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Café sûr le pont introduction

☕ Cafe sur le pont introduction 🌉 was hosted by Nori and Felix at the After Town Hall of 13th October 2021.

Website

Check out the Café sûr le pont bridgebuilders Website and Youtube channel.

Summary Keywords

The SUMMARY KEYWORDS from this meetings transcript :

people, community, voting, governance, system, catalyst, open source, dor, ada, experiments, blockchain, create, talking, point, vote, environment, public goods, build, quadratic voting, reputation

Speakers

Tom, Ken, Simon, Dean, Quaser, Johnny, Tevo, Robert, Felix, Filip, Nick, Melanie, Dereyk, Charlie, Dor, Yoram, Nori, Jonathan, Vincent, George

Café sûr le pont intro:

Café sûr le pont (Coffee on the bridge) is the very first iteration of an open call to discuss highly relevant topics in regard to the Cardano Voltaire Era. In particular, to talk about the evolution of the community, possibilities, visions, and ideas.

At Café sûr le pont, the greater Cardano community gather to engage in an informal conversations on a variety of timely topics. This conversation is not intended to drive action items or agendas, but rather to open up silos, bring the entire community together on a personal and human level, to put faces to names, and connect people and ideas.

Voltaire

The subject being discussed is broadly “Voltaire” - an “era of Cardano will provide the final pieces required for the Cardano network to become a self-sustaining system” (Cardano Roadmap).

George - What is the intention ?

Assuming the Voltaire infrastructure is going to be delayed. What are the interim solutions ? Will Catalyst Circle v2 expand upon this ? I guess the process will be open-source. And the interim will build processes that in the short-term is a democratic kind of systems. Is that is that the intention? - precis of George - 07:18.

Nori - A conversation

The initial preference is to have a conversation and not necessarily come together to make decisions. We just want to make sure that everyone’s voices are heard, ideas are expressed. Then we can go away and actually make things happen. - precis of Nori - 08:04

Filip - A Plutocratic system

Is Cardano a plutocratic system ? Which means, one ADA one vote. I just want to ask is this fine? Do we do we accept this as a fact of life? If we look at governance systems everywhere, it’s basically plutocratic. We may be sometimes mask it as a democracy, but in the end, it’s heavily influenced by money. And should we just keep aligning our system according to plutocratic principles ? - precis of Filip 09:00

Vincent - large ADA holders

I do see a point in the future when we’ve minted all of the ADA that’s ever going to be produced, where you could end up in a situation where you have large holders who can effectively just stake and stay rich and stay powerful forever. So we may need to look at a transition at some point. But things are working presently. - precis of Vincent 10:40

Dor - Building Legitimacy

I think it assumes a lot that a lot of people want a plutocratic system. And it is working against the stream to want something else. Nobody in IOG wants a world governance where rich people have lots of power. I sit in countless meetings trying to figure these things out and resolve them. And the truth is that any type of governance needs to develop legitimacy over time. Maybe someone here in the room has a quick fix. But we do not presently have an alternative voting model that cannot be Sybil attacked.

A way to validate your identity is one pathway forward. Only when it is feasible are we going to start experiments with different decision making mechanisms and allocations of voting power. And I think it’s more of a question of do we wait in the sidelines and wait for the perfect conditions to arrive and only then start to experiment or do we take what we currently have, which is ADA based voting and leverage it. To start to build legitimacy for even introducing the concept that 10s of 1000s of people can make joint decisions together effectively. So it’s not ideal, but this is the reality we have.

With our rapid funding mechanisms we can already start to launch large scale projects where we can see decision making. If we can prove that we have figured out a mechanism that is more effective, then it’s not a matter of ideology. It transcends questions of whether I believe in this or that form of governance. It will become an inevitable truth that is just going to become the new norm over time. Simply because groups which are making better decisions are going to flourish and are going to outcompete any other group.

And the unfortunate thing is it’s not going to matter if it’s more moral or less moral. Its going to be about what’s more effective. But of course being attractive. A system that is fair is engaging, and is going to have more chances to succeed. Because people are going to believe in it, and be engaged with it.

