 Hi, I'm Dazza Greenwood, a researcher at MIT Media Lab, and I'm joined today by Anjali, who is a legal engineer at MONACS. She's kindly joined us to give us a walkthrough of a smart legal contract tool that is open source, that MONACS is providing for participants, well, for the world, but that we're recommending participants in the Open Media Legal Hack Distributed Hackathon series, give a try to build innovative projects in the music and media context. And you can learn more about that at legalhackathon.org and more about MONACS at MONACS-M-O-N-A-X.io. And so with that, Anjali, thanks very much for taking some time to walk us through the tool and take it away. You are most welcome, and everyone is most welcome. This is the home page after you sign in, and you can see your task bar as well as you can reach the same places going down below. What we're going to do is explore this by creating an agreement. And because this is content geared, I'm going to go with a songwriting agreement, an agreement between two co-writers as to the division of ownership in and income produced by the song. So we're going to go to templates and look at what's available to us. Oh, I did get logged out. I thought that might happen. Sorry about that. Always comes back to identity. No. I'm sorry, we can't all see your password. Is it possible to just get it? I think I'm in the wrong one. I think that must be why. Let's try that. Yes. OK. So this is what it looks like when you sign on. But we kind of skip through all that so that we could go see how to actually use this. So we're going to go create an agreement by looking at templates. And you can scroll down and see some of the templates that are available. This is the one I put on for this purpose. And here you see what the title is, what the jurisdiction is, the price. It's public. You can have prime but agreements that you don't want to share with other people. This one is public because both for the purposes of demonstration and because this is an agreement that ought to be available to songwriters, whether they have a publisher or not. It's very quick. It's very easy. There's no reason for it not to be free and put up there. Here are these are what happened. This is the way it works is you fill in the parameters. These are kind of the deal points. This is the information that is not differing. I mean, it is differing, rather, from agreement to agreement, the identity of the parties, the percentage splits, who are the publishers, who are the PROs for the songwriters. And here are the workflows. We have two separate workflows, one for formation, one for execution. In order to form this agreement, the parties have to do nothing but sign. And then after they have signed the agreement, this is the execution process. And the way this would work is you would, at the end of the songwriting session, OK, let's say we wrote one song. And we are going to upload the delivery content, which is what our publisher agreement requires us to do. Part of the agreement says, you need to deliver this many songs. And this is the format of the content for delivery in order to make sure that it is considered delivered. So you upload the delivery content, both of you. And then it would automatically populate a master list of songs, which is something I think all songwriters should keep, to avoid any snafus that come from changed characters, typos, all those things. And then after that, it would submit to the PRO. So your PRO has the exact right song title. And there's no snafus related to a change from one to the other. And it also notifies your publisher. So you get a timestamp on your delivery of content to the publisher and exactly what you did deliver. So we're going to go ahead and create this agreement because it looks like the kind of agreement we want to create. Yep, this is relevant to the topic of the hackathon series. And the workflow that you were showing, is that supported in part by the new adoption of business process, the BP-MN language that you've got now? Yes, we can go back and look at that workflow. In fact, we'll look at when I've already created. Let's look at this process. So BP-MN is business process modeling is something that's already widely used. And that way, we knew it would integrate easily into other people's systems. This is entirely open source. This is our platform you're looking at. It's a thin user interface. But the agreements network is entirely open source. And anyone can create their own UI on top of that. And this is what the formation and execution process looks like. This would be the way we're showing it now is as user tasks because we are brand new and don't have all the integrations. Now provided you have integrations, I would want an integration with your publisher. And then whether the song list would be on your own system or on your publisher system would be, I would imagine, vary from situation to situation. But you would upload delivery content. And this would send it directly to the publisher as opposed to the user clicking this and saying, yes, I did notify my publisher that I had created this song. And then, yes, I did deliver the necessary content to the publisher. So yes, that is the way business process modeling will be more useful in the future. The more integrations we have, the more parts of this are going to be automated. But with or without automation, just the process of taking the information directly from the agreement and populating a master list and using that agreement as cutting and pasting from there is with eliminating typos is going to eliminate a lot of problems in terms of having more than one version that is typed differently with your PRO and as a result, not getting the payments that you want or having a dispute with your publisher as to whether or not you delivered everything that was required or whether or not you told them the proper script in ownership. So even without the integrations, which will make this all much more smoother, even without that, it's still going to eliminate a lot of the problems, even if it stays manual user tasks, which is where we are at this moment. So back to creating the agreement. Let us scroll back down. This is the part we looked at before. And then we go to create agreement at the bottom. And we'll call it music code writing agreement. I mean, we're just going to call it four because I've created a bunch of these and that way we'll be able to keep them straight. But I would advise this being the title being something like code writing agreement between and then so, so, and so, and so, and so. So you have the two names there so that you know. Or you can do it by song title. And I'm going to select