NEARCON 2023 | Layer 2 Stage - Day 3

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:01

   please welcome our MC to the stage near foundations David Morrison ladies and gentlemen thank you for coming out to the final day of neon 2023 all right how you all doing hung over yeah what you're going to be even more hung over tomorrow when you got the big party tonight um I just want to say a huge welcome to everyone uh it's been an absolutely incredible event are you agree yeah perfect okay we have um we have a wonderful lineup of speakers for you today I think the stage is going to

2. 0:46

   close about uh 1:00 there's going to be some Alpha downstairs with uh iler and core it is your last chance to grab swag and I've heard there's a fire sale there will be an Encon QR code up here that you can scan to grab grab yourself the last little piece of change to get whatever t-shirts uh hats water bottles that you want uh that's all there's left but that's enough of me we have a

3. 1:09

   wonderful panel about the near governance forum and I'm going to introduce your wonderful moderator who I think is actually slightly taller than me yeah we'll find out Gus come on come on this is Gus FR of new week yes so hello everyone welcome to this first session on the last day of ncon today we're going to talk about near digital Collective and I say it that way and not IND DC because I feel in this

4. 1:47

   discussion it's important we are not just using aerations and and and really make it accessible for people who perhaps are not as as much as you guys like following NDC uh all the time um for this session we're going to have uh 55 minutes we're going to divide it into like two main pieces the first piece is going to be us uh first we're going to hear about you guys we're going to hear about the the purpose of uh the body you represent a bit about you guys a

5. 2:13

   lightning talk about 3 minutes each um and in the second half we will hear about what you have to answer for questions from the audience and that's an opportunity for everyone in here thanks thanks for showing up that you know you can ask what your mind and uh if we have nice polite answers we will answer politely so looking forward to conversation um we all have good intentions so so this there's been a lot of debate recently around a lot of things in the see but I'm sure we can

6. 2:44

   have a very nice conversation um I don't want to speak much myself I can just say my name is Gus I work at near week and also building Heroes um not too relevant uh for this conversation um how I got into this field originally of blockchain in 2016 uh was uh actually because of governance uh I'm a political science student and very active in the down system so governance both from the uh old world centralized and and decentralized variations I find very

7. 3:13

   interesting um enough about me so uh Cameron why don't you tell a bit about yourself and like the the the house you're in now the body you're in and and what the what's the purpose of that great so hey everybody uh my name is Cameron Dennis I've been working near ecosystem for the last three years or so um specifically at near Foundation Pagoda or near Inc before and I represent the house of Merit I'm one of

8. 3:35

   15 elected people so this body is primarily responsible for providing recommendations to the council advisers on how a budget should be spent and we are the ones to sort of be more forward- facing with these Grassroots Dows these organizations that are applying for money through the NDC so we essentially try to filter them and make recommendations to the budget of the council advisors and so um you know Blaze will probably tell you a little bit more about the COA Council of advisers want but uh in a nutshell they

9. 4:06

   Define the what we Define the how so they say we need these things done and we are like okay great this is how we're going to go about it this is how much money we're going to need and this is how we're going to spend it so um we'll dive more into like actually what's G on thus far but I think that's a sum set up yeah thanks AVB please go ahead hi I'm AVB from the transparency commission so in my background I

10. 4:30

    actually have studied law technically a lawyer in Australia and yeah I mean a guru would say at the top of the mountain that the universe is conspiring to help me achieve my mission which is to senior succeed they sent me to law school was torture for seven years and now I somehow ended up in the transparency commission so the transparency commission resembles a legal body to a large extent it's there as the name implies to make sure that

11. 4:55

    there's accountability as we move to these new forms of governance and uh yeah it's just an oversight body we've put in a lot of work to try to Define what the processes are what the scope are and yeah we'll be forthcoming with over 100 Pages worth of uh Frameworks to help us deal with some some outstanding issues all right yeah so hey everyone I'm blae I've been uh with near since before mainnet started as uh as part of the validator competition uh joined that

12. 5:27

    became a validator on near been an active Community member and contributor to the ecosystem in general then co-founded cheddar which is a small y yield Farm focused on helping provide opportunity for small wallet balances on near and then the champion of the NDC in terms of just getting vzero governance to a point where we could launch to where we are now so now as part of that a member of the Council of advisers which is really a seven member Council

13. 5:56

    focused on advising the house of Merit which is where camer is so the house of Meritt is about budget allocation and about establishing governance processes the Council of advisers is somewhat like an oversight Council to that so they have the ability to veto budget to veto policy changes that they might make but also really to more work with the H and the rest of the governing bodies to ensure that governance is aligned to the Strategic direction of near and that we're actually deploying funding and

14. 6:28

    deploying NDC to grow and sustain the ecosystem so yeah glad to be here and thanks everyone for joining we thank you all for your public service in those chambers thanks a lot for that so um yeah thanks for that summary uh before we go into like more debates around specific topics I think it would just be for my own curiosity quite interesting to hear each of you around as well hearing from your side uh Cameron starting with you um what do you think works well in NDC in the hold right now and what don't you think like

15. 7:00

    works so well what's the main challenges yeah so um just for context the NDC was first created by a group called The governance working group and or the the first legal framework and so the framework was intentionally designed and I think ABB and blaz can talk more about this but to be sort of broad to start and the whole goal is for the house of Merit to kind of refine it and actually submit like formal bylaws and how these

16. 7:25

    things operate and how voting works and the whole bit and so um I would say that has not totally come to fruition yet um the house of Merit is a little bit fragmented right now um and we can also go into why in a nutshell uh for those who did not participate and don't understand how this works uh the voting body is essentially anybody that has a crypto in your wallet and went through

