Empowering digital freedom through collaboration

Transcript

hello everybody thank you thank you for coming to the talk my name is gregor i'm from swarm and we are building um base layer for the self-server and digital society um it's great to be here always good to be in paris always great to be at ecc it's easy feels like home it's so first maybe a big thank you to the organizer the organizers to jerome and the team to pull off such an amazing event in actually quite difficult times for organizing such events and yeah they

brought us together they brought us together thank you it's quite inspiring to see uh the ideas that are being exchanged the collaborations that are being discussed it's a buzzing place so to speak so today's talk uh my my talk today is about empowering digital freedom through collaboration and i'm hoping i'm hoping that also the talk will inspire some more collaboration some more more ideas uh so yeah um in the talk i will basically uh stop for a bit in this uh basically outlining how there's really a thin line between

the technology we create that this technology can be used for good or for bad how we should stop and ask the why this why helps us to identify also the values that inform how we proceed then we i touch upon values such as freedom which leads to data sovereignty data interoperability and privacy and how how we apply this in swarm how how it also informs our strategy and decision making and finally i will conclude with with an example with an example of the project fair drive which is being developed within the fair data society initiative

that swarm is incubating so yeah lots lots of stuff to cover um let's go um so like i said it's we see every year when we come to the this conference or in general the the decentralized space the ethereal space it's um it's really exciting so many new things that happen in a year uh that it's hard to actually list them it's like new new songs coming out in a way and it's exciting it's in a way it's new world being made a new paradigm is evolving um but uh it's also at the same time a bit frightening because it's going like

really really fast and um we have all kinds of technology and sometimes it's it's really really hard to very easy to see how these technologies can be used in different contexts so for example we are using we are very used to use facial recognition on the phones and it's so convenient it's so good you know it's i just look at it i don't need to type i wink at it in a sense and i'm in but at the same time we see facial recognition technology for example being uh mentioned quite often in other contexts the markets uh the shopping malls are tracking our faces ideas we hear about

companies like clearview ai that uh basically scrapes the whole web and uh works for the various intelligence agencies or state actors so it's like uh yeah it's the proliferation of technology it's so fast and that we actually don't control where it ends up and it's not also that this technology is inaccessible we see the rise of open source and in a way you know so it's i did like this little experiment so this is this is a diy box it costs less than 100 euros it's made by google and it's a raspberry pi with an extension board with

ai extension board and out of the box dc already detects the face it does facial recognition moreover the the default demo here is called joy detector so basically if i look at it and if i start to smile it makes a photo let's try automate so it was like right you know so isn't this like really convenient you know like in the future we can have social media that just automatically detects when we're joyous and posts only selfies of being happy you know it's kind of like to be or not to be well happy so yeah but and we can think as

developers oh this is so cool we can make it so easy to work you know and the same things apply to blockchain but what if i just put it here and say see this green light it now records you and because i'm like really you know like i think i have like like these really good ideas it's uh uh we have like this awesome new other shiny box it's actually quite awesome custom raspberry pi case for uh running a swan note and i have only one so who should i give it to maybe the person oh oh good good already hands erased it was a rhetorical question i'm sorry because

it's just one and two hands were raised but maybe you know maybe because i cannot decide now what if this little device just measures how joyous you are through the talk and at the end of the talk well the one who is the most happy gets the case isn't that cool we can maybe even make an nft nft to it you know so to really because this is going up in value so but what did i do actually you know it's like what i did is i introduced like positive in a way monetary incentive uh that actually incentivize

behavior change it it asks you to be happy you know and does this sound familiar it's like we can see this in the legacy world in the centralized paradigm world with the products that we use but aren't we also seeing this in the blockchain space is are there maybe projects that are tokenizing things that they shouldn't be tokenizing even though we think it's the best thing to do that so there's a slippery slope with technology how we use it and it's going really fast and for this reason it is also good sometimes that we just stop we stop in breathe out and essentially

ask the why so the why is very powerful the why is the beginning of a journey of in a way of discovery of discovery what is it all about why why are we doing the things the why helps us to uncover our values what are the values that you know inform our design that get manifested then in the technology what are we creating the why in this regard also informs uh essentially how we uh how we think about the things that we do and how we implement them so it's in a way um how does this for example relate to swarm

and maybe i hear i need to stop for those who don't know what swarm is the technical description would be that we are a decentralized storage and communication project the metaphysical description would be that we are on the mission to empower digital freedom by making data unstoppable and it's actually been a really good year for us we launched on mainnet it's been amazing it's been like big milestone reached and yeah it's uh it's also been an amazing journey it's been the team has grown uh as team we have in a way become as one swarm one

so it wouldn't be possible without without collaboration uh so at this point the second tanks goes to the to the amazing swarm team it's an honor and to work with you and i'm really grateful um but yeah let's get back oh by the way yeah we're also growing hiring the start has been great uh 200 000 nodes on the test net the network could be faster we're working on it it's just the beginning so uh yeah join us but coming back how does now this why inform uh what we do at swarm for

example so uh at the beginning i said we are creating a base layer for self-sovereign digital society so there's already the notion of freedom and in a way we it didn't take us a lot of time to identify that this is one of these base values now there are actually more so let me uh let me first a little bit of i need to connect to my notes so so blur is the first kind of those value sets but yeah let's do this so what the what you see is basically

