 Yeah, so the theme of the day is economy. And I thought I would just come up here and basically tell you a story about my journey with that concept of economy. So in 2008, the world around me was crumbling. And I didn't even realize. I remember coming downstairs one morning in my flat in South London and my flatmate, this guy from Australia, who worked in banking, was just sort of sitting at the kitchen table staring at his half-buttered toast with his glowing phone in his hand. And he said, northern rot, bank failed. And I had no idea what that really meant. I didn't understand that that was, in many ways, the beginning of the financial crisis, which was going to just unfold and this crumbling around me. So I just left the house. I got on the train and I went to my own job in the financial sector in the city of London. I worked at a company that was a provider of high-speed financial data to sort of the whole global financial sector. And our office was just around the corner from the neoclassical buildings of the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange and around the corner from these huge steel and glass skyscrapers of the biggest banks in the world. And you come in the office and there's like fish tanks everywhere and neon light sculptures. It was basically like working in a nightclub except everybody wore suits and wasn't having as much fun. But yeah, it was, I never expected to work in the financial sector. I was raised in California by hippies. My degrees are in arts and Asian studies. And yeah, I didn't have this aspiration to work in finance, but they needed somebody who was fluent in Japanese and knew about computers, so that was me. I worked on the IT, sort of the IT side of the systems. Yeah, so I was a weird fit for a corporate hierarchy. It had been a really strange fit, not really in my last job, which was as a civil servant working for the government of Japan. And in that job, I drove my boss crazy coming up with all these ideas and new initiatives. And that is not what your middle management boss in local government wants to hear. And in this job, the same thing was happening. I was driving my boss crazy with these ideas, new ideas and initiatives. My boss was this guy named Paul. He was sort of like a kind of overweight, middle-aged guy, lumbering dude who would sort of slump in his chair and just be like browsing eBay all day long. And Paul was not interested in my ideas. Paul liked to keep things simple. Paul did not like change. But I just felt like, yeah. I just felt like I had this little flame inside me for wanting to make a difference, wanting to care about what I was doing and do something meaningful in my work. And I looked around me and I saw that things could be better and I wanted it to happen. But in that system, the only place for my ideas to go was to Paul, and that's where ideas went to die. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that little flame inside Paul had kind of gone out. Yeah. And so I was like surrounded in this company. The system of the company was all around me, but it was like I couldn't really touch it. I couldn't change it. I couldn't do anything with it. One day we got a message that a VIP was gonna come visit our floor. And so we were told to like wear our best business clothes and the fish tanks were all polished and yeah. And he came and it was the COO. It was the Chief Operations Officer of the whole company coming in from headquarters in New York. And he was like wearing a really sharp suit and had a toothpaste commercial smile and really looked like a corporate executive. And I was prepared to not like this guy. I, or at least to feel like he was literally from a different planet. But when he actually started talking, he talked to our department and as he spoke, I realized like actually, I think this guy kind of understands me. He's kind of on my wavelength. His name was Ken and Ken really believed that the company was there to do something, that we were all there to use the resources of a company to the best of our ability and that the company went to lots of trouble to hire smart people and lots of expense and that they weren't supposed to be put in a box with nowhere to grow. And I resonated with that. So I just wrote him an email. And I was like, hi, Ken, I'm Alana. You don't know me, but I've got lots of ideas. And I think that other people in this company do too. Yeah, because what I realized is like, he understood that way of thinking that he just couldn't hear us. He wasn't connected to us. He couldn't connect to those things. And he wrote me back and he was like, great, let's have a call. So I like, I logged off the phones and I get on to go to get this conference call and Paul comes over like, what are you doing? I get back on the phones and I was like, oh, it's cool. I'm just having a conference call with the COO. A bit of hierarchy hacking, what was he gonna do? And so Ken and I started working together and what we created was something we called the ideas market, which is like an internal system where employees could go in and post up their ideas and comment on each other's ideas and vote on them. And the top ideas would be picked up sort of every month by management and implemented. And that was cool. You know, it was like seeing like, oh yeah, all these other people around me are, they have their own little flames and can hear about that. So I was put on sort of the management track and I was made a team leader and sort of started climbing the ladder. Meanwhile, things