17. 7:49

    the IM am human verification process which means you scan your face and that image then gets uploaded to a gdpr compliant database uh through this organization called fractal and these are the people that are now registered to vote and they're the ones to decide on who actually gets placed in these different houses and so that although it is actually I think one of the the better approaches as we've seen in the blockchain space um and I've been

18. 8:13

    in this space for about six seven years now and I've also participated in decentralized governance um normally that doesn't work very well because those who actually have all the votes can essentially Place their people in key offices and do it strategically so they have majority for when a budget comes through and they can just essentially approve it and steamroll anyone who disagrees and so unfortunately this is kind of what has

19. 8:38

    happened in a way uh not it's not too far off um that is it can be fixed I guess as my point um but right now in the house of Merit there is a very strong Coalition and they are very coordinated and so they don't necessarily need to cooperate with anyone else because they can essentially push proposals through and vote at least internally within the house of Merit to get them passed and so what we've seen

20. 9:01

    thus far is uh decisions being made without the entire house of Merit even participating uh because they can just you know make a proposal pass it within themselves and then push on the council advisers and I feel like that has actually led to less engagement from the people who really are trying to do it for the right reasons because their voice doesn't really matter so um I think that's something that we definitely need to change in terms of what is going well uh I did appreciate

21. 9:27

    the uh sort of speeding of the council advisers coming out with metrics defining the what um and so that was that was good but besides that um we have a lot of work to do and with that bridge let's go to AVB same question what do you think works well what do you think is not working well and and and you can speak for your own body but you're allowed to speak about the whole I'm an individual I nothing I say is legal advice uh if you want to see what

22. 9:51

    works well I would look at devhub and uh I would split the NDC landscape in several categories because multiple things can be try once and you can mix and match we may have to revise the voting body because it is too broad that may be true but it may also be true that the majority that got in got in because they represent the general sentiment of the community so there's there's a tension there between finding the right balance of how do we who do we

23. 10:22

    want to participate actively in governance and acknowledging grievances to the community the third category which is where focus on special through transparency commission is just the processes assuming that the the people elected have the Mandate and that they do represent some interest in the community and by the way most of the House of Merit is actually aligned in what they want to achieve but we have now our discrepancies in either how to

24. 10:46

    achieve it or just personality clashes different uh work modes so what we think well what I personally think should be the priority would be to have very well understood simple processes so that everyone can be on the same page even if you're a minority you get your period to discuss to be heard Case Closed moved on and it's just having the tense of furnace uh we're not going to be able to win all the time we're not going to be able to have something perfect we just need to get to the minimum viable trust

25. 11:18

    otherwise the the long-term viability of the of the institution is not there if if we if we're not able to agree and Trust in internally the community is obviously not going to yeah yeah please please over to me so the the first thing to understand about uh governance and decentralization is that they are very difficult topics right this is something that hasn't been really solved in the web 3 space very well and so with NDC we

26. 11:50

    took a completely different approach where we put the community at the heart of governance instead of hiring high-end outside counsel or advisor or uh you know making the decision making in the hands of the founders that and the VCS that established the chain we really engage the community to begin to develop governance and in that there was a lot of challenges but I would say

27. 12:13

    that this you know initial state of governance that we have now V1 is what we're transitioning to it's like looking at you know live raw earth right and now we've got to shape that Earth and create more rigor more processes more procedures as ABB was saying to make that next version uh even better so we know that this is going to be iterative we know it's going to take time and we know we won't get it right up front right we just we're just not going to get it right so um I think that's the

28. 12:42

    both the power of what we're doing and it's kind of the you know the side effect of saying that that's the you know that it's both the negative and the positive that we're working through but what is exciting is that we have an active Congress now right 29 elected members elected by the community right and so we made the houses as big as they are uh because we wanted to make sure

29. 13:07

    that we knew that there was a potential for collusion we knew that you know there could be coalitions that formed that tried to take over you know the governing bodies uh but you know the good thing is is that we have people like Cameron and other members in these houses because we made them in in such a fashion that that would be enabled now the other thing that I would say is that

30. 13:29

    you know this process that we're going through it will be bumpy but you know we're going to continue to make things a lot better and so the idea like ABB was saying is how do we grow this voting body what are the criteria to vote in this next election what kind of election are we going to build uh those are all the things that we have to work through in very short order so we've got about five months left to deliver a new voting

31. 13:54

    mechanism to stand up these processes and procedures to then turn the this governance over to whoever the next elected officials are assuming some of these folks will run as well and still be in the houses for another term yeah and if I could just add to what BL mentioned because there's a fourth category assuming that we have all the processes in place I like the analogy of terraforming because if we in this room

32. 14:18

    had to terraform a planet we wouldn't pick people off the street you probably want to have some nuclear scientists and so that fourth category speak speaks to the challenge of having people that are very skilled and experienced and smart they may just not be skilled or experienced in the governance real and to be perfectly honest the opportunity cost of them attempting to do governance is just greater than what they could be doing say on engineering so there is a bit of

33. 14:50

    the spinning of the wheels from having people that may just not be into governance so that's why I think that the big picture is important we have people that felt the need to step up to make sure that the First Council gets done right and uh yeah I I would be patient on these group of people's ability or willingness to put in the processes so that then they can go away and at least from the transparency commission what

34. 15:20

    I've What I've Done quite explicitly and everyone agrees is we're putting in Frameworks in place so that it doesn't matter who's in the transparency Commission as long as they're doing their job and applying the Frameworks the outcome should be the same I I could resign the day after all the Frameworks are gone are there and the outcome should be the same so I think that is something um to aspire to it's just like the fourth

