 Hello, everyone. Whatever time it is for you, whether you're watching this live or in replay, thanks so much for joining Complexity Weekend May 2021. It's been quite an awesome weekend and we're heading into the last third, the final stretch. We're going to be having this live stream featuring some facilitators and some more interactive jam-boarding. We'll talk about team formation and try to get a few more teams over that registration form bump. And then we'll have a few more hours to work and prepare our presentations before that closing ceremony on Sunday, where we're going to be hearing from all the teams. So for the next 25 minutes or so, we will, as usual, listen to some music of one of our great facilitators, Michael Garfield. And then we will be talking to you soon. So enjoy the tunes and I will see you in just a few minutes. Thanks, everyone, for joining to all of you who are watching live in Replay. This is going to be yet another fun stream. Thanks a lot for joining, Sean. Let me make a few little tweaks and why don't you just say hi from whatever time zone you're at. Sure. Hello. It is 7 a.m. over here in central time. It was actually fun being in the gather space later in the evening yesterday where there was a good solid, just a group of people waking up and engaging. It was just cool knowing at any given hour that everyone's connecting. That was fun. Nice. So for this live stream, we're going to be starting off just speaking with you all, taking any and all questions in the live chat. Truly anything could be a complexity question. And the worst case scenario, we're just going to push it right back onto the community and see if there's somebody who knows it better than we do because that's likely the case. And then we're going to be speaking with a few facilitators, which ones we don't know yet. But we're going to find out who comes on. And then we will just continue on the team formation. We have several teams already registered, and we're going to make it a big goal to keep pushing for that team registration because when you coalesce on a team and you get a few people together, have that shared purpose, start off on that long journey together, it's really going to be a fun and markedly different phase for your complexity journey. And also just one thought right off the bat is a weekend hackathon style event. I mean, there is so little time to actually make it happen. I'm almost like wondering how did you do it in the startup weekend and in other contexts? How was it possible to connect and to get anywhere? And then what happened after the weekend? And then how can we take the best aspects of that excitement and productivity but also marry it with that longer term view? Yeah, great question. It's a very different like a startup weekend, for instance, like a complexity weekend. In the startup weekend event series, you pick your team very early on. Friday in the evening, you've already got your team, basically. And it actually is much more individualistic in the sense that everyone's practicing pitching as an icebreaker. And then the mic gets handed around, people get on stage, they pitch their startup idea. You know, everyone's usually in that environment going for more of a for-profit, you know, times high growth tech company. Hey, hey, today we have an approval. Sometimes, you know, some other form of business. But everyone pitches the ideas and then people basically, are you guys okay? Can you hear? Yeah, we can hear you. And, you know, basically everyone takes like a vote on what, you know, pitches they heard that they're most excited about. And then the top ones get kind of put on to like big post-its around the room. And then people vote by moving. And then whoever's congregated around one post-it, boom, they're a team now. And that happens in Friday evening on a startup weekend. But that's obviously a very different context. And I think, you know, for us, it takes a lot longer for a team to gel. And that's an okay, that's a good thing actually, because this is where we have very different outcome goals with startup weekend versus like a complexity weekend. Whereas ours is much more longevity oriented. It's many, many different types of outcomes. It's not as kind of a small of a subset of focused outcomes as startup weekend. And the energy is just very different. At a startup weekend, you're getting kind of pushed this idea of almost, you know, the deliverable for the hackathon. And again, we don't have the same deliverables. But for startup weekend, it's much more, can you even get like a first promise of sale by the end of the weekend? Like that's really the main criteria that everyone's going for. And so it's a lot of an emphasis on external calls. And finding other entities out in the world that agree that the solution to the problem that you're scoping out is real. And the solution you're coming up with is something that they would adopt. And that's kind of that context. But Sudevi Prabha, I'd love to hear from your experience in all these different kind of hackathon like events. What's different kind of between them and like a complexity weekend, for instance? Yeah, Prabha, that's a good question. Yeah, we can talk for hours about this. I can't remember. That's what brings us back again and again. I think Sean, the favorite word we have for one of these hackathon events is innovation theater. And I think that's where the difference between you guys and the rest of the faces, I don't think we're trying to put up a performance. There is no, you know, that big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow kind of where people need to, you know, perform and try and run towards, you know, like a temple run towards that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which is, you know, somewhere Sunday evening on a typical hackathon. So I think, you know, for that, that is one of the reasons that we keep coming back to you except for, of course, we love working with you guys. And like you've done, you know, the monthly updates are something which is completely different, you know, mostly wherever we see it, be it a weekly hackathon or be it a hackathon, which is slightly of a longer duration. We don't see, we don't see catch ups, we don't see going back and trying to look at the measure for success that we thought applied to the hackathon and see where we are, you know, keeping that depth in the mind. I think that really makes a huge lot of difference when it comes to anything to do with innovation or, you know, be it social or otherwise. Yeah, and I will say that, you know, a lot of people always use templates to do things, and I'm not saying templates never work. They do work in some cases, which is why people use that. I think personally, I'm trying to work towards templates, because I feel that the moment there is a template, there is no recognition of an individual in that template, you know, and the fact that the context can play a major role. Why I'm talking about this is that you will see in different corporate spaces and other spaces, people using farming, farming, storming and all of these terms, and you don't really know how it is used. The other thing is that when we are talking about complexity, I feel like there is always an attempt from the organizers and facilitators to use complexity within the structure of facilitation and the design of it. I mean, I would actually call it an oxymoron. There was just two days of a complexity weekend related hackathon, because you're then not really covering all the different parts. You're not acknowledging the individuals who are then forming a team. We can just talk about collaboration and isolation without really focusing on how the collaborations can work out. And there are so many reasons why people collaborate, right? And I feel that's something that I find very interesting and very powerful that there is always a recognition that there are many reasons why people come together and there are many reasons why people may not want to come together. So that recognition, I think, makes this process a very human and a very humble process. Do we always get it right? No, but I think complexity weekend to us is all about learning and the focus is always learning. It's never to come up with either judgment or to come up with a really good sounding term, sounding right, and then sort of getting a recognition which is that reward doesn't last. I feel it's a sure waste of everyone's time when you have a list of so-called solutions or whatever, and then there is a competition happening about sounding right rather than getting it right for yourself and the team and then trying to win something. So I think that nobody is, you know, it's always a win-win, I feel, the complexity reconstruction. Everybody is a winner because I feel the biggest winning for anyone for that matter is something like this is if you have learned something in the process and that like I always say, learning is always about unlearning. I definitely know that if people give the time that complexity weekend speaks for, definitely there's going to be some unlearning. If nothing, it's also about so many other people, so many perspectives, you know, which might be not even contrasting to your points of view, it could even be conflicting. But then how do you come together and then go together, right? I think that's really very, very different in complexity weekend. I think one of the key pieces also is, you know, when the pandemic kind of pushed everything into, excuse me, you know, all of us being in this virtual medium, I think a lot of people around the world started assuming that the same rules which apply to a physical gathering, apply to an online gathering, which is, hey, we are all human. But the rules of collaboration, I wouldn't even call it rules. And the norms of collaboration, especially in online space, especially for a multi-national, multi-cultural even such as this is quite different. It's been a learning experience for all of us. And I think those are also some of the nuances that you really, really focus on, you know, in trying to ensure, for example, that there are facilitators from around the world, you know, but 50 countries now, you know, if for nothing, it's also the culture. And since we do a lot of work in that space, collaboration and cultures and how it's an easy world to use, you know, collaboration and often, like a lot of other things, it's not as benign as it sounds. There's much more to collaboration than, you know, just both working together. And there are learnings, of course, you know, there are some that you learn along the way, there are some that you understand, you know, but probably should maybe can speak about, you know, one of the projects that we're working on for the United, sorry, for the... Yeah, keep the people in the United Nations for some reason. For the European Union, you know, they call it the National Institute of Culture and how they're trying to look at this entire idea of collaboration. And fair collaboration. Fair collaboration, yeah. You know, so, yeah. I think there's one more thing which I find quite interesting and more from a facilitator's point of view. And possibly I can say it because we have been associated with complexity we can over a period of time. I feel that, you know, I do a lot of work with teachers. Teachers of primary education, middle schools, higher education and all of that. And I feel like using design principles and learning design is something that's really my passion. And I've been spending a lot of time on it probably for the last 15 years. And one of the things that I've often seen across the globe is that like in many other realms of life, people have a... people like short cuts, right? They want quick fixes. And so they come up with a bandaid solution for everything with the technology. So you think that the moment something's not happening, let's use technology without giving much thought. I feel that complexity we can even for a facilitator, if you see it like this... Now, you have used, I would say, certain technological tools which not many people might be familiar with. I mean, it's a different thing that I think Pramala and I do engage with different kinds of technological tools because that's something that we like to win. But it's not about the technology and saying, you know, it sounds very cool that I'm using... Gather and I'm using Keybase. My interest always lies in understanding what would be different if I were to use Keybase versus a Plack or a Discord. They might sound the same, but are they? Each one has its own advantage, each one has its own limitations. So when I think about someone is using that similar to Gather, right? If I were to use a Gypsy versus Zoom versus Gather versus something else, you know, how each thing allows for certain things and I feel that if one has to be a creative facilitator, it does allow a lot of thought to kind of think about the instructional design of what you're trying to do. So for me, it's really like, you know, the medium and the message. They're really intertwined and that's how the metaphors come out and it's not really theoretical for me. It really, really makes you think that I also then need to think about each person coming for a particular session or