We Have Some Structural Issues | Yaniv Tal | Innovate Bay

Isn't it so refreshing to open your horizons and hear from speakers and thought leaders who are addressing the same challenges but from completely different worldviews and industries?

Imagine what can happen if we all work together.

It's my privilege to introduce Yaniv Tal. He is the founder of Geo, a visionary leader who had the courage to see the potential and said, "Let's make innovation happen."

When I was just learning about what blockchain was and this thing called Bitcoin, Yaniv was already building it.

It's a tremendous success story, and together we're partnering to solve the Bay Area's biggest challenges so that we can have a trickle effect that changes the whole world.

Hey everyone, thanks so much for being here today.

I'm Yaniv, the founder of Geo.

We've got over 70 different nonprofits represented here today. We're going to be talking about systemic solutions for revolutionizing care.

We're right here in the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, a birthplace and heart of technology here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We've created technology that's changed the world, been at the forefront of cultural revolutions.

But we're living through a period right now where there are some challenges that we need to step up and face.

I think we can do the same thing that we've done at different points throughout history, which is rise to those challenges and surprise people with what we're able to accomplish.

We all came here today because we share a common goal:

We want to end homelessness in the Bay Area.

There are folks in this room doing just such incredible work;

It's inspiring to see the level of accomplishments and what you all have been doing,

Some of you working on this problem for 10, 20 plus years.

But the fact is we do have some structural issues.

People talk about structural solutions because there are a lot of things that make addressing this problem hard.

But the reality is that we don't have to just settle and accept this homelessness situation, this crisis.

The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the wealthiest regions in the world, so we have the resources.

We have incredible people here, and really, this is a coordination challenge.

I'm here to tell you today that we have a new set of tools that we can use to solve our coordination challenges, and that is Web 3.

Web 3 is a new platform for decentralizing coordination.

You can think about decentralization in two different areas:

Political decentralization and Technological decentralization.

With political decentralization, we have governments and processes that we use to set public policy.

All of you working in the space, I'm sure you're aware that not all of the policies really help to solve and address these challenges.

The reality is it's not necessarily the people in City Hall that know how to address these things.

There are a lot of people on the ground who are doing the work and they're in the best position to inform.

So with better tools, we can capture their knowledge and information and bubble that up so that we can make better policy decisions.

On the technological side, if you're a nonprofit, one of the first decisions you need to make is what tech platform do you want to use.

All of these tech platforms are built using Web 2 technology, meaning there's someone or some company that is running the database, running the servers, maintaining that system, controlling who has access.

That means all of our systems end up being siloed, which makes it much harder for us to coordinate on our shared goals.

Web 3 is here to address all of this at a foundational level.

We have built something called Geo Genesis that we're going to be launching soon.

We're going to be giving you an early look at it today.

We want you all to be part of this so that we can be part of computer history

With Web 3. We have several key benefits over the way that we run software today.

The first is seamless interoperability, moving away from these silos.

Because all of this software runs on open public infrastructure, it makes it really easy for people to participate.

You get all of that integration and interoperability seamlessly.

It gives us transparency and accountability.

We spend a lot of resources to tackle issues like homelessness, and it's not always clear where all of that money goes.

There are certainly some organizations out there that take advantage of the system and aren't necessarily delivering the results that you would want.

Then there are incredible organizations like yours that are really doing the work.

With better transparency and accountability that we can have using public blockchains, we can make sure that the resources are going to the folks that are really doing the work and delivering results.

With all of this, we can have improved coordination where we're looking at the same numbers that are updating in real time.

With the interoperability, we can all be working together on our shared goals.

There's a lot of ways that with Web 3, we can improve the coordination so we can really work together on all of this. I want to show you how this works.

Later this year, we're going to be launching actually a full native Web 3 browser, but right now we have this Geo Genesis app.

You can go to geobrowser.com, and you can learn about it and actually launch Geo Genesis just inside of any web browser.

When you do that, what you see is a set of spaces.

A space is any kind of community.

With Geo Genesis, what we do is we give communities tools to organize any kind of knowledge and information.

The last session was actually really interesting because we were talking about how there are these different communities and subcommunities and how do we organize and determine what is true and what is true in different contexts.

We need decentralized systems for organizing that information.

Here, these spaces can be anything from industries to academic fields to regions.

We can have spaces for every city.

