Marko Prljic

Neo-Generalist Designer

[markoprljic]

Internet of Jobs (IoJ)

token emission = f(time, materials, skills, work output, … other signals)

The tokens you earn are the results of f(inputs) where inputs are the time, materials, skills, the value of the work output you create.

Distribute tokens based on the value that peers have identified in your work. (Coordinape)

There are many other implications on human welfare, and they will be explored as well. 

token emission + reputation + learning + impact = f(time, materials, skills, output, other signals)

Notes from Bankless original post by Kevin Owocki.

[markoprljic]

Squads

One necessary condition of the squad is this sense of persistence: co-presence and continuous availability to one another.

But the squad is more than a loose network of affiliations, it's a coherent body. A second prerequisite of squad formation is self-recognition. It's not you or me. It's Us. We. Ours.

Small groups are crucial for tight coordination. A greater network may surround the squad, making it appear big and fuzzy from the outside. But for the core crew, an invisible circle binds and protects a space of group identity.

Squad space is more than environment, it's a collective body, a shared cognition layer. Squad space is where market-moving trades are planned, conspiracies are conceived, and memes are spawned. Members of the squad may live in different geographies—but within this space, everyone is on SQUAD TIME.

Once together the squad's potential for creative production is immeasurable. 

Group identity. Shared space. Vibes. These not only enable the creation of social capital, but strengthen the squad's capacity to organize, minimizing transaction costs and leading to greater productive capacities and resilience; this is "the nature of the squad."

Contributions to the squad are positive sum. And in return for their contribution, members have access to an expanded set of opportunities, claims on future economic flows and guarantees backed by the group. 

Squads value self-determination, not through individualism, but through collective maintenance and care for one another. Squads value creative expression, but celebrate the group rather than individual authorship. For the squad, the autonomous is always collective.

Squads will be as important as companies in the years to come. And as the micro-structure of our social and economic fabric changes, strong vibes and sustainability will become the new metric of success. Squads don't need to scale. They can just spread the big squad energy.

https://otherinter.net/squad-wealth/

[markoprljic]

The Future of Digital Finance (DeFi)

Macro-financial and technological trends that are contributing to the exponential growth in decentralized finance, aka DeFi

Notes from ConsenSys webinar by Lex Sokolin.

Fintech progress to date

Financial services have become 15%-25% of GDP in developed countries.

Over the last 10 years, VC's first innovation used to happen in public companies has shifted into private capital.

Driving R&D in this space 20% of VC money going into fintech.

Startups such as Revolut, N26, Acorn, SoFI, Robinhood, Betterment built out specifically around a particular product, advice trading, loans, etc. (this game is over, there are already a ton of companies in this space)

At the same time large banks are at the same place, JP Morgan, Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, Merril, RBS

Big tech companies are similar in this game, FB Libram Square and lending business, Apple and Goldman building credit card, or Amazon lending for merchants.

Because of all this entry there has been price competition and a lot of supply and collapse in marginal revenue on the business

Investment management fees went down.

All of the different components of financial services got bundled in one continuum, you chat send a message and move money, save money, trade money, all in one app.

These are not separate regulated industries they are one continuum that people do in a financial environment.

What it means is that financial services are no longer powerful instead we shifted to attention platforms, marketplaces (loan, toilet paper, Disney tickets etc.) power to distribution.

The missing component

“We’re going to democratize traditional finance”

Where does that innovation sit?

The chatbot is in distribution. CRM or trading is the Middle office / Software

Manufacturing had the least disruptive moment in the last 10 years. What does it mean to change that?

You need to have 0$ manufacturing to increase the 50% revenue (cost of website/blog post was 0 increased search from Google, Napster music increased CD manufacturing, Uber transportation made in a different way).

Financial services have not had this fundamental breakthrough moment in financial products, it is all sitting on the regulated geographical local rales.

The answer is open source programmable blockchain network is the same answer to rising the DVD or CD. You're using an infrastructure that is ripping off the traditional financial product, then you have full asset provenance on the ledger.

