Holke Brammer 0:47 All right, cool. 0:50 Thanks for making it. 0:51 Even though it's like the last talk of the day. 0:55 So I'm excited to talk a little bit about how we use at Porto for funding impact and resource allocation. 1:05 And luckily I'm actually not here by myself, but there's also Shafi in the back and Adam here. 1:12 So if you have additional questions later, especially on the technical side, both of them can definitely help you more than I can because I'm actually a political economist. 1:21 By now I also have acquired some technical knowledge, but it's not my expertise, but it is theirs. 1:29 Cool. 1:30 And also I will in this talk sometimes say we are building this, we are building that. 1:37 It is not just kind of the Hypersense Foundation that I'm stewarding, but there are other organizations like Gainforest and MyEarth that are building with us these impact funding mechanisms. 1:48 And Hypersurfs is one of the primitives that we are stewarding. 1:53 So that's why the Hypersurfs Collective is the word that we use for, like, the organizations and the people, the contributors who help build this. 2:02 I deeply believe that right now in the current conditions, what we choose to fund is the world that we are creating. 2:09 And the exciting thing is that Proto has a lot to say about this, and this is in that way, I think, one of the most important use cases where we can apply Proto to. 2:24 Why this, this is important is because there is something that we collectively value that doesn't have a normal business model, and this is actually a lot of things that we care about: digital public goods, open source software, regenerative land projects, Science, journalism, community organizing— those are actually the things that make a good life, and we're actually not really funding them. 2:49 They are all underfunded. 2:51 If we would put more resources into this, we would actually create a better world. 2:58 How I am thinking about this is that when we make decisions together what we want to fund, we have at least these three layers. 3:06 We have funding mechanisms. 3:07 This can be grants, milestone bounties, prize competitions, crowdfunding, etc., etc. 3:13 So there are different funding mechanisms. 3:15 Then there are different decision-making mechanisms that can be a jury in a foundation, that can be also in crowdfunding, kind of just like the crowd deciding. 3:24 It can be any democratic mechanism, deliberative mechanism. 3:29 It can be just a funder saying, it's my money, I'm the dictator about this money. 3:33 That's also fine. 3:34 But these are different decision-making mechanisms, which I think now is an exciting part that we will see a lot of innovation in the future. 3:42 Because with like kind of human-AI collaboration, how we can make decisions in the future will really change. 3:51 And this also interacts with the context layer because now the AIs can read for us much more context than what we can. 3:59 So from my perspective, sometimes I say it's like the dream of a political scientist come true because you can come up with funding mechanisms, decision-making mechanisms. 4:06 In the past, the voters just didn't behave the way you wanted them to behave. 4:11 They were not informed. 4:12 They didn't actually do what would be necessary to actually reach good decisions. 4:18 So the context layer, that's where AdProdo comes in because context, like the context for an AI, is what do we put into the decision-making mechanism. 4:27 So in the case of regenerative land project, this is, for example, satellite imagery, this is bioacoustics data, but also community input and expert input. 4:38 So in the case when there's a regenerative land project— I grew up in a small town of 300 people in Germany— if there's a project, the people in the town, they know if it's good or if it's just some bullshit carbon project that is not actually helping stewarding nature. 4:56 So why do we not just ask the people that already know? 4:59 And then, yes, let's add some technical data from satellite imagery that support that opinion. 5:07 Or if they actually disagree with each other, then we can also have a conflict resolution mechanism where, like, OK, we see there's some kind of a conflict. 5:15 But this is exciting because Edphoto makes it easy to collect this context. 5:21 And it makes it possible that we are not just collecting the data, but we are also collecting who said it. 5:26 Because that is important when we analyze it, because it depends on your reputation if this really should be considered in the decision-making process or not. 5:37 So this is all kind of a loop, because the project actually creates the work, the impact. 5:44 Then there will be third-party measurements and evaluations, community input, all of that. 5:49 And so if we do that loop over and over, we can also over time improve that decision-making mechanism. 5:56 Because this is not a static system. 5:58 This is ideally a self-improving system, similar to how we now train AIs to become better over time. 6:05 With this context and the tools that we have here now, we can also over time make better decisions than what we have today. 6:14 Here's today: context is fragmented, data siloed, trust signals don't accumulate. 6:18 That's exactly what we see from social media, but it's the same in funding data. 6:24 You have like a crowdfunding platform, you have the foundation that raises— like, that gives out grants with data. 6:31 So these are all data silos, and the projects have to put in their data over and over again. 