 This is a design from trust call on February 6th, 2019. We are designing design from trust workshops, but we're in a general conversation about webs of trust and other kinds of things. And Christopher was just explaining some of what was happening with their rebooting webs of trust initiatives. So back to you, Christopher. Yeah, I don't want to necessarily dominate the conversation. It just, it's coming up in a month and we've got a lot of things that, I think are relevant to your discussions and I'd love to have some inter, I mean, there's just a bunch of things going on. Like this whole area, I know April, I don't know if she's on the call, but there's been a bunch of stuff around crossing borders and what is citizenship and what is sovereignty in a world where every nation is kind of renegotiating what it is that means to be sovereign and corporations are sovereign, sovereign, but people aren't. So we have people like, I mean, the next events at Barcelona, in the Barcelona government conference center because of the politics of Barcelona, feeling like they want to have a different relationship with Europe and Spain and the rest of the world than what is currently accepted. Similarly, we've had some calls from Taiwan and I was in Taiwan and spoke with a number of people of the Taiwanese government who have, their own issues of their own sovereignty, but also like what happens when and likely will when China basically pushes things over the edge. Super interesting. Are you familiar with the V-Taiwan people? A little bit, I haven't met any of them. So Taiwan has a minister with our portfolio named Audrey Tang who I've met and we've had a Zoom recorded call, stuff like that. And she basically, after the sunflower revolution in Taiwan or as part of that, she started creating a platform for citizens to connect and talk. That ended up becoming a legitimate thing that the government of Taiwan wanted to do more of. So it's become V-Taiwan and they have a platform called Polis, I can put some links in here in our chat. I was supposed to meet with her at the last one, but I did end up meeting with some government ministers and you are correct, there was one, I know it's not a senator, I forgot what his official, but he's equivalent of senator and he also is a supporter of it. So yeah, there's a lot of interesting things, but they're down to like only 15 nations in the world that accept that Taiwan is a sovereign state and they look at Hong Kong and all the promises that were made there of sort of a semi-autonomous place and China's violating that all over. I've been at Scotland, there's a sort of a hidden story there about why the Scottish Parliament members voted for Brexit, which had a lot to do with the fact that they got a kind of a side agreement from Theresa May's government that they're promised not to have a referendum about Scottish independence, could be abrogated, they can bring it up sooner than 10 years or 12 years or whatever it was they promised. So they basically voted for Brexit, not because they want Brexit, it's because they want Scotland to exit. Exactly, that's Scotland to exit the UK. Yeah, and join the EU. Yeah, it's complicated, but yeah. I'm showing you some of the articles. Yeah, there's two tribes in, oh no, excuse me, there is a single tribe of native indigenous people in North America that whose borders are half in Canada and half in the US and they consider themselves one people. Canada considers that Northern have to be a sovereign, US considers the Southern have to be sort of sovereign in the sort of a Native American way of sovereignty, but in fact, either really happens. And they're talking with us about having some kind of digital identity thing for their people. So it feels like there's just a lot of stuff happening. Oddly governments are coming on board faster than I thought and it's largely because also there's a lot of these, so like China, they're not a big fans of self-sovereign identity. But if we basically say, well translate it in China to be self-administered identity, just don't ever call it, don't translate it. Don't use the word sovereignty. Right, and they like it because they have problems where goods come from a semi-autonomous region, come into China, go into Hong Kong, where then they're shipped to British Columbia, where then they go to Toronto and then go to train to New York City. So they're constantly crossing borders and having lots of problems there. So they like this sort of self-administered identity because it lets them cross borders. So even in China, which is one of the people that are most challenging individual sovereignty and citizenship or whatever, oddly is quasi on board when it comes to business. British Columbia is probably done the most. They have all of the corporations in British Columbia and everybody who has a business license in British Columbia now has a self-sovereign identity. They may not use it. They may not know they have it, but the British Columbia's thing is supporting it. So it's weird. Anyhow, I don't understand completely your workshops and your objectives and goals. I just know that there's some commonality and I wanna make sure that your people and community where they intersect know what's going on. Awesome, thank you. Judy, go ahead. A couple questions, great discussion. Thank you for your input, Christopher. The thing that I'm wondering about is in terms of web of trust, which I'd not heard of until today, how would an individual like myself who's interested in building communities of trust for social action in a state like Minnesota where the Stolderobe heritage is sort of cool toward aggregation in general, how would we use your materials and do you have materials that help people begin to develop this type of communication? Yeah, we're beginning to, I mean, we're still in some ways early phases, proof of concepts and stuff. So I would say there are sort of three examples of what people have done. So one of which is Venice did a self-sovereign thing around transportation. So they basically have one iPhone app that basically works with all of the various government and non-government and NGO things around transportation in Vienna in a way that you don't have to use a single identity. You can bring the identities that you've already got with the state or with other countries or with whatever to use them in that thing which had some security advantages, had some advantages in Europe because of GDPR. So that's, you know- Is that one Vienna or Venice? I thought it was Venice and I- You said both words in your description so I was curious about what you're talking about. I'm pretty sure that it's Venice. You can look it up. I'm gonna have to look it up. Anyhow, so that's an one example. Kind of another example in, you know, is sort of self, you know, sort of peer attestations. So there are a variety of communities that want to be able to make attestations within the community about their commitments and things of that nature in the community, but don't necessarily want these to be taken out of the community. So as an example, there is a sort of, you know, alternative lifestyle community that wants to be able to do various kinds of things that are, you know, I mean, if you think about a marriage is, you know, you're standing in front of your community and you're basically saying, we are going to make commitments to each other and we're doing so in front of you to establish our, you know, our commitment to each other and have you as a community help us keep those commitments. But they also worry about, you know, flying through Bahrain or something of that nature where the nature of those commitments, you know, mean that, you know, they could be arrested and, you know, lose their lives in some of the books. So how do you keep that private? How do you keep, and yet still have these attestations within the community? So that's another extreme of things. The middle ground is the city of Zoog is using something called Uport to allow for polling. I mean, they're technically not voting, but, you know, various kinds of polling, things kind of like the polar stuff that he was talking earlier about in Taiwan, except for the fact that the identities are all, you own your keys, you control them. You know, they're not, you