Graph Protocol Graph Day | 2022, 6 Jul 2022

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From YouTube: Graph Day 2022 - Web3 & Civic Abundance by Rhys Lindmark, Founder of Roote

Description

Rhys Lindmark is the Founder of Roote, a non-profit startup studio co-building the Wisdom age. In his Graph Day 2022 talk, Lindmark teaches the importance of how Edge & Node’s new Geo browser works, the values and morals Geo users can shape for society, and how it will progress the future of web3.

Learn more about Roote: https://www.roote.co/

Sign up for the Geo beta waitlist here: https://edgeandnode.com/geo

Watch more Graph Day 2022 talks, panels, and announcements here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTqyKgxaGF3SWt8ipQw-Ul9HQvmxulbUu

Keep up with The Graph on social media!

Time Stamps
0:00 Intro
0:45 web3 civic abundance & Geo Browser

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thegraph
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Website: https://thegraph.com

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Okay, what up everybody? What up? What up? Can you hear me? Okay, yeah, okay, I can stand wherever I want to stand. I'm gonna stand right here. It's good to see all of you uh great to see you in person today. I am chatting about uh web 3 and civic abundance, so just get a raise of hands. Who was here during yaniv's talk this morning: okay, most folks yeah.

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So today we're going to be chatting about geo, um the application there and some of the work that root is doing with them and then uh kind of by ourselves as well. So this is the current situation in society where we have this meme, where we all think.

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Oh man, society would be amazing if just eat gas fees were a little bit lower, but then we have the reality, which is I'm not sure which of you are at the civic center bart station, or things like that which is san francisco and many cities around the world have a lot of difficult problems, and that is a tough situation to be in, and so it leads this question of. How can we help cities thrive, and I want to talk about two different parts of this?

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One of them is our work with the graph and geo, and one of them is kind of our work with root, and before that I just want to share a little bit about root.

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We are a non-profit startup studio, so we incubate nonprofits uh co-building what we call the wisdom age and we have great uh supporters like yaniv himself um and other crypto whales, and then uh the graph uh foundation supports us and protocol labs and some others, and we have a bunch of these different uh projects that we're working on definitely check out web3 and society. But today I'm gonna chat about civic abundance and again it's this question. How can we help cities thrive?

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And the first quote that I want to give you all is from theodore roosevelt, and he says the government is us. We are the government you and I- and this is a response to what a lot of tech people do, which is they look at the badness, that's happening out there in the world, like, oh god. No, um I don't want to help. I want to just dunk on it on twitter and that's bad, because we are the government, so we should help uh with the society that we're all co-building.

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The other quote that I want to give here is what gets measured, gets managed from peter drucker, and the idea is that information is upstream of all of our problems.

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If you are managing your twitter profile, uh then you're not gonna necessarily do good governance and, as we saw this in san francisco recently, where we kind of optimized for public performance and twitter likes uh where we changed the names of the schools, while the privacy private policy that should have been happening about getting low-income kids back into school and helping them uh with their learning goals wasn't happening. So we have this kind of issue where we're measuring our twitter likes and social media instead of the things that are really important for our cities.

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So to solve that, I want to talk first about the work that we're doing with the graph and geo and, as a note here, this is an ecosystem that is being co-built by everybody.

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So software is eating the world and web3 is going to eat cities in a positive way, and so there's great people like oak and cabin and praxis and biology's um book on the network state where we're all kind of memeing with each other on twitter and then now it's going to come into the real world in a kind of a serious way, and so I want to share the work that we're doing with geo and kind of give you a little bit more on the app that they're building and some of the policy work that we did with it.

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So, as you can see here, this is the geo ipad app, and this is one of the goals of san francisco, which is public safety and public safety in san francisco. As you can see on the top line here, it's a much debated topic. uh People are like, oh, my god, everything's, so bad or oh, it's so fine or oh. Should we put more people in jail or not? There's a lot of uh debate here and it's just polarized kind of twitter debate.

