 Hello everyone, good morning. Thank you for that lovely introduction. Yeah, I'm Alana Irving and I build tools and structures for radical collaboration, and I'm here to talk to you today about collaborating with money. So I work in the social impact venture space where people are brought together by a desire to make a positive difference and by values like cooperation and connection and caring relationships and in this space, I think sometimes money gets a bit of a bad rep and Yeah, I think sometimes people feel like it doesn't represent those values, right? It brings a lot of baggage with it from the individualistic capitalist society out there I'm quite interested. Yeah, like money can be uncomfortable But I'm interested in what can happen if we if we stay with that discomfort instead of avoiding or shying away And start to unpack. What is this money thing? Why is it so powerful? What could it be with a different set of values? Yeah, so I've been working on some projects around this Alternative story about money and a different way of relating with a different set of values That can help us build trust and build community and build commons together and I'm gonna tell you about three of them today Right, so the first one I want to tell you about is called co-budget I started working on co-budget at Inspiro, which is a network of social entrepreneurs a pretty a large group of people Who does a lot with? Financial interdependence so pooling resources sharing income and we needed a way to involve a lot of different people in Financial decision-making and setting the budget So basically we developed this process of participatory budgeting It started as a basically an ugly spreadsheet or I just put all the different Financial contributions from that month down the side and then across the top with the projects that people wanted funding for and people could Come in and put their part of the budget toward the projects that they wanted to support And then it grew from this ugly spreadsheet to a piece of open-source software Which is now used by different groups around the world, which is super exciting Including Edmund Hillary Fellowship actually which used co-budget to give but parts of the budget to the fellows who could then find the projects that they Wanted to support in the community So what I've noticed about groups who use co-budget is just real just increase in engagement Feeling of accessibility about the budget And a shared sense of ownership of hey, we can put our resources together and build things together and share ownership of those outcomes It's kind of like yeah, like you think of it as internal crowdfunding using shared resources And so in this way it can help a community build trust Build strengthen the community itself and basically get get things done together build things together. So that's co-budget The next thing I want to tell you about is open collective which I've been working on more recently Open collective began out of trying to solve a problem in the world of open-source software Basically these distributed collaborative communities come together to produce open-source software Which is really valuable and does really important things and people come to rely on this software build businesses on top of it And there's ways to contribute code back But there really was no way to contribute money to financially support these projects and help them be more sustainable or get to the next level and that's because kind of by definition a distributed Collaboration Nobody owns it. It doesn't have one person's name on and it doesn't have a Company that can have a bank account or issue a receipt or generate an invoice Which you sort of need to interact financially in the world so open collective solve this problem through Essentially like a hack of fiscal sponsorship where project can come along start an open collective page Which is it kind of looks like a crowdfunding page. This is who we are. This is what we build it has a donate button and Yeah, it can accept funds and start spending money and a set importantly. This is all completely transparent So you everybody can see where the money comes from and also where the money goes and what it's spent on and it can Be accountable to the community at large and the way this is accomplished Like I said about fiscal sponsorship is there's an umbrella organization sort of in the background Which is legally incorporated has a bank account can hire an accountant and pay taxes and all that stuff And then under that umbrella all of these collectives can live and basically use that Like a legal and financial comments Like so here are some of the projects. It's grown now beyond open-source software to lots of different kinds of projects and sort of any organization can Start one of these umbrella organizations and create a legal and financial commons for the collectives that they want to support for the community that they want to host So to make this a little bit more concrete An example women who code has a mission around supporting women in programming And so they have their women who code organization, which is legally incorporated It has a bank account and they have an accountant and everything and then all of the women who code chapters So they've got chapters and cities around the world can have that can have their own open collective page their own Transparent budget can fundraise in their community Can you can host events through open collective and the ticket sales go to the budget as well? It's all transparent And that way they can also support their community members to do cool stuff Like you know buy a 3d printer for the community to hack on or pay for childcare at the event so that more people can attend and