know, issued by the state. The state, you know, the city of Zoog basically says, you bring us your keys and your data, you know, your proof there. We will give you an attestation that you're a citizen of Zoog and thus entitled to services and other things within that city. So, you know, I'd say a fourth area is around education. So the country of Malta and their pilot is doing, they're basically trying to put all of the educational claims for things like, you know, doctor, CEUs, various kinds of professional licenses that require, have educational requirements, et cetera. They're trying to set that up in sort of a self-sovereign portable way that, you know, isn't necessarily a state-issued educational credential. It's more is that you bring your educational credentials and can get them, and, you know, get them recognized by Malta for your various kinds of licensing and stuff. Now, those are some of the things that are kind of going on right now. I mean, the key thing though is you want to control, you want to have some measure of control over, you know, your digital identity in the same way that you have control over things in your physical identity. You can move to another nation. You can move to another place. You can decide not to, you know, give information to people in the digital world where, you know, they can basically decide, oh, you know, you're Christopher Allen and we know all about you because we've gotten collected all this other stuff from all these different places. That's not good. And that's what we're trying to stop. And I just put on the chat about ATAR in India and Sunil, I don't know if you have any opinion on the system. I'll share a little bit my screen about the controversies around, yeah, the international ID system, which is certainly controversial. It is controversial. I think the intent is right, the execution is wrong. Yep. And then if you look at the cultural construct of India, you cannot get into something in which a culture or a country which has illiteracy, which is almost 70 to 80% and create an identity system, which those people have no clue about what they are, how they're interacting with the system. Execution has been really bad. And then it's also become a little bit autocratic. The ruling party is actually going about it the wrong way. So the other way to look at it is at least somebody's come up with some sort of an identity system in India and a country of 1.3 billion people not having an identity system itself was a major, major gap. And also a big opening for corruption for other sorts of things. Yes. Here's a bunch of money that needs to get to those people over there. The idea that it'll get to them was sort of like laughable in some situations, right? So this is an attempt to cut through that. And yet. Yeah, but the problem I guess from my point of view is that you're not keeping it totally transparent and even the tendering process is not done in a manner that's fair. You're using corruption to cut corruption, which is not such a good idea. One of the other things that I would maybe say that is a serious issue is there is especially in the civil service system and other places strong culture of authority is right or whatever in the sense that a low level administrator who has a woman come up to him who is starving because her fingerprints no longer are working for her to get money from her dead husband's pension, they basically say, no, the computer's right. I don't have the authority to help you solve this problem. Sorry, go next person. And that happens a lot in the system, which is kind of a cultural issue as much as it is a technology issue. There just isn't a lot of recourse for any civil servant or someone who uses these systems to be able to mitigate the fact that it's new, it's got its own problems and human issues. It's interesting. On the other hand, they do say it saved them about a billion dollars and it cost them about a billion dollars and those savings will only increase over time. So there is a legitimate financial reason why they're doing some of this stuff. It is kind of using 20 year old technology, which worries me, but that's another story. Yeah, so what Jerry said was actually he kind of started on that example and I can share a personal story way back in 2011. When Adha was not even part of the scene, but they had something called, they had some sort of a government scheme where the whole idea was that they would be able to provide a plastic card to a manual laborer that was going to do work with the earths and would get paid a hundred rupees. A hundred rupees is like about a dollar and 20 cents, in today's conversion per day. Now the question was that, okay, so to go through that entire workflow, what these people needed to do, and these are people who come out in the hot sun early in the morning and are barely clad. So first thing that they didn't figure out was that plastic is not the right solution for these guys, right? Where are they going to even keep it? And then they had this problem about whether the handheld attendance system would even connect up to the internet. You didn't have bandwidth in those areas. So that's something else that they had overlooked. But, you know, so I don't know if you've heard about this word called, let me just type it in there. This is... Jugaad, yeah, exactly. I know, innovation in India. Hold on, I'll switch screen. All right, so it's not, Jugaad is not innovation. Well, it's a frugal innovation or... No, Jerry, it's not innovation at all. It's just mick-mousing. It's not innovation. It's like cherry-rigging? Yeah, cherry-rigging, yes, exactly. And so it's, you just keep doing band-aid kind of stuff. You don't, and see, the reason Jugaad became very popular was because HVR, Harvard Business Review, actually picked it up and somebody wrote an article on it. And so like all labels catch people's fancy and then go into business schools, they started claiming that Jugaad was the ancient Indian technique. And they started using the word reverse innovation. And I kept wondering, I mean, what is reverse innovation? And... Going back to the dark ages. Yeah, so I really don't know what this was, right? And I was a big factor, I was one of the biggest, the fiercest critics of Jugaad as coming into the lexicon. So why did we start this? Yeah, okay, so you don't think the, you don't look, you don't do any big picture thinking. All you're doing is you take pieces, so you think that the sum of the parts will become the whole magically, right? So that's the kind of thinking it was. So what ended up happening was that, you know, they couldn't record the attendance. So this is exactly, this is the background that I'm giving you, but then coming back to what Jerry was talking about. Now at the end of it, after these guys have actually, okay, so let's see, let's take the best case scenario that you have recorded somebody's attendance. These people have done the work through the day and they're entitled to whatever 150 rupees at the end of the day. Now the question is that if that 150 rupees at the end of the day is supposed to mitigate and give these people employment and money, then how does it make sense for you to pay them after three months or not at all, right? If that's the kind of money that you're paying, you need to be able to dole it out exactly at the end of the day, like a daily wage. Now the big thing that loops back into this whole thing is that there might have been a huge nexus between the company that was implementing it, the bureaucrat that actually ordered out the system and the guy that was going to, they called it, in those days, if I'm not mistaken, they called it BC. BC stood for not British Columbia, but it stood for business correspondent. It was a euphemistic way of saying, this is the guy that will actually collect the money on behalf of the beneficiary and make sure that that is actually handed over. And the excuse was that we don't have a banking system that goes all the way down to the remotest part, right? Wow. And so now what you're doing is, it's very, very interesting, though the irony of the thing or the paradox in this whole story is that you bring in a technology, you implement technology in piecemeal and you leave the problem exactly the way it is, except that now