Digi-sign Governance Agreement Made Easy

Digi sign governance agreement

so just to add to that i don't dispute for a second that the rate of innovation is easier that we've flattened barriers to entry we might have increased barriers to exit different problem but nevertheless i think there's a much much broader base of innovation around the world and many more opportunities and what we're learning the hard way and we're learning it if you just rewind the tape and you look at the massive series of enormous failures post-dot frank failures and finance and governance and leadership failures the fact that aircraft engine or aircraft ceos are selling safety critical instruments as an aftermarket thing just illustrates the problems right the volkswagen cheap device debacle is a governance failure of epic proportions so governance to me i agree with the statement that governance is the is the sort of the next frontier um and then you also have to when you think about what it is to govern a modern institution or any institution we also have to look at the structural issues right the government today and governance today is is a traditional pyramid the narrowest body makes the most consequential decisions so the u.n security council are the ones that are going to vote on whether to go to war or send in peacekeepers the general assembly is largely there for for ceremonial purposes largely right and if you start to flip the script on its head and and have a governance model where the base of the pyramid has the the decision making power for the most consequential decisions you could then start building new institutional models and part of what excited me the most about libra is that at least what we're putting in place in the last six months is a model in which the hundred votes of the council are the ones that enshrined the most important decisions in the project and to really see that being exercised behind closed doors and sort of on the stage as part of building trust in this project because people didn't like the initial initial messenger is our one big advantage and if we get that right i think we can do a lot of positive things with this project so i want to hear from brian and also get to this in much greater detail over the course of the conversation but what libra has done in my mind the most intriguing innovation associated with the project has nothing to do with the technology this is the first time that a major tech provider has created a population scale platform and then immediately turned over governance to a multi-stakeholder entity is that correct and if it is correct then what does this say about the future of tech development is this an admission on the part of the existing incumbents that they are no longer the right entities to take ownership of these governance challenges yeah and i think the best emblem of that and this is this i you know i quote you on this a lot to micah is if you look at the edelman trust barometer institutional trust of both public and private institutions is at its lowest point ever and the theme humanity no longer trusts in those institutions whether it's democracy whether it's private sector is that we all now know and we have an enormous body of proof that bad things happen behind those closed doors right and so the best way to flip that on its head is to say open transparent governance and that the code base should not be the source of competitive advantage for any one enterprise and so you know that's why i think it's pretty easy even in the short run of this effort to say that this is digital commons you know that if the code base is open source we already have developers all over the world working on the test net building out this platform and whereas the first round of technology innovation it was it was value capture it went largely to a couple of places on the planet and created tech titans and an embarrassment of riches but not a lot of that was disseminated in in a broad way and we have a chance we have to flip the script on that thanks greg i'm going to do my best with uh voice battling cold apologies for that um definitely agree that technology has greater leverage power today than ever it's easier and faster to move fast and break more things right um uh and that has caused a whole bunch of reckoning out there in the marketplace and amongst innovators certainly thinking hard you see this in artificial intelligence about the ethics of the application of their technologies but there is an old trade as well going especially in digital technologies around you know for building a networked environment let's talk about how that should look and how that should work back to the earliest days of the internet there was you know you know it was researchers initially working together on what are the common standards that we should adopt using very ad hoc standards bodies like the internet engineering task force uh they happen to use free software to show here's how to connect our devices and and uh into a network and send email to each other because that made it easy to get adoption out there right and that continued through the rise of the web that continued through the rise of a lot of the infrastructure we have today this resonance between open source sorry open standards open source software that implemented those standards and then you started to need some governance just a little bit of what i had started what i would call minimum viable governance through organizations like icam right that said okay here's the root level of the domain name system let's just come to the basic agreement about how to farm out kind of the top level uh and try to set us you know policies for registering domain names and then the whole ecosystem can flourish around that right um and as we've seen with blockchain technology and others finding the uh the right balancing act in all three of these domains what are the standards for how blockchains should talk to each other uh let's build open source software to do that that's what we do at hyperledger and really broadly at the linux foundation that's