So I would concede the fact that currently this is the best thing we’ve got. But we also need to start to figure out how can we actually transition in a controlled way. - precis of Dor 12:15

George - Reputation, different levels of democracy

I don’t really see this plutocracy kind of thing fading away in any kind of immediate sense. But I do see a Swiss Army Knife of potential new options. There are going to be different levels of democracy. One that is really high level decisions, like the [Catalyst] Challenges which we vote for. But also smaller kinds of governance that just talk about how we manage this documentation or something else that’s really important to the community but is very distributed.If we can build reputation tools that can prove I have a level of skill level or reputation based on my contribution then 30% of the voting power could come from reputation and the rest be plutocracy. I think it’s going to come to this kind of AB kind of testing, some data science looking at the history. There is massive kind of potential in public goods when you’ve got proof of identity. And there may be a public good focused challenge, for instance, whereas a developer ecosystem challenge would be more focused on the right skill levels. - precis of George 17:47

Johnny - Benefits of the iterative approach

I think about the existential threat to the incentive system. But the thing I love most about catalyst so far has been the iterative approach. Its not all at once, it’s each fund, it’s scaling up. I really respect the teams for really looking at the data, really analyzing the activity of the wallets, and the participation. The other thing I love is the value system that we have within the Cardano community. We have done a pretty good job of attracting people that have a notion of community value, civic responsibility and communal effort. It isn’t just about a pure financial economic vision or economic self interest. People care about values that aren’t purely based on ADA, or Fiat. - precis of Johnny 20:11

Tevo - Experimenting in a safe, stable environment

One thing I would like to mention is that having this kind of iterative method makes us the people who are here today. Like asking questions such as “why don’t we use this method” or “why we don’t use this voting solution”. And Catalyst helps to promote this and allows your idea to flourish. This provides incentives and the opportunity to create these small little experiments ourselves in a safe environment. - precis of Tevo 22:15

Yoram - Testing based on wallets

Continuing what Tevo said, we can do a nice test. I mean we can compare results based on wallets and an estimation. So we can do a lot of trials and we will have some indication how far we have progressed with two different models. - precis of Yoram 24:31

Charlie - Structured competing interests - power plays

I guess one of the things that strikes me is that there’s nothing more efficient than a centralized government in terms of getting things done in the short term. But in the long term it cannot last. And what’s interesting with a lot of government structures being discussed now is you have structured, competing interests. It’s interesting how there are technocracies, meritocracies, sociocracy - there a lot of different dimensions of power. So you see this sort of power play happening. - precis of Charlie - 26:01

Filip - Reputation as perception

As Charlie just said reputation will always have something that is social. Our personal identity is one thing, but reputation is a totally another thing. The reputation of Filip is how I and all the rest of us perceive Filip it has nothing to do with me. I have no control over it. I may act in a certain way to try to manipulate my reputation. But it’s coming from outside. And it’s extremely dynamic. So I think to attempt to quantify that needs something revolutionary. - precis of Filip 28:27

Nick - Building communities through archetypes

One of the big things we have to start with is involving all the stakeholders, we’re still such a niche environment that we’re going to get very limited perspectives. And there is ways to measure that. My proposal Cardano community campus is all about using sociological and psychological research to build communities through archetypes. It’s a way to understand if we have a holistic environment in which to actually gather all the right information to make these decisions.

I really want to focus on gathering the human capital in the right environment. An emerging space, not just iterative, emerging meaning we actually create a space where things can come through in this effort of play and making mistakes and curiosity and imagination, because I think that’s where the blue oceans are going to be for us.- precis of Nick - 31:20

Ken - The freedom to choose a different way of doing things

It is important to recognise that if you have just one system then everybody is stuck using that system. The freedom to leave or to choose a different way of doing things is important. Catalyst is just one system. And with Cardano, it’s possible to build whatever other voting system you want to build on it. - precis of Ken - 35:05

