first what's what's kind of taking off from here from those learnings yeah everyb you're aware you want to chime in here depending what you ask you'll get a different answer so you got to pick the got to pick the speaker justan the

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    biggest accomplishment and with your question I think that getting to the destination like being alive would be the biggest accomplishment um it's almost like you're driving a car you crash and then you keep going yeah there are many lessons along the way and uh yeah I think it's important to put in context that as we describe things as they are now they're probably going to be evolving very soon and there's been

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    many lessons learned already uh question the three houses MH so the are three houses as a House of marriage 15 people Council of advisors seven people and transparency commission seven people the initial uh idea was that the house of married people would be elected due to their experience and the value that they could contribute they'd be placed in a position to be able to allocate the budget

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    responsibly there would be there would be oversight from the Council of advisors even more Senior People veto power they can provide advice as an M implies but also make sure that the house of Merit is kept in reign and transparency commission it's meant to be an independent body to provide ecosystem wide oversight and uh yeah that's the theory there's been uh yeah wants to jump in yeah so I mean I think he hit it but you know Council of advisers is more

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    of your board so they have that strategic direction making sure that the budget allocation is really aligned with where we're going as an ecosystem making sure that those funds are deployed correctly also Alo helping the house of Merit with vision policy and things of that nature as well and then we say the transparency commission which AVB is a member of are the Watchdogs of the treasury and of of the governance framework ensuring that if we do have

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    Bad actors enter the scene that you know we have processes and procedures to remove those Strokes from governance uh after there's been an investigation and of course hom is about deploying the budget and also setting a lot of the policies on how governance works for the ecosystem so I was on maternity leave when the elections were taking place and I know I know and I was very present with my son but every now and then I would pop on Twitter and I would take a look at what was going on and

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    transparency was something that I saw in some threads you're obviously deeply involved AB where do you think we need to shine more transparency on decentralized governance it's almost like a like an oxymore no they are fundamentally incompatible we're creating smart contracts so that we remove human trust we're removing middlemen we don't have to rely on some mediocre person to perform something like we're putting the trust in the

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    system the challenge is how do we govern this immutable efficient code that is better than you know what came before it if we also put humans in the middle so decentralized governance need to be seen in that you know Spectrum or trying to progress we spend a lot of time I say we Loosely place with GG and me with transparency commission now we're spending a lot of time putting in place Frameworks that if the person in charge of uh acting on it do their job they're

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    great if they choose to disappear for three months nothing happens so the challenges that we have now are trying to reconcile the autonomous part in a DA with the responsibility of stepping up to public office with the reality that everyone may not be as skilled or as experienced or just as committed to getting the job done so yeah I think that as we move forward from that base and acknowledging that the written word

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    is correct we need to move into that human side of things or skip that all together and just go to the AI and mhm well so speaking of AI yesterday Ilia talked a lot about AI governance what are some of the behind the scenes ideas game plans tell me that you're aware of what's coming to the table what do we expect more from AI governance in 2024 is it going to be a Pitch at 230 uh

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    one thing that is really unique about the near ecosystem is the remarkable speed that we go from idea vision and execution um often we execute first and then we find out later so people are going to be very surprised very soon that this seemingly New Vision that Ilia has presented yesterday around AI governance is actually already fairly Advanced and there are experiments that will be revealed to you in about an hour and I think that the right way to see it

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    is will be a long way until we get to AI president at the moment it's really more of like a unified layer of compliance and due diligence instead of putting a proposal here and getting an outcome there and a black box in the Middle where the reality is people don't read the proposals they do not do due diligence Etc you're going to have much faster turnaround times you're going to

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    have a system that is able to process unlimited information as much as you throw it they can go through keot repos better than most technical Grant proposers so there's going to be a layer of efficiency to enable us to better guide the ecosystem and uh yeah I think that that would be at the grant allocation level that would basically acknowledge that the roadblock that we have now is we're desperate for funding and the community is kind of suffering but we're also not trusting each other