what we do in all these other domains cloud computing software defined networking etc and then really though the question is now that we we have the technology how do we wire them up to do trade finance networks to do supply chain networks to do digital identity networks in a way that kind of avoids centralization on the part of either a government or a private actor how do we avoid the world looking like the kind of relationships that uber has with its drivers or airbnb has with its guests and hosts right those are two great companies but they are centralized platforms um and i think most of the world wants to find cooperative ways to build these these kind of networks and that's really the big challenge as we see blockchain scaling to these kinds of national and international types of applications so i want to excavate that last point a little bit more governance at its core is a technology for managing society in the same way that finance is a technology for managing risk so it is a mechanism for working through difficult challenges reconciling a lot of different needs and hopefully when done right delivering citizens what they need to realize their aspirations and live good lives when it comes to tech governance in particular we have seen a number of models emerge that you touch on that seem to be by broad estimation falling short you know we have the the centralized structures your ubers or your airbnbs or your googles we won't pick off facebook since that's happened uh elsewhere in the course of our conversations but we could where a lot of data is aggregated by central actors that data is provided by a lot of individuals for their own reasons and the net result is something that looks a lot like a feudal system you know and and again chava palace made this point if we're all doing the work and all the benefits are being derived by a handful of people sitting in silicon valley or seattle then something's wrong here you know this this is not a viable path forward what are the alternatives because you know the other alternative that seems to exist is the authoritarian model that is emerging in china which also is pretty unsettling for a variety of reasons what what models should we be looking at what's out there that could provide us a third way you know if you pick up an old manual for a database product you'll probably see the terminology master slave right yeah which seems crazy today and hopefully no one creates a database book it publishes a book out there that uses that terminology today but it was the easiest computer architecture in the world to say all the interesting stuff is at the center and all my clients are in the core that's the mainframe model right that we've just kind of you know danced on the edge of for the last 50 years decentralized systems are hard they have an economic disadvantage they have an operational disadvantage they're slower and you know anybody who talks about any blockchain use case it'll always be faster to do with a centralized server somewhere um so it's natural that as silicon valley grew as the technologies grew i uh the easiest answer to any problem was put a big honking server in the middle and we'll just scale it right what you see in the blockchain space and again you know it's perhaps trying to cite the satoshi nakamoto uh i might cite you know john uh uh john gilmore i i got one of the early founders electronic frontier foundation and others who really said you know the decentralization of the internet in the 90s when it came out of the early web before everyone was using gmail and google right those were not just you know kind of accidents of history or academic research projects there was an intentional design there and i think satoshi picked up on that and the people who've kind of carried the torch after that have picked up and it doesn't have to be you know a hundred million nodes that they're all equal it can be decentralization in a given industry between the top 10 players in that industry it can be between participants in a supply chain it's a balance of interest and we have governance models like that today already outside of the technology domain there's industry associations in every industry that strike try to strike that balance right um so i i think it's about trying to model those human governance and institutions and policies into just enough code to try to automate that but none of the blockchain systems that that we see out there or governance models that work without having humans somewhere in that core uh having conversations about the right way to build this the right way to evolve it it's that balance of human governance and automated governance that i think will carry the day and i was just going to add a point to that i think the the reflection that the internet undoubtedly sort of removed friction from information sharing and communication but it also enabled people to start doing things that would otherwise require centralized empires right so freelancing journalists and people armed with their iphones and taglier square you know capturing things that would have otherwise been blacked out because traditional industry and traditional models had single points of failure the issue there in from the rent seeking point of view that you just raised is that not with saying the fact that we've liberated many industries from traditional shackles we haven't liberated the way economic gain can flow from traditional shipments and and that's the problem i think that for blockchain and its original vision and internet for payments and the ability to to enable sort of micro payments and fractionalization um that's where we think there's a really really compelling next wave where people get to participate in the fruits of that labor have a couple more gateways between their personal information and and you know these these enterprises so that there's a trade off there so that the two things can move in lockstep and it's not just one-sided that's the that's the tension we're we're we're sort of side hustling to make ends meet in most western world countries