i'm connecting to a fair drive and this is our oh there's you cannot see it so just a second so you so basically okay so there we through the through through our let's say introspective process we basically identified uh more uh more values and when we speak about freedom what does this mean how does this inform our design in the digital world in the data economy world freedom can correspond to essentially data sovereignty

but what is data sovereignty well data sovereignty can be made possible through data interoperability so but at the same time is this something that we need to create on swarm i would argue no but it's something that we should support in swarm on layer two we should use positive incentives to support it another another value like this is also privacy i mean at this conference there's been enough said i would say about privacy and you probably heard so many talks that maybe i will just skip it but yes so we can see that in a way then if we really walk our talk and look at

what swarm is yes it has extraordinary privacy features and it will put the user in a full control without necessarily others knowing that depending how how it's used so yeah um just a second so uh so another thing another thing that comes then uh to mind if our cause is social and we are i would argue we are not solving just a technical challenge because if you would do this then the research would be enough what we also want as developers is that people use our technology you know so

and we want to use we want to see actually this technology to be used for good things and this i would argue again it's something that's quite common in the space we just don't speak much about it but moreover what it informs is first it should inform anti-maximalism notion it's like it's us and others and everybody helping to work towards a cost towards something that i would say the mainstream didn't yet recognize and this is our right to agency in the digital world so but at the same time it leads to other insights so if positive social impact is our metric uh how do we define it how do we see it and it's reflected in the ecosystem

and we again return to the importance of value alignment because swarm is also not an isolated island it's we are all swarm swarm swarm is reflected in the ecosystem and vice versa so there's not really a clear boundary where something starts and something ends and in this regard it's basically we can take it even from biology reading guys like bruce lipton's or bruce lipton or similar so collaboration first approach we see this in nature when we look uh when we look at various rich ecosystems how essentially the importance of creating

connections connections connections exponentially grow creativity growing connections means facilitating innovation so in this sense it's also kind of important to think like i see a lot of times and we are all kind of in a way you know like i wouldn't say pushed into it but it's just the social norms so it's like the metrics the market shares the drive for i don't know users and things like that but does this really matter so much for us at this moment in this space i would argue no it's one personal kind of story it's in in my interactions with the let's say

with um potential partners other stakeholders uh often i get asked like probably the most often question is how does one compare to ipfs or filecoin you know and uh rinke got asked this uh at his talk on monday here and uh he did a good answer and i would invite just everybody to check check that out because uh he gave a relevant answer he gave an answer for developers but the people that i interact with most 95 percent of them for these people i would argue this question is not relevant because i said like when i discuss it i said why shouldn't we rather speak how

does decentralized storage compare to legacy cloud if we look at the corporate matrix at market metrics we see that decentralized space or decentralized storage is still very tiny compared to the to the legacy cloud and truth be told it's like the more each project is educating the users about the paradigm shift the more it helps to others those who know ipfs very quickly grasp what swarm is and vice versa so it's i would argue that we are in an environment where we need to be aware that collaboration first is the approach that unlocks most of the value

the success thank you so the success of any project should be also considered a success of other projects and here grief had like an amazing talk and i think this really he sets the stage for i think this kind of thinking and uh yeah it's we should be thinking about collaboration so but then when we think about like how we are connected this collaboration then becomes basically the question for us okay how to go from swarm to a swarm because essentially collaboration first approach when we uh want to create as many connections uh and how we work together it's how much

time two minutes oh so okay fast forward them so it's uh basically new approaches demand new structures and for swarm long term it makes more sense to be organized as swarm to be to basically engage into other also uh initiatives and such initiative is also the project fair drive so i will i wanted to do a demo but yeah you saw before how we are using the our markdown editor and it's a little bit

difficult in the sense how to now navigate because i don't see it but also today we published a fair drive fair drive landing page and i would invite everybody to also test it out so it's quite simple okay let's maybe switch to the light team and you know it's essentially the notes that you saw before uh in the markdown editor it connects to this

long story short we can it's the first kind of exploration sandbox into uh how we can create uh user-friendly solutions on top of swarm uh and yes uh try it out and let us know so it's been already quite active we have many grants and with grants at the same time it's not about here speaking about the the amount of it we put more focus on the how we engage with the grant recipients on the quality of connections so there's a lot in the making uh really exciting uh from eterna galileo dracula is the markdown editor eternal video player the applets are

augmenting the web persona and other data storage and so forth so we have just go to eatsform.org check out grants or just send us an email if you would like to collaborate on any of this lastly very important thing is also when we speak about collaboration where does it end so collaboration should be multi-ecosystem and even more it's about if we are truly about creating and following the values that we speak about then these values don't stop in our case with the small network

if we are speaking about data interoperability it needs to happen among different data networks it needs to extend so also fair drive project and fair data society initiative is meant to be multi ecosystem and here is actually an action call to other decentralized storage systems just let us know and let's work together on a quick note there's a hackathon in preparation for end of october and yeah there's going to be a lot of action around this so to conclude i wanted yeah to kind of show why do we need to ask why why collaboration first

is important and how we apply this in swarm and the for closing thought would be let's collaborate you