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    so we've hit the handbrake and uh yeah AI are friends not foes and I would uh I would welcome that that that that era yeah and I can certainly see how AI is going to play a role in you know taking the emotion out of the equation so one of the thing that we know is that in governance even with these 29 elected individuals we have many different cultures many different languages um different understanding of what you know folks think governance is right so AI is

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    going to allow us to use that as a tool to take the emotion out of the decision making longer term and to make decisions that are based on actually factual data so um part of the challenge that we experience with electing all these ogs is that we have you know a lot of folks that are active contributors to the near ecosystem and they may not always have the time available uh to contribute fully or maybe they're not engaged or not quite understanding uh governance in

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    general so I think AI will help us bridge that Gap as well to bring more more cohesive understanding to the collective of what governance is how we're progressing where we're going and use that as a real tool and asset mayb you mentioned earlier while we were chatting that democracy is often tied to the tools and Technology we have now if we look at next year and even the years

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    beyond that what are some governance experiments besides AI besides what we're playing with today that you think need to emerge what will emerge what are you dreaming of for the future with governance excellent question so the framework for governance is as you mentioned limited to technology so if we think of Elections every five years we could have them more often we could have them on specific issues like we just had

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    a referendum in Australia it's just that it is so expensive and it is so much work that due to the constraints the operational constraints we just don't do it very often there should be a correlation between a system that is efficient cheap and even more trustworthy to enable you to do more decisions and this is where the scope of governance is going to start to evolve because even if we look at something like inflation data it's been spoken

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    about recently in popular podcasts that the tools that we have for Gathering the data are inefficient and you know the information is often lagging up to months they're very blunt tools for making very big decisions so the vision for the open web basically acknowledges that if we have the right data we can make really like much better decisions and we're going to enter a world where we're going to start seeing data Commons and public goods and this is where the

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    governance comes in you know how do we manage these new structures that are in many ways autonomous um does that make sense yeah totally I think you know mention I see Alla frowning so in if we look at the power of llms to date they're amazing but they've been trained in mostly private data so as we realize how valuable that information is then the question is who is going to own all the data from now into the future that will

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    power systems that are going to create 100 times more value like everything is going to be interconnected you know AI is going going to be engaging with each other through AI if we have machines engaging with each other through Ai and creating a lot of value who owns that Network who owns that data it's basically governance all the way up the stack and yeah you should do it on the near protocol Blaze do you have any comments

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    to add to that yeah so what's the future look like for governance um you know we know that AI plays a big role in it but I think we're going to continue to experiment with uh decentralization as part of the process as well so it's really about how you take a network and distribute the power to the greatest ends right because the the power of a network is in its band so uh we really

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    need to continue to distribute power give more autonomy where autonomy is deserved right make sure that autonomy is something that we can have within decentralization uh you know we know that folks are are very tribal in nature so figuring out how governance supports that right and supports collectives not just one Collective but many collectives to self-organize to build their own autonomy and then request funding so that the ecosystem continues to grow so

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    I think we'll see much more experiment experiments in governance where we've seen more centralized governance we'll see if we can find a way through a AI really to begin to really understand and see true decentralized governance at work you know yeah and near is an ecosystem that really believes in an open web obviously NC con's theme this year is step into the open web so I might be biased I think we're doing it the best I think we're actually getting to true

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    decentralization of the protocol but if we look at other ecosystems who who else is doing it who's doing it well what are they doing yeah one of the models that a lot of folks are looking at you know that has been quite successful is gitcoin and the model model that they've done in terms of Distributing grants and we looked at that one quite a bit and tried to look at what the shortfalls were

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    there and then expand upon those as well we actually have some of those folks that were consultants for us as well that came in and helped look at our governance models to to do it but I think it's about you know we know that there is going to need to be Humanity at the heart of governance we need to know that we're actually giving either autonomous agents or human funding um so

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    I think that you know this proof of humanity with reputation I think we're going to see a lot more of that and ecosystems that are focusing on you know their humans and building reputation for them will be a critical part to governance and growth yeah when I think of gitcoin and I think of Kevin auke I often think of public goods and just really having access and that's something I think they do such a good job at pushing and promoting which I see as a big driver for