35. 15:42

    category after the first three so it's a it's a training motion uh whether it's going to crash or get to destination it's up to us and in terms what what uh what Cameron you mentioned um the status of the House of Merit um I guess like regular kind of like organizational Theory governance you would maybe in democracy Theory categorize this as sort of uh a majority dictatorship so you

36. 16:07

    could actually say it works because you have stuff that's being pushed but you you are questioning the representation H is that how it's supposed to be I just wonder you AV how do you see that situation I mean if I had to be Devil's Advocate and I think I am the only one that is more in contact with the other faction an analogy would be when you got a like a legal case in court and there's some great examples captured in you know English common

37. 16:33

    law sometimes a judge slaps a lawyer because they're just wasting time there's an accident and the insurance company is suing and the lawyer is asking is the person alive of course it's alive it's in the room with us so there are things that you for the of efficiency and pragmatism you just don't waste time on because you can just assume so when you're looking into governance the tricky area is if we have have a majority and we're all busy doing four things in the ecosystem do we have

38. 17:03

    to spend an entire week you know with mental masturbation for lack of a better word on something that we already agree on and if we disagree put it in writing Post in a forum it's going to pass anyway I think that's a tension that we have how much is your diligence how much is your process how much do we Grant people the opportunity to express themselves do we have a body that is intellectually honest to consider different points of view and to blend in

39. 17:29

    different points of view so that we have some compromise how much is it super basic and we just sign it and move along like we have to do years worth of work if you look at like the real world in 6 weeks to make sure that this stays alive and that's the tension whether everyone is able to see how complex that is and where to be super fast and where to take the time to ask questions I don't think so uh um it's more of an eego issue everyone is very successful in their own uh Space by

40. 18:03

    doing their own thing so when you're suddenly all equal it's if I just may like U and I'll let you follow up um another key thing I heard you talk about ABB and also a bit you uh place is institutions right we have this body and in States we also know that you can have institutions but if there there's no legitimacy around those institutions um then basically you know you don't you or whatever out policy output or policy outcome that

41. 18:35

    might be um it it it might make you know it might have zero value or negative value if there's no legitimacy uh so I just wonder and like how do you see that uh Cameron in terms of what you describe of House of Merit how like how to approach this from where we are now what should we do now to like make sure you you from your point of view representation is taken into account there is like legitimate y organization um so first thing is like Implement some basic processes um how quickly can a

42. 19:07

    vote be passed or like how many people does actually require to vote can people vote just to have their even if Quorum is met can they vote just to have their voice heard um these are all things that aren't totally defined yet within the house of Merit and so I'd say first things first is just get clear on how decisions are made internally and this was one of my uh you know primary points before we you know pass a bu let's understand how we would actually go about spending that budget before asking

43. 19:32

    for money and so first thing is just like Implement some basic processes around Capital allocation um second thing is you know devising a strategy like very basic stuff by the way like this not this not rocket science it's not new um corporate strategy and corporate governance is has been around for decades or generate like hundreds of years and so we can just Implement a similar process and Grant programs have

44. 19:54

    also been around and we've learned a lot of lessons around Grant programs and people here honestly are just trying to reinvent the wheel well this has been done before it was interesting everyone always references rocket science rocket science it's hard for it to succeed but it is easy to see when it is not working the rocket exploded and this is where I think that there needs to be empathy like if you're speaking with like you

45. 20:19

    know Spectrum level Engineers it is easy to know that your technical code is not working cuz it doesn't work like you get together to troubleshoot and you have a shared language where it either you get the outcome or you don't the set truth in the social sciences is that everyone bends themselves backwards to interpret the same words differently and that's why us lawyers become absolute

46. 20:42

    millionaires watching two people try to assertain what the meaning of xword is community yeah what is community and I think that's where for something that the engineers know can easily be fixed if it doesn't work for us who suffer watching extremely poor writing and then extremely poor interpretation of what was poorly written in the first place and there's no clear way that things die in Social experiments states don't go bankrupt Gus from dmark May challenge the legitimacy

47. 21:16

    of an institution but the truth is the worse institutions are run the more likely they're to succeed so we have the challenge of trying to understand that we're building a digital Nation some people emphasize the digital some people emphasize the nation the digital Camp is extremely confident because a you know when it's failed but B they're the only ones that can build it you know that we

48. 21:40

    buy to div Vision or we don't the nation Camp oh man that's a bunch of like childhood trauma and vision and Utopia and dystopia there's a point where you go around in circles and at many points of the circle you have to ask are we still talking about the new ecosystem or are we projecting something else here are we talking about incredible products for Mass adoption and consumer

49. 22:01

    applications or Ubi like where are we at because they're at some point just not compatible and if they are the conversation is so broad it loses meaning so I think we need to pick our battles uh camera and I have had conversations sometimes you compromise on one thing grassroot budget done let's focus on processes like some things in the past may not be ideal not much we can do about it the key question is in six months time do we have a new successful election or would do we wrap

50. 22:31

    it up yeah and and how do you see that place um is it is it all about processes that's I heard a lot of talked about and and and and like getting more into you know connecting better the the the culture or are specific uh products technological things that also needs to be iterated on as you're saying it's a complex problem as ABB is saying we may be like civil complex problem at the same time like we we have several battlefronts um are there legal obstacles like what what are the what do

51. 23:04

    you think like are some of the main things that uh you've already been part of of of the Journey of indc for a while but like what what are the next big like challenges you see for yeah to address this yeah I mean our challenges you know are the same challenges really that we've faced since the beginning of the ecosystem and that is that you know NDC is not our first experiment with deploying funding right we've had the

