 Hi everyone. Welcome to today's Protocol Labs Research Seminar. Today we are joined by Oliver Sodder who is co-founder of Memex, a collaborative online research school. Oliver is a passionate supporter of CAT return investment models with which Memex has been financed and believes that many of the world's challenges find their roots in un-CAT investor return models because they create incentives for extra behavior that can hinder the free flow of information. Today Oliver will be sharing how to use Memex in various capacities. So Oliver, I will let you take it from here. Thank you so much. Yeah, so I would start with just generally explaining why we're doing this and where we're heading with this. Then I would give the introduction into Memex and in particular first into how to use it as a personal organization tool then as a collaborative organization tool and then we can also go a little bit into the way we structure our fundraising model in order to kind of get to the effects you just mentioned of less extractive like organizational practices. Yeah, so I founded Memex because it was clear to me that we're in a phase of society, humanity, where it becomes increasingly difficult to make sustainable, effective and compassionate decisions and we see it in all levels from like high level governance to individual interpersonal relationships that this becomes much more difficult specifically in the last like five to ten years. And it was clear that in order to make those good decisions what we're lacking also is kind of good quality information that we can ingest in order to make those decisions and being less polarized in the process. And so the overarching design objective of Memex was how do we increase the quality of information that people have access to and also decrease the polarization that people experience when reading content online. So making it much more easy to compare things. And so the general principle here is to use the fact that every one of us is doing research in one way or another. We read stuff, we do proactive research and when we do so we apply a lot of knowledge and experience into filtering content and making notes for ourselves but also that are can be useful for others. And so the question was how can we make it possible that each of us can much more effectively capture, share their research and then build on the research of other people as they are consuming information, specifically information that might not be in the immediate like knowledge vicinity of oneself. So where people are newbies and we benefit from getting a head start by building on other people's research. Yeah, so let's get into it. I'm showing you a demo of how this all works. For example, I've been doing some research before because I've been playing with the idea of how I can integrate something like the soil and or fuel in my nutritional diversity but realizing also it has sucralose in it. And so I was reading this article and wanted to find out what the effects of sucralose are and take notes about that. And essentially now the big advantage that I have with Menex is that I don't need to organize the things that I find anymore into specific buckets in order to find them again or bookmarking folders or copy paste links into a google doc. The only thing I need to do right now in order to save an article is I need to go to the right side of the screen to let this toolbar pop up and press on the hard button. I can also use keyboard shortcuts without and wish with, for example, option s. Same thing happens. And when I do this, this article is saved and full text index. So I can find this article again with any word that I remember. So I don't need to by default organize anything. I'm showing you the search in a second. The second thing that I can do is instead of copy pasting sections of the content into my notes, I can just highlight pieces. And so, for example, here is actually the sentence that I was looking for before is how does sucralose actually affect their gut bacteria, which in this case seems to have an effect on it. So it's a consideration I want to save because later I might reuse it or I want to know what I've been highlighting on this article. And so what I can do here now is I can either highlight or add a note. So I'm making a highlight now. Or if I want to add a note, I can press shift click on it and then say this should be a consideration for me when eating something with sucralose. Yeah. So I can make my note here. And basically what I did now is I never left the tab. It's one of our design principles is to figure out how can you make as much as possible without you needing to context switch into other applications in order to make the notes that you want to about the content relating. So what this works on this highlighting functionality works on websites. It works on PDFs, even PDFs that are locally stored. You can just drag them into the browser and then make your highlights just the way you did it on websites. And it also works in YouTube videos. I'm going to show you that now. And so now on the YouTube video, then you go to the right side, open the annotation sidebar. And then what you can do is you can press command Y. Let me maybe to the keyboard shortcut. So you see my keyboard shortcuts. So command Y. And it creates a timestamp to that section of the video. And then I can take my note here. You see here, I already did this a couple of times on other places. For example, here, like the sections of the video. And if I click on one of those timestamps, what I will be brought to is the exact section of the video. If you go back here, that you don't have to organize doesn't mean you can't. You can also use spaces. So again, you go to the right side or you press option C. Is in this case my keyboard shortcut and click on this icon here. And then I say, for example, I want to add it to my space health. And spaces are much like tags with the difference that you can also collaboratively curate them or share them with other people. I'm going to show that in a second too. But before that, I would like to show you a full text search. So now the question is, now that I've saved everything in the process of doing the research, how do I find it again? And say, for example, I only remember this word that I kind of didn't properly pronounce. And then I can go here to the right side to search my mix. And then type in the search. And I instantly find the article again that I've been looking for. I can also see my highlights here. And with that being able to retrieve my content super quickly. What I also can do is I can apply filters. So I can say, hey, I remember I've seen this article like two weeks ago. I will filter by time. In this case, it's just one or the domain just coming from. There you go. And I can also filter by subspaces. So spaces that I've given that content. So in this case, health. So yeah. Any questions on that feature and functionality that I displayed so far? So I guess that's a no. Then I will now continue into how you share and collaborate with my mix. So this was a personal part. So if I'm now, for example, again on this article, what I can do is I can go to the right side again, open the sidebar. And then here, if I click on the three dots, I can share space. And when I share a space, it will create two types of links. One is a commenter access, which means you can send this to anyone and they can view the content of these spaces and they can reply to the highlights that are on the space. And a contributor access, which allows them to also add their own pages and all own annotations. And the contributor access is, for example, if you want to run a reading group together or have a research project where you want to have multiple people adding async their content as they go. And the commenter access is more like if you want to share research with a group. Like