there are now a Whole network sort of federated network of these open collective umbrella organizations that support different communities And each host number of collectives And in this way, it's another way that collaborating with money can help us build things together build trust and strengthen our community So now we are about to cross a threshold. We have been in the white background world of the current Internet that we have today and we're about to step over into the decentralized web the crypto powered web Web 3 whatever you want to call it. So of course, we need to have a black background and mono space font because this is a hacker zone Well, I'd like to tell you about my latest project, which is called dark crystal So dark crystal really emerged out of a question, which is who gets to be a peer in peer-to-peer? I think that the decentralized web is the emerging future. It's really important It's really powerful and so it's really important that everybody gets to participate But when you look at the demographics of okay, who builds peer-to-peer technology and who has cryptocurrency? Unfortunately, a lot of people look the same or come from a similar background and other people are not able to access access this world So we are interested in why that might be what are the barriers that people face or what might be putting them off? So my co-founder on this project dark crystal decided to just give Bitcoin to 50 of his diverse friends to understand How it was for them what their experience was what challenges they face So these are people who otherwise would never have gotten involved with cryptocurrency And we learned a lot from this experience And one of the strongest themes that emerged was around private key management. So essentially passwords secrets The cool thing about peer-to-peer systems is you connect directly with the people that you want to interact with There is no bank or a company or You know centralized server in between in between you intermediating your relationship The hard thing about P2P systems is there there is no bank in the middle that you can't walk in there and say Hey, I lost my password. Can you please let me back into my account? You are responsible for your own security So combining like anxiety around technology for people who aren't necessarily tech people anxiety around money plus this like really Unforgiving security environment. Yeah, really was putting a lot of people off. So we thought okay, can we build a better way? The way that dark crystal works Essentially is you take your secret so a password or it can actually be any kind of secret put it in your crystal and then through the magic of math and cryptography you split your crystal into pieces into crystal shards Each of those crystal shards is unreadable. It doesn't tell you anything about the secret on its own and you can take your crystal shards and Give them to people that you trust so give one to your co-worker and one to your mom and one to your neighbor and Say hey, can you please keep this safe for me? And then if something happens to you or you lose your password Those people who you trust can use their judgment and say oh, yep. This is a legit request We're gonna put our shards back together and reveal the secret So the underlying Technology of dark crystal isn't new but this approach of Backing up secrets using the trust trust in your social network and the way we're going about it is new so first of all The the technology that exists around this now up to now before we built our prototype is really hard to use I mean like we do the stuff for a living and we were trying to do this sharding process And it's so error prone and unwieldy and we just thought there must be a better way So we've built our crystal to be super accessible user friendly Yeah, really a lot less error prone a lot easier to use And it's also built with a community first mindset this technology up to now has been used and really I would say individualistic ways so for example people Enhancing their own security by splitting up their password in different places so that if somebody breaks in they can't can't get the whole thing But I think bringing this community mindset to the technology really starts to influence a different way of building it The other thing that makes dark crystal new and different and cool is it's fully p2p So it's built using the secure scuttlebutt protocol and I don't have time to completely get into this But really briefly scuttlebutt is maritime slang for gossip and the way that a gossip protocol works is you've got your device You have your data And if you come into contact on the same network with somebody who you're connected to your friends with your devices Gossip with each other and say hey do you have any news about our mutual friends like what's going on with that thing? I'm interested in and if they have any updates They share it with you and you share updates with them And then you can go on to meet somebody else and pass on the information that you learned and in this way Information and data can spread and people can be connected without any central server or company in between them So yeah, that's why it's fully p2p. So dark crystal is built on this protocol They're actually a number of apps built on this protocol Which is really designed? I would say humanistically. It's designed to mirror the way that human relationships actually work as a way to enhance trust and enhance community So I think that We can Re-imagine what money can be build different kinds of tools with a different set of values in mind To enhance trust to build our relationships and to start to build the world that we want to see and the world That we really want to live in thank you very much