we've run out of the runway in terms of trusted institutions and we need to really start challenging the way value is captured stored and to whom it goes in the global economy and that that's as much a governance issue as it is about building technologies and other platforms that can scale just a quick comment on um the essential server and one of the things we hear a lot from governments these days is that the old way of doing things was much more of the central server so you would have a centralized government that would go in talk to experts academics maybe talk to citizens here and there but it wasn't part of natural course of doing things unless you had an angry neighbor you know call up and i've been on those desks before and then you would cascade out policy and you would try to make that cascadia policy is as good as you could and then you would review it if it went wrong now because of this in in our lives as consumers we have much more distributed possibility and that expectation is being built into the governance systems so one of the number one things we hear from our platform is how do you actually really do citizen engagement in a way that isn't token it doesn't want to just be i'm going to throw you a survey how are we really going to do it and as it relates to that and i like to break down this trust thing because it's an easy trope to throw out around people don't trust government or any big institutions they don't trust centralized governments the big meta certain mega servers but if you get closer trust in the brain is a matter of proximity if you get closer to the governments and the citizens which by the way government is citizens they're not robots yet they're actually people who are citizens we we had our former commissioner here you're a real person with children and you care and a nickname and with a nickname who's using that for good um it's going to get better and so if i kind of have a take away for all of you for me please don't keep repeating this the trust is broken it's a proximity issue and if we bring government closer to solve these problems we're going to go a long way in helping all of these governance issues work better so one quick follow-up question on this because i think it's a fascinating opportunity and challenge multi-stakeholder models that try to bring more people into these processes are really complicated they're really cumbersome you know all of us have spent a lot of time working in and around multi-stakeholder systems but they also seem to be the only viable solution out there that does close that gap and get the right mix of expertise and legitimacy around the table to solve some of these problems i think of them almost as the way that winston churchill described democracy it is the worst solution except for all of the other solutions should we just embrace that reality and say this is going to be complicated this is going to be messy but we're going to go all in on this and governments are going to have to seat a little bit of power in order to make that happen and citizens are going to have to step up and civil society and the private sector are going to have to step up and participate in ways that we have not been accustomed uh accustomed to participating in the past well i if anyone knows tristan harris with humane tech he talks a lot about in his podcast if you're not undivided attention it's fantastic and one of the things that's going on with our mind because of social media is we're looking for quick quick wins and that means we don't we're not sitting into the hard things where we get satisfaction and my my thing around this is it's supposed to be hard why can't we embrace that it's hard let's disagree with one another let's have a fight here and there it's sort of like if it's not easy and fast it's not good whoever taught you that in life so i think we need to reframe it's it's a much more psychological and um philosophical point that you've got to get in and sort of get your seat in and be open and learn from one another you cannot go in and just stake your claim this is what it's going to be you actually have to go in with an open mind and very few people do that in governance discussions it's they fight between territories there's no way we will do that so i really that mind shift is is quite important and folks in government are trying to get it because they know they're a big player in that so dante you've just been through this process you you've done this in the real world at a very high level on an incredibly ambitious process project who do you need at the table to be successful who do you not need at the table to be successful what were some of the considerations going through your mind as you established the the libra council and you know now you're you're the vice chair of that council what's going to help you be successful in your work going forward yeah i mean i think one keeping your words to heart that that this is not the type of effort that for which instant gratification is a good plan right and if we had any ideals about instant gratification the world had a very different opinion uh the morning after um but it's partly about demonstrating common sort of cause that when it's dark and fuzzy and there's a lot of pressure both internally and externally to get all these stakeholder interests aligned the mission becomes bigger than the institutional grind right um so i think that's at least kept me sane and kept me in front of cameras and keeps me here um the the other issue then is to really demonstrate that there's an honest commitment notwithstanding the fact that this is a seven month old startup effort to getting this governance model right from the beginning and so the the operational trade-off is speed move fast and break things might have worked really really well in a bygone era but to challenge aspects of the financial system to ensure that you're compliant you need to have deference for what the regulator has done and why it exists and the rules-based system did not just emerge from a vacuum it emerged from the you know the the