say you asked for good resources, like me, good resources around our cap return investment model. So I have a space for that. And all of the things that I find that are relevant to people, I add there and people can follow it. I'm going to open out a health one. Actually, let me show you one that I know is pretty full. So this is our shared reading list of the company. And here if I open the web view, I see this is the commenter access link that is basically visible also to anyone who has that link. So they don't need to have memex installed in order to make use of the content that's in there. They can unfold here, for example, the highlights and can reply to those highlights also from the web interface. It's below here. And here they could reply. That's all without having the memex installed. But if they do have memex installed, then they can also do that in context of the websites. I'm showing you this here. And then again, we can go to the right side. You see here the shared spaces. So these are all the spaces in which this page is in that I either follow or collaborate. And then I can unfold, for example, here, the one from the shared reading list and see the conversation here about this particular annotation. You can click on the annotation and also see where this annotation is on the page. So one last thing about this is in the beginning, I introduced where we want to go with this. And one of the design principles was how do we make it possible to reduce polarization? And one of the things you see here maybe that could hint at where this is going is that a big problem of why polarization exists is because when I read something online, to get different perspectives is super difficult. You need to find the people first, and you need to check if they have read that article, and check if they have any opinions or notes on that. And if you have multiple people, even worse, like if you want to actually compare different perspectives. And with this, you are able to really quickly just say, oh, I want to see what people in this space have been annotating on this page or what people in this space have been annotating on this page and can, without the extra effort, once you have connected with the people and once they've shared some of their research, it becomes a serendipitous discovery of different opinions on a specific page. NEMEX is designed for multi-context work. So what we want to enable is once you've done and created an annotation, make it super easy for you to share it across multiple spaces. So if I go back to the annotation, you see here, this annotation has been added to two different spaces. So this means this annotation is now available in both of those spaces and the conversations are separated out. So you actually can have different contextual conversations in both of those spaces. And adding it to a new space is really just adding it like this to a new space. And there you go. One of the things that we intend to do to make interweaving those different spaces with each other easier is that we want to make these spaces discoverable. This means these associations will be discoverable to other people and the conversations that are happening in other spaces that are discoverable too. This means you are actually then able to see, okay, someone has responded in the World Brain Shared Reading List, but also someone else like in Evan and Ollie. And if I click on Evan and Ollie and it is a discoverable space as a recipient, and I mean as a recipient here. Imagine here the space, the space association was visible. And you could then click on one of those spaces and jump to the other space, see what's there, follow that space, integrate it into your own kind of social knowledge graph and jump basically horizontally discover the content that other people share, which is both an advantage for the recipient because they can now start discovering, but also for the sharer because the person who shares can very liberally associate things to spaces and just say, well, these all these spaces should be public. And meaning I can really effortlessly like enrich my knowledge graph and other people can discover it without me needing to put in all of the effort of sharing every single space with every single person that I want them to have it. And basically I would then separate out a kind of more public spaces, cluster of spaces that are discoverable, some that are more like topically or like focused on a specific collaboration between groups and some that are maybe completely private that are then more like tax. And what we're very likely introducing at some point is like filter ability by the location on this page by the person it has been shared or even things like how often it has been shared in multiple spaces who has responded. But anyway, however we're implementing this, any feedback as you encounter the problem is highly appreciated in the process. And then we can understand what would actually help you filter down to the spaces, sorry, filter down this information in an equal way for you. Then the last feature that I would like to show is very important one is actually how do I get stuff out of Memex? Now that I stored everything there and I need it in a context of another collaboration that is not between Memex users, I want to get my annotations out, I want to get my links out, etc. And how do I do that? And so again, just here to dashboard. So we have this feature called the tax exporter. And before I do that, I'm just limiting the search a little bit so we don't have too many results. So the tax exporter is a feature that allows you to design custom tax export templates. So I'm zooming in a bit so you can see what's happening here. So I'm using ROM and I regularly, for example, tag people that I find and articles that I read where I like to contact the author. And I like for example, actually, let's make this example very concrete. I'm having here contact, space contact. And in this space, I'm also having, for example, use case call up. So these are all the people that I think could have a need for the collaboration features that Memex offers. And I want to contact them for that. And I can now use the tax exporter. That's what I do is like I port I want to port these contacts over to ROM, including all the potential notes I've made on these pages. And so I designed this template and that suits this structure. I click on the template itself, see, and then I go to ROM here. And then I paste it in. And you see what happens here. Is it it's exporting it exactly in the structure I wanted to. And it also you see here, it created the right tags and the right spaces. So these are now linked with the wiki link structure inside ROM for me. Or if you use obsidian or lock seek, any any or notion, not notion doesn't support this pacing in, but lock seek and obsidian support this too. So any kind of linked knowledge management tool, I can talk tool supports those two. That was already it in the basic form of what Memex can provide as a tool. Everything that I showed you is my personal production extension. So if you download it, you will be able to use all of this. My my problem, my question to you folks right now is if in the hypothetical case, which is not so hypothetical, but in the hypothetical case, there was 500k dollars on the table, and you would like to improve Memex in some way. What is the things you would like to see to make this a tool that is at least 100% better than it is now for you? Good news is also like we have now one feature improvement ahead of us, which is being able to click on those links and it opens the annotations on the page in that space automatically. It's kind of a workflow improvement. And after that, we're going to spend a significant portion of time into improving generally content support. And one of the things is image annotation. I guess we're at the end then.