myself. That's my username that I'm working under right now. And then for the other songwriter, I am going to select another of myself. And then because this is just for demo purposes, I'm actually just going to type in the stuff that we have here. I'm just going to call publisher A, publisher A. Publisher B, publisher B. And songwriter A's PRO is PROA. Likewise here. And since it is more often than not an even split, we're going to go with 50 and 50. And now our next button is green and we're ready to move on to the next step. We already knew the jurisdiction was the United States All Region, so that was on purpose, so we're happy with that. We're going to make this private, although we certainly could make it public if we wanted to. This is external references, meaning references that are external to the process, like the business process modeling that we were looking at before. There's a lot of things. If you think of this as creating a file, a legal file, there are a number of things that you might want to keep a note of in that file that aren't directly related to setting up that process model. Meaning the process model can go on and it can access all the information it needs in order for the system to go through the model and for it to perform. But there's other information that's important, that maybe it doesn't need, that the program doesn't need in order to execute the model, but that you would want to keep in the file. So that's what the references external to the system are. And we're just going to put in an arbitrary number of 11. This might be something to use for delivery content in this situation. In my ideal, that would actually be separate because we would have if we had an integration with your publisher, we would want the delivery content to go directly to them. It would not be something that you just stored as an external reference necessarily. So without that integration, I can't tell you that exactly whether that would end up being an external reference you would list here. It could or it couldn't, depending on how that integration gets built. But I'm just going to put, that is the kind of thing that could go there. And so I'm going to put a placeholder number of 11 because that should let me cover it. Here's where you can see the template. You can download this template and have a look. That isn't where it was supposed to go. Hang on, the computer's being mean. Nevermind, we'll see it on the next screen. All right, so let's go to next screen because I know I can see it again there and expand. Here's all of the information. These are the parameter values that we've put in. That's why it keeps opening it in an app on IC because I put it in legal markdown. That's why. So sorry about that. I thought it was going to be coming up in a word doc or a PDF, but because it's in legal markdown, it is opened in Adam, which is a program that allows us to, basically you code pros in this. So that's why it opened here because that's what I use to put stuff up on the agreements network. But this is what it looks like. You can review the entirety of the text of this and make sure that it's happy. It's what you want it to be. And let's go back to where we were. So we're happy with all of this. We like the model. Everything is great. And we're going to create the agreement. And it's all set. It is created. Now, without taking the time to sign on as separate users, because as you saw from the beginning of this video, that does take a second and I didn't intend to waste the extra time on the video. So what I did is create some other examples that are sort of midway in the process so you can compare what this looks like at different parts of the process. So we're going to go to tasks. And there is what we just created, music, co-writing, agreement four. And the task that's up for this is to sign it. I am required to sign it. So I open that up and I will sign and complete task. And then yes, I am sure I will submit and now it's signed. Now, if you go to agreements, let's go look at music, co-writing, agreement four and see where it is. There was a draft and that agreement has been formulated and you can see the signatory. One person's already signed and the other person is not. And if you go into process, you can see with highlighting that the signing task is done for me and none of this stuff is done yet. We're not there yet. Events will also log in and I'll show you in another example how many events, this is a timestamp. And so every event that happens, you have a record of exactly when it happened. And documents, we only have our one document for this one but you could have a variety of governing documents. For example, if this were one statement of work under a master services agreement, if you were an app developer, you might have more than one document showing up in this section. So let's go back to our agreements and see other ones and see where they are in the process. This one is in the same place as the other one. So this is a consulting contractor agreement. This is one that's entirely fulfilled. And if you look at the process here, everything is green because everything is done. This is from one I did this morning. And if you look at, I think three is gonna be in the same place as four unfortunately and as the one that has no number. Oh no, it's actually waiting for me to sign. So the other party has signed this one, number three. So I'm gonna go look in my tasks and number three should be there. And lo and behold it is, they're assigning task number three for music co-writing agreement number three. So I am going to sign and complete that. And now we are in the execution part of the model. So we both signed and now we have to upload delivery content and get this started. So let's say I have done that and I can tell the computer that I have done that. Now you can see what it looks like mid process. Uploading delivery content is where we are on music co-writing agreement three. So once that's completed by both parties, these will start showing up in the task lists. And as soon as integrations make these automated, all you really have to do is upload your delivery content and then all of this would happen and then you would have a notification that the agreement is fulfilled. And that essentially means that all of your informing of your publisher and your PRO has already taken place. And that's it. Wow, pretty impressive. I have to say, this is great. So let me ask you a question. If there is a hacking teams, any of the locations around the world who wanted to give this application a try, where could they access the code or the service interface and find documentation on how to get it going and configure