Collective Truth in Web3

Transcript

There are two uh cure code that you can sc you can scan. The left left one is the alpha uh products that we've launched that you can play with and the right one is uh uh is access to the um documentations that where you can find more detailed introduction about pensive. So uh yeah uh and I'm Kathy and I'm now currently as the uh head of operations in Ether Community Fund and and and I'm also a researcher.

Um so before we uh dive into today's topic of like how can we uh get the truth let's first talking about um what are the challenges nowadays that keeping us away from the truth that what we are eagering for um so the first one is um the missing data um actually the beauty of the appearance of blockchain or let's say the bitcoin is that um every transactions can be stored on chain uh forever. So it ensures the transparency of the transaction itself but that does not mean the context behind every transaction is readable to everyone

and uh uh the second one is the data ownership. So uh with within the current current database or let's say the knowledge base um uh most project they are still running their narratives on utilizing web two tools uh like with most well known like Wikipedia because um it's sort of like still easy because uh it just relying on one centralized uh like let's say one centralized node to maintain it to fill in the uh to fill in the information uh about the project about the data. Um so with the nature of

relying on one uh centralized node just relying on one centralized resource of information it usually causes the uh like causes the fact that some of the knowledge um will not be reviewed to public. But usually those kind of knowledge um is more critical because uh it uh sometimes will review the vulnerabilities of the like the organization or um like some governance change. they will not involve the like community stakeholders.

Uh uh besides the process also the maybe some of the um decisions will also not be refused to the communities by the end. And um when we do the research we also found out um there are a lot of uh broken links uh with the nature of uh one centralized node maintenance um be due to the lack of m lack of like regularly maintain of those links. Um so the last one is the the scar tree of legitimacy. Um this one with the example as like what is what what um is public

good. It should be uh like narrative decide not in instead of like just you need you just you provide evidence to prove that you are public goods. uh which means that um you can like say I'm a public uh public goods project because I meet this certain standard but at the same times you need to share the value with the community with the public as well in order to make you as um public goods.

So with those um knowing let's say the uh challenges uh I know Vitalik and also the whole Etherman community they are um pu pushing this the act movement and info defense as one of the uh major factor in this movement um it is to protect societies organizations and also the individuals against threats related to the misuse of information which includes uh such as disinformation, social media manipulations or the control over of data um site ops um synthetic

uh media or the like deep fakes and also cipher texts uh for example infrastructure septage and int intelligence gathering insider threats data breach handler uh leak. Um so with all of this uh challenges or and also the threats uh we we are being keeping away from the truth but um with info defense and this uh whole the act movement we are try we are in the process to seeking the truth.

And on the left here is a saying from uh Dump Door. I don't know if there is a fan of Harry Potter there, but um uh our executive director QJ is a huge fan of Harry Potter and also that's why we have our product name as Pensive, which is actually also a magic name in the book. So um Dumpdor says that the truth it is a beautiful and terrible thing and should therefore be treated with great caution.

So now we are dancing to like seek the truth. Um so uh for us to seek the truth we first need to acknowledge that it is a forever collective human task that requires collaborations coordinations and also sorry like um and also the interpret interpretations of the information. But um truth is often pending and unverifiable.

Uh while it's pending, it will still influences those um irreversible decisions um like uh votes that usually happens in governance and also will influence the market performance and also the investment from the investors and also the grants allocations. So uh we have to work with uh perception community alignment and provide a immutable history of truth versioning in order to uh provide uh in order to build a robust information layer as a fundamental for the whole ecosystem

to make every decision. So in our particular um context that uh EF was funded by those uh early etherum community pioneers as you can see in the picture in 2018 and it started uh with the idea of everyone like those um pioneer projects uh putting resources together um in order to boost the ad adoption of Ethereum decentralized applications. Uh but and actually by that time it was

easy with those wellunded projects. Um but along the way like um we realized giving just giving out grants to uh projects. And even nowadays um like most of the grant program they're still struggling with is that uh usually comes to where's the money where where are the projects and uh are those projects good and if we say they're good those if those in uh evaluations are based on what kind of information and are is those information real um can

we trust those information. So um and also can those pro uh can those projects deliver the promise that they made on that uh on their uh grant applications. So most like most of ultimately most of the uh account grants programs they struggle with account uh accountability. Um and it it is very difficult and it's costly to track performance.