were crumbling around me in this system. I would sit at my, this console with like, four screens with just huge amounts of data flowing by and news tickers and graphs and huge sums of money being moved from one place to the other. But it was really felt unreal. It was like the matrix was something like, it was all around me, but I could not touch it and I didn't really understand it, but kept hearing about how things were all going wrong and when I would go downstairs down the escalator past the neon sculptures out the glass doors, there were people like emerging from these skyscrapers with cardboard boxes and they were being made redundant and I was getting, it was getting a bit more real. One day I was walking back to the office after buying lunch and suddenly there were just like a lot of people around me and I found myself just in this big throng of people on the street. And then I couldn't, suddenly I couldn't keep going. I couldn't get out. I realized there were barricades and the police were surrounding us and I had wandered into the G20 protests in 2009 because they were outside my office. And the police were using this technique called kettling which I think has since been made illegal where they surrounded like 5,000 people and wouldn't let them out and wouldn't let them have access to food and water and just to basically shut down the protest. And just right near where I was standing, this guy, a 47 year old newspaper vendor named Ian Tomlinson was batonned by the police. I mean, he wasn't even there to protest but he was batonned by the police and he died because they wouldn't let him have medical attention. That was really real. And I, you know, I go back to my office and I think that kind of sparked what had been a growing realization that I was climbing this ladder but I looked ahead of myself and I saw that no matter how far up it I climbed there was nowhere up there I wanted to go. Because at the end of the day, no matter how well I did my job or how much I improved things, ultimately what I was doing, if I did my job well was moving numbers from one column to another column and it was meaningless. At this company when you quit, you're not allowed to talk to anybody and you're not allowed to say goodbye and they have a policy that anybody who quits is never allowed to come work there again. So as I was being like the security guard was leading me by the elbow to the door. Paul came sort of lumbering up to me and I raised my eyebrows because he wasn't supposed to talk to me like I was put on an ungrotta at this point but he said, it's too bad, we had high hopes for you. I don't know, that was a surprise, I didn't know he felt that way but it was too late. What I did next was in some ways utterly typical like I moved to Spain, I enjoyed the sunshine, I went to Burning Man. I moved to India and I lived in an ashram and I studied to be a yoga teacher and I learned a lot about myself and I started volunteering at an NGO outside of Mysore that supports children rescued from human trafficking situations and that was meaningful work. Those were real people who needed real help that I could have an impact on and I felt my flame kind of brightening back up a little bit. But after a while I just kind of got this old familiar feeling of like yes I was helping these people that were immediately around me but really it felt like I was just moving numbers from one column to the other because I wasn't touching that bigger system that was actually creating this situation in the first place and I can only have an impact as big as myself. So I kind of knew I needed to keep seeking. I didn't know really what I was looking for. I moved to New Zealand and I had no plan. I did not know what I wanted to do or what I should do and I just started going to events in Wellington around stuff I was interested in like sustainability and collaboration and technology and I kept seeing the same people there and after a while I realized they all seemed to know each other like what's going on and eventually I figured out that this was in spiral and in spiral at that time was really small. This was in 2011 and it was just a group of programmers, computer programmers and designers who were drawn together by this idea that they wanted to use their professional skills and their working hours on this planet to make a positive difference and that by collaborating and working together they could have more resources and flexibility in order to do that. I met Joshua, I got to know him and one day he took me out to lunch and said, how much money do you need? Can you start on Monday? And so I started sitting next to him and working in spiral and in spiral at that time I think like many organizations, progressive organizations that have aspirations to work collaboratively really had the drive to be a collective but was missing I think a lot of the how, the real nitty gritty of like how, okay how do you actually get together and work this way? And so that's kind of what I really started to focus on. The way it worked and this is still true for the freelancers collective and in spiral which is now called in spiral services is that, I'll give you an example like people can work as contractors so like I do consulting sometimes. Last week I did a training for an NGO and they hired me to come in and do this in their office and I did the training and then afterwards I send them an invoice and to them it looks like a totally normal invoice in spiral services limited and I did some training $500. They