it? Where would they be able to access this Monax platform that I'm using right now? And where would they find the information that helps them understand how to use it? Yes, assuming that that's the tool that hackers would use in the event if there's some other platform, then let us know where they can find that. No, this is what we have right now and this is not actually, this is not gonna be out, this will be out for private beta in two, no, four days, four days to private beta. So this will not be available for use for everybody in two days, which is a problem. So I know the next event we have going is in New York on October 20th, but there's a bunch of big ones happening the following weekend on the 27th and 28th at MIT and Kansas City and Brazil and other places. So it sounds like it may be available by then. So where would people find the tool and how could they learn how to use it? So I will find out whether or not that is doable for the private beta period. It's whether or not we'd be giving out logins, but the way it works is the place to find the information you need is Monax.io and that's got a lot of blogs and a lot of tutorials there, information on how to use this. As far as, what else is I gonna say? The Monax platform user interface. So even if it's not available during private beta, it will be available for public beta, which is not too far off. And what we've talked about at this point is I believe we are gonna have a demo environment up for people to play around with for a little while. And the reason is because there are costs associated with putting information on the chain and using this for real. And once you are using the program for real, it's going on the blockchain. So it's immutable, it's there forever and these are legal agreements. So that gives people a place where they can play around and get to know the system and learn how to use a system and how it can be useful to them without necessarily committing agreements they're making to the blockchain. Okay, and so if people wanted to say, go to a GitHub repo and try to install, config and run the platform on their own and maybe commit to a test net to avoid some of those fees that you'd have in production, how could they do that? Or is that even possible? I mean, it's certainly possible, but whether or not we have a way for people to do that just now or whether that's something that we're allowing, I would have to find out and I certainly can find that out before Saturday so that we can put that information on the website, not just, I mean, I can of course announce it so people know that, but that way we can also put it up on the website for the future events that are coming up. Okay, great. So what I've been doing with like Endor and OpenLaw and ArcChain and others that are showing their tools that teams could use is creating a wiki page at legal hackathon.org just through the GitHub repo we're hosting the site where people can kind of get the current status of the tool and links to available resources when they come online. So I'll go ahead and do that for you, Angelien, for Monax, and as things become available, let's just stay in contact or you can go into the wiki page yourself and just keep it updated so that people will be able to go ahead and find the open source and access it. Open source is definitely available. So the platform, the platform is us. That's not distributed to the public, but the agreements network behind this that allows this whole thing to work, which has a lot of functionality that's not even showing up in our platform yet. It will take us so much time to build the product tools that will allow us to use the full functionality of the agreements network, but the agreements network itself is entirely open source. So anyone can download the 19,000 lines of Solidity code and they can start building their own UI if they wanted to do that to start using it. Okay, so where would they find that? What repo would that be and in what organization? I will find out exactly where that is and have a place, like a URL. I think that's it. Okay, and when you find that out, as I was just saying, we'll pop it right in a wiki page and people can go to town. Sounds good. Okay, well, thanks very much. And you're gonna be joining us as one of the speakers, I think, and sort of project reviewers in New York at the Bushwick Generator this Saturday, October 20th and we're grateful for your time and especially for giving people, I guess a little bit of a preview and an overview of the great stuff that you guys are putting together. It's really, really is good, especially this integration with the business process modeling open standard that's just been so needed in this computational contracts in general and smart contracts on blockchain in particular. So nice work and thank you for sharing. Thank you, we're very proud of this product and I am absolutely glad to show it to everybody and I totally wish that we were just slightly farther along in the process so that everyone could just start using this at the hackathon, that'd be fantastic. But as it is, like I said, the code, the Solidity code is definitely available and I will give that information to you very shortly. Outstanding. And then I guess in closing, I should say, we're gonna be doing another MIT law short seminar in January. It'll be our, I think, third or fourth one focused on blockchain and law and so we'll have an opportunity at that point to maybe look at doing a more structured set of exercises or some kind of learning sessions on your tools at that point. And I know people that show up to that frequently are coming from big organizations or government and military and you name it and they're really into this workflow and business process language capability. They're very enterprise focused. So we're hacking this month and we'll be continuing on into the future. So let's stay in contact as your tool evolves. Yeah, absolutely. That we would love to be a part of that. And that is, this is definitely something that can be used by everybody. I put in a music co-writing agreement because that's what I do. I work with content creators. So this was, this is addressing a pain point of that I'm very familiar with and a type of client I'm very familiar with. But it is really universal and every business will be able to use it. So it will be, I think it'll go over great and we can even do another video with a different example for that later on. Outstanding. Okay, well, so again, for those of you that wanna learn more about this particular event series check out legal hackathon.org and to learn more about Monax it's monax.io, right? Yep. Okay, thanks. So until next time, see you online.