Tom - We should assume corruption and prepare for it

We should just assume that corruption will occur, we should just assume that the system, no matter how successful will eventually collapse from its own weight. And the benefit of Cardano, or any type of project like this is that the keys to rebuild something new are publicly available and always being innovated on. - precis of Tom - 38:21

Tevo - Explaining Cardano to newcomers - education - keeping it simple

So many topics we have in between the Firestarter Filip with his radical questioning. I understand the problem of how do you explain it to a person who is outside of a blockchain and you explain don’t trust governance here is much better solution for you ADA. ADA is a cryptocurrency, it’s proof. This is a very radical change and people will still insist it is not safe. I like the way Nick started with how the question of how do we make the ecosystem healthy?

I think the education is the only chance to get there. And this iterating thing we are doing, we are educating ourselves. I don’t think any of us are experts not even the Catalyst team themselves, or IOG. They are experimenting with all of this and they are not experts here as much as we are. We live and learn how we should govern and how we educate ourselves to govern.

I like it simple as it is right now. When I know the system stays mostly the same. And step by step, slight changes. - precis of Tevo 39:26

Vincent - Voting behavior and outcomes

It might be fun to have a way to replay the votes under different schemas.No matter how you count the votes we still have wallets in ADA, we still have the same amount of information going into each vote, unless we do rank or quadratics. If we try these different systems. What might that change as far as which proposals get picked? I think that might be cool to have a playground of sorts that actually takes the real voting data. - precis of Vincent - 42:55

Robert - PACE - Catalyst data API

PACE and myself do want to make all this data available as an API. So you might at least get the raw data. We have a proposal for that in Fund 6 to gather that proposal data in a structure API available to the community. - precis of Robert 45:00

Dean - Similarities with 1990s open-source Linux - innovation of value

This is my second town hall meeting. And I’ve been I’ve known about Catalyst native for about three months now. It’s brilliant as to what’s going on. I want to just share my background in the 90s when I was moving forward with Linux and open source. I found some very interesting similarities when I attended the Cardano summit. As if going through the exact same process.

Back then open source was a really bad word. If you bet your career on open source you were giving everything up. No one understood or cared about open source. We had to educate the market.

Some things that I’ve that I’ve watched and seen said here is very much the similar thing,trying to figure out how in the world that you communicate to people, the value of open source. What we came to find out very quickly back then, and it was very painful, was it was a based upon the innovation of value. innovation of value was what would drive the market to be accepted, when people began to understand the connections between how the value was being brought forward. It was like, once someone saw the connection and the connectivity, it was the light would go on, they would begin to create their own visions of how they could start utilizing the structures.

“The real vision comes when the value gets created, and it gets connected.”

“And then we realized this, those who will create the value, and those that will help extend the value will always innovate towards goodness, they will do that.” - precis of Dean 45:49

Jonathan - Encourage many solutions - granular bottom-up decision making

I was listening to conversations, thinking about what I’d like to see would be to go back to what George was saying about different voting types for different scenarios.

We haven’t got a single solution for every problem. Things that need to be decided in the community are very varied in terms of their makeup. Whether on a directional, moral, ethical or a fiscal level. They have all got different aspects. And so, we should have different tools for those things.

A single solution won’t engage with people who vote. I think my drive is towards getting things more granular, smaller and decision making being made by people who are infused in the areas that they’re working in. Investing time and energy. Heightening their good intentions in areas that they have expertise. - precis of Jonathan 54:00

Deryck - Outsourcing hiring to Catalyst

In regards to hiring, it’s great that IOG is growing. What we’ve been hearing is a desire to be more integrated and have more open communications with IOG and Cardano Foundation. Is there a way to start to consider the hiring, onboarding, being outsourced to people in Catalyst? - precis of Dereyk 57:23

Nick -Taking advantage of Catalyst’s human capital

Our biggest asset is really the human capital that’s involved. And the investment we put into making that human capital work. In order to be the most innovative environment and sustain that environment because technology is going to change over time. And I’ve been part of and consulted many startups that had superior technology but really lost out because they weren’t able to connect properly with their clients or nurture long lasting, innovative environments.