The DAOs of finance

Not much difference between payments & commences and Banking and Lending etc. users want to do it all streamlined as we’ve seen in current fintech apps.

Institutions (enterprise) to get understand the sharing economy and distribution. Get them to just put data out there, nothing more, we don’t ask more than that. Once we have data we can create workflows (legal docs, check authenticity etc.) Those workflows start getting embedded into the software.

Data  -> Workflows -> then we need an Object (token) anything that touches a nondigital domain. The information in your token is limited and information is very heavy (100s pages of legal docs), over time more and more the token hyperlinks to starts living in the software and is embedded into the network to a point where this becomes thousands of DAOs.

Where we see most traction is specialty finance (invoice factoring, letters of credit, derivates, private equity, real estate fund, muni bonds, etc.)

Generally, consumers want to have assets all in one place rather than all over the place.

[markoprljic]

Re-affirming your purpose

Things to remember and remind yourself whatever you may be doing in your life.  

Do the things that matter to you

Your efforts need to feel valuable. If you stopped doing what you do, people would notice. What you do is your legacy.

Make something you want to use. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.

You’ll hopefully be working on that something for years to come, if not your whole life, it better be something you really care about.

When you’re new at something you better start creating. The most important thing is to begin.

No time is no excuse. When you want something bad enough you will make the time. If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they’ll never happen.

If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. Later, you won’t be pumped about it anymore. When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in twenty-four hours.

Inspiration is like a time machine, a magical thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work.

Momentum fuels motivation. If you aren't motivated by what you’re doing, it won't be very good. The way you build momentum is getting something done and moving on to the next thing. Create a habit of accomplishing small victories.

Keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing. You have to believe in something, and then you need to show it to the world. Stand for what you believe in and show it by living it.

Do things that matter, ask yourself:

Why am I doing this?

What problem am I solving?

Is it useful?

Am I adding value?

Will this change behavior?

Is there an easier way of doing this?

What could I be doing instead?

Is this really worth it?

Get it out there

When you start anything new, there are forces pulling you in a variety of directions. There’s stuff you could do, the stuff you want to do, and the stuff you have to do. The stuff you have to do is where you should begin.

Nail the basics first and worry about the details later. You often can’t recognize the details that matter until after you start building. That’s when you see what needs more attention.

Get it out there fast! Build the necessities now, worry about the luxuries later. Impose a deadline to gain clarity.

When good enough gets the job done, go for it. You can usually turn good enough into great later. Deliver maximum efficiency with minimum effort. get the most out of doing the least.

Commit to making decisions, this is how you make progress. Instead of “Let’s think about it” say “Let’s decide on it.” Making decisions builds momentum and boost your morale. If you make a mistake you can correct it later. Don’t make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going.

When you make tiny decisions, you can’t make big mistakes. There’s no big penalty if you mess up, just fix it.

Optimize for now and worry about the future later.

Get in the alone zone, that’s where the best work is done. You can’t get meaningful things done when you’re constantly going start, stop, start, stop.

Get it out there and let people see it, taste it, play with it, or whatever. Don’t cut yourself from feedback, everyone needs a fresh pair of eyes sometimes, a reality check.

Leave your signature

Make you part of what you’re crating. Inject your personality into what you’re offering. Focus on yourself, don’t try to one-up your competition. What’s going on on your side is way more important than what’s going on out there. Don’t be reactionary, be a visionary.

If I’d listened to my customers, I’d have given them a faster horse.

Instead of trying to outsell, outspend, outsponsor your competition, try to out-teach them. Teaching is your chance to outmaneuver them.

What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? People are curious about how things are made, they want to know how other people make decisions. Share that with them.

Be enthusiastic but know your priorities. Have as many great ideas as you can, get excited about them, just don’t act in the heat of the moment.

Come up with your own goals and execute them. Set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done etc. - do it by yourself and for yourself.

Excerpts from the book “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

[markoprljic]

Showing the value of UX

A great design won’t look like it took a lot of work. That’s not helpful if we want our peers and stakeholders to value UX design.