52. 23:27

    Grassroots uh movement going for a while we've had NF deploying grants right we've we've had what we call guilds previously that were deploying funding so really I think our largest challenge is the challenge that every Community or ecosystem face and our largest challenge is collaboration and Innovation right how do you bring a bunch of people together to make them you know want to

53. 23:51

    collaborate with one another to create that vision and move forward so yeah on the technological front we've got to build better elections right um we need to look at the legal uh aspects of what does it mean to have these governing bodies do they need specific legal requirements or specific you know legal setups you know to further uh protector emif the you know the members of Congress um the other aspect is the processes and procedures which we're

54. 24:21

    talking about a lot about now how do we actually deploy funding how do we measure the result to make sure that we're actually growing the ecosystem you know we just don't have a lot of folks taking funding uh that's what we saw a lot at last cycle is that a lot of funding was deployed but the actual measurable result was quite small so we need to make sure that these experiments that we're doing um have tangible

55. 24:46

    results and are moving the needle forward and that's probably the biggest challenge so we just won't get there this first governance uh session but the idea is to put enough rigor and I won't say rules cuz we don't want a ton of rules the moment we start introducing rules then we got gatekeeping going on again so how do we really collaborate and create enough rigor in the system just so that it propels through this

56. 25:11

    next Congress session we have a fair election we elect members to Congress and we've got a better operating model for governance and we do this current session that's really where we're at if if we think of governance as capital location because at least for now that's the community Treasury and how to allocate capital and then we draw an analogy with say a VC fund VC funds are

57. 25:35

    mostly fails and some wins the wins make it worth it in a young ecosystem we should be thinking the same way we really don't care if 90% of things we fund fail we just want 10 things to take us to 10 million daily active users and then 20 and then 50 and then we just keep learning and iterating so the issue is the issue with the funding is not really the metrics on not really what we're

58. 25:58

    funding they sure are the humans the technology is great the problem is do we have or does a community feel like we have the due diligence required so that if something fails we feel okay because they try their best and we move on we should encourage entrepreneurship that's American Spirit highly we should not be a culture that punishes people for being wrong if it was an honest attempt if you worked minimum wage not and weakens and tried something new we should app plot that so then the

59. 26:30

    question is what can we do to ensure that the people that are in charge of this bursing money are always a required to have that high standard you know considered a full picture and B are actually doing their jobs the problem with Ds is it the moment you grant autonomy I mean I have the autonomy to go to bed anytime that I want but if I were flying a plane and there's 700 people waiting for my A380 to the part I am no longer autonomous to go to bed at any time that I want and drink a bottle of scotch and whatever so the needs to

60. 27:05

    be a compromise of it is a privilege and uh and a big responsibility to represent the community in these bodies and we should be demanding these bodies to operate at a high standard and we should be Unapologetic about this and it's the only way we move forward so let's talk about like the house of marriage just just to to cut into so we about to uh already go to the second half of the

61. 27:31

    session uh I'll just let Cameron respond to this one but before that uh our dear Morning Fresh audience please uh think about questions uh for the guys because in a moment we would love to hear from you yeah please go yeah so like you know these people like in the house of Merit a lot of these people are are busy they run other companies or other like you know bone Wing manages uh entire protocol team so he doesn't always have the time to sort of deal with with

62. 27:55

    governance and uh the you need to motivate these people Inspire them to want to contribute and if you're around a bunch of other people that you know you don't necessarily align with you're not really inspired to contribute you're not really you know uh at all incentivized and right now in the house of Merit I just think like there's very little incentives for very busy people who have very important other things to do uh to deal with honestly

63. 28:19

    there's a lot of incompetence the people in a lot of people in the house of Merit don't actually have Merit in the ecosystem these people were just like you know like modern ating Discord channels and stuff and that's important but they're not like actually driving real ecosystem metrics at scale and I'm very just not not confident that these are the decision makers that we need in order to drive the ecosystem to be competitive not with salana but actually with like AWS like I want we want to

64. 28:44

    open the internet we we're competing with Google and Amazon like these people in the house of Merit are not the current people that are going to actually compete with Google and Amazon and so um yeah we need to actually refine what Merit means and I guess this is now up for the Congress to decide but I'm not optimistic that these people are going to figure it out including myself because I don't want to participate with them so maybe that was a great uh end

65. 29:07

    note for provoking uh more questions from the audience I don't know we will see but um we will open up now for questions from the audience so uh we think we're going to start over there with this gentleman you have a mic coming just next to you there there you go hey um first of all governance is very difficult as you can probably tell from the what's said and reading between the lines I guess it's important to say who

66. 29:33

    I am uh my name is Herb Stevens I'm one of the co-founders of the Democracy Earth Foundation uh I've known Cameron since he was a student at UC Santa Barbara uh leading the blockchain efforts there I'm also one of the co-founders of proof of humanity uh.org I'm actually ID number one um uh and I heard Cameron make a comment about uh you know governments has been done for hundreds of years in a very very productive way and if you look at the way Venture capitalists deploy their

67. 30:11

    money and every organization you have a board you have a management team and then you have the shareholders right and the board is typically kept really small and tight an odd number five typically not 20 something um I'm also an adviser to Aragon um I'm credited on their white paper and uh early on they decided uh you know with all good intentions let's hand governance out to the community I pulled my hair I yelled at them I said don't do it and if you saw their announcement

68. 30:46

    last week they just gave back 175 million to all of their users and they're starting over um I would advise keep your boards really tight it's their they incentivized to know what the community wants and they can make decisions really fast and if you throw out governance to the community the problem is time yeah we have to move fast we actually have to have results and whereas it may work