crater of the of the great recession and and all of the issues that we've had ever since and so i have absolutely enormous respect for for public servants and for kind of getting public interest right um and for you know so it's been difficult to be very transparent it's enormously difficult um but every one of those members and eventually the next wave that come in are kind of sticking to mission alignment as the thing that will help us get through just the startup phase and the next couple of waves of work that we have to get right but the tech i think is comparatively easy i've always said this tech is the comparatively easy part and i say that with absolute deference to my my technologists in the room it's the social coordination and the organizational coordination and the public interest alignment that makes projects of any scale complicated so brian to that point one of the concepts that has started to percolate in recent years as a mechanism for addressing some of the capture issues that go along with existing societal platforms and the deficiencies that we all see and that chairman john carlos spoke about very effectively around digital infrastructure is this idea of digital public goods and you see this concept taking root a little bit in india you see it in a handful of other jurisdictions estonia singapore there is a realization that we need to build some infrastructure and in the same way in the 20th century we built interstate highways and airports and those provided the mechanisms for powering commerce and engagement and interaction in the 20th century we may need a new generation of digital infrastructure in the 21st century to fill an analogous role does that line up with what you're seeing in the work that you're doing at hyperledger and what do you see as some of the key elements of that digital infrastructure to the extent that it does very much so i mean uh the digital identity is perhaps the most obvious kind of first place here and moving away from again a master slave centralized concept of your identity being your facebook login or etc and instead towards something that says your identity is a collection of documents about things you can prove about yourself and to present those to other people a passport a driver's license a birth certificate your credentials a different academic organizations information about yourself as well that has been certified by parties but basically it should be in your hands to decide when to share that to people and no one should have the ability to disappear that information you know because of a database error on the side of a server somewhere this concept self-sovereign identity there's a a multi-year effort that's gone on now and is is accenture is a big part of it ibm is a big part of it uh lots of companies are behind it around launching uh this kind of decentralized uh self-sovereign identity network uh standards out there that are really being baked into technologies it's uh you'll hear more about it i think tomorrow and some of accenture's talks here um this is a very it's kind of hard to wrap your head around it first and then it becomes really easy and obvious and governments are starting to go this makes sense to us too canada the canadian government has really launched into this uh uh amsterdam the dutch government as well and uh the government of sierra leone also has uh sponsored efforts here um but so it's uh that that's one piece of it for sure being able to also take uh evidence that's created on other blockchain networks and wire that into uh the court systems and be able to present that as evidence with the same standing as say a physically signed document is something that i think is another step that we'll need in order to uh digitize a lot of the kind of bureaucratic processes we have out there in china the internet court system now it has a blockchain base that truly distributed between lots of organizations way of verifying the integrity of documents that have been submitted as evidence in court and they've wired up a lot of other types of finance networks and supply chain networks in there to allow for much more rapid adjudication and and regulatory oversight of many of these processes this is the kind of thing we need if we're going to digital digitalize these things without it becoming an opportunity for fraud malfeasance and corruption the flip side of what you just described occurring in some jurisdictions is that we have seen a handful of governments and i am going to pick on the chinese here bring together big data technology and surveillance and infuse those tools with government in a way that really would make georgia are well blush and and it is astounding and at one level really impressive to see what they've been able to do with those tools western leaders are slowly starting to wake up to that reality what they haven't really done is put forward an alternative well let me so i think every every successful innovator has what i call the oppenheimer moment right oppenheimer he saw the test at white sands and the nuclear bomb and he said i have become kali destroyer of worlds right um i you know i i some mornings wake up worried that we'll discover hyperledger fabric is being used to track the uakers in western china other mornings i wake up and worry that we'll hear that dhs is using it to track separated families at the border right so there are plenty of opportunities here in open source offers kind of you don't get the opportunity to limit what users do with the technology what you hope to do is celebrate the beneficent uses make it harder to do things that might be awkward but you need that regulatory backstop you need a sense of ethics in the deployment of these technologies and that's what the human governance layer around the deployment of these networks has to be about you've given me a perfect opportunity to take the moderator's prerogative and provide a 30-second commercial break so we worked together with the rockefeller foundation and an array of other governments and partners around the world to develop open source