you collect money from the government because you go virtually on horseback to collect the money based on the attendance of these people and the money never reaches these people and they've got some excuse of the other saying, well, we cannot get your identity in place, we don't know if the attendance records have matched, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if you don't take the big picture into account, then what's going to happen is that you're going to be implementing solutions where the goons will always find a loophole to be able to get the stuff that they want. Right, because they have more control, they have more access points, they have the ability to bribe or interfere, they can cause problems where they may not be any, like, hey, our terminal didn't work in the field, doesn't necessarily mean that it was impossible to get wireless connections working. It means that somebody was simply unable to get it working and then they had to rely on a paper ledger and then, gosh, somebody spilled their tea on the paper ledger and it was destroyed for the day and, well, that's too bad, isn't it? Jerry, you should connect this to invisible architectures because although it's more, these problems may be more obvious in India, this is a real problem with smart contracts and with a lot of innovation in our various communities that there's a tendency to kind of not recognize that there are these kind of perverse decisions and history and culture in the past that are this invisible architecture that forces us into particular models. Like, I would argue one of the things that the blockchain ecosystem suffers from is the invisible architecture that causes inequality and wealth. So we're just replicating that inequality, even though I would say the majority of the stakeholders in the broader blockchain community are going, no, we don't want that, but because they're building it on this base of assumptions and ways of doing things and whatever that are some of which are unconscious or have unintended system effects or whatever, we just end up replicating it. And one of the big problems, one of the problems that a few writers are explaining well is just because something is using blockchain or some sort of distributed ledger, open ledger, doesn't mean that what's going into it is right because how things got into it matters enormously, right? And so there's not enough attention being paid to that and blockchain is being used as a blessing over systems, but you're mentioning invisible architectures brings us nicely backwards through the back door into a piece of what design from trust is all about. And so let me just riff on this for a second because design from trust implies design from mistrust. And one of my insights over the last decade was that most of our institutions are actually designed for mistrust. And that design from mistrust, we basically say, well, there's too many people, we have to scale the system so much that we have to design a system that is designed to prevent the bad actors from acting badly. And in different ways systems designed from mistrust create scarcity like the school system. So we don't trust the children are curious, there's a whole bunch of them. So we separate them into one year age cohorts which immediately creates scarcity because in the one room school house when Susie was showing Bobby his numbers and teaching him and she was like three years older, that was a huge lesson for both of them. That was anchoring the knowledge for Susie and getting her to understand it better and back and forth. So we create scarcity all the time. So there's this notion of hidden architectures of mistrust which I'm trying to figure out how to explain and how to make this role because the explicit architectures of mistrust, the ones that the barbed wire at the top of the fence, the lock on the door, the surveillance cameras, those are explicit architectures of mistrust that we put in to keep bad people from doing stuff or to protect other sorts of people and surveillance is its own huge topic. Those are kind of easy to see. The problem with the hidden architectures of mistrust is that we have normalized a lot of these behaviors so that we assume this is just the way it has to be. And one of the principles, one of the precepts of design from trust and I'll head over here for a second is a very common phrase from the open source community and from Wikipedia and from everywhere else which is assume good faith or assume good intent. And this does not mean that everybody is good. This actually means you just presume the good and you act that way. And then you create a very different system from doing this. So now heading back to what you were bringing into the conversation, Christopher, about the government of Zoog doesn't issue you your certificate, they accept the one you generated so that you created it, you own it and they certify they attest that you are a citizen of and therefore you can get the services of the city as a citizen, et cetera, et cetera. That's really interesting because there's a whole bunch of things going on here and then I'll say one more thing and then I'll see what we all think. One of the problems here is that we are shifting over toward electronic attestation and technology. A lot of stuff that I think actually is built in trust through human interaction, through I attest that I've known Judy for a really long time and she's fantastic in conversations and that means a lot more than the computer knowing that she's been a citizen for umpteen years. So my fear for instance with Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, et cetera is that the way that trust is created so that we climb into a stranger's car and they drive us someplace and we live in somebody, you know, we let somebody else use our home while we're away is because we have their credit card number, we've done some kind of a check on them, who knows how flimsy that is in many cases, that's coming back to bite a lot of transportation companies especially like Uber and India and how that plays out is interesting but my fear that we're starting to put the burden of building trust onto technology which is the wrong place because that then precludes in many ways the normal way that we build trust which is through human interactions and so I'm interested in that cycle a lot. So let me stop sharing and see what you've been saying on the chat and go from there. I've got a bunch of stuff. I'm trying to catch up. Awesome. You know, basically there is very interesting debate right now in the, I'm trying to find my link. But there is a strong debate in the last month or so between various people in the blockchain community around governance and, you know, it started off among kind of, you know, somebody on the Ethereum side of the community basically said that the Zabo's law, Nick Zabo is the guy who has coined the term smart contract and sort of established a lot of the early principles of blockchain and cryptography in this area is very suspicious, unhappy, et cetera with government and any kind of, you know, it's kind of the hyper libertarian type of stuff. So he builds trustless systems and Vitalik basically goes, not Vitalik, Vladimir of Zambir basically wrote up this thing and said, here's Zabo law and it's bunk. It's a serious problem and is because, you know, ultimately it does need to be these more human systems. And then other people, you know, have played different sides of this debate, but Alex said, well, I think you're right, but I also think that you're wrong because of the kinds of abuses. And then other people have been figuring out, you know, talking about constrained versus unconstrained approaches to blockchain governance. And then I've been trying to add the subtext which neither of those people are talking about the larger system and how do we make them more resilient and how do we make them grow, you know, with principles of commons and all of that. But it's a very vibrant debate. I'm trying to find some of the better links. I mean, I'm a pretty prolific Twitter person, so all of them are in my Twitter. I just have to go back and find them. And Zabo I've got, I'm showing here in my brain, I've got him under possible candidates for who is the Toshi. Yeah, I can talk with you