69. 31:17

    itself out it's going to take years if you throw governance out to a huge Community keep it tight have a management team report to the board and then there are certain times when yes you throw it out to the whole Community for a vote and that's where you elect that board right and so that's my piece of advice and I'd wondered why you weren't heading in that direction aen direction where hundreds of millions of dollars are deployed to

70. 31:47

    very effective governance anyone want to take that AB first if if that was a question say that of disagree with what blaz said let's just throw it out to the community because that does not work you'll get b b boat face do you guys know B mcboat face like uh the European or the British government wanted the community to name a a boat and they named it bod mcboat face and when you throw it out to the community it's going to be you know run by a bunch of degenerates especially when it's anybody

71. 32:20

    who has a wallet and can scan their face I think they're not real contributions to the ecosystem I think that people to become better at scenario planning as someone that has now outlasted three near Foundation CEOs um we need to really think okay what happens next and then what happens next and what happens next when you have very busy very talented people very accomplished people be elected into a house of Merit the community is signaling something we want quality we subscribe to their work when they don't

72. 32:51

    show up to the work are they at fault or is the how of whatever institution not enabling them to operate at the same level there as they have already proven that they can operate elsewhere the game theory here is very simple I know that my protocol that I run is not going to go away devop was very smart they slowly move to the corner and they are as solid and as successful as theyve ever been if you don't make room for me to contribute I know that you'll be dead before I am and

73. 33:23

    this is where the the ego and the humbleness and understand where we're all coming from is because now have people come to me as a person in the intersection of most communities asking me why are they not participating why are they not contributing I was like well maybe because you tried to fuck them for 6 weeks and now you're wondering why it's a silent fault so this is a fundamentally human problem the intention of the checks and balances

74. 33:48

    is there what we're doing the transparency commission is there if people can't talk to each other there's nothing I can do about it and to be honest NDC if it succeeds it's going to be like AI driven and if it fails it's going to be because you another governance experiment in the history of governance that it's just hard yeah so I would just to answer your question more directly we do have somewhat of a board of directors that's called the Council of advisors one of

75. 34:13

    the things we didn't cover in this session was the governing bodies and what their actual roles are so the Council of advisors has ability to you know veto legislation veto budgets based on uh you know how the progress is going to make sure that we're heading the right direction so they are somewhat the board of directors in that scenario we have the transparency commission one of the things that we know for certain is

76. 34:38

    that collusion you know uh you know um misappropriation of funds misconduct they seem to be very uh you know Keen things in web 3 and we know that's something for web 3 to truly begin to grow and we've heard it throughout the conference people said we need to remove Bad actors so we created the transparency Comm commission to be the Watchdogs of governance so that they can remove Bad actors in the case that those

77. 35:02

    things are found um the house of Merit is a bigger body but it's really about representation of our entire ecosystem so we have many verticals we've got defi we've got creatives marketing right we have gaming we have all these verticals so the idea of the House of Merit was to get good representation of the ecosystem because they're responsible for Budget planning uh to make sure that there was

78. 35:26

    good Collective representation now this is an active experiment and we are looking at how this is actively working what's interesting is that we made sure that only ogs could be elected into this first Congress so you had to be with the ecosystem at least a year and a half right um and like Cameron said we see several very successful individuals elected into this Congress but they have very active projects they're responsible for pnls are responsible for for and so

79. 35:58

    what we're trying to see here is where is the the kind of the fine line between being very successful and running your own project and then contributing to governance versus maybe you have a smaller project and are more active right someone like AVB he's been around for a long time as active Community member active uh really part of the community and so he's going to be more active so we're seeing this experiment live and we're not going to really quite know 100%

80. 36:27

    until we get through this next 6 months uh what it looks like now there has been a question um proposed do we need to be bring professionals into governance do we actually need to hire real governance professionals to come in and run part of this and so that's something that I think we'll have a better understanding of if this to see how this current Congress executes so please come a short answer and we we're going to follow up

81. 36:52

    to your professor and we're going to go back to next question P up chair the uh uh near found like working at near foundation for a while uh we've been trying to solve some of these like hardest questions about identity systems and voting and all this other stuff like how do you actually assess the growth and like success of an ecosystem really hard questions to answer um and I feel like all these hard questions were just taken and just shoved over to the NDC to

82. 37:15

    figure out and given about hey you have six months to figure out how to do verifiable human voting and make sure that there's this digital government that could be stood up and to be it makes zero sense because now we have a bunch of people that are supposed to be solving honestly these completely unsolved problems in all of society um to be done in six months by people who don't have experience doing it and or

83. 37:38

    have any actual process that they're interested in implementing because a big part of this is a lot of these uh people are actually from places that don't actually have functioning democracies and so now you're trying to get a bunch of people who don't have great experience with democracy to not only interact and you know behave well in a democratic process but then create one it's kind of insane and so I actually think that this is kind of set up to

84. 38:02

    fail um because it's probably trying to some answer all the unsolved problems in six months if you would think about it as an MVP and you have you say okay it's MVP so you need one thesis to test for this product or this increation of an MVP right then it's quite a lot of uh things you're trying to test at the same time and then you have a 6 months right now iteration Loop basically right to then do that again that's identity voting attribution what's but but I'm sure this topic going to going toenter I just want to park it for one moment ab

85. 38:33

    and then go for more questions to the audience uh so please raise your hands again we have one guy in the front row here please so I have two questions um one is how do you know like a after six month you are successful the second question is uh it looks like like the way um you guys are operating is more like a one person company so that means I have to do everything so I have to