platforms to power the public sector and our goal to the maximum extent possible mindful of the fact that you can never perfectly determine the end uses for a lot of these technologies is to hardwire in efficiency accountability security integrity to the maximum extent possible so that it becomes really really challenging for governments to abuse these tools and really really easy for them to provide high quality services and efficiency to their citizens we build 80 solutions so our goal is to have a really good core that can then be optimized and customized by different jurisdictions as they do their work but you know one of the things that we have recognized and i want to get your help thinking this through lisa is that the reason democracies were so successful in the 20th century and yuval hariri has spoken about this at some length is that decentralized systems given the tools that were available at that time were inherently more efficient and effective when it came to making decisions and processing information than centralized systems there is no guarantee going forward in an age of ai that that's going to be the case as you sit down with governments and think through the big challenges they are looking at right now is there a willingness on the part of countries that have historically maintained respect for human rights as a core element of what they were and what they did to build a new model to create new systems that will incorporate uh these technologies but do so in a way uh that respects rights and provides accountability to citizens it's a big question the the first principle response to it is governments that are clear about the values that are driving their problem solving do it very well when they have a vision and you talked about this dante the last round that when they're clear like what's most important is when you go to sweden safety and community is very important to them their regulators have a much easier time figuring out how to make laws and breaks or not based on that the countries that have figured out the values that are really driving them for this new age i mean we have this i'm american but i live in germany right the germans this whole idea of cryptocurrency like and and and electronic payments come to berlin like you can't go anywhere without this they are holding as a value they're deep privacy and americans are giving their stuff away to alexa left and right that is for an american regulator that's such a hard okay so you want privacy and human rights but you're giving alexa everything for free and you know that you are i think this creates regulatory like schizophrenia and headache i don't think we know what we want and if we don't know that how do you solve problems against that we have to make that collective decision the chinese know what they want stability long-term thinking the trade-off is just normal take everything about me whether whether you choose to or not but we're going to grow together together we don't have that in many western democracies so we're crazy right now help us not to know what i wish i could i mean you know so most of my career is risk management resilience and so you know and the lesson on governance drawn from when bad things start to happen a cyber risk issue a community is underwater is that you know where you had bad governance ex post facto when it fails and that's the challenge i think the american ideals our motto is a pluribus unum out of many one are meant for this new decentralized era of technology and blockchain and all these fine things the challenge is that up until now the experimentation has only been happening in the private sector and the knowledge gap frankly on the public sector is very very very real right um if you sat through the nine hours of public testimony that i did and you saw the questions and i only made it four hours thank you by the way yes tamika was my wingman and one of them um then you would see that we need to bridge that gap so that again the spectrum of possibility isn't all that all tech leads to armageddon but that there's an equilibrium point in which we could strike and and make the process of institutional relationships more participatory that's the that's the missing link i want to ask you brian for some additional help on this theme because you have spent time in the public sector you've been in the white house you've also spent a lot of time creating successful and there aren't that many examples out there you've been involved in a wildly disproportionate number of them uh instances of multi-stakeholder governance in the technology space what should governments learn from that experience because there is as dante says he's absolutely right there's a big gap right now around the knowledge base that exists in the minds of people like you and and the knowledge of most of the folks who are trying to you know man the steam room and make uh government work the way it's supposed to work so one thing that has made open source software development governance always work is uh something called the right to fork which was you know if the four of us here are working on a software project i have a great idea but i can't convince the rest of them that it's a good idea i can start with the same code go off in my direction build something rally my own group around it and either bring it back to them once it's obvious that it's a better idea uh or fail on its own and i come back you know crawling on my hands and knees uh but we can we can go our separate ways and actually what's kind of brilliant about the public permissioned unpermissioned blockchain networks out there is they have this same right to fork uh bitcoin has forked ethereum has forked often into ongoing viable branches and that has been a release valve for attention at the governance layer of those organizations you have a better idea you you know major groups can agree let's go try it out that's not something you get to do when you're talking about a central bank digital currency um admittedly i was going to say we tried that once in the 1860s in the u.s and