about that, but that's another story. Exactly. Exactly. But I had a couple of different things here, but I did not have anything on Zabo's law. So if you have any links on that, then you can- Yeah, I'm working on that right now. I'll do a search on that as well. Kari, I'm interested particularly in how we nucleate trust in the sense that I'm observing a lot of distrust in all types of situations, fostered in part by the political climate as well. But at the heart of it, it has to be a personal move to move into a position of guarded trust or presumptive trust or whatever. And so there has to be a personal process that then overlays the cultural community, professional, whatever group it is in which you want to instill trust. And my observations are that in other attributes like this, innovation or various things, one person is enough to start the process if they do the right kinds of things in the right way, because it creates an alternate model that people who are even a little bit open might step toward and then it grows. And so- Yeah, it's very butterfly-affecting. It's like there's a small things can tip and suddenly trust kind of ripples across a group and they can tip the wrong way and suddenly everybody's like looking at each other and what did I just step into? April and I just watched the Netflix documentary on fire, the fire festival. And we thought, oh yeah, let's just watch a couple of minutes. We were riveted. This is like this stupid high-end festival for rich kids that was, you know, they were gonna buy an island in the Bahamas, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out to be this massive fraud. But the interviews they got were insane and the level of, you know, con men play on trust, right? And the level to which personality, charisma, et cetera, et cetera was playing a role here, you know, in the fire fraud is interesting. But just to head back to what you're saying, part of the reason I say assume good intent as a starting point for design from trust is that what that does is it causes people to begin with a gesture of good faith, assuming the other person's showing up with good intent. And that, if you prime that way, that in itself cascades good things. Small side note, there's a novel about IT called the Phoenix Project. I don't know if any of you have heard of it. Have you read it? No, but I've heard about it. So the Phoenix, it's a novel about IT. And I'm like, what? And if you've ever dealt with an IT department in a large corporation, you will smile when you start reading this thing because the plot begins with a mid-level IT manager who suddenly made CTO because the CTO gets fired by the boss and he inherits this nightmarish IT department which is completely backlogged, doesn't know what it's doing. And the novel is basically an exposition of DevOps, is really what it is. But, and this is a little bit of a plot spoiler, three quarters of the way through the novel, the idiot CEO who's causing a lot of the problems has a bit of an aha moment and he opens the next meeting in the middle of this deep crisis. And he says, I have a feeling we need to sort of talk about how we got here. Then he then tells his personal story and there's a moment where they go around the room and say like difficult things. And through this gesture of vulnerability, which is one of the ways you can build trust, he begins to earn the trust of the people who've so far been hating him heavily and hoping that he'd just go away and the whole situation would go away. So I think that this building trust thing is something we don't culturally spend a lot of time on. We sort of, we know it's on the side, we know it when we see it, but we don't really kind of go after this in any way that's interesting. And as I said a little earlier, we seem to be replacing it with technology more and more. Which is even harder. I mean, I remember it was a key moment in my life where a fellow that I was dating for long reasons explanation anyway, he said that I needed to be a little more cynical. And I was actually miffed by the comment and ended up writing a note to him later saying, you know, I realize I might get hurt in situations, I'm making a conscious choice to assume trust until I have evidence to the contrary. And that was in my early 20s, which is sort of persisted as an attitude as I've become older and wiser, I'm a little more astute about reading early signals and what level of a sum through trust I could give to people without any data whatsoever. And I'm much more in tune with my own intuition, which turns out to be pretty good. If I'm some kind of a bad vibe, I now totally honor that bad vibe instead of saying, you don't have any reason for that Judy, you have no data conflict of intuitive versus scientific behavior. But I'm really interested now in how we bring this into institutional settings and the group settings and the community action groups because without the sense of shared trust, it's hard to unify for a larger impact or change. So I have a suggestion for you there that's fairly cheap. If you go in the chat, there's a link to a good faith assumptions pattern. So first off there, the heart of the pattern is, assuming others good intent increases trust and effectiveness instead of interpreting negative actions as attempts at manipulation, insults or power play, we choose to believe people are doing the best they can and look for underlying values or needs in common. Searching for a better story, we find or create one. But in particular, if you look at the related pattern, so this is a pattern language I really like of group process that 50 facilitators with very different ways and styles and structures. No, this is oddly related to you, Jerry. Remember we tried to do that kitchen project way like 2001? Oh yeah. It was a bunch of facilitators and they all got together and it totally collapsed. I wasn't able to make it work because everybody had different processes. Some people wanted open space. Some people wanted structure. It just was this real mess. Well, one of the consequences is some of the people that were involved in that went outward and said, let's not talk about processes. Let's not talk about methods or that nature. Let's just talk about the patterns that they have in common and they spent about three years creating this thing called the group works pattern language, which is amazing. And there's a lot of depth there. So if you look at this good faith assumptions, it says in order to have them, here are the related patterns. You have to, people have to understand how to do appreciation. They have to understand the pattern of common ground. They have to, you know, the not about you is a fundamental aspect of good faith of assumptions. Sometimes when people are saying things, it's not about you that there's witness with compassion. There's 10 relationships, setting attention, et cetera. So the city of Calgary in Canada basically started adopting this group works deck. They basically have a lot of people in the city of Canada government not only have the deck, they got some trainings and things of that nature. So there's emerged a sort of a shared language among the Calgary city government around these principles such that you have this wonderful kind of glass bead shortcut where somebody at a, even in like an engineering meeting can just simply say the words good faith assumptions or one of the other patterns and boom, everybody goes, oh, right. And so it's been a really major success story at, you know, of helping a community have a shared language around things. Now I've been working on another pattern language on what is collaboration, which is a little bit different, which is, and I think that, you know, there are similar sort of shared languages that if we can figure out how to communicate them properly, it can have an impact. But this is shipping, you know, you can buy a deck for 30 bucks or something. There's some stuff online on how to teach it. I gave them as a gift when I had a meeting of about 20 people years ago and I gave everybody a group works card deck back then. Yeah. So that's a cheap way. So just a couple of things. And I know that Sunil has to leave at the top of the hour, unfortunately, a couple of things. So here's the pattern language of group process, Dave