Solving the World’s Biggest Problems with GEO and Web3

Transcript

foreign [Music] hey so we're in the final hours of ECC here uh but the good news is that uh it's late enough at 3 20 that even the most d-gens in the group uh were able to be up for this so that's great um I'm Yaniv I'm going to be talking about solving the world's biggest challenges with web 3. so sometimes it feels like you know we're watching the end of the world I don't know if you ever have this experience you know I

know what you're doing on Twitter Doom scrolling you know all day but you know maybe they're you know we don't have to just watch this stuff going on you know maybe we can actually do something and um you know what we need is new ways to coordinate right because like whatever is going on in the world you know we have the resources we have the technology you know we can fix all of the problems we just need better ways to coordinate and so you know if we want to tackle like the big challenges uh that are happening in the world

uh you know what what are some examples and figure out how to make Donald Trump be quiet for five minutes you know I only want five minutes would be great or how to make bad and stay awake for five minutes you know equal opportunity above these sides um or you know I wanted to you know find a problem that I could really dedicate myself to um to to prove out uh you know this web 3 stack and how effective it can really be and so you know I wanted to to choose a problem that um you know was was a really big problem um and uh the one that we landed on

was any homelessness in San Francisco so raise your hand if you've heard about the homelessness problem in San Francisco okay so that's that's everybody in this room it's a really big problem you know there's a it's a humanitarian crisis there's so much human suffering and it's really you know harmed one of the the great cities in the United States um and it may seem intractable but I actually think that we can solve this problem and so I want to go over in this talk the tools that we can use and the framework for thinking about how to solve like a big problem like this so it starts with policy

um you know public policy there's a lot of questions that come up if you look at how to you know solve or address an issue like homelessness right like should people be allowed to shoot up on the street should treatment ever be mandated should there be conditions on receiving housing like these are all actually like difficult complicated questions and lots of people would have like different answers to these questions um and so you know we we need a way to um you know get better at understanding the world so that we can make better decisions um luckily we have a tool that can help us do that and that's knowledge graphs so a knowledge graph is a most flexible way

of representing information um so it's in a Knowledge Graph you have everything as an entity and um the and so like ethereum can be an entity um I can be an entity Paris can be an entity um and then you can assert facts about those entities that change over time and you can express relationships between different entities and so you can represent um just even the most complex free-form types of you know knowledge and information in this sort of structure so one of the things that we can represent with that is things like claims so if you have a claim you can uh add you know the supporting arguments

and opposing arguments to that claim or other people can add that you can cite your sources and so you know maybe you want to cite a study that was done that backs up your claim um and that study can also be an entity and experts can come in and you know debate whether that study was done correctly or not and if it's not then you can't use those claims so you know with this type of a tool you know we can represent really complex topics and actually get to a point where we start to have shared facts and then we can have reason debates and we can start to understand the world better and make better decisions um but how do we make sure that you know there's good information that's going

into the graph um you know how do you stop people from just you know adding misinformation and it really comes down to governance and so you know with blockchains you know we have like public governance systems that we can build you know with blockchain based voting and we can design reputation systems to give more power to experts that know more about any certain area and uh through voting you have a public process where over time we can converge towards truth uh so that's what we're building a Geo um you know we're building tools for communities to organize um any kind of knowledge and information

into a Knowledge Graph and then giving those communities tools to get to consensus on the state of those knowledge graphs and right now uh you know there are an early set of editors that are adding content in all kinds of different spaces from sustainability to history AI music art so lots of different things but one of the things that we want to do on top of this is show how we can solve the world's biggest challenges and going deep on the area of homelessness in San Francisco so one of the spaces that we have is the San Francisco space and you could

imagine organizing anything from you know local places you know restaurants and bars to events to having like a list of goals for the city of San Francisco to tackle uh and uh one of those goals is we have this Subspace under uh San Francisco for ending homelessness and here we're organizing you know these discussions where we're looking at these claims and questions and um and goals for ending homelessness and um from here we're spawning a set of dows to go out and Achieve each of the goals that we've identified