“…we jumped to voting, but governance really is about like, how do we nurture each person to help them go into their genius zone.”" - precis of Nick 58:41

Ken - Making things simple to access

We were talking about having a multiple different systems for voting but I think we need to consider it from the point of view of the individual contributor. From their perspective, it needs to be simple for the one who’s interacting with the community, whether it’s through voting, or whether it’s through some other form of engagement. Because as the system grows then it’s not going to be something that you can track and manage as one. - precis of Ken 1:04:08

Robert - Research on voting - revealing preferences via pricing systems - four quadrants of goods

First of all, there’s a heck of a lot of research, a millennium of research into voting. In the area that it’s called, is social choice. Within Catalyst we’re using approval voting which is one of the worst ones we could possibly have. But it’s the best sort of approach for the moment. Aside from voting, there is actually another form of revealing preferences.

“I think that governance is far more than just voting, it’s about actually trying to form consensus.”"

In fact, if you’ve reached need to use voting, you’ve probably actually failed at governance, in many respects, because you haven’t managed to build a consensus.

The other tool for revealing preferences is the pricing system, the market. And one of the key things is that we’ve actually got an accounting layer that works on a global scale. We can use different types of market mechanisms to reveal preferences which we can trust. This falls into things like reputation and identity.

There are basically four quadrants of types of goods that we’re typically dealing with. Most of what we’ve grown up is what’s called private goods. Things like Linux or open-source stuff was more in the camp of common, public goods. A lot of the blockchain space is about trying to bring back common resources and public goods. That does not mean we have to throw out things that worked well for private goods, which is the market system.

I would encourage everyone to do some digging into the work of Ostrom. She has 40 years looking at how to govern natural resources. A lot of that work was extended into how to govern knowledge Commons as well.

The key distinction between a market and a social choice system is that social choice never had the pricing function. So we need to bring the two together.

Don’t throw out voting. We can actually experiment with a lot of different voting systems beyond just approval voting. - precis of Robert 1:07:04

Simon - (quoting Stephen ) working meetings between IOG and Catalyst community

What is lacking in my view is any real sense of IOG staff and community members working together on day-to-day projects and deliverables. Not going away and coming back with readymade ideas and proposals. This may take some professionals out of their comfort zone - as we move to a situation where community members (“amateurs”) must participate in all Cardano deliverables in actual working meetings. Not as an afterthought or a community consultation. Circle has introduced the possibility of this - but it needs to be expanded upon. Perhaps there needs to be less concern about ownership of tasks (e.g., IOG does this, the community does this) and more focus on collaborative delivery (e.g. who from IOG and the community can work on this). There has also been a long-standing difference of circumstances between paid IOG staff and an unpaid community which undermines the possibility of ownership and creates the sustainability risk. Once some of our funding and resource initiatives are in place hopefully there can be a levelling effect - as the community are paid for their contribution. - Simon (quoting Stephen) - 1:13:51

Harris - Path from the community to Cardano

It’s not easy, there is no perfect governance. But as a community we get to reinvent what governance should be and take these great ideas, and leverage all the opinions from lots of different places around the world, to try to inform that.

“… I think, you know, the idea of catalyst is to fund great ideas and find ways to take people from being observers, to participants, to actually being active in the community to make this your full time job.”"

“And I’m a huge data fan. And, you know, I’m digging into data sources, I want to make data available. I want to make API’s available, to empower the community to continue to build the amazing tools that I’ve already seen being built …” - precis of Harris - 1:16:59

Johnny - A map of the ecosystem - hard problems of blockchain governance

Ecosystem_map_from_Johnny_Nguyen

Dean - Root of Trust, application service provider, extending the infrastructure

The opportunity for Cardano is this concept of the Root of Trust. As Cardano moves forward it can help those channel organizations begin to understand how they can participate and be involved. And there are people that are wanting to see it and understand how they can participate on the technological side and bringing services to the marketplace. And how they extend their infrastructure to what Cardano can provide? - precis of Dean - 1:25:06

Transcription

A full transcription of this meeting is available here