someone who's not coming for a session. Because I've very often seen a very common thing about the complexity we can, the participants, especially the ones who are new and maybe they're not so young. That's a composition of participants we very often have. And the moment you want to do some interactive sessions with them, unlike any other hackathon where people primarily want to do, they don't want to think, they just want to do. Here, they want to take time and they would be like, okay, I'm observing right now. I'm so new to this, I'm just trying to figure things out. So for me, it's a very interesting design challenge in itself. How do I cope up with the complexity of, for example, Gather, right? Where I can't hold someone like I can hold in a Zoom room. I mean, of course, people are always have a possibility to leave that there. But mostly, okay, I mean, the complexity of Zoom, I would say, would be that someone might be there and yet not there. But here, one can physically move out of a particular space in Gather. Now, how do I ensure that my communication is enough where I take into consideration each one of those people, rather than being forceful about it, but to say, let's try our hand at this. Let's forget about the complexity of Gather. Let's not think about that as an overall well-being thing. The entire focus is about Gather and not really the activity that you can engage in. So I feel that I find that quite interesting. Because this time when we were designing our workshop, we did put in a lot of thoughts around what all can we do within Gather differently. Because I think it's when I'm not challenging myself enough as a facilitator, if I'm doing it exactly the same way I would have done it for any other online presentation, right? So, yeah, sorry, we spoke a lot, but I think that's really our perspective. I wrote down just a lot of questions and words, but there's some awesome points in the live chat. Delek wrote, it's really nice to have people with different ideas and perspectives. Globally, learning from each other, thanks for the event. Well, thanks for being here. And Barbara also raising the point that competition and pressure to produce results that look good can go counter to the need to explore the complex space. And then, Sean, you raised a question about funding. So let's maybe have you raise that question, and then we'd love to hear, Sudevi and Proball, what you think about Sean's question about funding here. Yeah, I'm just trying to understand the role of funding kind of in the complexity we can community of practice, because, you know, again, comparing to like a startup weekend, it is very much a competition. Everyone's, you know, the final, it's literally a pitch on Sunday that you're giving is, it's in the same form as you would give for funding. So it's like literally that is the output is a funding pitch. And so, of course, people are going to the first, you know, solution they can come up with to get something tangible to share for Sunday, and everything is supposed to be as polished as possible. And you've called some people and had some promises that like, oh, this might actually be, you know, a real solution. And, you know, so that there's all that pressure to kind of, you know, go in on Friday and on Sunday, have a handshake. And maybe I've already, you know, got some funding or something like that. That's obviously different for complexity weekend and probably different with other hackathon like events. Can you just kind of go into how funding could work in a complexity weekend environment and maybe how it's different than these other environments? Yeah, I think I'll go and then you can add in. So I'll tell you something that I had done as an experiment. So you know that he facilitated a lot of different kinds of innovation jams and hackathons and all. There was one particular time where intentionally I participated as a participant. And what happened over there was it was actually for a longer period of time because the structures were quite interesting. There were lots of good things about it. One of the biggest takeaways for me from that space was the kind of people I interacted with. Because to be honest, the solution ideas, even once we've got funding really didn't matter. What really mattered was the relationship type of process. Now, why? It was a physical gathering. It was not online. Currently, because of the pandemic, some of those are happening in the form of hack. So the reason I'm talking about this is that I did this to, I did that to myself. Although when I engaged in it as a participant, I went through everything that a participant might go through. Ten days of absolute pressure, working towards things. Me being a part of a team where I know I can actually facilitate but then restraining myself from that space and from that process. And going through even the frustrations that a participant might undergo. And the facilitators in that kept on telling me, why are you here as a participant? You actually can facilitate it better than we do. And I was like, I want to know what the participant undergoes or what others undergo, what group dynamics stand out like. Because I feel it's going to give me a very different kind of view point. So one of the things that I understood or rather I realized in a very first time experiential way is that not only does this funding thing create pressure. That's at a personal level. I sometimes feel it's unfair because when you do that for a very short period of time and there is that carrot of funding, there are multiple things, right? So one thing is that if we talk about a fair collaboration among people, giving people a choice, we need to acknowledge first of all which is limited. Nobody is going to give you hours of time to understand what it is. We are just going to base it based on what we understand, what you speak in three minutes. So I personally have a big problem about that element of it. And I'm not just putting my opinion. I'll tell you what I've seen happen. So there are people whose first language is not English, right? So first of all, in that process of pitching, very often, either people struggle to make sense of what they want to say. So their articulation sometimes might not be really showing what they actually have done. So that's a big problem. Second point is the moment there's a competition like that and there's funding, that's the pressure, right? Within the team itself, I very often see the one who can speak English very well and also faster. So you can see, for example, my rate of speech is very high. I'm aware of it. If I facilitate in a non-finished speaking environment, I try to consciously make myself slower. But the reason I'm talking about this is I think these are all things that lead to unfairness. People tend to pick up the one who speaks faster than someone who takes time. And you know, because you don't know that I can speak 100 words in a minute versus someone is going to speak 40 words in a minute, right? So that's one of the other things that happens. And then maybe the one who speaks better gets the chance. May not be the one who has come up with a really good idea or someone who can actually get into the depth of it. So it's again about superficiality in presentation. Am I saying presentation has no value? No, I'm not saying that. I think storytelling, communication, these are also important learning that one needs to hone as is. But that can come as a part of an innovation, just as I would say. But you know, when you also learn how do you balance between depth where you dig deeper, you look at things in a very holistic, systemic way without diluting the depth. Then how do you communicate that? Again, not sounding like it's a jargon and you're reading from a paper, you know, which is published. So I think that that balance again needs time. And this kind of a negotiation doesn't have any room in a process like that where you are just trying to sort of say what probably might work. And people completely get tempted. They will look at, you know, a sharp tank, a sharp tank and jargon then and all of these, they have an impact. I mean, we all know popular media have an impact. What people don't remember is even in a sharp tank episode, the episodes are way longer than what you see. Nobody actually gives a three-minute edit with a pitch. People do ask clarifying questions. People do ask probing questions. So the focus is again never on the problem framing part of it. And I often have seen, from my field, a lot of projects which won the funding and therefore they thought that was a parameter of success actually did not really do the representative research that should have gone into framing the problem or executing. And I feel that it will again become an optimal in a complexity weekend situation if that had to happen so fast because we do have to consider unintended consequences of the solutions that we are designing. So can a process that is so fast consider the unintended consequences of what we are proposing? Can it really consider a decolonized way of looking at things in a really fair way, attaining real complexity and then coming up with a solution? So am I saying that there shouldn't ever be any funding to complexity? I feel that we need to think about it collectively when the funding can come into the play. I think that when is the key? And how do we go towards that? Because I feel it's such an opportunity lost for so many people. Maybe people who had an amazing idea which should require some funding. So many people can be impacted. They are losing out on it. People are heartbroken because people who think that they have really done a lot of work and they are not getting the funding it also demoralizes them in that process. Where you think what's the point in coming up with something which is really for the people when someone who hasn't considered anything is just like everything is based on a pitch. So I think the format of getting the funding and when not the funding, when would it come really is essential to ensure that complexity is equal it remains an effective and genuine process and it really does justice to the whole notion of complexity. So it's a really long answer to your short question but I feel there's no easy answer to it. It's a great answer. And actually one thing I was thinking of while you were speaking was it's really important also where your funding comes from and I feel like my experience as an entrepreneur trying to get venture capital funding is actually I don't know if I was doing actually a lot more social entrepreneurship type projects now that I look back and reflect and I was actually seeking the wrong source of funding and I think when you're in this kind of provolves terminology to temple run you don't have time to consider unintended consequences like you're saying including unintended consequences on your own endeavor, right? By seeking the wrong funding source and kind of locking yourself into these relationships a little too early maybe before you realize what is best for the team and the shared purpose. And also depending on our just really quickly our different backgrounds from an academic background I would have never even known that some of these avenues existed and when we're talking about innovation that connects research-like ideas with maybe application and including stakeholders there's probably novel funding mechanisms that are available so how could we reward and incentivize that process and that relating rather than set up a structure where we know the kinds of outcomes that we're going to see? Yeah, Prabhal? I was going to tell you that you could give that example you were discussing while watching Shark Tank last night about nobody's questioning how the price is lower than what you were talking about. Yeah, so these are pet fees that we have on a typical Shark Tank which you would talk about the cost of goods and what would be the cost and we were watching the season finale for season 12 last night and there was this lady who was from Texas and she was making some products in China and her landed cost per product was about 1 pound AP 1 dollar AP thanks so I was telling you all these guys look at how you always look at cost versus revenue and cost versus expenditure but I'm not really looking at how a product can be made in China and then shipped to the US for 1 dollar AP so what is it, what is really the cost of goods what am I, you know and I know this we don't want this to be political forum but how much do you really pay somebody who works on creating the product I know they can do several different levels of automation etc but that is not what China is known for it's people and you get cheap labor and how cheap can that labor be do I even know whether these are prison camps whether it's going to Vietnam or North Korea and China and nobody goes into those people ethical questions as long as the price is low and we work across industries and of course the most common example that you now get is about the fashion industry they don't look at how the sourcing is anything but ethical so do I use this forum for example CW is a great opportunity for me to look at the ethics of business itself we call it business or the ethics of sourcing and then taking to the market or