Pollard, Tree Bresson and a few other people and probably a bunch of other people who showed up that I don't know about. I have it under pattern languages, which itself, I don't know if anybody's familiar with it, it kind of comes out of Christopher Alexander's and he and some colleagues wrote a book, A Pattern Language, back in 77. Pattern languages themselves are an example of trust in action or, you know, what I used to call the relationship economy in action. These days I realized that relationship economy is kind of a mystical phrase, so I talked more about trust and design from trust. But this thought here, examples of the relationship in economy in action are in fact, a lot of the things that I'd be pointing to. And the thing that I mentioned when I was asking Christopher what this came from was this other super interesting group process technique wisdom cluster called liberating structures, which is I think a different group of people. I don't know if there's much overlap between these groups, Christopher. There is some, yes. Okay, good, because this is another really, really valuable set of, so let me actually, connect these two just for fun, so that if somebody finds one, they'll find the other one right away. So these are totally examples of design from trust. And if I were to tell somebody how to go start meetings and start helping institutions, Judy, your question, I think one of the good starting places is these two sets of collective wisdom. Thank you. I shared in the chat a link to Meeple's Together, a book that I did last year and coming out in a couple of weeks. But one of the things that may be an insight for people is that when we talk about collaboration and trust and all these tough things in the context of business and in these high emotional stakes things, that those emotional stakes get in the way of learning how to use them. When you basically use these in games and play, then it becomes unlinked from that and you can learn a lot. And I would apply that to pretty much anything. If there's some way, you say I know you would like to do some workshops on your design with trust thing. I would, for instance, suggest early on figure out how to have it purely about maybe building a game together or something very, very playful that involves trust in some fashion and then that will basically allow you to get rid of the, oh, well, we don't like governments or oh, this is about money and all these other things that cause problems and obstacles in learning. Awesome, thank you. Looks like you've got another meeting starting. Hey, Roy. Hello, sorry. I suspect I've crashed in either it's five hours too early or four hours too late or something like that. That's awesome. So we are one hour into the first call today which was about design from trust and designing a workshop around that. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. I realized it was either an hour later and hour early, but of course I'm in the UK so I'm an hour late. Nice. So that's the one you were aiming for? That was what I was aiming for, yeah, but actually I couldn't have been able to make it anywhere. I was on a dig life call at the same time and that's how I got through to, I got introduced to this and so on and so forth. So we just finished a board meeting there. So apologies for crashing into your conversation. I'll mute and listen and pay attention. I watched last week's video. Oh, thank you. Thanks for being here and you know what? I believe in the open space principles. So whoever was meant to be there, whoever's there was meant to be there and when you crash in is like, for some reason you were meant to crash in at the start. It's serendipity. Yeah, absolutely. I'm with you there. Judy, go ahead. Roy, could you introduce yourself? I've not met you before. I'm Judy Bay. No, no, no need. I will have met me before or at least in another life, if it were. What about me? I am originally a designer as in, as in artist sculptor designer. I spent 30 years in tech marketing owned and ran three tech marketing agencies in the UK, sold my last one about four years ago. since then I've been working and interested in asynchronous communities. I launched in my career, some of you may recall Lotus Notes and CompuServe in Europe. So ever since then, I've been fascinated by the dynamics of communities, digital communities, virtual communities, whatever. A couple of years ago, I became involved with DigLife, which Jerry will know about. So I've literally just got a call for them. That's kind of it. I originally an artist then through as a commercial designer, marketing type guy, now involved in about four similar communities. So that's my focus going forward really. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's really, that's super helpful and love the, so I wrote an article. Let me see if I can find it in my brain for a second. I'm also going to repeat the governance debates that are going on, the links that I sent earlier because he might be interested. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in the blockchain community around decentralized governance and blockchain governance and a lot of interesting debates there. I'm missing one link. Where is the constrained, unconstrained? I don't know. So Roy, just for your amusement, I used to be a tech industry analyst. I was with a company called New Science Associates for five years and then I worked for Esther Dyson after that. All right. Okay. And right around 1989. So right when Lotus Notes came out. Oh yeah, that was, that was smack in my, that was smack in my time. So I wrote this piece for our clients called Lotus is no longer a one product company, meaning I remember it. They were no longer a spreadsheet company, right? I remember that, I remember that article, Jerry. Oh, that's hilarious. Absolutely. Well, it was, it was, it was very true. It was something that fundamentally changed the Lotus organization and subsequently led to them becoming part of IBM and so on and so on and so on. So yeah, it's a continuum. And I'm pretty sure that later I wrote a piece that said Lotus is once again a one product company. How dismayed I was about the way that notes had eaten everybody's brain. And, and IBM ended up on notes way too long. Yes. Right. Yes. They went from props to notes and then kind of missing the internet stuff for way too long. Well, my first, my first agency was a, was a test case in, in Europe for Lotus notes. We were an 80 man agency. And by the time we'd, because it was a one of the products we supported and they were one of our clients. And really after about two and a half years, I think we had more people working on notes than doing anything else in the agency. And an awful lot of people asking us, what on earth are you doing? But it was a very, it was, you know, it was a very interesting baptism of fire into this world that we're now, what is it, 15, 20, nearly years later, grappling with trying to and still struggling to build a really good platform and still struggling to build a really good platform. Absolutely. What is about is like tech we can trust. How do we create, essentialize, how do we do that version of what notes promised in an open independent collaborative sort of protected way? Yeah. Well, I think that's the added dimension, because notes was, as I recall, it was very much, it was a commercial product who was supposed to exist within the firewall. All right, there was, there was some, there was some opportunity to come through the firewall, but you had to be someone who was authentic and you had to be part of the corporate structure or whatever it was. Yeah. And we now live at a time when that in itself is something that is so open for debate, identity, privacy, all of these issues, which we're very imperfectly dealt with it, but it was a place to start. Well, I think I can tell a parallel story that dates back to almost exactly that time. There's this little company called General Magic that was quite famous in the Valley. There was very secretive for a while, and I kind of made friends with them early on. And they then launched a tele-stream, sorry, Telescript and Magic Cap. Magic Cap was basically the user interface for their devices and Telescript was their messaging engine. And right as, right as the