Open Problems in DAO Science Workshop | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] let's actually get this started all right hi folks I'm Josh I'm a mathematician at Oxford and Stanford and a the executive director of medigov one of the organizations you see up there and this is going to be a workshop on open problems in Dao science how does that mean uh oh okay it works all right so this is actually a series of workshops that have been hosted at uh events over the past year beginning with Amsterdam uh following up with the researching web3 workshop and most recently at the Stanford dial Workshop part of the science of blockchains conference uh obviously at Stanford and this is kind of like an exploration or a long-term project to build up this field this new field of research of Dow science and maybe a good framing for this to understand where we're coming from and how this is down science or Dow research might be distinguished from you know typical things going on in the industry is that the framing for this for the questions that we want to ask are not you know three months or six months or even a year down the line it's really asking a question what will Dallas look like 10 years from now will they still exist how could they possibly disrupt the existing infrastructure for let's say corporate governance or other modes of governments like non-profit governance and there's a bet that we've released that maybe you could help sharpen this and the bet is Imagine by 2032 imagine if daos or other digitally constituted organizations controlled and managed over 50 percent of the assets of the U.S economy or just the global economy just imagine if 50 of the entire company was managed by Dallas what would that look like could you imagine today's Dows doing anything like that uh personally I can't but you know that's exactly what we're trying to change through research now uh I want to share today we're going to do a little exercise uh and it's going to spend most of today uh speaking amongst ourselves in these small groups uh so just you don't have to be comfortable hanging out with each other for the next 30 minutes hope you're okay with that uh the idea here is we're going to do a little funding exercise so over the past several workshops of open problems and downscience we've you know come up with lists of open problems uh lists of problem Source not only from practitioners but also from researchers in academics now what we want to do we've also sourced a more concrete research proposals that are derived and synthesized from setting some of these open problems and now we'd like to present a selection of these proposals to you and over the next 30 minutes we're going to talk about well what you want would you actually fund them you know as practitioners or sometimes as giving newbies to this space like do these things like make sense to you do they reflect or answer or respond to any of the problems that you care about and you'll have a chance to sort of allocate rank some of these proposals allocate them and to give us a sense of what are the priorities of the ecosystem you know what kind of research should we be doing and this is really just an access of course there are like infinite uh proposals that you can consider but we thought this would be a really nice way to kind of interface with some proposals have been developed by academics and leaders Within These ecosystems and then try to understand you know trying to engage how would you might be do this better or if you're interested in engaging with some of this research I can also connect you to the um to some of the academics and the researchers who wrote These proposals okay uh so with that said I'm gonna put down a QR code and everybody can uh go to that you can also if you don't have a phone just enter that short link down there this bit dot Lee slash Devcon Dash Dao and that should take you to a spreadsheet uh and a series of worksheets now uh I was completely underestimated the amount of people that will be in this room right now um I honestly thought uh there would be like at most five tables of around like 30 people I think we actually have capacity here around 120. okay which is going to be great because we're gonna get lots of data and has lots of great conversations uh but I'm gonna count down so just note your table because you're going to be each table is going to be assigned to a worksheet and that's first off uh do people have people found the spreadsheet you can see what's in there okay great um so I'm going to count down the tables from here so it's going to be table one table two three four in the back five six seven you're seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen I'm glad I can count because uh that is exactly the number of uh sheets in that spreadsheet and I want you to go through that spreadsheet and you'll find links to these proposals and descriptions and you'll you'll be able to go through the entire thing so what I would like you to do uh well I think this thing doesn't work oh no never mind okay so for the first five minutes and I'm gonna break shortly and I'll just walk around and sort of answer questions but in the first uh five minutes I really encourage you to just take a short time to introduce yourselves to the table see what kind of backgrounds are you like is it mostly developers technical people non-technical social scientists or some I know there are definitely some researchers interest person here uh briefly introduce yourselves and then just chat you know go through these proposals try to understand them talk about like what's what's missing what's good what's bad come up with a ranking and then you can allocate uh 10 million dollars Associated there uh across these proposals at the end uh the last 10 minutes or so we're going to synthesize some of those uh conclusions and we'll talk about and we'll have kind of an open question to answer a session where we can talk about what are the priorities for Dow science and how can we learn uh what kind of new things do we need to learn all right with that I'll break and we'll start these breakouts one minute one minute put in your rankings and your allocations oh my God you're really giving that much money to that put in your number see the numbers change all right the people who have uh already put in their things oh come on people there's no need to sabotage Dallas for non-profits it's building public goods uh all right uh I know yes there's a problem too many people are editing at the same time so it's actually not allowing you to edit uh maybe this is uh telling you you should have gotten your rankings early in earlier on okay uh so why don't we see what we have right now and uh okay could you actually uh what do we have okay granular Primacy primitive seems like can you scroll up and down just scroll up down let's just see like what the ratings are actually I'm gonna okay let's see we have what's what's highest right now uh one is good one is good 12 is bad uh okay okay you know what this is uh if you could like uh slice it like if you go to rankings in that little Dash bar if you could order it the ranking by that 'd be helpful oh my God granular privacy Primitives all right okay so that's that's interesting feedback people really like privacy uh or maybe they just like something like a really solid computer science thing allocation 900 almost a million dollars okay I think Tampa Bay would be very happy