whatever solutions we're talking about is that an important part at all and since we're trying to create something different I think that's something that we can really focus on the externalization of the past because the moment you get into funding people would like to understand your business model and all of that and like you're saying that you know can there be ethics embedded like can you sort of think about the social cost the environmental cost and so many of those other costs associated with your intervention so one of the things that I would say we have been a part of another process and I would say one of the learnings that maybe we can take into complexity if we ever want to get into funding is what happened in that process is that through a longer process of innovation jam not in a quick fix way some ideas which have the potential they're not the ideas that are finally chosen but they have potential to be taken forward because as you know that it ultimately has to be an idea which is practical but it also has the theoretical and other kinds of research like river that's really a good idea something which doesn't have any research backing it is definitely not an idea that could not come with its unintended consequences and if you only have theoretical ideas you won't be coming up with a practical solution but ideas which have some kind of a balance and they have potential they are actually taken into some kind of an incubation period for one and a half to two months there are facilitators who actually take them through a very rigorous process to refine the ideals and that's the process where many of these considerations are made so what happens in that process I would say that complexity we can I mean before even getting into the final funding one of the things that I mean I'm thinking about it in an ideal utopia solution is that some things which probably have a lot of practical and good ideas around business but they probably don't have that rigor to ask some of these questions the user experience is not considered in the idea refinement part we as facilitators help them do that part more if you find a thing which has like a lot of research to back them but they have no business model idea at all every step you can ask the questions and you know it's never going to be a sustainable model that's where we actually focus a lot on the business development part of that idea whereas ideas which have a little bit of both then we try and see how we can blend the two and then ask provocative questions in terms of how can it happen okay it's sounding like a good idea numbers are all fine and all of that then we bring in a more people centric view into it and a more ecological kind of a lens to it okay everything is sounding fine but do you think if you look at your solution from an ecological point of view it's a regenerative model is it sustainable is it doing something which is not right ethically or otherwise and once that process happens it's a rigorous process whoever is chosen for the incubation period as a team they have to commit a certain amount of time every week and there are modules formed that you go from here to there to get into that practicality and then after one and a half to two months there is a pitching that happens but the pitching is for a longer time and there is also a scope of people questioning that to actually understand it again not that the communication is the only way to sort of select something but there are ways to assess it so evaluation again plays a really important role and I mean that's something that what Babal and I have been working on a lot how do you evaluate an impact because I think that's a very complex and critical problem which most people don't have an answer to but you can bring in a humanistic lens to actually doing evaluation of a program and I feel that evaluation is an integral part of the solution you cannot think about a solution or a design of something without thinking how are you going to measure the impact and I'm not talking about numbers in tangible ways also how do you capture those so once all of that is done then there are people who have funders who listen to all of it and then they choose some ideas so the ideas are then chosen and in many of those cases even then people are not directly giving them funding they have yet another incubation process where ideas are further refined and then the money comes in so that there is a longer period of time to work through something really credible where I feel it also then tells you whether people are really committed to this or not because you'll also see another thing that happens and I've seen that happen many many times that ideas which are one funding let's say five numbers were initially there after winning the funding you realize that there's only one person who's willing to or incapable of giving the time that it requires the other four have so many other things to do they fall apart right so then they have to bring in someone else as partners or co-founders to take that forward and many ideas die they don't natural death over there so I feel like time is a key and you know spacing it out is a really important factor here's a thought on the time so I'm an insect biologist so it's gonna be an insect metaphor if the measure of success is the maximum amount of crop that you make this year and you know forget about the future well then you're gonna bring in the honey bees to pollinate and when I drive from California I see fields with hundreds of boxes people have brought in the honey bees on trucks to maximize yield and it makes sense under that incentive structure but then when you take a step back and think about through time it reverts the focus to actually like what they call ecosystem services and all of the native bees that pollinate a huge number of crops and so there's a focus on the solutions that enable maximum yields to be gleaned in one year but then when you withdraw the honey bees you've taken away the resources for the native bees so it's like now it's kind of like an addiction it's almost like you're actually worse off over the multi-year because you went for that short term optimization so when we're thinking about funding it's like slowing it down and using potentially some new mechanisms from crypto economics could be some very interesting ways where we can help slow down the process so that we get there take it fast, we'll get there slow or some other thing like that Sean? I'm actually trying to get actionable with this now I think this is all really good feedback and I'm wondering if you want to work on this after the weekend how do we actually take these monthly heartbeat structures and map that funding model onto that so that maybe not the heartbeat right after the weekend not for the teams that just came out of the weekend but for the other teams out in the community of practice you know, slow it down have them come to a heartbeat and really share the unintended consequences they've internalized their stakeholder feedback they've internalized their all the thoughts that get kind of crammed out during the kind of temple run dynamic have some sort of not, I don't know maybe it is a standard, I'm not really sure something that we ask teams to do the work on their own to bring that to the heartbeat you know, in each month whatever teams are ready can have that format to kind of share it and then again like you're saying maybe another incubation phase that might lead to resources and what does everyone think about that? Yeah, I think Sean like you said funding starts with the with the funder right and the the evaluation we are talking about it it depends on what the funder looks at as ROI from the investment that they're trying to make and I think so it's obviously very cyclical in order so you need that funder who wants to fund projects like these for the right reason hopefully and then you try and look at if you can set up the evaluation matrix with the funder to actually look at this is what I'm looking for and imagine a process where we can actually communicate to future CW participants that look this is your roadmap this is where you go from here to there and this is the funding or this is the kind of funder that we have and this is the kind of matrix that you're going to be evaluated for at say the end of three months and that creates a very logical life path for anybody who comes on to CW and of course it would also test the kind of participants that we have whether there are people who really want to take these ideas forward or these are just normal complexity enthusiasts who come and see what's going on and what's new and whatever is happening so you can get to use a SIF kind of in order to look at the ones who are serious ones who are really looking to take their ideas forward and of course the ones that who are here because they want to join the gathering and learn about the complexity altogether so maybe even in terms of the participants we can look at ones who are here for the experience and then there are ones who are really looking forward to taking this into the next logical steps etc so yeah I think I am smiling because I like facilitating a lot and I am actually thinking about it if you are all interested maybe I can facilitate the ideation workshop amongst us and whoever is interested to see how this can be done because we have a lot of ideas we have a lot of experiences also to sort of see how this can be chalked out and I would love this because it is not just about ideation and coming up with an idea because I think all of us are capable of doing that also to challenge each other to every proposal here we give because this is also a solution that we are trying to obtain right so to ensure that the solution is really ethical the solution is really long term everything will have its own consequences that cannot be taken away but being aware of those consequences and making informed and ethical choices I would say I am really happy to do that but we have to again then leave time for it because I would imagine that we need like a longer period of time to go through that kind of intense so I mean if you are interested well to kind of go back to the farm insect metaphor it's the difference between saying hey you have the title for this farm for one year again what is the incentive structure but when we make a commitment to serve through deep time it's like it's the family farm or it's our regional community that we know that we are going to be in and then yes it sounds amazing to find a time scale find a time frame that is going to work to hold that conversation and yeah Sean and I were just messaging on a back channel just writing down a few of these ideas you are mentioning like could there be a way where a team that shows up heartbeat after heartbeat to make it clear that they are incrementing and that they are including to innovate that they are really embodying all these things that we want to see we don't have the official mechanism we don't have the funding reserve yet but that's a team to me that's really succeeding and we would definitely do everything possible to help them this is reminding me of Dinello Meadows Thinking and Systems book and one example of this is I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the other points of ways to intervene in a complex system and one of the upper leverage points small change could have a large impact on the system the information flows in the system and the example that she brings up is the factory that is pulling water in from the river you need to put their outlet above their inlet on their environment but if you put that outlet upstream now they must take it into account it is the family farm it is something that there is actual meaning to bad practice that will impact them and it's not just a problem for somebody else to deal with fun and there's great comments like several people writing maybe a team can be formed around this idea of deep time I mean two people connecting on the tools connecting on the ideas and then what else do they need well the team registration form and then we're off the team registration form is not your final version it's editable and we always keep moving but there's something really nice about again just knowing that the timeline is out there in front of us and we want to think about all these deliverables as checkpoints not as end points so maybe you're welcome to stay on as long as you want I just would love to hear about what you would say to a team that's at that exact stage okay I had a conversation with A about this and a conversation with B about that how do we convert to the team and then what should we share during the weekend so that we can move forward successfully I think I'll just take on back to take us back to something that battery has died off is going to get the cable anyways I'll continue I think I'm going to go back to the reason why you know thought about doing the workshop that we designed and completed yesterday I would like to continue doing so we called it designing people and designing for people now the purpose behind that was when I come together as a team and I'm trying to design a solution one has to kind of think about the people you are designing for people you are consciously