internet becomes publicly accessible and available, they ship a closed system that believes only in message passing. They basically picked precisely the wrong architecture right when the internet opens up. And it was quite astonishing because they didn't really get it. They tried to, and the company cratered very quickly after the launch, the actual launch of their devices. I have, I have been a box in our storage unit. I have a little time capsule that has a Radio Shack Model 100, a couple of Palm Pilots. I don't remember what else, but in there is a Magic Link device. Yeah, I've been trying to hunt down the the Telescript documentation for my anti-patent project. So there's a lot of people in the rebooting, I mean in the blockchain community that are, you know, filing lots and lots of patents. Like I think Wells Fargo, who doesn't even have a blockchain, has no commitments to blockchain, has filed 300 plus patents on blockchains. So I have this book called Agorical Computing from 1988 that even though the word smart contract isn't used, it's in there and a whole bunch of things like, you know, token-based box and all that kind of stuff are in there. That's in the box. I have some books from things from Amix. Amix was the first sort of eBay, but it was really the sort of first smart contract platform. So when I joined Esther in 1992, one of my first tasks was I had to occasionally go publish our newsletter on Amix, which was a DOS interface. Yeah, it was free for that. And it was, and every time I had to do this task, I had to call them up for tech support because I couldn't figure it out. It was the most awful, it was the most awful publishing business. This is Phil Salem, right? Yeah. And some of his Phil Salem stuff, the wealth of kitchens, I think, it was just like the wrong time. I mean, if you look at like what Telescript was trying to do, it's what all the big players are now trying to do to dominate their messaging platforms. This is WhatsApp and the WeChat in China and stuff like that. Because it isn't just about security, it's about integrating with all of these other things. In China, there was this wonderful article about the difference between Amazon and the equivalent platform using, I always forget because there's two Chinese. Well, anyhow, one of them is kind of the opposite of Amazon, which is they enable lots and lots of small vendors to directly sell. That's Alibaba, yeah. And how the chat app and all that kind of stuff enabled that in an oddly unfree country. And yet in the United States, the free country, we're all kind of locked into this hegemony of Amazon for our retail distribution and their dominance, which we can't fight in law because they're saving people money, which means they can't be an antitrust attack. It was just such a weird juxtaposition of things. Every time our conversation was going all sorts of different fun, interesting places, and every time we sort of bounce off an issue, I'm like, yep, there's a trust issue. So like how antitrust law got co-opted, right? And I've got articles in my brain because I'm like, oh shit, we went from antitrust thing about damage to citizens to antitrust being protecting consumers, which meant that as long as the company was hitting everyday low prices, they couldn't be accused of being monopolists, right? Judy, go ahead. Well, it's just, I'm having the same reaction. This is so rich and so diverse that I'm hoping we're capturing all of these not only in the chat, but also to lay out a roadmap of what we want to get deeper dives on in subsequent calls. Because any one of these, I mean, this one's gone very much in the direction of the block mapping, which is fine because it's new content for me and it's fascinating, and I'm still extracting how do I apply that to my smaller communities, but to actually lay out a template of the richness of topics within design for trust, conceptually, and segment those into workshop models would be a fascinating group of exercise. I mean, I'm also feeling that direction. So I mean, one of the things that rebooting does very different is that everything we do, we try to ship something. So we'll have these kind of diverse dialogues in our first half day, quarter day, whatever. But then we quickly go down to, okay, given all of this stuff, is there something we can do in our remaining time that we can ship that is, you know, a curation or an incremental increase in knowledge? I mean, so we'll basically narrow down to go, oh, there's one thing in this discussion that we all resonate on, we all open up a Google Doc, we do a bunch of research and for the next day or two, we ship a paper. So we've shipped 40 some odd papers like that. I would love to see that replicated in other environments than rebooting Web of Trust because it really does have this impact of finding a few things where we can basically raise the bar and iterate and demonstrate to the world because the brain and some of these kinds of discussions and open space sometimes lead to these, everybody being all excited about the opportunities and then they leave a conference or a meeting or whatever and it's like, well, we have, we really changed things. I think that's an important point to emphasize because part of my questioning process has been how do you bring it back home for the individual, for the other people in the group? What's the next step that invites people to take the step toward the gainment of trust rather than hover at the boundary or even step back because it's overwhelming? And so it seems to me that if we want to really have impact in communities, we need to think about how to get the first and second steps toward trust enabled by the communication system in a meeting with a working model you can take out of a meeting or out of a discussion to assist you in engaging more people in the topic. I'm especially interested in it as an icebreaker for moderate functional level as opposed to intense functional level groups because that's kind of what the icebreaker should do. So I'm going to step back to sort of my introduction to designing a design from trust workshop which is one way of looking at design from trust is as maybe a successor to design thinking except it's different. So design thinking is a thing I can train you up and you can go into the field and you can observe and be empathetic and prototype and you can come up with a solution that'll kind of work and it'll work and there's been backlash against design thinking, et cetera, et cetera. That's a different conversation. Design from trust involves trust which is sort of this reflexive thing that if you're not trustworthy and you know in your actions to design systems based on trust that's going to screw everything up. So it changes the implementer and it requires transparency vulnerability, a bunch of other things going in. So that's kind of the I began with this how do I turn this into a workshop much like I could do a design thinking workshop and then I'm like oh shit this kind of falls back on the implementer and it involves different dynamics that I need to understand better. So then I was like well design from trust operates at many different levels and I haven't I haven't enumerated them all but there's the interpersonal level down here which is like right now we're on a call we're talking to each other how do we build trust what goes on when you walk into a room with strangers all that you know the interpersonal and small group dynamics are super important and interesting and I was saying a little earlier one of the things that we're doing is problematic is we're often replacing this this interpersonal dynamic with technology that lets us trust climbing into somebody's car or borrowing their you know borrowing their their living room or their house. So as I climb up I get to wholesale organizational change I get up to industrial policy I get up to government you know sort of intergovernmental things and you get very quickly to China's social credit system you get very quickly toward mistrust then coming in as a force from the side maybe doing a kind of a force field analysis on these layers are things like a whole bunch of players out in the political sphere have discovered that you can weaponize trust that you can use you can intentionally provoke mistrust