86. 39:04

    build a product I have to go for funding I have to fix bunch of other things so you have bunch of these problems like identity and this and that is it also responsibility of House of Merit to figure those things out or figure out how we can help the um ecosystem or how we can bring more people so yeah so the question is um why like a do you have a separate body who think about the process or improving the process because that's different from

87. 39:43

    running so it's driving a car is different from maintaining maintaining the car right so I'm probably not going to maintain the car if I want to drive properly right y yeah let me answer that so we'll start with what we did right so what we had originally was a governance working group and that working group was really broken into five main work groups that focused on standing up governance so we know that technology and the tech stack like we've got to build technology to be able to vote do all of these

88. 40:15

    things governance is another category we need folks focused on building and designing governance processes and procedures we know that legal you know in web 3 is a major aspect that needs to be addressed uh really the other one is marketing how do we Market the NDC do we Market it at all do we Market the uh the near brand how do we associate those things and then the last one's Community engagement how do we keep the community

89. 40:39

    engaged in governance and and throughout the process so the idea is that these work groups are supposed to carry into V1 governance so we haven't actually reached that point yet one of the things that was a little bit of a challenge when we transitioned from the gwg which was a smaller group group of people only about you know 7 to 13 people doing everything to now we we scale that up to

90. 41:03

    29 individuals was that some of the factions or some of the you know uh the Coalition didn't want to engage the existing governance working group so all of that you know process and that translation and that migration was lost so that's one of the reasons that we have kind of the situation we have now where everything looks a a little bit dysfunctional because it wasn't a true

91. 41:29

    transition plan right now we're seeing that everyone is actively engaged in Congress their mindsets began to change they first started out with everything's terrible and now they're starting to say oh well maybe it's not that bad it just needs improved right so but absolutely 100% we need to make sure that we have rfps for the technology or work groups focused on technology work groups

92. 41:53

    focused on governance and processes we need need to get legal in place right so all these things need to be created in more of a decentralized fashion from what they were before and that's the real goal of this go ahead please oh thank you oh was the longest qu have been for a long time there is definitely different points of view and a discrepancy on how much the NDC should do I personally think that it was attempting to do too much before and didn't actually do that

93. 42:25

    much the problem is with regulatory capture if we say there is one body that will do a you exclude other people to also do it and what I'm saying in the ecosystem now is high ranking people going around giving multiple groups trust resources but no loyalty either you ship or we don't give a fuck about you like this ecosystem has to grow how did we have a legal working group funded for an entire

94. 42:53

    year and 20 council members now are being told to go engage private legal council because we don't have answers to these questions how did we have a governance working group for an entire year and we literally have a one pager that says you have oversight we've spent four weeks drafting over 100 pages of Frameworks and processes and then the creator of the one page telling me I don't have mandate or scope these are the situations where

95. 43:19

    you're like look either we do something or we don't and if we have a choice I'm a minimalist marketing doubt everything you've seen on stage today where have you heard about it before why haven't we had any Bounty I wrote the marketing dollar chart and I can tell you we're falling way short on those metrics why have we not had any other initiatives funded from the community treasury V1 makes me bullish because we finally are opening the door for initiatives in my perspective House of

96. 43:51

    marriage should be very minimalist they simply approve a budget and they put in the the Frameworks and the criteria to give the money out we should be saying hey the community treasury is a big pile of gold it will be given to our best come with proposals we shouldn't be catering for the lowest common denominator keeping people that want 10 year a month to do some bullshit online no no no we need to go out there and get

97. 44:16

    our best doesn't matter is it 10,000 a month is it 50 million you tell us what you can do and we'll figure it out the money is sitting there we've got very capable people with the intellectual capacity to assess anything that comes at them and we should be enabling other people I am allergic to bureaucracy growing I am allergic to people being further and further being from the

98. 44:37

    community and the new management which has its ways and may not be popular came in course correct this feeling that we were no longer a blockchain ecosystem they came in to represent the engineers that have been dedicating two years of the time to the LI technology that it's on paralleled and no one knows of so I think that we are at the crossroads where we have to decide whether we're a builder blockchain or our bureaucracy blockchain whether we want to be passive and mediocre or be

99. 45:10

    willing to say hey maybe we can agree to disagree but we have to move on and yeah I think that Cameron has his work cut out for him do you want to quickly comment or we move to next we can move to the next yeah yeah so let's go to to the third question and we have a guy to put the hand up very fast we'll go for him yeah you know overall Modern Age governance is uh is is pretty pretty tough I mean applying traditional

100. 45:43

     governance uh values to you know technosocial projects or things hasn't proven to work well and you know by technosocial I mean anything that involves technology and anything of the social or the soft science Sciences right uh and you know we see this happening across the board not just in year has happened to uh compound where you know governance was gered by VCS in particular most recently in polka do

101. 46:07

     where proposals were being hijacked and so forth and even apoin Dow which I was involved in uh but I think there's light to Bringing subject matter experts or people who can be very critical on things that are happening uh and or advice on how to do things but but I think a course struggle really has been on how do we identify these subject matter experts that can come on board and how do we keep them engaged and incentivized and this is something I think other ecosystems you know ask

102. 46:37

     themselves and I'm curious to you guys what's your take on this how do you keep these folks or find them or keep them engaged uh in providing value to the ecosystem yeah I can really just speak to myself speak for myself um why I want NDC to work is because I want this like Mothership of an organization where I can spin up local communities so I run uh the ban Collective is essentially near us we help seed you know near San