it did not turn out well so i'm hoping um but you know de tocqueville did say that states are the laboratory of democracy right and i think the states and even municipalities are a place to experiment with not only new technologies but governance around those technologies uh and then to bubble those up and obviously uh countries of all sizes right um the bank of cambodia has a functioning central bank payments platform uh on blockchain technology today that i know has been highlighted here at gbbc last year and and you know we're learning things from that right so i think the key thing is if these experiments can be done in public if they can be done done with the possibility of when parties disagree being able to go their own ways and and circle back um and i think it might even mean building blockchain networks even the permission to blockchain networks in such a way that the constituencies can experiment and they can cleave if they need to um as a release valve for for pressure on leadership uh how that happens i'm still unsure about but uh but there's a lot to learn from from the history both open source and and and in the public blockchain space and how that lisa and dante's similar question if you're writing the book on this what's what's the blueprint what's the instruction manual look like lisa well i want to i want to answer that um i cannot my answer to all of that is the study danny kahneman um for any of you know him because i think so many of the issues we have with this is a deep uh systems one two how your brain works we're not communicating it it's a very complex thing or communicated too complexly but what i like to answer that question by just rattling off how we're thinking about um agile governance and this new model so what's like the what are the ten points just very quickly so first um to think about this differently the first chapter of the book would be do foresight very few countries actually have foresight units it's very hard to regulate if you don't know or even think about what's coming there's like 15 in the world right and you lots of private sector hire a center and everyone to say look at the future what we're going to do second is you talked about this the last don't focus on the technology focus on the outcomes be tech neutral and i think that's exciting experiment and learn there are forks happening they're called regulatory sandboxes they're happening at greater speed um and which is great it's be much more responsive so dubai has a regulatory team where they're crunching their own financial numbers alongside of the financial markets and they're comparing it back and forth so they can act more quickly and bring business on board from the very beginning there's been enemies and they haven't been able to speak the same language and that's really really breaking down connecting with peers so that's something we do at the agile governance council with about 20 governments who are working together saying we don't have to we don't need to recreate the wheel if cambodian did this how can we do it how can we change the concept there's this thing called the internet we can learn from one another um and then to your point this is what triggered it for me how do you coordinate at the sub-national level how do you use those states um as not experiments never say experiments with citizens as places to learn um you want to do everything wants to be the subject of an experiment no it's bad bad pr um for your political people and then last three global outlook we have to think about this globally we cannot this whole sovereignty thing is fascinating but we're living in a global world so you have to think that and and then last i'll just say is really you have to put citizens at the center doing that right is so hard but regulators are very much committed to doing that right we're going to open up for questions in just a moment but dante i need you to bring us home you guys are trying to solve some of the toughest challenges on the planet you are building a system that's gonna it works correctly gonna be a huge uh quantum leap forward and remittances as you say the the most vital pipeline for getting capital to a lot of global south and go a long way to addressing payment considerations that all of us struggle with every day but this is not easy work as you previously articulated what are the the guidelines that you would suggest for people who want to solve problems on that scale in their countries and globally no small question um the i think step one is you know a deep deep deep commitment to getting it right and and this i think is is an enormous lesson learned particularly for our silicon valley partners in this project that you know deference to rules deference to the system deference to governance and deference to public interest are enormously important as a result i've treated the last six and a half months as a consultation period and i promise you everything we have heard is now being taken in and absorbed and being considered as a part of the design principles for this project step one step two you cannot use any of the organizations that are part of this as quote-unquote fig leafs i was particularly offended when our colleagues in the nonprofit space were called as humanitarian fig leaves to masquerade this enormous sort of greedy capitalistic venture every one of those organizations has a commitment i think to the vision that is bigger than and to some extent has also created internal risks for them and market risk and others bigger than themselves and so if you're building infrastructure that can serve so many people the realization including of some of the partners involved that this is not an effort you could do on your own that you have to go with together is the key and so as we move forward and as we sort of continue the work in 2020 you know job one is to get it right and i think the measure that we're starting to get it right is that we've achieved a regulatory standard and a licensing regime for this process that protects public interest that acknowledges that we didn't