with that so he could he has a lot of money he'll be fine um let's see what's what's next we have a lot of people in the middle of the pack but it seems when the Dows win is fairly high up there you guys all want Dows to win or at least avoid the places where they're losing right that seems like a good plan uh but it's interesting that they are only getting half of as much as granular privacy Primitives so people seem to be putting a a premium on these maybe like CS research I'm just inferring here uh challenges of digital public infrastructure decently high ranking but not much allocation I don't know why all right uh in this expense that's left I'll let people explore this uh on their own it's kind of like an interesting data set if you I would really encourage you to uh if you're already on these groups that kind of just refine the data a bit because I'll tell you why uh so this data is going to be uh refined and clean up a little bit and then we're so right now this is uh 10 million dollars in fake money or fake fake money right uh so we will be giving some of this data to uh a bunch of different vendors ethereum Foundation uniswap the World Bank National Science Foundation and trying to actually uh building together that 10 million dollar Grant to fund the future of Dow science and this will be directly from the community saying these are our priorities this is what we care about at least you know with this this sampling of research proposals that are currently out there and hopefully this will help guide uh if not the next 10 years at the very least the next two to three years of funding decisions so I really really encourage you to go back uh and you know at least fix that rough mistake come on who did that who did that I'm gonna find you I will find you I like non-profits uh I'll also just get a little bit background of This research project uh so this is um as I mentioned this is part of a longer uh project to build up the infrastructure for Dao research and for Dow science so for those of you who aren't researchers even for those of you who are you know there's a different set of incentives in institutions that you need in order to build an effective research ecosystem right to be able to produce uh results that have implications not just you know three months or six months but ten years down the line and what we're trying to do is working together uh I won't pull up the sort of the data set again but the um with the slides rather but actually could you go back to the slides and go to the uh the the slides Devcon 22 that that's have tab at the top um anyways go to dowscience.org you'll see all this sort of previewed there and it has an explainer for what we're trying to do basically a collection of some of the main research organizations in the Dow space including metagov the dial research Collective and a smart contract Research Forum basically a bunch of nonprofits are teaming up in order to organize uh this field of Dow science and trying to figure out how we can sort of synthesize and bring together practitioners many of which I'll represent in this room with scientists and how do we onboard practitioners more into science and of course attract more scientists more academics people from really a large variety of different backgrounds into this space to make it stronger to make it more vibrant and to ultimately solve some of the problems that we care about uh so yeah all that will explain at dowscience.org I can't direct them to point it edit but just go to dowscience.

org you'll see what's next and I think with that we have around three minutes left are there any questions what was going to be the conclusion of that whole then I didn't want to get that money yeah so the question uh uh was about Dolly and the fact that the dolly proposal and the fact that it didn't really make sense or it didn't communicate a sense of like this is the ultimate end right this is the broader impact uh and the reason we put that in here as part of the sample is because uh it turns out there's well it turns out funding goes everywhere but also uh there's actually a lot of very playful proposals coming out of places like art schools or collaborations between art schools and engineering schools that are much more exploratory that don't have a sense of like oh this is the ultimate benefit to Dallas right and this is actually one of the uh the reasons I think it's important to think about Dow research and DOW science apart from standard like VC investment tracks is that you can fund uh these kinds of more speculative proposals that don't have any specific impact in mind they're just play right it's a little book like art like dolly any other questions in the back like how can we use these proposals like a lot of things yeah yeah um so these proposals uh will eventually all be synthesized uh into a big survey paper called open problems and DOW science and it'll be much easier to consume and shorter and have also citations and you can see It'll be like a kind of like a nice uh concise way to sort of share that with your Dao where the pactation is near down um the other side of this is that obviously like a and how do I say it and there's different ways uh being built by different organizations including as I mentioned Medica of DRC and scurf uh to figure out ways to how do I say it shorten the pipeline from production of research to application of that research um in science we call this like translational research right and there's effort to do that it just takes time and it takes building institutions this is why it's important to build a research ecosystem because you can't just researchers like doing random where academics you know spounding Theory you need to have this whole other piece of infrastructure that like pays attention to this stuff and then figures out this is the part that's useful these are the experiments we're actually gonna you know put money into running yeah yeah I think one question I had was more like on like like 10 minutes a good example because probably most of those like don't need much money at all but like below a certain threshold they also couldn't do anything so I wonder if there could be like something like a with more skin in the game like a git coin run on like purely dial signs where you for example like as an active down member get higher matching so actually the people that I actually have an idea of the house like uh have like high metric but I think yeah like signaling also like what's the minimum money needed and the maximum so you're actually almost more like I'm not sure if you know the S process of funding um that uh so I think there's like ways to improve the allocation over there yes yes I'm going to answer that very shortly and out of respect for the next speakers we're going to end this but the um yeah very shortly the first time we actually ran this exercise was at Stanford with a panel including uh guy from accz Aya from the ethereum foundation and Scott from getcoin um and very much into this idea of yeah doing something some sort of quadratic funding infrastructure and we actually been talking with Bitcoin because they uh recently are trying to make their funding package a little bit more like a protocol yeah doing like a test run of that or maybe just doing a like a like a funding around that specific debit towards science very much exploring that all right amazing thank you all for coming and sharing your thoughts appreciate it