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But what we can do instead is have something like a web 3 for wikipedia, and that is what the graph is building with geo, and so this is a page that we made and you can see the text up top and you can also see some of these crucial data points up here which is on the left, uh is the property crime per a hundred thousand dollars a hundred thousand people um population and san francisco is pretty bad. You know it's like 5 000 um crimes per 100k people, but for violent crime.

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San francisco is actually pretty good, so about 560 per 100 000 people, and so these are the kinds of information that people will be able to put into these new web3 wikipedias in order to help people coordinate around some of these shared goals. So you can imagine other parts of that dashboard up there at the top.

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Violent crime for 100k, county jail, population 911, call response rate, and then you can also think about the goals for those crucial metrics. So something like getting the murders down to um you know 100 to one per 100 000 people. um Instead of these higher numbers, you know like for violent crime, it's 560., then as you're starting to work on these goals like uh county jail, population or violent crime. Or what have you?

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um You say, what are the underlying problems that are making these goals that are stopping us from these goals and some of these problems and all of these have links and and database stuff, and please you know, uh debate us on this, but income inequality, poverty, stuff like that, and then there are, of course solutions to those um problems. This is like raising the dropout age is a pretty good one.

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Eliminating blighted housing is something that both people on the left and the right seem to agree on uh implementing some like restorative justice techniques that are really powerful here and so there's a lot of solutions that we can use as a community in order to solve these problems, and then, finally, I want to say a little bit about this final piece here, which is claims, which is someone like the district attorney chesap boudin. I never know how to say his name.

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um He there's a big debate right now of whether he increased crime in san francisco, and so this can be a place for folks to have like a slightly measured debate about that and, of course, there's outstanding questions like how does drug use increase crime, and things like that.

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So this is a first look at geo, the app and it is a way again, I think we think of as a web 3 for wikipedia or web3 native wikipedia that helps cities and other folks coordinate is the way to view it. You can also see on the left here. You can publish your changes and so I've been doing a lot of changes.

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You know in the last couple days and you can also vote, and so, when you vote on these things, the folks come around and then there's a reputation weighted voting system to kind of get these into the public knowledge graph.

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So this is how to think about um a new kind of coordination and information infrastructure that will help that is in a web, 3 kind of native way that will help cities thrive, and I want to say something about this, which is that this is just now starting to be some of the web 3 visions, I think for folks in 2009.

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It was like this anti-state thing anti-government. um You know the the bank bailout at that time and then in 2015 we were making ethereum and then you know from then on. We've done a lot of financial engineering and defy, and what have you and just now we're starting to get into uh web3 kind of pushing into the real world in a powerful and positive way.

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In addition, I want to talk a little bit about root and civic abundance work. More generally and again, this is part of a great civic tech ecosystem, folks, like effective government, california, digital public infrastructure, work and again, to remind people of these two crucial ideas. The government is us and what gets measured gets managed, and so we have, you know biology talking about what. If your community newspaper was re-centered around a community dashboard and then some folks said hey, this is happening.

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This is a community dashboard in a small city in kansas that actually is organizing around some of the key metrics for their city, and so what we decided to do is make that that dashboard for san francisco- and here it is skirt um there we go. um So this is civicdash.org and you can go. It's a live website right now and, as you can see here, it's this community driven platform for proposing and evaluating solutions to realize civic abundance.

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uh Oh there, it is it's still there. The screen turned off by the way. um So you can see these themes at the bottom: abundant housing, quality, education, public safety, similar themes as in the geo app and then at the bottom are scrolling. Some of these crucial metrics, uh like the median housing, sale price and uh the rental vacancy rate, and these really crucial things that show the city whether it's operating well.

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Just like you want for like a company or something like that, and as you can see here uh this and by the way, this is all um new and built in the last kind of couple months. If you want to connect with us around us in the top left corner, there's a discord join our discord uh check us out here, but let's look at this first one, this median housing sale price, and this is actually a really bad graph. It's a really good graph, if you own a house, but it's a really bad graph.

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If you want abundant housing, a rising housing costs at this extreme rate is a sign of super constrained supply, and so there is artificially constrained supply within the ecosystem within housing, in most major cities in the united states and around the world, and that is a graph that we actually want to be flat instead, and so that's a crucial um metric that we can look at that says.