103. 47:02

     Francisco New York plan to seed Austin Seattle Denver Chicago DC Florida like Miami all these other City nodes and I don't want to be this Mega Corp I don't want all these people reporting to me and us I would much prefer to spin up a Grassroots organization and have them Point them to the NDC to get long-term support and so I am directly incentivized to have NDC succeed so I can actually push people to a proper

104. 47:30

     bucket of funds and that funds those funds are actually like uh you know followed up with proper due diligence and there's like we can grow the ecosystem this way and so I want NDC to work because of that so I guess my point is uh I'm participating because I'm directly incentivized for this future of my company if the if let's say the protocol team doesn't really see a a need for the NDC to exist I'm assuming that those people are not going to be as active I'm not saying that's the case but like we need to actually align the goals of the NDC with the goals of the

105. 48:01

     individual um because right now it's not going to be money you can go get more money doing other things um it's not really just interest because those people weren't researching and doing those things before they're working on you know another pro project and so um I don't know uh I would say yeah just make sure that the goals of the NDC align with the actual goals of the organization people you've you remember

106. 48:24

     my reference to devop having another conversation they have a really interesting initiative around decentralized Dev rail so before it was with imp Pagoda and I've attended conferences literally everywhere in the world paid by my myself and I'm often the only one that is not an employee of foundation proxim your pagot so just having a decentralized Dev rail where anyone can put their hand up and say hey I've got the skills I've got

107. 48:49

     the interest I live around the corner and there's an Avenue for them makes a huge difference so the question is how can we extend that to more things I see devel and evangelists or cheerleaders people that can represent near and get interest and leads and then direct them to the right person is being slightly different how do we create a structure and programs where people feel like this backing for them to go out and do that I

108. 49:14

     can tell you for most of my time at near we've never had that you go out there you meet some people you tell them the near is great and they get excited I don't know what you send them to and you see is nuclear I would certainly never send anyone that way that's the easiest way to lose people until now and the question is as Cameron says how can we remove most of the governance and bureaucracy so people spend the least

109. 49:37

     amount of time doing the minimum needed so that they can then go away and create value in their own ways we can't predict it but we really need to get that subject matter expert value so like you're going to need so over the last like year and a half we stood up all these Builder groups we have a wallet Builder group go to nearb builders.com to check out all the Builder groups group uh nft Builder def5 Builder all these other things and so if you're if you go to one of these conferences you

110. 50:00

     meet a def Builder send them to the def Builder group send them to the wall Builder group and then uh in my perfect world each of these groups will have their own treasury to set the direction of that key vertical but um right now in the house of Merit they don't want to touch anything that I have been remotely a part of and so uh this is the challenge here um because I'm not even a part of this I get zero money from this the whole point of me standing up these

111. 50:24

     Builder groups and shot on my team is to actually step back and have new leaders take control of that vertical but um this is the Dilemma we're in now is that everything I've touched is radioactive and maybe you want to follow up it sounds like you have a follow up to that go ahead but talking talking to Cameron a little bit about this and you know I think in particular just me me and myself been in the space for over 10 years I think at this point like for

112. 50:49

     folks ormes right or what he just mentioned that are you know the the contributors that want a Cen share the project I think there's like an information problem because a lot of folks in the ecosystem sometimes they do these things for hedonistic purposes they don't care about getting paid they care about contributing I think most of the time we see that folks leave an ecosystem or kind of step back because no value is highlighted or the information that has being disseminated

113. 51:13

     is not shared with the world so you might have someone propose or get feedback to a white paper write a white paper make a contribution but you know they're not getting the right uh amount of information or value out of it and I think you know one parallel that I recently saw was in the academic area in the Academia right like as as a PhD or people who are doing research you have your quote unquote duty to do peer

114. 51:37

     review this is a not paid work you might be reviewing like an 8-page paper which you know might take you like five hours or something right and you go ahead and write down and say hey this is how I think you should improve it I saw this happening somewhere else or this is garbage so for the past few years a lot of folks are doing great job but most recently a lot of professors and people in Academia have been writing

115. 52:01

     really bad reviews for you know students and academic papers and just at this point we're seeing that a lot of these folks are taking these reviews that were given to them that are that are horrible putting them socials and saying you know this person did a bad job of reviewing my paper you know but again this is unpaid and most people really just want to do it for the head of ntic value and I think it's an information problem because an ecosystem some you have

116. 52:25

     people that come and provide value without getting paid but they're not getting highlighted or essentially the information is not disseminated quite well just some thoughts yeah so just come back to your question then we can go to the next one so how do you keep you know and how do you find these advisers these experts how do you keep them engaged first it starts with contribution and you just literally said that right you've got to find people that are willing to contribute to the

117. 52:49

     process that means that whatever is being worked on aligns with their passions and their own personal goals right so just hiring experts and bringing them in isn't necessarily going to move things forward if they're not passionate about what we're actively trying to achieve and then they're not engaged in actually contributing so I think that's a key aspect you can bring in hundreds of people and maybe only find three contributors right but then

118. 53:14

     the second point you said and that's something we've got to get better at is how do you kind of put the spotlight on people and thank them for their contribution right so we created something called Kudos as which which is about appreciation acclamations right we need to do better about like celebrating the contributions of folks paid or unpaid but certainly even for the unpaid folks to make sure that they are getting

119. 53:38

     notability within the ecosystem and they're building reputation so reputation is a big uh item that we need to continue to work on and build that shows your value of contribution to the ecosystem overall but yeah that was just a followup there as you gu all know the end is near so we just have time for one more question and I see you have been very uh very proactive so please uh go yeah thanks for everyone for discussions I want to make call for action and also