thinking about people you are not thinking about but they are going to be impacted but it is also to think about the people in your team and I feel that very often this is a part which goes amiss in a collaboration it's very important to understand and acknowledge what is the motivation of each individual within a team and that's really important without which I feel like one can't move forward right and I would say that there needs to be some kind of mapping of those motivation and I know that one might say that I'm going to have a nice paper talk to people and say hey what has motivated you to join it I'm not talking about just that I'm talking about really spending time and understanding the motivation where to say that if we take this forward and I think about it long term we understand that we are in a very uncertain world so things might change but at least from your intentionality perspective do you intend to commit to this over a longer period of time or over a shorter period of time secondly if things go okay then what level of commitment can you be giving for this and that kind of brings you to the question I think it's a chicken and egg situation where one of the teams might say that we will decide how much time to give for staying here for longer depending on where it can go I mean if we know that there might be a potential funding and we as a team might be showing more interest because that's something that I can afford I mean someone might say that I don't have interest in showing commitment but my practical situation in life is such that unless and until I have some financial backup I can't commit so it is not really a problem of intention it's also to understand where the person is coming from and maybe this team can keep on showing up one heartbeat after the other because they are working towards it whereas you might say that there might be a team which might be just taking part in it for the sake of learning I definitely would say a major part of this should be that the team members know each other at the level of motivation and purpose really well they need to understand the kind of values that they are guided by again not to use values for the sake of saying that all these are my values basically to have a conversation which might even be difficult to have but basically to say exactly the things that we were talking about that are you someone happy to take an idea forward without doing ethical considerations the other side of it is that you also know that a team might be comprising of two people who are very practical who want to get into the next part and get going there might be two people in that team who are very ethically conscious and they are so ethically conscious they are more like active with there is nothing that's moving forward in it because they are constantly posing an ethical question to it so how do you bring your balance you know like how much do you analyze how much do you frame problems how much do you spend time in backing your work with research and then when do you sort of decide that this is a point when we can stop it then move on maybe we can revisit it and understand these things are done within a group I think that you can come up with the best idea in over a weekend but that idea will definitely die down you will be very happy and think about it it's not going to go so I think I would say 15% of the time within a product team I would say before the complexity we can end when we are together in this immersive space they should outline all of these and say what work or doesn't work what kind of mechanism I would even even say something as simple as how do we keep in touch one of the things that I have noticed in my last one and half year experience since the pandemic had hit us all is how you keep in touch and in what form through what medium and what you are comfortable about makes our great relationship some people just feel so fatigued with screen that they just don't want to keep it up through a screen based thing you know some people want to see another person over a video for some other people that doesn't work so I don't think there should be any assumptions there should be absolute like you know a very important conversation I am being authentic about it that someone might say you know I know key base is amazing but I can say yes to it now but I am not the guy who is going to keep in touch through key base that's not my medium so one way is to say oh I am going to change the person's behaviour and say you have to be comfortable with key base the other way is to acknowledge that and say ok maybe we need to get on a call and see each other for example and talk through things you know when you have things written down they want to read that in advance think about it and then come for a meeting whereas some people writing is a big hindrance for them to get into anything they would like to first come ideate together whereas some people want to ideate alone and then come together right so I feel like some of these very important and very often overlooked things need to be taken into consideration and also to say who is the big idea person in your team who is the person who really gets into the detail and even to kind of take a check, really check whether your team is balanced if you have everybody in your team who have all come together for the fashion of the team but behaviour wise background wise, interest wise they are all very similar we need to figure out the way how to bring that balance right now once that is done and I would say the next thing is to sort of say that how do we move forward and I think there is no right and wrong answer but if you think that you are investing in wrong time into this how do we go about it so basically to create a team charter kind of a thing and in the team charter some things might say that we decide by this we can we need to think about one idea and then later on figure out the other thing some things might say you know our ideas are so ill-formed we have just come together maybe we are giving ourselves two months to even get into a properly framed idea but we still would continue to work on it right but what is going to be a disaster for a team is where one member is here to learn about complexity so even if you are getting into a funding zone they are still trying to learn complexity and there is no end to it they just want to acquire more and more knowledge around it one person in a team who only is interested in coming up with a solution they don't want to understand anything about it so having that and maybe identifying an internal facilitator within the team and that can also shift I would say but this team formation part I think is key to anything that that has been my experience otherwise ideas can come and go you can actually be hit with an amazing idea and refine it a little later but finding that common thing towards which you would be working and one of the things that I would also say that even though I must say that are we going to invest enough time in understanding people who are going to be impacted by what we are working on that is actually a very good thing that can bring people together you know so even in the past in complexity we can live stream and otherwise we are very often spoken about how if many people even if they don't know each other walk together towards the collective it works well because the moment you work based on a common idea already it creates conflict because you are only going to get people who are going to say yes to each other or people say I am only interested in biological sciences or sociology or something else so are we feeling that it's okay if five members of a team are interested thematically about many different things because they can find the commonality but they need to be able to articulate for themselves what is it that they are speaking out of it and that should be a filter to move forward. I've got a question just from all this discussion so I think you are outlining really interesting ideas of the balance between thinking versus doing and how like a team charter or maybe an internal facilitator could be a means of finding that balance but since we are all kind of thinking about complex systems and the connections between systems how do you balance overthinking on connectivity versus not enough connectivity? I think sometimes guidelines help like we were saying we don't want it to become a process which is templatized but there might be guidelines that we provide people that we want to not use in the process at all using our collective intelligence and thoughts around them we can think about like you have, Laisha Devi was talking about the team charter term to reference document for example can be something that can be extremely helpful to process like this so instead of letting of course we go to some level of you know hand holding we do with respect to team formation and we look at it on team base and other things so maybe there is a process that we can define and it is up to the members of the team about what they adapt from the process but at least there is a set of guidelines there is some kind of for wonderful better water framework which they can work with or work through and that kind of gives them some level of support even if we don't get to a level where an individual facilitator for some time works with the team in order to ensure that they are working towards the ultimate goal there can be a framework that they can use which we can develop for them which kind of comes in very handy for a process like this so not everything is intangible there are some tangible parts that would be great for them and then the majority of the team and the members they are often in order to take it forward from there you can even find something like a very often seen that you might be having a team of people who have come together they have shared purpose everything but their working styles are so different I think that's another thing one needs to have good clarity on how people work what are their personal working styles and preferences which could also include that some people in a team actually try when they take risks if you ask them to be in their comfort zone and work on something that's not enough for them some people they would say that I am not going to take risks over here and this is not for me to experiment I would rather be in my zone of comfort and I am going to do it well so that's also another value that needs to be brought in right I mean a concept very often that I bring into my work and I am sure many educators do bring in is the notion of zone of proximal development which we talked about right so how much are you making your task the task that you are taking for your team comfortable enough for you that you don't know that you get told that you stop working but how much challenge are you putting into the task that it actually makes you better so that the zone of proximal development is something that I think everybody has a different zone of proximal development and that is something for them to sort of figure out because unless and until that happens I feel that you know again this is where I would say that internal facilitation within team is important externally one can give you a canvas or a template or some guideline but what can be done is maybe we can talk about a few frames or few things that they think about but they need to come together maybe put it into writing you know sorry Dan I think you want to say something you know bringing in the external facilitator that's the honeybee okay you do that you do that and then withdraw and there's no endogenous support whereas we want to think through deep time and ask how can we each facilitate in our own way and each bring our own perspective so that that ecosystem is balanced so that when there is a perturbation and there will be perturbations there will be negative perturbations positive there will be ones that are positive like funding oh money's good keep thinking because it is sometimes certain types and so how can we make it so that we're planning for resilience and for anti-fragility and that's where we need a distributed facilitation concept and our facilitators lead by example and they work on teams but it's really something where it's like everybody is going to be playing a role because if there's somebody who's not playing an active role they're not going to feel included and they're not going to be included and they're not going to be contributing as much as they could yes yes absolutely any um in the last just a couple of minutes that you're on here Sudebian Pro Bowl okay there's a great question from Sid in the chat I know this could be a five hour question what books, movies and podcasts do Sudebian Pro Bowl recommend the most oh that's it's a very difficult question I mean I won't recommend any specific ones I mean I think that it's again something that in today's world I feel it's a skill that we need to own that we need to find our own interests and need to know where to find them and I'm sure most of us are spell-takers we were growing up people like us who have seen that transition neither old nor too young um I mean the role that we had I remember for a school project we had to figure out where to find