pay to the bank account like normal and from the outside this bank account looks like any other business bank account in spiral services limited, big pile of money but what's going on inside is actually something quite different. From the inside we use a system that we've developed in house and this system like it doesn't even have a name and I think this is emblematic of how we haven't realized that this thing is actually cool until very recently. It was just like our like admin so we just call it the backend or by its URL which is my dot in spiral but what it does is allows us to take that bank account and from the inside it's virtualized into hundreds of tiny accounts that have money in them and that money is pegged one to one to the money in the actual bank account. So when I get paid that $500 comes in and my dot in spiral picks it up and it knows it automatically takes some of it and the default amount is 20% and puts it into collective funds and that's the money we use to build up the company and pursue the social mission and 80% comes to me. So $400 out of that $500 80% goes in my in spiral account and that money is 100% mine to control. I can log in there and I can see how much money is in my account and I can do anything I want with it. For example, I can pay myself so I'm an employee of Inspiro Services Limited and I decide how much to pay myself and my income tax is taken out and that stuff where I can spend it on business expenses like I bought a laptop or I go to a conference and I get to decide, I don't have to ask anyone's permission to do that stuff. It's like I'm the boss of my own business unit and that's the budget and also importantly within the system I can take that money and send it to any other of those hundreds of accounts. Frictionlessly, it's only when money leaves or enters the system out there that we have to worry about sort of accounting and taxes which we do, we pay our taxes and we do our accounting but inside like the money's not actually going anywhere so we can just send it, I can hire somebody to do something for me at Inspiro and then just pay them into their Inspiro account instantly and that enables some really cool stuff. So what about that 20% what about that $100 that went into the Collective Funds account? That's where our collaborative funding comes in and this is the process we use to make decisions about our collective resources. Before we had collaborative funding kind of for really practical reasons only a few people kind of understood the budget or had their heads around the numbers or had access to the bank account and we'd try to involve people in financial decision making and say should we spend money on this or somebody else would say can I spend money on this and the answer was almost always like I'm a designer, not an accountant, I don't know or like how much money do we even have? I don't know. You decide. And the effect of that was that a lot of power and information was really centralizing on just a few people and that's not what we wanted, we wanted to do something different. So like I said, like many progressive organizations we had these aspirations to work as a collective but I think unlike some other organizations we were ready to like make it real, really start experimenting and putting our real money on the line. We were inspired by this process we knew about for kind of an offline sort of participatory budgeting process that an intentional community used, what worked is they, if people had ideas of like how to spend the collective budget they would literally put out a bucket and people would come in and they would be given sort of monopoly money and go around and put money in the buckets that they wanted to support and the results of that would be the budget. So we thought well why don't we try to bring that online? And the way we started was with like a really ugly system of spreadsheets and forms and the way it would work is we'd put a call out and say okay proposals for spending the budget people would put their proposals in and we'd stick those ideas across the top of the spreadsheet and then down the side would be the names of everybody who had contributed that month to collective funds and how much money they'd contributed and everybody would come into the spreadsheet and put their dollars against the projects that they wanted to support and this really changed the dynamic. This meant that it wasn't just a few people making financial decisions but everyone the crowd making them together and it meant that 20% contribution to collective funds, it didn't feel like a tax. It felt more like you were an investor because you decided where that would go and people would decide if we wanted to take a risk on a project everybody could invest in that together and then own that outcome together. And critically it really helped us think more strategically about money because it wasn't just about advocating for the thing that you wanted to get funded it was about actually being invited to look at the whole landscape of here's all the resources we have here's all the things we might wanna do. If we say yes to this thing we've gotta say no to that thing so we really need to think strategically about what we're trying to do here. So yeah so that was transformative and Spiral began to really scale up and it went from kind of a bunch of individuals collaborating this way in one company to a network of companies. Sort of like a fractal level up because now we've got the Inspiral Foundation which is a charitable