Show the work all the way through the design process

Include their peers and stakeholders in the design process (design critiques, work sessions, show&tell, posting work on the walls, blog etc.)

bring non-designers to user research sessions

If our goal is to drive our organizations to deliver better-designed products and services, we’ll need everyone we work with to appreciate the hard work that goes into a good design. And the only way we’ll get that appreciation is to show the work of UX.

Notes from UX strategy with Jared Spool.

[markoprljic]

1. User 2. Business 3. Team 4. Self

https://www.fastcompany.com/90156186/designers-finally-have-a-seat-at-the-table-now-what

[markoprljic]

The Experience Vision: A Self-Fulfilling UX Strategy

The engineer reviewed his options one last time. While he was making an important decision, it was like many other important design decisions. If he made the right one, his work would be lost to obscurity. Yet, if he screwed the design or engineering up, it would be all anybody would talk about.

An experience vision gives a team direction. It puts the user’s experience in the center of every important decision. And it drives an organization to deliver innovative products and services every step of the way.

[markoprljic]

Giving a design critique

Good critique is asking questions and guiding the discussion.

Move the conversation to talk about the bigger picture: “What alternatives did you consider for ...?”.

Avoid hollow compliments, such as “I’m liking the direction you’re going in.” or “I like this, but...”

“Have you considered...” is a great way to start an important criticism.

Ask yourself:

What did I enjoy about this design and why?

What concerns me about this design and why?

What does this design remind me of and why?

Notes from UX Strategy with Jared Spool.

[markoprljic]

Broken Welfare systems

We need to start rethinking our welfare systems before we automate them.

Complex systems problems, especially those that involve human systems, are rarely resolved by chucking software at them.

We don’t have good mechanisms for public scrutiny and accountability of these initiatives.

Algorithmic systems may deprive subjects of a clear explanation as to why a decision was made.

Governments are not the most sophisticated buyers of technology.

Replacing humans by technical systems owned by third parties can reduce the states’ ability to adapt or respond to unexpected changes in the environment.

It constructs a slippery slope towards data-driven governance and a route into social credit style management.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613508/ai-fairer-than-judge-criminal-risk-assessment-algorithm/

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25152&LangID=E

[markoprljic]

Platforms power

How well we govern ourselves — learn about each other, discover shared concerns, encourage or sanction behavior — all of this governance depends on how well our communication systems work.

What it means for ‘the public’ to be built on top of platforms owned and controlled by private corporations?

Infrastructural platforms - make the often invisible web through which almost all data today are captured, processed, stored, circulated, and sold. Building a complete stack of experience through custom hardware, software, server farms, data warehouses, private internet networks, undersea cables, and even entire city neighborhoods.

moving far faster than governments and civil society, often outpacing the very idea of governance.

motivated by their own vision of public life

the scale is not necessarily the scale that works for good public life

rapidly changed the popular meanings of words like “friend,” “share,” “like,” “private,” “speech,” “trusted,” and “popular.”

knowing its power or how it works, cannot explain exactly how their artificial intelligence systems work

controversies in terms of the public values at stake, the image of the public in question

Lead with public principles grounded in democratic legitimacy and accountability.

Platforms need us — our content, out labor, our attention, our money. They are ours to control — if we can figure out how to do it.

Source

[markoprljic]

Where do I want to go to work every day?

Just because someone pays you doesn’t mean they own you.

Feel that you have to follow everything in the organization if you miss you think you’re gonna miss if you’re not there.

Don't turn work into 24h newsticker. Tech ruined it for us, the advent of realtime communication has made it too easy to follow too many things at the same time. You can’t THINK about something anymore. It’s like a conveyor belt. In a sense, we turned into factory workers.

Communication is scrolling by and if you’re not there and did not engage you missed it. You have to pay attention at all times, if you miss it it’s gone and you can’t go back to influence that conversation or a decision.

Make slow decisions and communication, old school message board. It’s fine if you reply in a few days, why rush? FOMO. Most of the stuff is just noise.