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    decentralization ABB I well the reassuring thing is that it's a disaster everywhere it's a classic tragic moment when you're so good at your job you get promoted to become a manager and then you stop doing what you're good at so governance is split either in Engineers who are not really the best at governance or people that see the money that the engineers are creating the value and are trying to prioritize for short-term profit it's very hard to get human alignment every time that you try to get aligned then they say it's not

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    decentralized anymore so it's almost like your values are being used against you to extract as much value as possible we need to find a way to yeah bring the AI yeah well I mean one year is really just a short amount of time I look at you know all the entire world right now has systemic issues and and when you're taking democracy and you're trying to transform it and redefine it you're really going uphill

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    against hundreds of years of these systemic issues that have been in place that don't work for society right now how long do you think it's going to take until we really feel Improvement and what we're doing even transfers to the rest of the world whether it's like an election fraud preventing that create giving more public goods access to the people it's probably two tiers there the first thing is that in the real world it's very hard because if you don't like the

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    government and there can only be one you have to leave in the web 3 world it's fascinating because if you don't like dndc and you don't like ilad you can just Fork it and there's some factions out there thinking of just splitting ways if things get back so the fact that we can create new competing groups and always strive for excellence and have many experiments and just battle it out until something works should give everyone hope um if the ultimate goal is to have the the open web stack

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    the was the protocol that you're the which one the part oh never number things so really my point was you know the systems we have today have been in place for hundreds of years in my opinion I don't think there's been much change someone can definitely debate that point with me uh but with what we're trying to do with the NDC I mean how soon do you think we'll start to really see impact not just like within the near ecosystem but even start to translate into other parts of the world

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    or other ecosystems yeah I think that you know the the data is what AV was trying to allude to is that we need systems to support the path to decentralization we need systems that can really look at the data look at what the impact was that's where AI really enters the scene so we know that um you know it's going to take probably at least you know three to five years on any strategy to see something really fully developed the thing that we've always said about NDC is that it's

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    evolving governance and really what that means is that we want to evolve the governance as we learn more as we experiment more as a community gives more feedback as we have more tooling like AI coming in to give additional feedback as well we want to make sure that governance really evolves to do two things uh sustain the near ecosystem and grow the ne near ecosystem and that means really uh you know supporting all of the representatives or all the collectives within it so uh it's going

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    to be a narrative that just grows over time what we can see happening though is that we will have like AB said we'll probably have Forks of NDC right is NDC going to be the only you know governance system is it going to be the only treasury uh that remains to be seen some folks have more of a vision of a centralized model of governance some want to test decentralization so I see I think we'll see the nodes in the near ecosystem continue to expand as we go AC cross

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    chain there will be several governance models sever several governance Frameworks uh many of those will be iterations of NDC maybe they'll say oh NDC V1 we want to take that we want that to be our governance system and then we'll have this continual evolution of governance and some may decide to stay on the old version some may decide to go to the new version but that really is a

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    power of building the network and allowing nodes to have their own autonomy do you have any comments add ABB yeah I've uh I think that we need to be careful not to do governance for governance sake if we're going to have a positive impact in the world is going to be the your Tech stack so we need to see the governance as like the minimum thing that we can do to have the highest impact Community treasury should be seen as a pile of gold it's a privilege to

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    access it we invite the best and brightest Pates your idea and if it's good we give you money if not that's the end of the story and it should be all those you know top deer contributors that we aggregate um that start delivering it's very hard to assess how much progress we've had in EOS system in general and in governance because there's been many Primitives falling in place and I think that if you were to aggregate the presentations from nearon most people would probably come to the

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    conclusion that they can build something now that they could not have possibly built one year ago so it's almost like we have to reset the timer and say okay with this onboarding with data availability with the multi-chain abstraction like we have to start from the yeah we need to reset our expectations including what we fund and how we fund it I'm personally have the view that nothing should get funded unless that teex St gets implemented