For example, a lot of the work that we're doing here is related to the field of social work, so we have a space here for the Social Work industry where we can organize goals and specific services.

We've gone through here and organized really a whole hierarchy of services and subservices that you could use to form sort of a directory.

But instead of it being hardcoded, we're organizing this information in what's called a knowledge graph, which is the most flexible way of representing information.

So, we can really have this hierarchy of subservices to organize all the different types of work that people are doing.

We can describe our different roles and what skills are required to perform those roles.

Over time, we'll be able to start to organize things like actual educational content.

With things like workforce development, we're organizing training programs.

But all of this forms like a global graph that allows us to coordinate a lot better across different disciplines.

That's just an example of the social work space.

Here we have a space for the city of San Francisco, and we do want to bump this up so that we're actually doing it for the Bay Area as a whole.

So, we can have a goal for ending homelessness in San Francisco as a space.

It's a whole space dedicated to this one goal, but we can also do that for the Bay Area as a whole and then for each of the cities as subspaces.

Then you can drill down, and everything is interconnected.

Here we can see subspaces and what we're doing here is we're breaking out into individual DAOs.

DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations.

The idea is here we have a public entity with a mission, with a goal, and you can have lots of different organizations and individuals that are participating in these DAOs on shared goals.

There's a lot of things we need to do to end homelessness.

For example, we need to do street outreach, mentorship, recovery services, workforce development, transitional housing, and many more.

These can all be thought of as subservices.

We're doing things here like tracking the nonprofits that are serving the region of San Francisco, their provided services.

We can do things like have conversations about public policy.

A lot of these public policy questions are quite complicated, and it's hard to have nuanced discussions using our existing tools.

But knowledge graphs can help us with this because for any sort of question that you might have, people can start adding proposed answers, and those answers themselves are claims. Each claim can have supporting arguments and opposing arguments.

So, by structuring this information, we can actually have much higher quality discussion.

We're not just shouting at each other. We can be citing our primary sources, and then we can invite people in.

With blockchain-based voting, people can upvote, downvote, and rank.

Over time, we can have a system that allows for the truth and for better and better answers to really rise to the top.

This is all happening on open public transparent infrastructure with Web 3.

Just to give a small example here, we've got a street outreach DAO, and we've got a booth with folks that are working on these DAOs.

We're just at the beginning of bringing this stuff on chain, but for example, every month, this outreach DAO has these different outreach walks.

There are ones that happen in different neighborhoods in San Francisco.

One of the ones that they do every month is in the Tenderloin.

So, you could see, for example, a Tenderloin walk that was done in December.

They can post an update and like who those specific outreach workers were.

The other nice thing about this blockchain technology is you can have these public bank accounts.

Each DAO, each space, can have a public bank account on chain where we have programmable money, and we can design new incentive systems.

We can make sure that people can get paid to do their work.

We have a really great set of powerful new tools that we can use.

The plan is we're starting, basically, I've been self-funding these proofs of concepts to show how we can use Web 3 to solve these big challenges like homelessness in the Bay Area.

This year, we're starting to see the emergence of the next big crypto cycle.

When people are making a lot of money through things like cryptocurrencies, they become generous.

We're going to be doing a big drive to raise funding that we can deploy towards solving homelessness in the Bay Area.

We think there's going to be a lot of people that want to be part of that.

Then once we can prove the efficacy of these tools at the next level of scale, then I think it's time to hand it over to the cities and direct public funding through these tools of transparency.

For the folks that are watching this at home, you can scan here to sign up for our mailing list and get updates.

For everybody here, the next steps are we want to get you all involved with this.

We want to bring you on chain, your organizations.

We want to help direct funding towards your organizations, and we want to help with coordination.

So, we're going to be following up with you after this.

We'd love to get you onboarded onto Geo, or we could put your nonprofit up on here, and you can share about your nonprofits and the great work that you're doing.

Check out the DAOs that are doing work around the services you know, whether you're doing transitional housing, mental health, workforce, any of these areas.

There are DAOs that are meeting regularly, and you can become part of those.

We'd love to all work together to solve the Bay Area's biggest challenges.

I think we really have an opportunity here to once again lead, to help revolutionize the base systems that we use, and to really become a model for the world.

We can do that starting right here in the Bay Area.

I'm really looking forward to working with all of you.

Thank you.