launch this effort in a void of gdpr and that there's a chance to harmonize that kind of consumer protection and sort of consumer observation around the world and not do what we often do in technology in business which is sort of arbitrage we find the place of lowest operational standards and then we make that the base of operations we've chosen the hard path is to try to arbitrage to the highest operating standard and then make that the harmony that would sort of reflect across the ecosystem those are enormously big ideals enormously complex standards to achieve and the tech mercifully is moving ahead full steam working exceedingly well it's the governance piece and the alignment of public interest that is the hardest so i'll be able to report back to you in a year on how that goes well with that as backdrop we have a few minutes to collect some input feed that into your processes and the work that uh brian and lisa are involved in we're going to take three questions at a time to try and move this as efficiently as possible and we will start with the amazing jeff saviano from ui oh tamika you're too kind thank you so much for the invitation today really i appreciate the panel and the discussion i'd be interested in your thoughts on the issue of governance and how it aligns to financing the technology seems like getting multi-stakeholders together around the table to govern when there's no money exchanging hands is hard enough then when you start to look to those stakeholders for actually financing the initiative it becomes almost impossible i'd be interested in your thoughts on how do you integrate the two how do you how do you fundraise for an important initiative and do it in a way not to disincentivize others for joining later if that makes sense marvelous question next please hi uh dr nominee from london exchange group um so i actually had a fairly broad question and just kind of thinking about things in the abstract so it strikes me that from a governance perspective you can't necessarily think about governance without necessarily considering information whether information and really speaking about information symmetry and then information trust and so i'd really love to hear your thoughts around so information symmetry in terms of kind of when you consider that you know if you broaden access to governance if you bring in more participants to make decisions how do you ensure that they equally have access to the same base level information in order to make the right decision and prevent kind of perverse incentives from driving decision making and creating bias and trust is more around preventing misinformation being spread and propagated and distributed uh through that network fantastic and one more in the back please it's played safe um thank you my name is jose el pino i'm part of the management team of opensc and we're supply chain traceability platform co-founded by wwf and bcg digital ventures and we're a profit for purpose business and as part of my role i think about how can we decentralize sort of as a long-term vision the governance of this company and um that i think it was you who said that the more complex problem is around establishing the rules and not so much the technology and then i thought well what happened with the dao in 2017 and how can we prevent that today and my question for you brian would be what are the most current technologies today to apply sort of decentralized governments governance as a technology layer that could you know avoid the issues that we had a couple of years ago so we have finance how do we finance this stuff from jeff and uh here i'm going to pause for another commercial break jeff will be on this stage tomorrow at 5 p.m announcing an incredibly exciting open source collaboration uh around tax and public revenue uh so please join us for that but it's a really really critical question uh symmetry information symmetry and information trust and then decentralized governance brian you look like you started with a bit of uh jeff's it's obviously a long story our premise is a lot of the technology development a lot of the standards development can actually be done by tapping into corporate intrinsic motivators rather than extrinsic motivators meaning you know companies want to be in a business in a certain domain there's a lot of table stakes type of development they need to do that's non-differentiating can making the case to collaborate on that even to put in a little bit of a share amongst other parties you pull the right people around the table is not a big leap that's something linux foundation that's done repeatedly in this space right when it comes to operating a network right um you can start with that but once you're at scale you do need to find some ways to compensate the people who are really you know greasing the gears and keeping things up and running and that's where network fees make a lot of sense in one way or another and either a very decentralized way to compensate for that i'm not a big fan of mining for environmental reasons but i think there's a lot of ways to compensate for that and you'll see i think uh uh interesting governance models emerge around that that aren't as exciting at a crypto layer but just exciting at a chance to see it out there and deployed um to answer uh uh the uh sorry what was your name jose jose's question um one of my mentors was tim o'reilly and one of his quotes was create more value than you capture i think there's a lot of things that businesses can do to launch a product that ends up leaving some value on the table for your customers that ends up with you creating kind of a a an enabling technology that that is not doesn't grow to become a rent seeking platform right uh uh and red hat might be an example of this you know as a participant in the linux community um sold lots of services even some products around it but fundamentally was enabling technology for their members right um i'm a bigger fan of that kind of strategy than i am necessarily of adapt right or trying to have an automated process um which you know i don't