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Oh, this is not something that we want and we can set goals around trying to make it so that graph, instead of having a yearly growth of multiple percents. Instead, it's kind of flat, another kind of graph that you can look at is something like rental vacancy rate, and this is a kind of counterintuitive one, but you actually want a higher vacancy rate for these cities.

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um Economists agree: roughly, eight percent is what you want, uh because that's a sign that there's enough abundance in the ecosystem, so there's a little bit of slack and so the rental vacancy rate. Here you can see in san francisco it's like three percent 3.5 percent, which is a science there's, just not enough um housing uh and not enough rental uh options as well, and so for these crucial uh metrics, like rental vacancy rate, and is it still going?

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My uh let's see here, keep going buddy? Oh there, it goes yeah um uh for uh for rental vacancy rate. We can then start to think about these solutions in the bottom right hand corner here, and these are solutions for abundant housing, and we want people to be able to uh instead of just voting once every four years. We want people to be able to collaborate around some of these crucial goals and these crucial metrics, and so this is actually a prediction.

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Market uh currently live on manifold markets and uh it's the question is: hey: are san francisco's existing initiatives enough to bring abundant housing in five years? You can see the folks right now agree: yeah 29 not really going to happen, and if you want to, you can go and click on the button and say: oh, let's go over to manifold markets and, like add your prediction there, and for folks who aren't aware of prediction markets. This is a great way to do kind of policy-based predictions uh if people wear a futarky and things like that.

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This is a way that us as a society, instead of just optimizing around twitter engagement, we can optimize around the policies that will actually move the metrics that are most important for our cities.

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So this is the idea behind civic abundance and uh again it's just kind of another frame on this idea, for how can we use technology to make our cities much much better? uh If you want to, you can go for this one again, you can join us in the discord or you know it's open source software, so you can check us out on with the docs or on github, um and then you can log in or sign up as well, in order to um kind of get personalized recommendations and stuff.

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So for both of these applications really encourage you all to for the geo application. You can the one with the graph, if you're around for graph hack this weekend, uh go to edgenode.com geo and start to download it and push back against our kind of claims there and start adding to that public database for um how to coordinate uh infrastructure for san francisco and then for civic dash.

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If you are looking for a way to actually understand, what's happening in your city, go to civicdash.org and check it out and then feel free to also contribute to us around. Some of these prediction market questions and the most crucial metrics for our city.

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So that is the idea behind those two applications. It is comes from this crucial question of: how can we help cities thrive, and especially, how can we help cities thrive with the new technology that we're all building a reminder for all of everybody? All of us in the audience is that we are the government. A lot of us here are in the tech world and for roughly 20 years.

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What a lot of us have done is just kind of ignored the government and said: oh, that's those people over there and they're doing a bad job, but I really encourage everybody to say no. The government is us. We all need to be part of this optimistic solar, punk future and not just build it within this little web 3 niche, but build it in this like more general way that benefits everybody and then.

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Finally, what I want to tell you folks is that what gets measured gets managed and so whatever, when you're out there in the world. Thinking about how your city is doing think about how your town is doing think about how your company is doing. Think very crucially, about your metrics and try to find good information inputs in order to make sure you're optimizing those metrics every day.

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As a note, if you want to chat with the civic dash team, I did I don't code anymore, and the team did an amazing job of of developing this so finn and andre and brendan feel free to reach out to them or find them in the audience.

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After this we're looking actively looking for feedback from folks and they'd love to chat with you about their design decisions, um how they built it and those kinds of things so definitely reach out to us and again we're trying to push for the future where a society where not just eath gas fees are lower, we're using beautiful l2s, but where society as a whole can coordinate around this infrastructure.

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If you have any questions about this, uh reach out to me on twitter, go to either the graph or go to edgenode.com geo to use uh that new application. There also go to civicdash.org we're hiring a full-time engineer for this um so feel free to reach out to us for that or if you want to go to root.co and check out our web3 and society and other initiatives we're all ears. So thank you so much and let's build a better solar, punk future for everybody.

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