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    unless you're maximizing the advantage that n provides to you we're wasting money yeah no a bit of maybe a lighter question but also a big passion area for myself I really look at diversity I look at culture and you know I look at diversity of all layers diversity of thought diversity of background geography uh I'm a full believer that the more diverse you have diversity you have in whatever you're doing the more informed and more intentional and just more refined your project or outcome will even

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    become what are you going to do in 2024 to kind of help bring in more diversity within the NDC yeah you know it's interesting the governing bodies are quite diverse today but when you look at diversity you also have to assess you know when we're talking about specifically governance what are the skill sets of these individuals right so what we did is we started with just the OG gbt so if

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    you've been in the near ecosystem you could run you could be elected right most folks had a minimum of a 100 votes to be able to get elected but as we've kind of done this experiment we've also realized that there are many cultural differences within the NDC and the way that one culture May interact is significantly different than others so we do have to like breed a culture of collaboration and Innovation that's at the heart of it so I think that focusing

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    on ways to build environments that are collaborative and Innovative where people really are there for one purpose to work together one another and we're starting to see that amongst the houses now while where there was some specific you know uh critiques or things like that more folks are saying hey now it's time to work together together so I think we've got to continue to breed

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    that culture and culture is part of the transparency commission's commission is to ensure that we have good culture within the ecosystem within the NDC itself so I think that'll be a major topic for these next governance sessions the the diversity question is hard because sometimes people focus too much on the individual the best performing teams and most of ours that have been in no one feels like they feeling A diversity quota and everyone feels like an equal you know there's

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    a there's a shared Mission and there's an access to opportunity that people just take it so I think that we should be thinking about it more like ecosystem wide you know which regions do we want to have a presence in and the opportunities clear to them can we find leaders in those regions to activate groups we've uh notice the amount of babies and we've discussed seriously like hey we should have childcare next

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    year you know our third panelist had to fly early home because of family issues so I think that we can be very pragmatic but always acknowledging that you know we've got the mission and yeah need to find the people where they are but yeah I'm I'm a big believer in skill set right the more diverse the skill sets you have the more complimentary your teams are you know maintaining that agility especially because we work in such a fast-paced Innovative space being

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    Nimble being able to fast act yeah I it has to be in the NDC too just to follow up on that and I know that Ilia covered it quite a bit uh in the presentation the other day but gatekeeping right so one of the things that we really got to look at in NDC is how many rules are we going to establish for instance when you said diversity we certainly need more women in governance right and we certainly need all kinds of culture and diversity but the moment you begin to

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    start to make these rules around these things enforce those agendas then we start gatekeeping the process so I think it's really going to be through Community discourse that we find out what is the right balance you know on these different topics and that goes from everything to what skill set should you have to actually be elected right do you need to have certain do you need to

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    understand Finance budgets you know uh kpis okrs do you need that level or can you just be a Community member so I think through discourse we'll need to continue to find what the balance is there but also be real clear about not making too many rules too fast because that will really create a system of centralization faster than we would anticipate well and I think those are some of the systems that we're trying to combat as we even get into next year uh

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    now I can talk about that for hours while we are at time I do want to leave it here for any closing comments anything you want to let the audience know um if we could get the NDC QR code up on the screens that would be great so yeah leave it with you guys any last closing comments yeah we've entered a new era uh for a while there was a lot of Grievances and complaints and we finally have the chance to shape things in the way that you want um if you see

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    something and it's kind of crap you can just start a competing alternative o second time sorry and yeah if you want to get involved that would be a good time um this is now ours to uh make it succeed or fail so you're interested just reach out yeah and I would say the same thing if you're not happy with NDC or you feel you have something to contribute this is your moment you can

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    join the movement it's still very open all you have to be right now is a human on near to be able to vote and make your voice heard so please check out the QR code if it's up there join the NDC it's a community Leed initiative to build governance and funding decentralized funding on the near ecosystem uh so we really appreciate your contribution and thank you yeah ABB Blaze oh sorry go ahead I was going to say uh if you want to get involved also now would be the

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    time because the AI is coming I'll say you're at 2:30 well thank you ABB blae this was amazing let's continue to keep in touch and chat about next year thanks everyone