“But my industry is moving fast, I got a boss and a team none of which allow me to experiment with slow work and slow decisions.” It’s very difficult to implement if you don’t have the power to implement these processes.

What are you in control of and don’t have control over. Things you have control over is something you can influence and should focus on. Begin to affect and have a minor influence to start with.

I want to trust people that are doing good work. You hire great people to give them room to do the work, they’re not going to do great work if you look over their shoulder. Autonomy and trust. You want to be surprised (occasionally on the downside) more on the upside, step back and let them do great work.

Trust battery - everybody who is hired comes with 50%, but you should earn some more and you can also lose some. Good relationship, good work and fill in the battery (there’s no real measure, it’s abstract). Battery between two people, personal relationships. If the battery is low by someone figure out why it is so. It can be repaired directly with the individual so they can build their battery up.

Write long-form and long passages so that people can have time to think about that. We need writers, we hire people who are good writers. We don’t care about the CV we look at the cover letter, to see how they write, communicate, express themselves, how to persuade etc. (like a writing test).

Where do I want to go to work every day?

We build a product that WE want to use. Spin-off other products and keep focusing on the core product. We build a product for use and hopefully, people who like us will use it. Versus convincing people who Put our something that works well for us, explain the benefits and if it works for you, cool!

We don’t want to have a few high paying customers and then be afraid to lose a few of them, and they are the worst customers. You want to have all customers and care about them equally.

Do whatever you can to practice saying NO. Which is really hard. NO is the only word that will protect your time and attention and everyone wants a piece of that if you have nothing left of that you can’t make do what you want to do, because time is owned by someone else. Just because someone pays you doesn’t mean they own you.

Notes from It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work with Jason Fried

[markoprljic]

Knowledge is at our fingertips. We know a lot. We are no longer in the Knowledge Economy — we can access information with the flick of a phone. We're now in the Human Economy where relationships, purpose and experience matter most. Shifting mindsets, attitudes and behaviours towards more human-ness is what will make us the most effective in our organisations. It’s who we need to BE and how we show up as that person that will have the most impact. Our ability to adapt, be flexible and emotionally agile will determine our success.

Dara Simkin

[markoprljic]

Mentoring at Diffusion Hackathon

On the 19th and 20th October at Factory Berlin some of the world’s most important Web 3 protocols and leaders in blockchain, from across The Convergence Stack came together for a 2-day in-person dev con made up of hacks, exclusive product launches, and live demos.

About the hackathon

Diffusion Hackathon is a two-day event with the focus on the practical application of open-source distributed ledger technology, smart contracts, machine learning, and programmable tokens, to create a new data layer. It brought together leading decentralized projects and their tribes, developers, economists, system engineers, enterprise and technical academia to define the next major web cycle.

Hacking is based on The Convergence Stack which is Web 3 protocols in blockchain, AI, IoT, and Big Data.

Leading practitioners from cryptography, machine learning, smart contract dev, IoT, systems engineers, and crypto-economics were exploring the implications of deploying new technologies and distributed systems in complex and challenging fields such as smart cities, Industry 4.0, and Mobility.

How can you leverage the Convergence Stack to do Good, with a capital G? How do we create an infrastructure for collaborative knowledge networks? How do we create Crypto-economic systems that will allow us to establish new rules and economic incentives for blockchain ecosystems? What can you achieve with machine learning with the ever-growing open datasets that decentralized systems themselves produce? How do we enable access control in decentralized systems? How do we share data over a trusted network, without losing time, reducing trust and ownership? How do we make every interaction that a user has with a smart contract understandable and safe? How do we onboard the 99% of developers and organizations who are not into Web 3 yet?

These are just some of the questions that Diffusion hackers were seeking answers to at selected hackathon tracks:

A Stack for Good: your moonshot for a better world (this one had some really great projects)

ETHBerlin and the DoD: community improvement bounties

Web 2.5: onboarding the rest of the world to decentralized technology

The Odyssey Serendipity Network: growing a network of ecosystems

Token Engineering: (re-)invent economic mechanisms by using simulations

Machine Learning in the Decentralised World: opening the AI silos

Shaking Up the Model: data and compute in different places

Sharing in Consortia Networks: permissioned, tokenized data sharing with T-Labs

The Usable Stack: new and better ways to use Web 3

Identity and beyond with Hyperledger: credentials for digital trust

Mentoring and Hacking, why not do both?