something right and what to find so in a in an information rich world I think that's one of the biggest like skills one can hold how can you be self-directed what to take, how much to take and how much to reject you know I'm just not right and wrong on some I mean I can say that a podcast you know me brilliantly might absolutely not work for you so it depends on what you are speaking so I would actually put it back and say that maybe a process of saying what is it that I'm speaking to have my own trajectory and then finding you know the internet can be a space which is like a map but it can also be like a junkyard right if you are looking at it that way so you finding your own compass to navigate through that map what do you need to do you know yeah I think since we work with a lot of students and young professionals I think this is a very often posed question you know and I think probably for being radically about the hundred but I think you know this is also something which is a myth which has been propagated by people who gain from books and podcasts and other things and you know whoever has been an entrepreneur out here there is no you know one way from A to B or three ways from A to B I think it's like Shadee we were saying there is so much information now I think the role that we all have is how we synthesize the information it's not about where to look for the right which is the information any information can be good as long as you can synthesize it depending on your own needs and then go on and deal with it you know we when some of our student interns etc. come up to us for the same question we often tell them you know you can read a book but the books can be like the honey bees we were talking about you know then you know I feel great when I read it I feel great when I hear the podcast and then how do I get on with the rest of my life how do I actualize it with the knowledge converted to wisdom I think the wisdom is what we are looking at politics of knowledge as well and I would actually say that I met somebody very interesting a designer who actually said as he started working with people he started realizing he does a lot of work with children he realized the fallacy of his own education the fallacy of his own bookish knowledge and he thought that there is nothing that he thinks on his own everything is taken from some book or from someone else and you know he stopped reading book he actually said that in the last 10 years of his life consciously a person who was a big book lover he stopped reading books and he said I am only going to listen to people I am only going to observe people and see what I can think for myself so I know it's a very radical view but it really shook me to think about it how many people do we know who only focus on people who have read a lot so they are reading someone else's language can I think on my own and maybe say my experiential knowledge about people and my actual interactions with people that are informing what I know about the world so yeah awesome we are going to have facilitators Sid join Sudevi and Proball as always really awesome I know that you are going to be there in gather and just helping people get over that bump get over the team and just while Sid is joining Leon wrote a great point talk about how we need more folks to rise into the role of being chaos pilots my previous team at Singularity University tried to develop frameworks and guides around that that sounds pretty cool welcome Sid Sudevi and Proball you are welcome to hang out or you can just close the window yeah great to have you on oh Sid bye it's a cheap trick Sid what you have done do you want to say hi and introduce yourself and then we can go where we want to go yeah I saw a lot of books in their background so that was an obvious question for me to ask so yeah hi everyone I am Sid and the reason you see ants behind me is because my first name ends with an ant it suffixed by an ant so I am very fascinated by ants and I think you should see the full background by the way so so so yeah I think we were talking about two different things there one was funding and the second was how do we continue working in the metaverse so I think we can start from there whichever point we can branch out from perfect let's start with what is a metaverse and then maybe we'll bring it to the operations of funding later but what's a metaverse are we in it yeah I mean this is the metaverse where we are right now so I think a lot of us here might have some background in World of Warcraft or some games from that age like Second Life or someone who comes from a bulletin world system background like I was too young for BBS but I think there are a lot of people who adopted the cyberspace early on and all of them have been in the metaverse even if you were writing letters to your pen pals even before internet was invented you were living in some sort of metaverse which is not in your physical space so I was attending this conference from Stanford yesterday it's called redefining XR extended reality so this is the first time that a professor in that course is forced to offer an entire semester's worth of course on virtual reality so like 80s undergraduate students from Stanford all got an Oculus Quest headset and all of them will attend a virtual reality class in virtual reality so this is the metaverse that we are heading towards but in the broader sense anything besides the physical space can be classified as a metaverse cool so how do we connect that metaverse idea to I guess our day-to-day or hour-to-hour here in complexity weekend I think we have been in the metaverse for many months through key base and I think the hard lead is a good way to continue living in that metaverse so the metaverse is always driven by the community so like every decentralized structure like complexity weekend still needs some sort of centralized scaffolds like the organizers to keep the metaverse sane and to keep it organized so that we can have organized chaos later on so that's why I think we need the health of the metaverse depends on the participation in the metaverse cool um maybe let's go to that funding point then because you mentioned quadratic funding and for those who have been in academia or traditional venture capital or some other area is that linear funding or what is quadratic about this digital funding and then how could it play into a distributed community of practice like ours so this is a field that is fairly new both in the world and it's even newer to me like there's so much happening in the world of crypto and crypto economics these days that it's hard to be on top of those things but I think Kristoff gave a talk on token engineering and he had a model for funding which included quadratic funding so the difference between linear funding which is prominent in academia that there's a central funding source and that trickles down to the people who need that funding has been very popular and it's a very robust mechanism in some organized systems but when you have a distributed community you cannot expect a veil so in funding terms a veil is a person with the highest bag of available funding resources so when you have a community you can expect to have contributions from lots of different individual members of the community and those contributions don't add up linearly they instead are matched with an equivalent amount from a veil so if all three of us contribute one dollar the total contribution in a quadratic funding scenario would be much greater than three dollars because a funding veil would be funding exponentially more with each added participant to that funding pool so this model has been very popular in open source software development so that's why I pasted that link to get coin many open source projects there have been successfully funded through quadratic funding so I'm not sure if we can share the screen right now but we can also have we can also have our own yeah I'll try sharing my screen to get coin one second go for it yeah so okay can you see it? okay so yeah that's the difference between quadratic funding so firstly we were talking about competition and scarcity of resources in that talk so funding is most prominent when it comes to public goods so public goods is something like a complexity weekend like we are not fighting for resources we are collaborating so when it comes to funding public goods quadratic funding is a very good idea there so I think complexity weekend is along these lines open source free education and free services so we depend on so if some project requires funding it's a good idea to do it quadratically because the formula that's used we will not go into the exact formula of funding but this is the difference that quadratic funding makes so if this slide is visible to all of us you can look at the column number C and see that if you have 20 contributors instead of 5 or 2 contributors the total funding amount can be the same but the matched amount and the percentage return that you get on the funding can be at least 6 to 7 times 5 to 7 times of your original linear funding source so column A is representative of research grants in academia whereas column C is more representative of quadratic funding and community projects so this is Gitcoin so yeah any open source contributor can contribute here so we can have for example a complexity we can collection here and present different projects there and just they have funding pools available from time to time we can explore one of these grants and see if that helps in funding the community so all of this is okay I'll stop sharing the screen once again just a quick fractal yeah that sounds awesome it might be a good thing to actually make a team on here and it's a great example of why we can't just pitch on Friday and deliver on Sunday because many people might be hearing about this idea for the first time and think yeah we're not going to finish the collection we're not going to finish the idea today but heartbeat to heartbeat is very powerful especially if we could be developing an open source stack for example many tools have already come out of complexity weekend like dentropy daemon and the ability to interface with Keybase but to work towards a distributed community stack and complexity and accessibility throughout would be something very powerful and something that I hope a lot of people would be wanting to do and we can all contribute in different ways like someone might want to be leading that sort of financial side and then also anybody who wants to contribute their time and attention which is truly priceless can help co-organize and help catalyze those teams so it's like do you want to be in that team or do you want to be at a level above that team helping that team form yeah Sean and then said anything else I think this all these points about funding are really interesting and I do think there is a team there if anyone is interested we can think about these ideas and how to maybe implement them and spread them out over the monthly heartbeats and allow the teams to kind of step up into that funding in the time that makes sense to really have everything considered that needs to be before the funding is actually grabbed I actually want to take the conversation back to the metaverse point I'm curious if you have any advice for teams especially global remote teams that are coming out of complexity weekend like events what should they consider while they are generating their own metaverses yeah so as much as possible that they can work in a physical space I would highly recommend it even though most of us spend a lot of time in the cyberworld because I don't think anything beats physical connection so especially in the context of multi-team so I can narrate one experience from my life where such kind of a weekend had a major impact so I think weekends like this in the metaverse or in the physical space can be summarized by a quote from Lennon which says there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen so so first such weekend in my life was a design innovation workshop by MIT media lab so that was when I was in my third year and the whole team of 60 to 100 people from MIT flew down to India and they just rented an entire college campus and divided us into like 10 different tracks from synthetic biology to designing sensors across scales to like smart textiles and all sorts of emerging technology projects and also public policy and civil design so what was special to me about that was there was no scarcity of resources they managed to get a whole boatload of hardware and funding resources from there and they managed to ensure that whatever hardware component we needed we had access to that and as a beginner you look up to these resources if you are in an environment of scarcity you won't be able to innovate so I think projects even in the metaverse also sometimes die out because of a lack of time or lack of resources of any kind so some sort of support from be it attention or time or mentorship is very important in the metaverse and the second thing that I learned in that particular workshop was they made teams and they ensured that there were different people it's a fine member team there should be an electrical engineer there should be a designer there