to destroy your enemies and this is not a new strategy this is an ancient time honored strategy it's just that we're in an era now where this is this is surged at a moment where a lie travels around the world 30 times before truth can get its pants on is roughly the quote right you know social media plus connectivity plus everything else is going on has really driven the our ability to lie like crazy and it does not help that the major platforms we are all on like facebook have as they're in a business model to get more attention than to suck data from us and sell off that data which is partly why a lot of us are here it's like how do we build the web of trust how do we build dapps how do we build tech we can trust all those things are in some sense a counter movement to this invasion of our lives by these technologies so so partly i'm trying to figure out in design from trust which how do we articulate the layers and that's i think that's where i'm going to go probably next is like let's just let's just enumerate the layers and then let's pick the low hanging fruit so judy you're really interested in walking into a group of people you've you've got some track record with and helping them figure out how what do we do to build trust and i'll let you articulate what are the top three or four questions around trust that matter in that setting and then let's go flesh that out let's create an artifact could just be an article on medium it could be a thing an exercise people can pick up could be any series of things and let's play that out and then let's let's sort of figure out where in in this little i don't want to call it a stack because it starts sounding like a you know iso stack and i and i fear iso stacks but how do we actually sort of tackle different parts of this so that we can start moving forward and different people can congregate around the parts of this puzzle that they like right and i and i have a simple very simple website built on google sites at design from trust.com which i'm happy to give people you know right access to so that together we can begin building things we can also co-authored things and post them and then cross-post them and refer to them everything that we talk about i go back and harvest and and sort of add to my brain so that's there's this sort of curated web of context on the side that helps and i'm trying to figure out okay what is the dynamic where these things can play together really fruitfully over time as Christopher was explaining go ahead Judy part of what i what i'm really interested i like everything you said absolutely spot on i'm also interested not just in my individual groups but as you move up the levels of complexity how do you insert yourself as a dendritic starting point for trust as an individual as a collective group as a participant in the community who's going to a council meeting all these different levels where decisions are being made i i have a sense that there's that certainly the basic things of personal exposure and vulnerability are important but i think there's the opportunity to create a powerful social movement by a change of behavior in multiple dimensions that becomes another speed of light networking kind of thing because i think humanity is hungry for trust and i love what you just said this friday morning at the same time the call is an inside jury's brain call about something i call up keto which i'll explain very briefly right now but i've been doing a semi keto on the side that's my sport and i keto is and i'll say this again on friday but i keto is the i is harmony he is chi is universal life energy and dough is the way due dough uh you know all those probably nintendo who knows um the way of nintendo um and so i i married i keto to uplift or upward spiral as a neologism in order to create a practice that helps people learn how to improve everything they touch which is sort of this upward spiral kind of kind of concept and so and so i'm really interested in in there being an up keto a virtual up keto dojo that invents some practices that include what you just said what is a practice i can bring to a group that does some of these things exactly so so a kind of connects to design from trust as a playful a little bit and to me humor is really important here because it trust in particular if you take it too seriously and you're like oh trust me trust it doesn't really work so i'm interested in how do we do this with a little tongue-in-cheek but with serious intent um to play out some practices that anybody can go pick up and use because uh you know i think i think open sourcing these things is the way to go well if you if you ever want to do a in you know an in-person thing i have this great exercise that basically where people create a game together and there's a process by which they create a game together but then what what it's really about and you know it's you know think simple you know sorry monopoly or whatever to but at the end of it you end up being able to have this sort of larger dialogue about you know what is the you know how did we cooperate to do that um and again it's kind of like what you were you were just saying if you if you can get it out of the the the you know certain context into the play context it just allows for a lot you know more um possibility of learning i do have to roll um you have to roll yes so i it was nice meeting everybody i hope i can't do all of these things you tend to do them in the morning which is when the european clients all want to meet me or various standards things so but i try to attend when i can't i will make next week's dft call in the afternoon because i move them around just to make it kind of random who can show up and i don't i don't have time to doodle everything i hate doodle polls they're like crazy maybe better figure out to actually actually try to figure out to include people it's harder than it needs to be um thanks for being here um i want to pass the floor to roya in a second but i just wanted to mention you real quick um does everybody know arthur brock yeah amazing he is the uh agile learning centers holo chain he's a certified genius and one of the things he's invented is a process called game shifting which is which is a group process technique that he used for a meeting i was hosting once he sort of ran that part of the meeting using just a whiteboard uh or a marker board and uh and he was busy tracking the meeting and i had this sort of notion that there would be a beautiful ipad app that game shifting could become a really beautiful ipad app and that one of the elements of it i'll explain it in more detail some other time would be that you could bring in group process techniques into the app and the app would help you step through them it would basically coach you through christopher's game building exercise or you know what have you or the vault of vulnerability exercise or mindfulness breathing practice or you know these things would simply be available to be brought into the app to run through um and then to keep in your library of tools of the trade forever like because mostly experts in facilitation and group process have a whole bunch of skills but one of the things they have is a bag of tricks they have they have a bunch of things they've used over and over again that work really well that they can just pull out and implement right away and and how do we make how do we make this easily accessible and that the group works deck that christopher was talking about and the liberating structures are attempts to do this to publish these these sort of collections of really great ways of of helping humans collaborate and trust one another so with that to you roe um in a way this this possibly speaks to the question of trust and it is only a question um we on this call and funnily enough the call i've just come from as well we're all roughly the same demographic roughly the same age roughly the same experience history we started i by crashed in talking about my personal history now we come from a a domain where interpersonal trust was by and large formed i mean most of my client base used to be in the us i was in europe so it would have been done by phone or it would have been done by people getting on planes and flying across the atlantic but it was