Um and also it's cost costly to do so. And it usually like to the end is usually about face checking. You must need to know someone in there and to do the fact check um to verify if the information is like is uh real or not. um which is which is um like take like the grants that's why the yearly the grant uh process takes much longer than we expected.

Uh uh okay then uh here is the grant history like when EF was still like a grant giving organization. Those are the previous granters and also the grantees that already got um support from uh us. So with all the uh let's say the all the all the issues all the problems that we as the organiz as the organization and the operator of this uh grant uh program we we've seen the issues and so instead so we decide that instead of directly funding the project

we um we we we solve the issue of information layer first. So we are now coordinate information within the internal community uh to first find the truth first and also we are aiming to uh provide uh educational tools and uh for sure at the same times the project discovery and also highlight those legit and accountable web 3 projects in order to um help them to get more like resources in the in the ecosystem either the grants either the like the uh

community attention and pensive uh so that's why we design designed pensive which is an uh is a mechanism for collective cognitive sovereignty and foundation for governance and we deced decided to um use EF.net network directory as a our first use case and it is a uh decentralized communityowned platform to make sense of blockchain projects with uh validatable crowd intelligence and those are the other use cases that we already thought of. Uh so the first

one is like instead of web3 specific uh decentralized wiki it can the pensive mechanism itself can also be used as the uh general purpose decentralized wikis uh foundational layer and also it can also be used as the academic research collaborative literature review and data interrogative for experimentations and for like laws uh and that the democracies pensive can also be uh utilized there and and for governance they can also use pensive mechanism to collaborate and coordinate on their open

locks and also the uh like the crisis response playbooks and for teachers they can also using pency mechanism to create or build the open courses for their students and uh for environmental use. the like the they can the organizations they can create citizen science reports to help the environmental monitoring and uh and also uh for AI agents the like the pensive can can be used to train the knowledge base and it can also be used as as the knowledge management standard for corporates. So those are all the use

cases um uh can be like can be built on pensive. Um so with all the concept of like uh truth challenges um threats and the missions but how exactly uh pensive the mechanism help us to like uh re like get the get to the truth. So on pensive.ef itself. Uh you can first create a project proposal. Um as I just mentioned uh the

uh the pensive.ef it is a uh open platform where anyone or any grants program they have access to the same database. So which means uh it also like anyone can create project proposals by filling up an essential item set. But the the current essential item set is um determined by the team by team but in the future it will be also open to proposals um by the by the community as well. Um so every item has an item weight and u this item weight actually uh reflects the

importance of the item itself um based on the accountability framework that we design as well. And um every user they will collect their contribution points and we call it CP after they create the their project proposal. And this CP um uh it can be seen as the app proof of your intelligence contribution on ECF plat on pensive.f itself and also it can it it also uh like reflect your reputation in the platform and because like one thing here is that um one one

one nature of this CP is that because we believe that reputation cannot be transferred to others. So uh so as to this CP here is not transferable. Um so the initial CP can be just simple simply gained by uh proposing a project proposal on the platform uh even without the like without the validation from the uh remaining community. You will get you will first get a 0 to1 reward. It is now set as a certain percentage of the total uh essential item sets weights.

Um so uh by to so in order to get your um like the pro the project page proposal just create there to be published because now it's still listing on the pending project list. In order to uh get it to be like listing as a published one, you need to uh reach the threshold uh which is having at least three peers validating each item in the essential item set. And after that uh you will get the remaining CPS uh besides the there one rewards you've already got.

So now the project is published with all the essential items that but still um there are still a bunch of non-essential items on the project page now is available for uh either the other users or also yourself to complete it and also moderate it. And um here is the be like the the most beautiful things here is that how we uh ensure the legitimacy of the item uh the value of the item uh uh the continuous governance involves here. So uh like

although the project although your pro although the project page proposal has been passed the threshold and get published there that doesn't mean that you own the project page or uh the information the data on the page is fixed. It's still open to anyone to go to the page to challenge the current published value. So as long as the user with enough CP they can vote uh new item versions over yours over other users and replace the current leading one um as long as they for sure get enough uh like vote from the others

and um all versions uh are in constant competition to become public versions. Um so that means every project page reflect dynamic dynamically of the collective state of mind and the state of mind reflects the items value in the public discourse. Um I know uh many of you guys would ask like how can I get contribution points? How can I get the CB in order to support others? Um besides the the easy way as I just mentioned open a new project uh you will get the 0ero to one rewards uh you