should be a computer scientist and one more person from a business or management background and it was interesting to see that after a week of exploring together all these roles were flipped like the computer science guy was doing business stuff the business guy was starting to program things and I think that was very important like each one of them are leaders in their own fields but when they work together all of the rising tide lifts all the boats together so I think that's very important in complexity weekend as well because we all have different XP points whatever gaming metaphor you want to put there all of us have different experience points in different fields but when we work together in a team the experience just quadratically increases and helps the entire project but it does require a lot of funding in terms of time money and resources now the specifics of the metaverse we started from it can be a simple google docs document no tech a simple google docs document and getting the basic idea out there can be one of the biggest steps in getting the basics of the project right after that you can start exploring tools like spatial or different metaverse tools like VR chat or jitsi or whatever tool you want to collaborate on gather is a very good example and application of many people working together so that is the second part and third is the actual development part I think that happens on platforms like github when it comes to software projects about other projects there are alternatives to github which I think we can get into cool said thanks we'll ask one more question here and then we'll bring up the jam board and try to bring this to the team formation stage so you talked about the co-location and also about some of these tools that might exist for working remotely you've worked on the cyber physical in many capacities so when we're dealing with teams where there's differences and the tools that they're using like how do we take all of those differences in our character class in our experience levels whatever is in our bag I mean how can we just know that we're showing up for each other as humans but also that there's a task to be done it's an infinite mystery but I'd love your insights here and also how can it be secure yeah it's an infinite mystery with a surprisingly simple answer just have a messaging app messaging group in a messaging app like telegram or discord or whatsapp something that does not require extra steps to set up like most of my collaborative projects happen on telegram and I think half of the crypto community is collaborating on telegram so even if I could extend that to say most government work or most organizations now are shifting to discord and telegram especially in the cyber physical space so just becoming friends in that telegram group or that whatsapp group is the first basic step to do anything substantial in their projects cool so I'm going to share or use keybase just use keybase if you're cared about privacy if you care what future platforms could exist what's on the horizon in the next few years that teams could look forward to because sometimes it's dismaying to see that each platform is engineering to build walls each platform telegram discord they've all added their own video chat features rather than allowing for interoperability so we heard from Dave Snowden about connecting silos but that's not the way that platforms are developing how can we make sure that we're developing towards a future where that might be possible and what might be possible then I think we did see that we are using for this live stream is a very good example of that that's an open source application I think which will be supported by many different applications later on but these platforms keep evolving like it's a complex web of messaging applications out there so I think all of us need to keep evolving with them so there's no other way like we were on IRC a few decades before internet relay chats then those are still alive but we can't expect all people right now to join an internet relay chat so these platforms have to evolve and people have to evolve with these platforms so as of 2021 Telegram is a good option if you're not overly concerned about privacy because it supports a lot of human communication and it's very easy to set up cool I shared the Jamboard link in the live chat and so we're going to first just go to the 13th slide where we're looking at another colony of ants as they are helping each other map the gap helping each other over that team registration form barrier and the link will also be posted but Sean what would you like to head over to the Jamboard? Let's start on 13 and just kind of articulate the team registration form and maybe just jump into that formal quick and give it an overview. This is really the key moment right now where we need to be identifying everyone in the cohort who wants to be on a team matching them to a team that is open to new members or help them start a team and we need to fill out this form so that if your team wants to again your team can stay completely off the grid if you'd like but if you want to signal the complexity weekend that you'd like support from facilitators and in helping you find your shared purpose and have team longevity after the weekend this is the way to signal that so Dan maybe walk through that for a second and then maybe we'll go to slide 14 sorry slide 16 after. So just to walk through really the required question is just your email we just want to make sure that we're going to be able to be in contact with you and there's something that as organizers we get we get to know that you did make it happen as a team we get to stay in contact with you but also you'll see that some of these questions they're optional but they're conversation topics for you to get at with your team so we ask about the team name we ask about the current people on your team with first name and a key base identity which is a nice piece of key base that you can make multiple key base identities and switch between them quite easily so you can have some identities that are very connected to your real world you know legal name straw man etc and then you can have other identities that are very private and we hope that will facilitate a lot of kinds of collaboration and then any email addresses for people who would like to be contacted we then ask if the teams interested in having their name on a co-working space and gather and remember the weekend kind of never ends because for those who you meet in the cohort you're always going to have access to that gather space and it's going to be 24 seven it's like a no-host co-working space so you can always just pop back in there and then if you want to include people who weren't in the cohort in the team eventually which is totally a great thing and many teams have done that then make your own gather space make your own key base team just clone off the stack that we're using and you'll have familiarity with the tools already so we're not just onboarding you to these tools for those of you who are unfamiliar so that we can see you there it's actually so you can make the best of it and then if you go okay I understand why they did this but I think there's a better tool great iterate on it for your own teams and then give us feedback so that we can improve our stack as well here's a question what's a question or issue your team will be addressing so I'll pass it to Sid how do we come to a question or a problem framing that is in that sweet spot of motivational exciting tractable plausible specifying a deliverable or not like how do we navigate all the possible ways that we could frame the question because we know that so much of the project is actually in that framing so how do we converge even just on a first draft of that sort of question yeah I think there needs to be that initial spark that brings those people together so for example think Dan started an explore genomics sub channel so just getting those initial seed of people four or five people is very important to just even start exploring that question so so yeah I think first you need those critical mass of at least two to three people to get those things started and it's something we've heard from Sudavi and Proball from you from a lot of other facilitators which is almost like focus on the connection getting into the chat thread figuring out how you're going to stay in touch and then let that be your trampoline so that whenever you you can bounce back on that whereas if you don't connect no matter how cool the question it is you're just going to get lost in the movement of the metaverse but when you're connected then the question can change and we've seen teams more from topic to topic and from an initial idea of the direction to another idea later on ask about how complexity informs your team's approach and again I'm just curious Sid in your work or in all of these projects that you're involved in or aware of how does complexity inform your team's approach especially when you might be working with some people who are very familiar with complexity and others who are learning by doing at the very introductory phases so I think my brief chat with Shirley comes to mind so we were just discussing that applied complexity is just applied curiosity so you don't need to think of it from a lens of complexity or learn the hundreds of models of complexity and organization and chaos that are out there like whatever you're curious about I'm pretty sure complexity has a metaphor for that so just start with that and I'm pretty sure a complexity enthusiast will find a way to connect it to some concept and complexity nice answer applied curiosity applied simplicity, applied pragmatism these are all things that we can have under a banner of complexity as a keyword we then ask for your team's key base name and this is going to be a new feature in key base for some people to go to the teams tab and then create a team but that's how you actually form that shared identity key base teams can have people be added and removed so again you're not locked in stone but then you're going to be able to have sub channels so we kind of hold it first as a sub channel on our cohort team like project and then an animal name or something like that but eventually when you break off to your own key base team then you can have a channel of papers funding opportunities questions ways that you can then go into your own homestead your own farm and build that out the way you want to see it Sean I think this is the great inception of complexity weekend I think whenever we have the complexity weekend event is all this pre-weekend we've been doing and getting people trained up on key base and gather and asynchronous and synchronous in this kind of metaverse that we've learned to use over the weekend this team registration form is a mitosis event where you basically have your own cell with the same exact tech stack that we've all become familiar with and that is now your team's initial tech stack and it doesn't have to be the one your team always uses it's just we're all on the same page at this moment in time on this metaverse once you just take a fork a copy of that have a copy for your team and you can start those conversations with a stable metaverse maybe you can say that and then evolve from there maybe you decide you do want to go discord and use primarily google docs whatever that ends up being we're at least familiar as participants in complexity weekend with this stack and it's immediately transferable to your team nice we ask just a yes no other are you open to having new team members join over the weekend or after really because we know that not everyone's awake at each moment and people might not realize that a team is open but for teams that signal that they're open to having new members we really appreciate that so much because that reflects you stepping into the gap and allowing other people to rally around your pheromone signal so if you're on the kind of early adopter side of that team formation curve we encourage you to promote accessibility and then if you're on that follower ant side of the curve just know that there's other teams that are going to be stepping across just like the bridge that you're seeing behind SID and it's um you couldn't have that bridge if there was just one ant so you need to have multiple perspectives we're not all going to jump on to the dance floor the same moment but you know if it's a song you like go for it and then stay on for the song that you don't like and just consider deep time again right denture gaming is a team that came out of October but they've signaled they want new teammates and that uh you know they're here now in this cohort and they've added people to the team that I just saw yesterday so it's this is an ongoing thing and it's between every six month weekend hackathon and every monthly heartbeat this is the and if you signal this and you can always change it and close the system that's totally fine but if you signal it's open well there's lots of opportunities for new people to find out about your team and join it over to you to get the skills you may need to expand into yep thanks Sean SID yeah like talking about deep time you can also be ants on because deep