The moment I heard about Diffusion got me really excited and I knew I wanted to be there, either as a hacker or a mentor. Since I mentored at ETH Berlin Zwei two months earlier I figured it would be best to continue in the same direction, so I applied ... and got accepted!

I was mentoring about User experience (UX) - for projects that build a product that will be used directly by people, e.g. a DApp or a service. My initial track of choice was The Usable Stack (new and better ways to use Web 3). A word about the track from the organizers:

It’s been ten years since the inception of blockchain, and using crypto and DApps is still hard. Too hard for the widespread adoption it deserves. Things are getting better: there are many great initiatives to make accessing DApps easier for new users, such as Metamask, Portis, and Torus, but to an extent, these are only scratching the surface of great Web 3 user experience. How do we not only lower the barrier of entry but make every interaction that a user has with a smart contract understandable and safe? As we extend the usage of distributed ledgers from simple value transactions to elaborate smart contracts and realize an open data economy, how do we provide ways for users to interact with it, without creating new centralized gatekeepers?

Web 2.5 (onboarding the rest of the world to decentralized technology) which I call The Liminal Web has been my second choice because it tackles the problems on how to assist people in transition from current Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 looking at current problems and future scenarios from user perspective, how we communicate the value, find the best product-user fit and offer the tools needed to make that transition.

Our Hack-along crew was also participating and since I’m close to them on a daily basis I was also considering hacking along.

My mentoring duties have been priority and I scheduled my calendar to listen to some interesting talks which I outline below.

Into the talks ...

Enterprise interest in blockchain

Customer need: Uncertainty and complexity prohibit adoption of DLTS We have a lot of people who are not familiar with BC and can easily deploy their node.

Stax:

dApp

Connectivity

Payment

Data verification

Storage

Identity

Security

Our aim is to create a network of devices and don’t need to enable your data every time, just once.

Odyssey: ecosystems for good

Rutger van Zuidam gave a talk about the Odyssey hackathon, the bigger picture, vision, mission and explained the process and approach in building new ecosystems for mass collaboration.

Notes from the talk...

Odyssey hackathon is used as a time-traveling device. Portal of the future opens and co-create with your future clients future solution and take it back. What can you do with it after the hackathon?

We’re building the infrastructure for ecosystems for mass collaboration.

Complex challenges:

Multitude of stakeholders

Borderless + Interconnected

No one can hold all the information

Not:

Linear, top-down leadership

Money

Who thinks that the Amazon rainforest is your responsibility? What can you do about it? What is the best tool to use it and how do we scale it? How do we incubate all the ecosystems in solving together all these problems? Complex challenges like these need all stakeholders. The ecosystem awareness that can allow people to act on the whole. Group A is not building something for Group B, Group A is building for Group A, we’re all part of a greater whole.

The emergence of the collaborative layer of the internet. An operating system for our global society. Ecosystem + Token = New market. The ecosystem grows, the cost of collaboration drops and creates new business opportunities.

How can you validate green energy going into the grid but without installing IoT devices? Vattenfall brought their competition on board, everyone from the ecosystem, all stakeholders. They all go and do the hackathon and program through a transformation. Then you encounter a new world together. If the team come to the hackathon to build what they planned to build then why did they come to the hackathon?

From hyper-competition IQ to hyper-collaboration EQ (emotional) and SQ (spiritual).

More and more emphasis is put on the human processes which make the difference and sets the DNA and culture of the Ecosystem. It allows people to understand each other, that’s what we’re looking for.

We need board members to understand the complexities of the 21st century and find a bridge to get onboard.

Fission talk: licensing open-source software

Open-source licensing evolution.

What does OS mean? Lcinscing, community, voting, democracy, mob rule?