think we found a way to avoid bugs in a lot of that code um and that's an awfully risky strategy to take uh uh in uh you know if you can't prevent bugs at that at that layer but i do think there might be another kind of thread through that which is pursuing the concept of minimum viable governance finding a way to create a lightweight human organization with just enough power to be able to balance the interest set some standards set up the compensation structure and try to keep it to five people or six people or less right and then your company for example or other people's companies come in as technology suppliers solution providers trainers enablers building apps on top that's a really rich ecosystem and avoids any one party becoming uh you know a monster in the middle one quick note both on jeff's question and on jose is we've seen some fascinating examples emerge from the public sector that we think could be applied by the tech community so if you think about initiatives like gap global alliance for vaccination and immunization which initially used governance and capital from the philanthropic sector to jumpstart what is now a very robust multi-stakeholder initiative that's vaccinated three-quarters of a billion people and project prevented tens of millions of deaths there's some intriguing possibilities there you know similarly if you look at what's happened with nato and collective defense you can envision scenarios in which you would have organizations band together and commit to help each other out when they come under attack or face common challenges around security so there's some very uh intriguing models that can be transported from other places could i just make a point it's it's kind of next to your point it's a little bit different but i think i'd be remiss if i didn't bring it up as we talk about innovation and governance a lot of companies don't get the shot that they can to really make the change because of procurement challenges um oftentimes government will be the biggest buyer and the incumbents really have the advantage and there's a real procurement revolution going on around the world maybe aided by blockchain in a big way to stop the corruption but also ensuring that these small and local businesses get a chance to come on board and i think we can get behind doing those things differently creates a great market for big companies to go buy those markets anyway basically paid for by the by the citizens i say the other is it's controversial but it's interesting to look at and i haven't done enough research on this but when governments get involved in funding some of these things so there's a horizon 2020 grant but there's a lot of funding in this space we just got a grant from them non-dilutive capital alongside traditional investors really helpful the uk has a pioneer fund for things that normally wouldn't get funded because the regs are so against it but they want to create innovation so i know the conventional wisdom as government shouldn't be in the funding innovation space but when regulations hold things back i think there's opportunities that do things differently yeah so i think you know the balancing act that jose brought up around around governance and sort of this notion of dows and things that just could exist in an entire vacuum it becomes difficult to do that when you're attacking highly regulated issues you need a neck to choke and a you know an address to serve a subpoena two or a summons two right so did you say neck to choke yeah unfortunately ring and and you know so but that's part of the trade-off because you cannot have you can't have your cake and eat it too we have to have models in which there are really broad-based open-source collaborative technologies but then there is a center point where there's some degree of accountability um and that is answerable to and that is part of sort of a learning model that can drive improvements we've all learned to the hard way that when technologies fail and there's no one there consumers are left with no recourse the quadric scx example in canada is a teachable moment and and how that can work um on the question of funding i i do think when you think about what a lot of these types of investments represent to the private private and public sector for the private sector its coopetition is partly the motive and you know to have a seat at the table and help catalyze a flywheel of something that's new and becomes fascinating better to be in than out and for the public sector you know i think there are co-investment vehicles that are non-dilutive that are very interesting but then the the net result is something that sort of lifts all ships so it's a market expansion moment rather than just preserving status quo and then last i think this informational asymmetry question is one of the very very biggest challenges we've got um and so the more the open source code base flattens the the access to the opportunity and to the developer community the more the technology enables a democratization of value value capture value shared and so on the more we can get a lot of this stuff right but asymmetry is the biggest problem of information you could exploit people when there's a asymmetries of information so here too i think there's a big chance to get a lot of things right the folks you see on this stage are each working in different ways to create the next generation of digital public goods that we spoke about a little bit this is only going to happen once in our history we don't know how this story ends but it's an incredibly exciting time we have had breakthroughs in technology you know that much i think is is pretty clear to anyone who's been uh able to fog a mirror over the last 20 years what we now need what we are now seeing are breakthroughs in governance it's going to take collaboration from all of the folks on the stage all the folks in this room to make those breakthroughs happen but as they do we are going to be able to do extraordinary things we look forward to collaborating with you to realize that potential together thank you [Applause]