time is I think where most projects the longevity of those projects is decided so so yeah I would like to pose a question to both of you guys so it's a hypothetical scenario if you had a choice between unlimited attack points versus unlimited defense points which one would you choose? my first answer is I'll take which everyone Sean doesn't take I was going to take attack so you can have defense what makes you ask or what do you think that dichotomy a fun but false dichotomy offers what does it signal about that is it our stance towards skill or what does it mean it offers a different and on the team you might want people who have both I think my voice is chopping up but if you can hear me clearly yeah I got you try refreshing state I think the longevity of the project is decided okay I'm going to talk for a second about why I chose attack I think my philosophy is you can stay ahead of the chaos if you are creating it best offense is a good defense best defense is a good offense that's sort of the non-duality of attacking defense and also defense is active in the sort of fortress metaphor let's get those walls short up let's make sure that we're defending as well as we can but then in active and in distributed environments you actually need to have active defenses and so it's almost like when we're in a swarm setting attack and defense start mixing with each other yeah welcome back to it yeah so I was getting to a point about anti fragility and that's when my internet connection went off so that's the irony of the situation but the point I'm trying to make the point I was trying to make is that the longevity of the projects is most of the time decided by the indestructibility of the project so while you might have someone with a lot of attack points or a lot of enthusiasm at this point in time what sustains the project through deep time is having at least two members who are ensuring that the project is in it for the long haul so the reason I say this is because if you take any kingdom in history or any long surviving organization in history they survived not because of unlimited attack points they survived because they were virtually indestructible they ensured that they were indestructible like you can for a modern example you can take bitcoin for example there were multiple competitors or alternatives to bitcoin but it was designed to be indestructible so if you are a character which can not be killed you just need to learn the new tools and then you are as good as your opponents but if you have unlimited attack points all it needs to kill that team is just one single point of failure or one weakness and that could be in a team setting that could be like everyone is busy with their own lives so the project just dies out or there is no heartbeat session so they have no incentive to work ahead on that project so you need some sort of anti fragility in the sense of in the sense of prolonging the project in defense great points and also what you said about having like two or more people who will totally hold it down we found that to be really critical in several places where like two people entering a team who are actually friends they side channel, they talk in a different capacity that stabilizes it's like a party where ten people who don't know each other okay it might work it might not but if five couples come together then you have a sort of multi-level stability that can keep because it's built upon lower level connections that are not contingent upon the success of the higher level project it actually allows the project to be successful in a different way so back to the form please providing five key words or phrases describing the problem tools or ways you're approaching the problem and then the second question is provide up to five key words or phrases by the problem and to me this is almost like academia and research versus industry and application because a lot of times when we approach things as theoretical we might be curious about the problem statement or the ways we're going to approach it that's like a regular grants application but when we think about the stakeholders and the impact on the system it's not always considered in research questions so this is sort of a two-stroke engine with learning and doing we want to be thinking about what we're going to be doing as a team and the ways that we're framing the problem but it's not just about our team's internal understanding of the problem it really is important to be considering the stakeholders and these are some of the people and some of the groups that you might want to get in contact with as soon as possible because it's their input that will help you calibrate the project we also ask about the ecosystem that your problem is embedded with in and about a few words to speak a little bit about the attitude and orientation that your team is going to be taking so those are questions about like what your team's perspective is how is complexity coming into play just what is the question at this early snapshot stage so for people who think that oh we don't have enough time to come up with five words okay now just imagine that there's other weekends where they want you to have the final version done we're asking for just the v1 v0.1 release draft candidate whatever you need to put on it so that you just go for it instead of second guessing it being final because don't worry it's not here's where we get to some logistical details for the weekend we ask which representatives if any will be available at 2300 UTC so it's like I think 4pm pacific on Sunday during the closing ceremony live stream we invite you to either record a video so that we can play it lag free and so you can get multiple drafts on the video we'll play your video right on the stream or you can come on the live stream to give the presentation but that might be a little bit choppier just to be fair and then also if we play the video we can still have you on to ask some questions and this is where even if you're the only person on your team you can make that presentation and everybody is going to be watching that so it's a great opportunity whether you have one two three ten people on your team you're going to build momentum and you're going to build documentation when you give that presentation and then if somebody tomorrow morning or next week says what did you do what happened you can give the time stamp to what you had done with your team and again it's just going to be a draft no one's going to say you know we got together we it was amazing we had three days to work and then we're done no we're not setting up for that so you don't have to even frame it that way we then ask whether and also nobody will ever be required or forced to present on a live stream or to be publicly associated with the project that they don't want to be seen as working with so it's all opt in with the projects and it's also opt in with how you want to represent yourself as being associated with the project make sure to express that clearly with your team and that's part of that communication and the consent on the project understanding amongst the team members and the motivations if someone says look I want to do this and I have five hours a week but it can't be outside of this team that I'm working on this that's fine working out with your team sit yeah I want to come back to the metaverse point of this because some people may not want to share their public identity so the one place where metaverse is really shine is where you can be pseudonymous like you have a pseudonym or you can be anonymous like you do not want to reveal even your pseudonym so I think pseudonymous contributions have been gaining a lot of recognition and in the future that we are going towards I think pseudonyms will know people by their pseudonyms and that's already beginning to start through twitter like most of the twitter influencers are essentially just pseudonyms we do not know who the person behind it even the creator of bitcoin the team behind bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto Nakamoto is a pseudonym so I think if that's what if that's the style you prefer it's okay to be a pseudonymous contributor as long as the project moves forward some amazing collaborations I've begun connecting with somebody not using my real identity and I would never say something that was unkind even under a false identity or not quite a transparent identity because if you do continue that relationship it may come to a point where you do reveal so you kind of got to commit are you going to never reveal this identity or are you going to act consistent with your broader self so that it could be revealed but just keep in mind that tangled web of identity and there's a lot of probably a lot more that we can all add on that but it's something that I think we'll all be experimenting with in the coming years we then ask whether your team wants any help recording videos so my facilitated session is about teaching you two different ways using Jitsie and as well as using OBS for a little bit more customizability so that you can record your own video and that's a really great skill to have because being able to record presentations is something that not every single person in the community needs but if we have a critical density of 25% of people then for any given team of 4 to 6 someone's going to be there to help take that team to the next level and again that's if you want to be playing a video during the live stream we just ask whether you're already working with any facilitators which are just people who are there to help you and then we also ask whether there are particular facilitators with a skill set you'd like us to introduce ourselves to any stakeholders that we can introduce you to to help you make some initial connections because there's a lot of people who are from all over the world so many different sectors how do individual teammates learn I'll just get to the end and then Sean and then a question chat we also have a supporter which is Wolfram and if your team is interested in well first off everyone who's here at the weekend has access to Wolfram for a short period of time and just go to the explore Mathematica channel if you're curious about that but also we can up to five very generous licenses so if your team is even curious about applying this it would really honor our supporter and be a great catalysis for you as a team to use this and then we just have any feedback any questions at all so Sean and then I'll ask a very nice question from chat actually ask the question from chat I want to go to the team co-working site and talk about my point great so the question is tell me why you feel the need for false identities Sid what would you say to that or I'll give a thought I think a false I won't call it a false identity I'll call it an alternative identity so if you have a public image and you can explore other areas of life by having an alternative identity so for example if my day job is in cyber security and I want to explore another field in arts all together and I don't want these two areas of life to intersect so I can just create another identity and live another life essentially so I think it just opens up your possibilities to explore more areas and also like start afresh like start from a clean slate and like just see how people react to it and you can always switch to another identity if that's not working out so it just frees you from the burden of connecting your work with your identity so anything that frees up that burden is a good thing in my books a few other points and then we'll go back to the Jamboard Sean so associating your real name with your online activity is sometimes awesome like documenting so that people can find you contact you great but a lot of times you might not want in open spaces your identity to be known you might not want to be having some text messages associated to you not because you're saying something impolite but it's just the context you never know who's watching and there always is watching and also like if people can see your name they may do like searching on you so that may put certain people in certain situations at risk but even if it's not at risk if someone is going to say oh well okay I'm talking to an insect PhD it's like no no no don't worry you're bringing preconceptions about what a PhD is or what entomologists study so just I just might want to interact with somebody as you know ant love or 21 or something like that it's just a fun way to share the energy that I would want to bring in a way where there aren't preconceptions and where it can't necessarily be tracked as easily to someone's real identity because finding people's identity and connecting the dots with where they live and all this other information it's too easy and so adding a few opaque screens that you're in control of gives you a tremendous sense of agency when you're online because it's like yeah I can go into my virtual box on my operating system login to this key base account which has never been connected to anything in my friend it has just totally separate and then I'm going to be learning in a different area so it's not for everybody but it's something that people can be aware of and it's a new opportunity in terms of like the