company that sort of sits in the middle and facilitates collaboration between the companies and the companies give financial contributions to the Inspiral Foundation and then they participate as companies in this bigger collaborative funding process. We've built an app for this process called co-budget and it's really kind of visual and engaging and it feels like doing the budget is almost like a game of fight, it's fun. And Spiral's grown now to about 300 people we call them contributors across New Zealand and the world and any one of them can come into co-budget and propose an idea for funding, propose a bucket and say please fill this bucket up I wanna do this thing. And to me what that looks like is 300 little flames that can be fanned. Now because we've turned this into open source software other groups are using it as well and enabling the same process and that's really exciting for me. That's a pattern you see a lot of in Spiral like we're hacking on our own challenges around collaboration and then we polish something up and open source it so other people can use it as well. Recently I was in Berlin at this conference called Capital for the Commons which was really cool it was about sort of like what could the future of the economy be and there were some really smart people there like academics who study this stuff and progressive economists, people who run public banks and credit unions and invent cryptocurrencies and stuff like that. And I learned a lot at this conference. I, you know these people really understand how the economy works and how it could be different and through listening to them the main one of the main takeaways from me was the global economy is not something that has emerged from the laws of nature like we human beings have decided how it is and made the rules and it emerges from that and because we invented it, we can change it and I found that really inspiring. Yeah, it was really inspiring and that's why these people do this work but I also felt this really underlying sense of frustration in this group of people because they could see how it could be different so compellingly but it's really it's like they're immersed in the system surrounded by it but they can't touch it because convincing governments to change policy or taking out an entrenched interest is really hard. So I got up there, I was asked to present and I was like, I'm a little bit nervous what am I doing, like I'm not an economist what do I have to tell these people but I just showed them how money works in spiral and my done spiral and co-budget and they were blown away. And I was blown away that they were blown away because I did not realize what we'd done. My done spiral is a bank, like it's a virtual bank we do accounts and transactions and we enable overdrafts and what we've done is taken the form of an LLC and use it to create sort of a walled garden, a bubble within which we can make our own economy where we get to set the rules and we don't have to wait for the world out there to change for us to start living in the transition economy right now. And yeah, this like really woke me up to that idea. I was sitting around my kitchen table the other night with Doris who's a lovely person she's a recent and spiral contributor she's about a generation older than me and she is not a tech person. She is an educator, a gardener, a nurturer and she was telling me about this bread making workshop that she's gonna host and she'd put it up on a spiral sort of internal pure learning platform and the way that works is she can charge a small amount for people to come to this bread making workshop and that's an income source for her. The experience as a community building exercise for everybody who comes to the workshop and also passing on this amazing skill because Doris' bread is delicious. But also a few dollars from every ticket of that workshop goes to the Inspiral Foundation into co-budget under Doris' name and she gets to go in there and decide what projects to fund with that money going forward. I think that the software is really helpful the technology is really helpful but I think some of the most exciting stuff is actually the legal and financial tools that we are building the way that we can set up companies and it's like how do you set up an employment contract so that you are the boss of your own miniature business unit inside the collective? How do you do shareholding for a structure for a post capitalist company? These are the problems we're working on and the ones that I'm really excited to start open sourcing and sharing. Doris was telling me that she's really inspired in her work by what she can learn from nature and that one of the most important principles is go from practice to theory, not theory to practice. And that really resonated with me because that's been my journey. Like I did not know that I was setting out to create an alternative economy. I just had a feeling. I just had this little flame inside me of like I think I wanna do stuff that matters. I want to care and I think other people do too. And I followed that feeling, found other people who felt that way and importantly started putting things into practice. We've made so many mistakes along the way it wasn't perfect but we are doing it for real. And that is how we can right now create this little garden, plant this little seed in the midst of this giant system we might not be able to touch or change but grow a new economy for the future right now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.