so uh you know Dows are a really effective tool to help us solve big challenges for example the city of San Francisco spent 1.4 billion dollars last year to address homelessness through non-profits and there's very little accountability for you know where that money is going and so with Dows you know we have transparency and accountability all the money's on chain so we can actually see where this money's going and so if we start to use these sorts of tools to you know tackle real problems in the real world they can be much better than you know the alternative systems that people are using um so the first Dow that we announced

that we we've helped spawn is doing transitional housing in San Francisco so this year this team is is working on a pilot where they're building a tiny home Village outside of San Francisco with about a dozen tiny homes and uh this is something where if somebody wants to get off the street you know they'll be able to stay at one of these tiny homes and be connected to resources to help them get back on their feet there's uh you know several other Dows that we're also going to be spawning to tackle different parts of the problem so you know for example one Dow focus on Street Outreach for people who want to go out on the street build relationships

with you know people on the street and then help connect them to resources we want to have a dow for Recovery to help people get clean a dow for Workforce Development to help train people and help them find jobs so you know one Dow per goal and that way you know we can distribute resources and make decisions to you know tackle this problem and you know I really believe that you know web3 is incredibly powerful and that with it you know we can solve you know a problem like homelessness in San Francisco so how are we going to fund this you know it's going to take some money um

so um I've been you know self-funding this to date to show an initial proof of concept and show that you know this technology can really work um the next step is going to be opening this up so that people in the crypto community that want to show that you know crypto can be used to make an impact can get involved and and help us with this Mission and once we prove out how effective these tools can be at a next level of scale then we can go to governments like the city of San Francisco to get like Public Funding to you know scale this out and I think you know once we demonstrate that these tools are more effective than um than you know the existing uh you know uh

ways of doing things then I think it'll be uh you know really easy to get the public on board uh so we're focusing on San Francisco but you could imagine using um you know this sort of process to solve any problem in any City so you know imagine uh having you know a space for you know for every country for every state for every city and you could have a ranked list of what are the biggest problems what are potential Solutions you know claims questions and start to organize as subspaces to you know address you know um

local local issues to solve all of the world's biggest challenges at a local level so if you want to get involved right now um we're opening things up for Early Access editors you can go to geobrowser.io Early Access or scan this QR code we'd be happy to get you on board in and um uh you know tweet about the work that we're doing we're at Geo browser on Twitter we want to get people starting to talk about this and you know if you're uh you know working on something right now that you feel

like you know isn't as impactful you know we've been spending a lot of time building infrastructure and foundation and you know it's really time to start bubbling you know this one level up to start making real impact in the real world and so you know I would invite you to think about like what are the big problems that you see in the world you know in your local cities you know maybe you could start one of the next spaces or Dows to tackle these problems and um we'd love to uh work together to do that you know I really do think that um we can use web3 to solve the world's biggest challenges so thank you [Applause]

all right yeah do you have any questions hi um what do you think is like the fundamental difference between a Dao and a NGO in terms of being able to solve these problems effectively you mentioned transparency like one doesn't say where they're where the money's going in here the transactions are on chain can you say more about that yeah I do think transparency is one of the the biggest things I also think that you know this type of like composability and the way that we can just organize in a much more fluid ways right so you know for example starting with like a goal like ending

homeless in San Francisco that's something that maybe a lot of people would want to contribute to but there's a lot of pieces to that so being able to like easily break out into like sub-dials essentially and then to focus on each one individually you know just Workforce Development or just transitional housing and direct funding at that level and then further down and so having that accountability at each stage and being able to distribute resources to the most effective you know teams or individuals and then having full transparency over that I think that that type of composability and transparency and then also having like you know accountability through voting and having like lots of people that can kind of participate in that process I think that is you know all is what makes

us more effective than uh traditional ngos sorry oh very quick one can we see your slides one more time how to get Early Access yeah thank you all right uh thanks everyone [Music]