# The Wellbeing Protocol - Scaling Localism by Mark Pascall | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 09:32
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-doOQJRqTzSs
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doOQJRqTzSs

## Description

Imagine a world where:
 - hyper-local marginalised communities could create impact DAOs as easily as creating FB groups
 - we could create a UI that abstracted the complexity of quadratic / conviction / delegated voting to create a continuous resource allocation alternative to governance
 - funders could stream money into millions of these treasuries

Find out how this New Zealand government funded project, now running trials in three countries, is creating a network of  grassroots changemakers.

Speaker(s): Mark Pascall
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: DAO, Governance, Quadratic Voting, Collective Intelligence, Conviction, Ethereum for Good, Public good, Climate, ReFi, Regenerative Applications, User Experience, zealand

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## Transcript

[Music] hello hello can you hear me so my name is Mark pescal so for the last few years we've been thinking about a problem that was really well described in this book book called the third pillar uh raguram was the ex head of the Indian Reserve Bank ex-chief Economist at the IMF and the way he describes the problem is that Society is sported by three pillars we've got the the free market capitalism company pillar then we've got the state government pillar and we've got community pillar and what's happened is we've had a few revolutions we've had the agricultural industrial technological Revolution and they have fundamentally shifted the power they've moved the power towards the big corporates the company pillar the government pillar and the community community pillar has suffered and he argues that this this shift in power has fundamentally caused some of the most systemic problems we've got uh in society today so from the environmental breakdown to loneliness to inequality so what can we do to to to correct this problem because it's really hard to take away the power from the people who've got it on the two very powerful pillars so what we can do is Empower community and I guess we've been reflecting for a little while and asking ourselves the question could decentralization help to bring back Community is there a way to do this we went down a whole lot of rabbit holes over the last few years exploring uh not only web 3 but whole whole lot of other other tangential things and we kind of emerged uh in this point where we started to imagine imagine if we could uh if a small hyperlocal informal group in a marginalized Community could spin up a micro Collective micro Foundation a micro Dow as easily as a Facebook group and imagine if the if that user experience the uh and the support network around that made it super easy for that group to make decisions about money and imagine if we could scale that 100 times a thousand times a million times and imagine if we could also make it super easy for funders to stream money into those micro treasuries and and by funders we mean any body with a kid with $10 through to multi-million dollar Dow could we catalyze this network of decentralized Grassroots change makers with this mechanism so we got a really exciting opportunity last year to uh to take a first step towards that Vision we got funding from the New Zealand government to uh work with an indigenous Community to actually start to reimagine the community Grant system this community was a Mari Men's Health Group uh this is a picture of some of the lads here that's me and my co-founder and some of the some of the ladies who represented the funders uh and really our brief was to reimagine the grant funding system to to create one that supported and empowered the group the men to solve their own problems long story short we uh got more funding from three other government agencies we built some software we ran a trial went really well last year and we're now running trials across New Zealand Australia and the UK K and we picked up some pretty cool supporters along the way so a was uh she personally funded one of our trials in New Zealand and has been a great support for the project so what did we actually built uh we uh we were really inspired by an article by Jeff EMT who is maybe even here he presented yesterday so he's been a real OG in this space and this article he wrote a few years ago gave us a lot to think about but what we decided to do was to really try and take some of these quite complex uh governance mechanisms and to focus on the user experience how do we turn this into something that real people can use so what do we actually build uh I'd love to spend half an hour showing you the app it's an app you can download from the App Stores uh and but what we we and I haven't got time to show it so here is some of the key things so we but we build in fund streaming conviction voting quadratic voting dyamic thresholds workflow delegated V voting all sorts of cool stuff so uh yeah so it's out and and we're running a bunch of Trials across the world using it so what next so I think the really exciting thing is that once you've solved a trust and engagement problem you have a foundation to build some really some other really exciting stuff on top of that so uh micro endowments volunteer Co coordination tools savings pools all that sort of stuff we get 100% vot to turn out we get 100% uh engagement uh come join us uh we're looking for funders we're looking for partners to roll out more trials across across the world uh and yeah if you want to have a play afterwards uh just in the top right hand corner download the app search for hum hum Community request to join the Ross Reserve community and you can do some quadratic voting thank you very much thank you so are there any questions questions yeah over there thank you I any deepin projects has been experimented on uh no yeah hi hi um it was an highlighting s so the thing what I would like to understand is um you know when you have certain of these ideologies um for example like effective altruism which could uh you know which is termed as beneficial to all but over course of time it get diluted and we see uh you know bad things happening in the ecosystems how do we make sure that you know the essence of what uh we are trying to achieve using protocol is not eventually getting diluted and how do we prevent the Bad actors getting into the thing that's a difficult one uh I think I mean what we've done is we've experimented with uh building something where we can yeah create a new mechanism for to stream money the big picture is we want to create our own Dow and embed embed the values of the Dow into doing good and ultimately decentralize our governance to the communities that we're supporting so yeah I think uh it being taken over by Bad actors that's something that we are very conscious of and uh we'll yeah do everything we can to make sure that doesn't happen but I think we're we're quite centralized at the moment we're going to obviously becoming a dow is a journey uh we're early on that Journey so yep so the question I had was that is there a roll out plan for involving some of the developing nations as well uh yeah I mean we're we're sort of say on a journey we've been talking to people in Uganda uh Africa and yeah it's really about building out that Network I guess one key point I would like to make is for the the marginalized communities technology is just one small part of the solution uh we need Partners on the ground Partners to work with those communities and there's there's there organizations already out there there are community development organizations Charities so we partner with a bunch of those in the UK and Australia already we need to connect with th more of those in developing nations so they can work with the communities and effectively we we support those organizations to run trials and grow it out from there yeah question over that so what did your myori users decide to do with your fund uh they did a whole bunch of things uh again the interesting thing was so the the the whole thing is held together with con Constitution that's a document that the community make that really defines the purpose of the fund and what they're going to do with it that's pre-agreed and the funer agrees that Constitution and essentially agrees to keep streaming money in if the community had holds to that Constitution the the first trial the Mali Men's Health Group T order they uh they the funer agreed to a more holistic view of health so in Mii we have a thing called taraa which is more holistic view of health and the funer agreed to that so the guys they organized trips to the beach they bought sports equipment they paid for uh for nutritionist to come in they did a whole whole bunch of things but it was very much their their decision and yeah and and they come up with all all sorts of ideas so yeah okay uh sorry that was our last question thank you very much for your presentation uh please give a nice round of applause to mark [Applause] um