Transcript of People Should Have The Power by Yaniv Tal

"Hey everyone. Thanks for coming today. I'm just so inspired by all of the work that all of you are doing. It's really, really incredible. So I'm Yaniv. I founded Geo. I also co-founded a Web3 infrastructure protocol called The Graph back in 2017 and helped start House of Web3 here. Thank you.

I really believe in the transformative power of technology to empower people. Web3, it's a new platform that's been under development for many years and it's an incredible new set of tools. So what is it? You know the web, we use software, we use the web every day and it has a certain architecture, right, where there's companies that run these servers and these applications that we use, right? Companies like Facebook, Google, and YouTube. These companies really control the software, right, and we just have to use it. They set the rules and control all of it. So Web3 is a new platform that's decentralized. There's no company that controls the core software for society that we use every day. Instead, it's the people that have the power and control. It runs on decentralized networks, open public infrastructure. I think that can be a really powerful tool for all of us in this room who are working on social services, right, to really serve the public.

How does it work? And how do we want to use it? We're committed to using these tools for good and we want to solve big important challenges. So we've dedicated ourselves to the problem of ending homelessness here in the Bay Area. We are going to be working on this as long as it takes and we're so fortunate and lucky to be learning from and working with incredible folks like those of you in this room who've been doing this sort of work for much longer than we have. We started House of Web3 here to be a place for technologists, people who are building Web3, as well as people who are working on local areas in San Francisco doing the social work to come together to work on these things together. If you have events or meetings that you want to have, in collaboration with other folks in this room, we can make this space available to you. Please get in touch with Nicole, who can help you get plugged in.

What kinds of things can we do with Web3, right? We want to organize the world's public knowledge and information in a decentralized way. It's a new Internet. One of the things that we can do is start organizing things like policy. We talked to a lot of people who are doing things with nonprofits. If you're getting your funding from the city, a lot of times there's strings attached. There's policies that are made by the Board of Supervisors or in City Hall and maybe you're not part of those conversations and you're not able to impact those policies. What we've seen is that the people on the ground who are doing the work are really in the best position to know how these policies are affecting the people on the streets and the people doing the work. Giving people new tools and ways that they can be part of the discussion and provide their proposed solutions and the data that they're getting and having these conversations in an open way. That's one type of example of things that we can do with this. A big benefit of Web3 is it uses the blockchain, which is open public infrastructure. We have transparency and accountability. Think of having a bank account that's public on the blockchain that people can see the flow of funds. That creates trust. Now people know. You don't have to just have these transparency reports or these things where people don't necessarily know where all the money's going. By actually having things that are verifiable on chain, on the blockchain, people can trust these social services much better and we can start tracking results and metrics and all of these things.

On the blockchain, we can have interoperability. Right now there are lots of great organizations, but they operate in silos. They're individual systems. They don't necessarily work together. So if we have this open public infrastructure that we can share with interoperability, where we can track the user journey for people across these different service providers, and we can have a shared set of facts, a shared set of metrics, and these things interoperate. That's the power of having open, neutral infrastructure that we can all plug into.

We can have new voting systems. We believe in meritocratic systems and empowering a lot of people to be part of shaping this. So on the blockchain and with Web3, we can design new voting systems. For example, if you want to give a voice to the clients, or the people who are receiving the services, they can have a vote. You can bring in different stakeholders and they can participate, the different service providers. So you can design these new voting systems that are very democratic, public with transparency and accountability to help do things like setting policies and making decisions.

We have things like DAOs. DAOs are like a new organizational structure. Today if you want to make change, you have a for-profit corporation or you have a nonprofit, or we have governments. But really, DAOs are a new organizational structure that operates on the blockchain. You can have members and those members can do things like vote and set policies. They can distribute funds out to the different service providers or participants. There are lots of things that you can do with this. At Geo and here at House of Web3, we've already started spawning a set of DAOs to tackle different elements of the homelessness issues. For example, we have a DAO on transitional housing, workforce development, street outreach. We'll be hearing from five of these different DAOs today right after me. Each one's going to go up and share a little bit about what they're doing so we can get an example of how these sorts of things can work. People can provide services directly to these DAOs, but also they can be a great way to just coordinate work between different organizations. So all of your nonprofits, organizations that already exist, can just plug into these DAOs or you could create your own DAOs. There's really a whole new set of tools here that we can use for social coordination and to really make progress and impact in a new way.

So I want to just show a little bit about how this all works. If you come to Geo browser dot IO you can see the browser. Here we're going to have eventually all of the world's public knowledge and information organized and served in a decentralized way on this new Web3, this new Internet. These are all individual spaces and a space has its own community and each community can organize themselves and have knowledge and information on here. We can have a space for each industry. So for example, let's say you work in social work, there's a space for that. You can jump in and see here we have these pages or you can add tables, text, images. So maybe in the social workspace, there are a bunch of different roles. For example, maybe I want to see about being like a probation officer. Everything here, you know, it looks a little bit like Wikipedia, but maybe a little bit nicer. And you have, so these are entities. Entities can have a type. So this is a role, right? And then there's data related to that entity. And you can also just have any arbitrary content, these beautiful pages that you can publish. So maybe, you know, to be a probation officer, there are different skills and maybe I want to learn about one of these skills. Each thing gets its own page and over time you could imagine maybe we want to curate a list of different training materials and certification programs, different things for people to provide these different services.

We have spaces for things like psychology where we're going through different studies. A lot of times we can't even agree on basic facts and people will cite studies and how do you respond back if we can't agree on basic facts? So we can add all of the studies, all the different claims and get to share truth around that areas like health and healthcare. So spirituality, you know, there are a lot of people here that are faith-based, so organizing a lot of the, you know, maybe lessons from scripture or things that are relevant there. If we jump into the California space, we can see things like community improvement and initiatives and businesses where we can see, for example, our nonprofits. So every organization can have a page or even a space here on Geo where you can show off the work that you're doing. And this way we can be tracking our progress against all of our goals. What we'd love to see is this start to become kind of a dashboard that we're using for our city where all of the metrics and the progress and the information are all being tracked on this open infrastructure. People can come and we can see the progress that we're making on our different goals. We can agree on our shared goals, we can discuss the problems, the solutions, and we can distribute funding out to the different organizations that are doing the work. And so, yeah, it's just open public infrastructure for us to coordinate on solving the Bay Area's biggest challenges. And I'd love to chat with anybody here to see how we can plug in and just work together on solving these big challenges.

Thank you, Yaniv. So before we introduce the DAO coordinators, why don't you go on and come on up, all the DAO coordinators. Yaniv, while they're coming up, would you mind answering one question? In your opinion, what are three benefits of having decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs? Yeah, so the first big one is transparency and accountability. I think people are going to give more when they can see the results of where that money is going. And so I think that's a really big one. I think having the voting systems to have more democratic systems where people can really participate and you can have a place where you can have all of these in-depth discussions and I think that is a really big one. And then programmable money I think is a really cool tool. You know, when people hear about crypto, right, sometimes they're thinking oh it's a get rich, you know, kind of thing. And that's really not what it's about. And you know, for a lot of these things like we can just be using U.S. dollars, right, that are just on chain, but we now have these smart contracts where we can program incentive systems. So you can say, OK, if you perform these actions, you get paid out this much money, right? Or if you've done these things and you've done these trainings, then you can perform this action and you can get paid out for that. And so, you know, these are all just tools that we can use and innovate to design our incentive systems and to get the outcomes that we want.

Thank you very much. All right, let's give Yaniv a big round of applause."