Definition of OS:

Legal innovation of licenses

Way of working together in code, collaboratively, asynchronously, remotely (large corps did this)

Ideology of code re-use & sharing (gentle versions of)

Commons-based peer production: Lot’s of people work on it, everybody benefits from it and people can build on it even in revenue-generating fashion.

Open source is not a business model.

Why do you choose a license? Is it because of distribution, free labor from contributors, lock it open?

We forgot about a lot of stuff we fought 15years ago. Devs and biz people don’t spend much time which licensed they pick and why?

The copyleft (against copyright). GPL (don’t need to share your changes in code, keep it closed) and AGPL (mus share changes back).

Apple is moving from Bash to Zsh because of licensing, it’s GPL v2 and the new version uses v3. This is to think about licensing in business context.

Licensing innovation is in fact one of the definitions of OS. Cloud providers are making record profits from OS contributors.

Should we licenses who restrict others to do business even call licenses? It’s really weird when your biggest competitor is running your software (Amazon)

License Zero

Licensing as a business model, pay attention to this. Parity and Prosperity are two new licenses. Sell licenses over command line to individuals and companies. Automatically get licenses if you sponsor on Patreon or Github sponsorship.

Do you think current open software licenses are the best we’ll ever have? NO!

Cross License Collaboratives: “Maintain your projects and create shared moneymaking opportunity without any company, foundation or dictator.”

If we can get China and India into open-source collaboration. Just number wise it would be huge!

Anti 996 License - releasing software to companies to comply with local labor regulations.

Data Ethics We start seeing people saying “Maybe I don’t want FB and Google have all my data with them?” Blockstack - Can’t be evil as opposed to Google’s “Don’t be evel”, but it’s not just about the technology. It’s about principles like Fair data scotiey, Local First Software and licences like Cryptographic Autonomy Licences, Icepick.

If we start tunning our own IPFS local servers we’re saving server resources, which saves us a lot of money. - Constellation provider

Step 1 from going into production should from your laptop! Give developers tools to keep date user-controlled.

Why are we not making smart contracts that are deployed once, audited once and we can all contribute to them, in an open-source collaborative fashion? Where we have a global shared rich environment that we should make us of.

Into the hacks...

Here are a couple of projects that caught my attention. You can browse all teams and projects here.

Fission Live

Host your app from your laptop.

Fission is building a backend-as-a-service that will include hosting, database, identity & more. Their service lets you instantly update files, directories and obviously websites directly to IPFS and serve them anywhere.

At Diffusion, they’re launching the first piece, FissionLive. FissionLive allows you to host your app, whether it’s a static website or a Single Page App, directly from your laptop.

Here you can follow the steps and try it yourself (I’m installing it as I write this). Having not much technical background it was super easy for me to set it up. Thanks to Boris Mann and Brooklyn Zelenka who worked hard on this to ship it before the hackathon started. Go, try it out!

Spekboom

I met Denham Preen outside at the courtyard and he explained to me the idea behind the project they’re hacking. They figured there’s a plant called Spekboom in the Karoo of South Africa that provides one of the most cost-effective carbon offset solutions. It grows on the eroded ground and you basically can’t do anything with that plant or the soil on which the plant lives. So why not make use of it?

Spekboom (aka Portulacaria afra) is a succulent that helps fight air pollution. It has the ability to 'sequester' or capture four to ten tons of carbon per hectare! Essentially, it acts as a carbon sponge, absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into plant matter.

They built a system that connects plantations and farmers (landowners) to everyone allowing to buy carbon credits

Plantations are always for sale as NFTs. Holding an NFT continuously generates verifiable carbon credits (ERC20 tokens). Corporations can burn carbon credits to transparently showcase they are carbon neutral. The Harberger tax received from the entities holding the always for sale NFTs, flows directly to the farmers for income and the upkeep of the spekboom plantations.

They used Ocean protocol to implement functionality where Carbon generation and Carbon use data gathered from our use-case. This is our step toward kick-starting a Data Economy!