last couple of years and that's kind of the metaverse so let's jump back to the Jamboard so Sean which slide would you like to go to 14 alright so here we are on 14 with the team co-working slides describe what this is so one of the questions in the team registration form was let us know if you want connection to any stakeholders or any first customer you know and what this really means is if you think you're developing a product or service that you ultimately want people to pay for which is great sustainability all that is awesome you're going to need somebody to be your first customer and that doesn't actually mean that usually doesn't mean they're actually more of a partner they're more of somebody who's going to work with you to figure out how to make your product and service actually marketable to the next customer so that's kind of a certain particular role that many in our cohort could probably connect you to so this team co-working space is a specific space when you registration form you're going to get one of these if you choose and it's to the right of the cafe and gather and some unique properties of this co-working space are you know you get your own shared whiteboard for shared drawing or shared documentation I would copy that into a more permanent persistent Google Doc or something just to make sure it doesn't get lost ever but it's just a fun way to kind of collaborate it's you got your own private space you're going to be around all the other teams so it's easy to collide as everyone's starting to work on their presentation stuff getting ready for Sunday but the thing I really want to articulate right now is that green phone tile and this is an external call block and it's actually using a platform called Jitsie which we're using right now to record this live stream it's the same thing that's actually in the studio and how we will encourage teams to record using this platform but in this instance in the team co-working space we're trying to leverage this technology to easily connect your team to anyone outside the cohort so if you are working on understanding for instance like how a hospital you know is resilient under the pandemic or just whatever your topic may be it's important to root any problem you're defining or any solution you're mapping out to stakeholders in the system people with lived experience in that system that you may not have coming from whatever background or perspective you're in so if you are wanting some connection put that in the team registration form and organize or a facilitator we will search our network and try to find somebody today that your team can press X on that call block you'll open up a Jitsie window it's just a browser based video chat we pass that same URL to the external person and boom you're interfacing in the video chat and now getting invaluable feedback for your team so that's something I would really stress today and I'll be posting about in Keybase and trying to facilitate for anyone who answers that question with a desire for it yeah that's the only point there do you want to maybe go to 16 and we'll move from there sounds good here we are on 16 so it asks are you looking for team members and I'm going to make it a little bit bigger so we can read it and there's two sides here in this distributed marketplace little d5 for teams we have on the left side our team is missing the following perspectives skill sets or disciplines and so these are posted notes where take a look at them and if you resonate with that if you think that's me or I know somebody who that could be even if they're outside of our cohort remember the gather and the key base stay for our cohort but once you make a new gather space once you have a new key base team or once you use a different platform just it's all good complexity weekend is something you can do again and again but your team has its own vitality and direction outside of our direction or jurisdiction I guess so include anyone else who you see fit to include on your team but on the left side you can see and add post it's related to teams that are actively looking for something specific and then on the right side we see awesome post it's I want to join a team so for people who are wondering how can I join a team or how can we start one it's like if you see one of these post it's on the right side which are connected with the key base identity then message that person or tag them in a channel because they're on key base they're here right now they're using our shared documents and they want to join a team so it's the best way that we can support each other in a distributed way is when somebody kind of gives that bid they say hey I am interested in governance I'm interested in socio-technical systems I'm interested in humor and complexity let's support each other by joining that way sit yeah I know that this is not a hackathon but there are certain models in hackathons which I think we can borrow from which are probably very successful so the idea of pivoting to a different idea like a different idea all together is very useful because from all the hackathon experience that I have we have pivoted at least three times before finalizing on the ultimate pitch that we give and the reason we were able to pivot is that an expert just came to our discussion table and just proved to us that this idea won't work out so I think if in the complexity we can model if some experts in complexity or some enthusiasts can just help the different teams out by periodically checking on them I think that will help them realize the end goal for their idea and help them pivot to a different idea if needed yep and that's a big point of that team form because we're going to check in with you once in a while and say hey I don't know if you saw this but there is a heartbeat in three weeks you know the RSVP is here could we do anything to help your team succeed do you want to have a five minute spotlight talk where you just say hey we had a lot of fun over the weekend so we haven't met because it's been busy times but we are still interested we have a meeting time in two weeks so if anyone wants to join that's all it has to be nobody is judging or holding us to a standard of productivity this is all opt in and so these are the people who you can contact and for those of you who are not watching this live you're watching it in replay again the Jamboard is accessible for you as well so how can we include many time zones and many perspectives with transparent communication like this so that people know how to contact otherwise it's going to be like the missed connection section on Craigslist anything else to add there Sean or what do you want to do here I just posted in general in Keybase so this Jamboard this entire Jamboard is the same Jamboard we've used for all the middle live streams and in the program we actually link the URL right next to the live streams so it's successful to everyone you know return to this look at this this is a resource and even if you're watching this live stream after the fact even if it's two months from now the actual weekend come back and check in and see if you know reach out to people on Keybase and have Keybase and see if that's still the case if they're interested in working on X or Y or if you're a team seeking Z that's something that we can show up for each other using tools like this cool do you want to stay on 16 or do you want to go to another slide let's go 17 alright so 17 is zooming out one level from the teams to the next level up which is the community so we have this multi-level nesting individuals and then you have relationships teams projects and then the community and so the community support again with the two sides what can you provide and what are you looking for this is where we can just like a community message board let each other know what we're looking for and what we can provide and that's just an opportunity for saying well I didn't even know about this skill before the weekend but now I'm looking for somebody who could help me teach it or this is a skill that's really obvious and everybody has it in my day job but I'm seeing that there are people who could learn in this community this skill or another thing is several people had pointed out like how can we connect people who have generalist skill sets to specialist skill sets so if you can offer feedback say I'm just a person who's learning complexity if you want to use me as a sounding board I'm available for that or I'm looking for somebody to run my ideas by those are incredibly important and special roles and it's the attention that's so valuable so if you want to be providing feedback or you're looking for feedback then definitely you can put it here so while people are adding yes okay Sean you added Barbara's question so how can you tell an identity you're interacting with isn't a Russian bot I usually don't cast shade or dispersion on any national identity but what do you think about that Sean? I was actually going to direct that to Sid I was curious if you have any strategies there just about in this kind of metaverse space where the identities you're not sure exactly if they are what they're saying or if it's an alternative identity or any of this how do you navigate that what information do you process to kind of make decisions in that space I mean there are two ways to look at it either you can go full on game theory with it and see who is winning in that situation or there's just an intuitive aspect to it so as long as you are docs resistant like nobody can docs you or find your pseudonymous identity on the internet you are safe so in that situation you have to just focus on your own identity and not worry about the other person's identity it may very well be a bot and that may not be even a bad thing like most of the interactions in the future will be bots and humans working together so we have to be prepared for that scenario can you elaborate what that means to focus on your identity in that relationship yeah so if you have your public identity online then obviously you have to be relatively more careful I don't think that's an issue we have to worry about in complexity weekend because we all know each other and we are comfortable sharing our cameras and microphones so it becomes a concern when you are working on collaborative open source software development or anything involving large groups of people so if you are involved in communities which appreciate anonymity like the crypto community is an example of that most people prefer to be pseudonymous or anonymous there then it's a wise move to be pseudonymous yourself because otherwise you will have people reaching out to you privately and asking for favors or something similar so yeah just play by the community's rules in complexity weekend we are okay with sharing our public identities as they are well a few points on that we never can really know for example there are people in the keybase who never posted anything and may have joined gather or may not have joined gather so we truly don't know and when I look at this question how do we know someone is a Russian bot I kind of think it's like insert country of your choice because there's many countries and just someone's citizenship or background is never enough to simply know and also as you pointed out Sid it's never enough to know if somebody is on the continuum from natural human to human using like a translate which could be an accessibility issue to somebody who's deployed a series of total text bots so on that continuum I think you know if somebody has deployed a bot that promotes accessibility and complexity education and learning by doing what else do we need to know their contributions to the commons are positive so it's like it's something where we want to be careful what information we're sending out and being aware that even though Keybase is like end to end encrypted there might be identities in Keybase that can be taking screenshots or can be pulling information and so it's always a very delicate dance but that's actually where we come to know ourselves perhaps the most is when we're investigating those things because it really refocuses on the information we put out there and on how we evaluate someone's contributions whatever their background and then whether it's a bot or a human Sid? one last point on that I would say focus on the idea and not the person because people are just embodiments of ideas or ideas are like people are physical embodiments of ideas so just we are just ideas in the physical form so just focus on the idea if it's coming from a bot then it's then just accept it for what it is if it's a good idea it will survive the evolutionary process so just focus on the ideas more than the identity of the person creating that idea cool so that brings us to the end of this live stream Sid thanks so much for joining that was super interesting to hear your thoughts and thanks again to Sudebi and Probal for joining earlier let's continue this discussion we'll see you on gather and let's as we head into the last third here let's get some teams registered so if you're not registered on a team get active on gather and in the I need a team channel on Keybase and we're going to be there to help you so thanks again and we'll see you soon