broadly speaking it was face-to-face communication of some form and even the telephone uh actually gave a certain kind uh it was a single medium it was a single way of communicating phones are really intimate it's super interesting it was very very intimate exactly now going forward and very soon there is going to be a generation for whom the determinants of trust are multiple so you so you know the phenomenon of people for example breaking up with the text now from my generation that would have either been face-to-face or if you were feeling extremely timorous it would have been a note but by and large it was a very personal thing and we treasured trust it was significant we recognize it up front now the technologies that are being used increasingly and almost universally by a new generation trust i'm fairly certain is is not an inter it built it is not built into those systems at all they're designed to enable rapid disconnections uh avatars you know um you know the whole the whole framework that this upcoming generation is going to have to deal with is fundamentally different to the one we have and i find this particularly now i'm i'm involved with a a cooperative another quite well a large cooperative basically formed by people in their i suppose probably from the late teens early sort of 20s up to probably their mid 30s they're all technologists they're distributed all over the country they're making community contact across the world with other similar them they're they're extremely aware of the public importance of action trust political trust etc etc etc but they are still within this uh they still see they seem to have a different concept of of the i'm trying i'm sort of struggling for a way of describing it but it's i suppose it's a very simple thing if i once upon a time if i send somebody an email or any kind of communication i expected a response even if it was just something that carried the conversation forward now i'm not in the least i used to be shocked when i didn't get a response now i'm not i take that as being that's an accepted process now it's accepted behavior so i think this is all over the map though because for example there was a really nice i think npr report about teen girls on instagram and the reason they were sitting at dinner is that there was this expectation of all mere instantaneous liking of everything everybody else was doing and not catching up with that was a reason to be cut out of the group that that there was this extremely high touch instantaneous communication with very blunt like liking or not liking right like really stupid this this bit you know eight bit graphic version of emotion but if but if you weren't there in a timely fashion and you didn't do the right things with the right groups of people you were out you were sort of social socially cut out so so i and then i tell the story really often um oh what was her what's her name uh the woman who ran lamb to move uh amy brachman she once wrote long long ago she said um at one point she types uh her character name uh bites its lip and bites its lip and looks looks at his shoes and and this was on a pure text moo interface and i'm like that was beautiful and eloquent and i was just recently a couple days ago uh there was a question asked of me of well how do you help people you know how do we do diversity how do we help people get to meet other people online and i was like you know what the plain text interface masks where you came from that you're huge or little or green or purple or any it masks it and it's really useful in particular when after doing something interesting that connects you then reveal identities and go oh shoot you're the kind of person i would have tried to shoot or would have run from or whatever else so i'm trying to figure out among many other exercises how might we create places where those things happen in a in a safe way how might we create instances of connectivity across these communities where they don't know they're talking to the enemy as they've been raised because as in the uh musical south pacific there's a song you've got to be carefully taught right which is basically about racism that that we're not born racist we're taught to be racist by our culture we're taught to hate other people so in many cases we just have to un we have to like hit control z over and over again and undo on these cultural trainings i have a pretty negative attitude about socialization i think that most of our problems are due to our socialization world that socialization destroys the innate connectivity we feel this you know destroys a whole bunch of things that we're just born with unfortunately and some of this came out from my first girlfriend introducing me to alice miller the swiss psychologist anyway those are each of them interesting tangents and we're at the top of 90 minutes now roams i hate that you jumped in at the at the top of the first hour i'll be back i love this my problem is if i if i move this conversation to the afternoon next week it's too late for you in the uk uh not necessarily like not necessarily i 2pm pacific is what nine year time or 10 yeah it's i i have a wife who's an academic and she's up at all hours of the night producing papers and things so it's not no i mean i think this is a this is a this is a this is a very large rabbit hole to go down and it's it's something that i try it's just come up in so many spaces recently this concept of trust what it is how do you generate and create trust so yeah absolutely um okay so i won't so are you on i forget which lists if any of mine that you're on are you on uh i get i get your email that's it at the moment sounds great so inside jerry's brainless is the most inclusive one because i i tend to over post to that okay if you think of other people who would enjoy this conversation and bring good stuff to it please invite them in yeah we'll do no absolutely yeah yeah can you remind people about the ability to share things in the the blog mode or the whatever we call the chat that's ongoing in the groups because i think there's so much rich content here we could pull a lot of that in outside of the conversation and then speak to the highlights of it so people aren't using the lists right now yet to have these conversations which i would like um you could provoke that just by chatting about some of the points you liked here and and i'll answer you and then we'll see who else kicks in we've got something that after hannah's talk yeah that was you know and i think partly because she was so open it inspired all of us to jump in with open sharings as well so maybe exactly we could be a working group on this topic ourselves i totally the intention and i will post this thing to youtube and the chat to the the list and all that so everybody can see the chat but you don't get the richness of it and my mo is weird i like sort of go with the flow for a while and see where the conversation shows up and then like suddenly gets interesting and i i i i that's just the way it goes but but when people trip into the beginning of most of my zoom calls they're like what's going on here what's remind me again the call this afternoon so this afternoon let me look at i've got four calls set up this one was designing the workshop this afternoon is are things getting better or getting worse oh yeah friday morning at nine pacific is up keto like introduction to up keto and then friday afternoon at two is the unschooling design questions it's like if you if you wanted to actually build scaffolding for for unschoolers what would you build could you put all four of those in one note um or you know i'd like to forward this to a few people that i've been trying to get to come in live and so far it's like i can't come in live but i'll try to watch the video but then i'm not sure they get there yeah exactly uh so three of them are in one invite already which i think i sent out last night so i can copy paste the other one and forward that to you okay great thank you cool thank you um go ahead roy any clapping work no no that's it that's that's thank you very much um good to have been here and yeah pretty i missed the first hour but hey that's the way it goes love having you here thank you very much thank you judith okay see you guys the other side