can also fill in the non-essential items of other published projects and you can also propose alternative item versions and gather sports to make them public. So um let's say uh pensive enabled the information layer the collective um like collective knowledge base utilizing the community uh intelligence. It's it's a heart of pensive uh but still there are still many other interesting plugins that we're uh experime experimenting with and also

building with and first one is the pensive ads it's a ads billboard uh built like built with a habburger tax protocol I don't know like if some of you guys already familiar got familiar with it because it was actually first proposed by uh radical radical change. So uh we we referred to the like the let's say protocol they proposed before and developed the ad board um in on in our product. So which means that um the like anyone can come to the platform to

beat for the ad banner but um even like it even though the one the the first one for example this it be for 10 days but it doesn't mean that you will own it for 10 days it's still open to others beat uh as long as the there's other one beat over you then your um like your ads will be immediately being replaced. Um but at the same time that everyone needs to pay tax based on the valuation they beat for.

And um the second one is my se which is the uh costume filter project collection. Uh actually we are we we uh built this feature because we want to encourage the other uh community grant programs. They could come to uh our platform to our to utilizing our uh product as the true tool to create their own community brand. Uh like they because they can custom the filter um to their standard like you can you can use the filter to choose uh uh we only

accept open source project and also we only accept the project haven't um have the have a token yet. So they can they can c custom the filter um to their scope and they can also share the uh my link to the public directly and to show okay now we're seeing the current current knowledge base current projects on pensive.

What are the projects are the most accountable in the in this certain grant scope? And also uh with ALF we also built a AI agent to help the users to fill in the uh like the information of the project uh of the project page you want to create. So you can use the search function there on of this AI agent. you you just search the uh project name uh you want to like you you want to create the project page for and it will automatically fill in the um the information of this essential item like

set for you. So what you the only thing you need to do is going to check the uh information proposed by this AI agent and maybe to adjust some of the some of the information is not accurate or is not right. Uh so with this AI agent it will significantly reduce the workload of manually uh information input. Uh so uh so the last one is like um let's say pensive is building the like uh the truth the information layer and but here's another like important mechanism in pensive is that the

evaluation mechanism the elder wand so elder wand is the uh evaluation mechanism for projects accountability and also it's a uh fundamental logic algorithm that we're using to display the ranks on pensive.tv. Yes, there are uh some of uh there are a lot of ranks on pensive.tv as well. Uh for example, now we we already have the like version 0.1 launched uh as a accountability rank. Um but like because now we we we haven't had all of items on ECF blueprint added

uh deployed on to to the product and I would say there's only 1/4 items has been there. There are still remaining a lot of uh items will be added to the to the to the platform. So uh with more um like items added to the projects uh to to the to the platform um it it will map the picture complete and it will enable the evaluation of the pro uh of the project's accountability more rational as well.

And those two are the other um other features or other things that we are putting efforts on. Um the first one is this course and now we're uh it's already in like production and we're we plan to launch it uh this month I think before Christmas. Um so um the discourse the first version of this course we plan to use complaints and redress as the first example on discourse which means that you uh the users with enough CP they can uh open the compliance there on

the discourse and uh other other users they can also uh they can uh like answer the complaints and also open to discussion and open to comments. And uh and now the the second one is that the current version of pensive.ef is not fully on chain yet. And why we make this decision uh as a start because we want to test the mechanism the pensive mechanism first. We want to uh make sure the mechanism can truly reflect our goal, can truly reflect our

mission, can truly like uh enable the collective uh intelligence from the community to surface the truth first. Then we have the ontime migration have the like uh immutable version. Uh and yeah, we also just started um our like brand new grant experiment. And why we say brand new here? Because um it's like the amount is not a lot. Um but it's long it's a lasting one like last it last for 10 weeks and now I

think it's a week already week eight. So we already have uh like the seven weeks happened in the past and now we have the we are having the uh week eight. So every week every every week like the top four most accountable um projects will get the reward uh will get the grant and the reward from uh from our team. And I I strongly suggest that if you the if you have a project um you can definitely try with that. And as long as like it's super easy you as long as you have the information about project you

fill in um it like you fill in it as as much as possible like you need to open and then you have the chance to get the grant. Okay. Yeah. Um then yeah that's all about today about the truth about uh how can we get the tr to the truth and the challenges along the way. Um so if you guys uh interested in it you can also scan the discord QR code to to join our community or uh scan the code to play with the product directly. Thank you.