120. 54:09

     want to see how um what do you think about it so um uh I have a lot of Reflections and I see that you know many people talk about the problems which is kind of a good but okay I mean everyone can see different problems from different perspective what we we need what we need to create is a place for project managers like I really see it missing people don't talk about it enough if you go to like a successful business if you go to a successful um creators they will

121. 54:39

     see we need a project it doesn't matter if it's a technical artist or or Community project managers I don't see project managers I don't see enough people talking about it that's my my latest reflection yes what do you think about call for Action I love it um just want a racy chart what are the things that we have to do who's actually going to do them when are they going to get them by you know what is going to happen if they don't do it what is going to

122. 55:03

     happen if they do it this is not that difficult um but it's not that difficult but you know we need to make that space found it yeah create you hit the name the head it's not don't post it nobody will post it it's not that difficult it's just that somebody literally has to show up like the bar is that low and to the point that I started with you know humans using language you can wait or be proactive be proactive you want me to answer the question or the challenge that we have with

123. 55:30

     communities do we are we still in bull market mode where we do some bullshit airdrop and we pretend like there's users that because they just want to get 20 bucks are we in corporate mode where we have millions of users that no one know who they are and whatever they have transactions for now or do we really want to go to that core I mean I find Community web 3 as the people that are willing to take credit for somebody

124. 55:54

     else's really hard work and they go out there and sell it I spoke to Skov yesterday he doesn't know how to speak to humans but if I get excited about his work I am out there whing myself to sell it that's Community where are the die hards that understand the engineering and while the engineers take some rest they will go out there and sell it now all of us are gifted programmers some of us are psychopaths can talk to people

125. 56:21

     we've got a community we can succeed together we have never really tried to identify and Empower that cohort the people that do it they have it in their core and the day that I live near I'll be either dead or near will be dead but most other people that were there at some point they just left they realized yeah I am doing free labor for somebody that's really smart and I want to help

126. 56:44

     them grow but I can't carry the entire ecosystem on my shoulders so now the message is of Hope we've got the NDC to channel as many initiatives as possible it needs the bureaucrats to get out of the way and let people do their best once again like the call to action to me is you got an idea create the project manager's Dow and really get together with the best people you can think of

127. 57:08

     and put in place everything you need I'm in C with the house of Merit right now well the other half of the House of Merit they are looking for Grassroots style to fund because obviously the current ones there's just not that much happening there I work closely with the devhub and they've been given mandate to do what other part of the ecosystem are not doing I'm in contact with the Horizon and they've been given more and more expectations responsibility like no

128. 57:31

     one should be sitting in their ass complaining I agree with you uh the days of anons on the governance Forum hopefully are behind us and the message for people should be let's try to find a way to come up with a solution remove the people that are in between you and that solution and give it a go BL it's something that depending on the context that you apply it to I disagree but as a general statement is

129. 57:55

     true when you start doing the work you realize how hard it is we need people to just get their hands dirty and uh yeah that's a good place to wrap it up do you want to follow up Kim on this one uh yeah the part of the big issue is like none of us actually trust each other um and that's going to be a really hard place to start if we're trying to build a digital international government uh that is responsible for redefining a

130. 58:21

     voting system an identity system attribution system and like honest these unsolved problems that no ecosystem has solved before um and I would say it probably starts by just hopping on a call and understanding why we're all here I was very transparent of why I'm here I want an entity that I can spin up organizations to and send to um why near you know a lot of these people who I've talked to they barely can answer these questions or don't even like or don't

131. 58:46

     even do due diligence on some of the Grassroots STS that we're speaking to and so there's another big question that I want to flag or not question but point is um the whole transparency commission at some point was funded by marketing Dow um in the last like probably two months or so uh there was a pretty sign you can go to the Forum and actually see all this uh why if somebody in the transparency commission primarily gets

132. 59:08

     paid through marketing Dow bring up any issues with marketing di there's a absolute conflict of interest here and I mean as a as a number one spokesperson against the marketing Dow see it's ironic that people complain that I would be buying against the marketing doubt cuz i' have been so outspoken and that I would keep them in place cuz they pay me this is where you need to have processes and integrity exactly doesn't matter who makes an assessment if you apply and and I can

133. 59:41

     showare the framework nine-step process and then you establish every single element this is what lawyers do this is what legal process you looks like anyone that applies that list should come to the same outcome collusion if a proposal would have not been approved but for the Hopeless people in place corrupt if a proposal would have been approved by anyone you put it in front of them and you can actually do a sampling size get

134. 1:00:06

     four random people from Foundation from random people from any country that you want for strangers from the street there are processes where these claims can be established we've got a very comprehensive conflict of interest proactive conflict of interest where people will have to disclose and then we manage the conflict they can put measures in place uh information segregation you can abstain for certain things you may have to step down like most issues that can be identified can

135. 1:00:32

     be dealt with and this is where the importance of having a clear beginning and a clear end and your process in the middle are because the toxicity of Half Baked ideas and Ill informed claims it's going in the ecosystem and with that in mind and uh the time in mind uh we're just going to say that's it for today we all still here we can still have a conversation around it in corridors we've got some boxing gloves thanks a

136. 1:01:07

     lot please welcome back near foundations David Morrison all right okay we' wrapped it up guys it's done it's finished the Leer 2 stage is officially closed paused we're going to take a quick Break um feel free to scan the QR code if you want to get your last minute en con you can zoom in on your cameras but I would encourage you to run downstairs as fast as you can because there's a very special announcement with ilap poos sukin taking place right now on the ler one stage thank you very much

137. 1:01:42

     and we'll see you next year God bless