To show where the spekboom plantations are they used FOAM to enable a crowdsourced map and decentralized location services.

CarbonCreditsClub (name of the team) won several awards at the hackathon and very well deserved. Kudos to the team: Denham, Jason, and Jonjon.

https://devpost.com/software/assetnomics https://carboncredits.club/

Hack-along

Mentors were allowed to participate in the hackathon, so I took advantage of that although I did not contribute that much as I wished. I was part of the Hack-along team (Liminal Village) together with Josh, Thomas, Pavle, Vlad, with a partial presence from Jakub (a very smart guy from Prague).

The system being designed intends to co-opt short term extractive behavior into long term resilience for people and planet via a triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. We want to outcompete (hyper)capitalism.

We split the pie (funds/resources) on the streams via a monthly proposal process that deploys a splitter. Personal streams are transferred directly to your personal wallet. Local streams go to a community DAO that uses liquid pledging to allocate funds into internal projects (like co-budget). The global stream is for when personal and local streams reach their cap when this happens excess overflows into ecosystem partner DAOs.

What's next for Hack-along? Harmonization phase back at the Village to tidy up and integrate various parts that have been contributed from a pluralistic whole.

We’re already forming new teams and doing preparation work for the Odyssey 2020 Hackathon.

Closing words

This hackathon was good, quality content, very knowledgeable people, very good tech being showcased and used, great talks (mostly technical) and great organization all around. Kudos to Jamie, Charlotte, Aron, Matt, Scott and everyone from the Diffusion team. I’m looking forward to the next hack!

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Challenges to achieving decentralized identity adoption

Personal identification information is becoming increasingly more, if not fully, digital, public, and out of our control. Unfortunately, there are limited options for securing or protecting this information as it’s needed to access and engage with most devices, applications and digital services.

The whole decentralized identity movement is still in the early stages and has to overcome their fair share of challenges to achieve adoption. Major challenges include, as stated by Circle Research are:

Pushback from companies like Facebook or Google whose business models are reliant on owning and controlling user identity 

Fragmentation and lack of interoperability between DID systems

UX hurdles — namely wallet management and key recovery mechanisms

Lack of interest from end users who don’t care about self-sovereign identity and privacy

Read the full report on DID and ION

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DAO Challenges

A DAO is a way of allowing a group — people, corporations, even machines — to come together for a common purpose without the need for a central administrator (but with full trust in the code). 

Common challenges:

Maintaining ‘mindshare’

Blockchain scalability

Blockchain viability

Legal challenges

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Incorporated into the design

Organizations are often more concerned with putting out daily fires within the business or reacting to external factors to becoming pro-active to create new value.

Instead of having to wait for a well-established company to resolve such a lack in a certain resource (which often takes an extended period of time), a design sprint attempts to efficiently compensate for a shortcoming within a large establishment in a very short timeframe.

This allows for a highly intimate and focused discussion, where ideas and applications can be healthily brought to the table and explored, in a brief space of time.

There should then be a concise and practical problem statement outlined. 

The whole purpose of a design sprint is to augment a certain sector of a business, but this can only be achieved when the actual needs of a company are investigated and incorporated into the design.

Notes from Daniel Tutt’s post “How to empower large organizations to successfully plan and implement a Design Sprint”

[markoprljic]

Finding humanity in the other

Notes from “The Humanist Cyberpunk Is Lit, Fueled By Big Tech’s Tragedy”

There’s just a handful of businesses leading the focus of research, the distribution of funding, the relevance of government involvement, and finally, the development of consumer-grade applications that will pre-set the terms of our thinking and behavior, and ultimately shape the society we’ll be living in — on a global scale.

Rather than focusing solely on the utilitarian value of humans, one must believe that there’s more to the human species. An intrinsic value, if not, a soul. Thus, what really is needed, is retrieving and finding some globally shared human values. Reconciling humanity and tech, and redistributing power and more equal opportunities.

There is a growing movement towards real, human interactions, and openness to “finding humanity in the other.

In the end, each of us needs to decide and step into action for a future we actually want to live in.