6:37 So we think we can change that, and We are collaborating with a bunch of projects here that are working on this. 6:45 We are trying to kind of help build one context that different platforms can tap into. 6:52 And if you don't recognize all these logos, we will get into that. 6:57 This is where I normally spend a lot of time on, which is nice because here I don't. 7:02 But all of these reasons why you want decentralized social media also apply to Why do you want to have decentralized information for decision-making mechanisms that concern the public good? 7:15 Another one is, in the ideal case, we will actually create a lot of network effects. 7:25 So network effects, if there are more funders, obviously that's good for projects in this network because when you have your data, more funders can see that data. 7:34 But also for projects, it's good if you have a lot of evaluators because you will get better information to the funders. 7:42 And I mean, it's only good for the good projects, not for the other ones. 7:45 But there's— everybody benefits from more actors contributing to this network. 7:52 And what we of course want is that the value compounds across the network and not inside of a platform. 7:59 Another reason is that when we think about the projects and funders and evaluators today, this is how we might think about it. 8:08 But already today, you don't write your grant application yourself anymore. 8:12 You actually let it— let somebody write it, an AI. 8:15 And the funders, they get so many applications, they have to use AI to sort them and find out, like, at least pre-select some of them. 8:24 and then they make decisions on what to fund. 8:27 So this is the world that we probably have today. 8:30 And I think at Proto makes it possible that we put like shared observable records in the middle. 8:37 And I think this is really important to make this system accountable to what we as humans actually still want to fund. 8:49 This is kind of an overview of like the shift that We want to get to what we believe is really a modern funding stack, and it's all that, that I already introduced. 9:00 It is users control their data, we have many evaluators, we have many interoperable funding mechanisms. 9:09 It is about narratives, verified data, and trust-based funding, not just about I have really nice pictures. 9:16 It is about human error collective intelligence, and we are building self-reinforcing systems here. 9:25 All right, switching gears a little bit. 9:28 This was like the high-level, where do we want to go. 9:33 This is a little bit of how. 9:35 So a HyperCert is kind of a living record of work. 9:40 So it starts with just a record. 9:43 Who did what, when, and where. 9:45 This can be for the past or for the future, so it can be a proposal as well. 9:49 This is kind of the record here, and in that proto world, of course, this is just like one record. 9:56 And in our case, it is an activity claim. 9:59 Then the evaluate is all the data that can be added to that to really make sense of it. 10:05 And this can be self-evaluations or additional data from third parties. 10:10 But that's why we say it's a living record, because over time, more and more information about this work will accumulate. 10:16 And that makes it possible to really make good funding decisions, funding decisions either as grants, because you also observe the, the other work that they have done in the past, you have the reputation, or you have outcome-based funding where you see somebody has actually proved that their work was meaningful, and that's why they get funding afterwards. 10:38 All right, let's get into use cases. 10:43 MyEarth is a project that basically wants to fund the regeneration, and that means funding a lot of projects. 10:56 And when I say a lot of projects, we actually need to fund hundreds of thousands of projects in the world. 11:03 That are really connected to the land that they are stewarding. 11:06 And this is not just— we cannot scale the projects up because then the projects actually lose the connection with the land. 11:15 So this is really a challenge of a kind of decentralized sense-making system. 11:21 How do we actually know where all the projects are? 11:24 And they are taking on this challenge. 11:27 They're using HyperSearch to record the data and add kind of the other data and stay interoperable with other platforms that also work in this space. 11:39 They will have a crowdfunding campaign in June, I believe. 11:45 One second. 11:50 So in June, a crowdfunding campaign for 100 land projects. 11:54 With a matching fund of $500,000. 11:56 So this really will get adoption latest then. 12:01 Maybe some other platforms do already some prototypes before, but that's our really the first big use case. 12:09 100 projects will be onboarded, and then all the communities will join to fund these projects. 12:19 Another project, Gainfirst, and Shafi is the co-founder of that in the back, also works in the same space. 12:27 And that's exciting because GainForce also works on how do we help communities deploy technology like bioacoustics to give them tools to prove what they have done. 12:39 And so when communities that are part of the crowdfunding campaign for MyEarth go to GainForce and work with them and create data, then this data is recorded on that Proto and shows up on the crowdfunding platform for myEarth. 12:57 The time is not working anymore. Speaker B 12:58 Oh, I have a time here. Holke Brammer 12:59 OK, cool. 13:01 Yeah, let me know when I have like 5 minutes. 13:03 Cool. 13:04 So here we really see already why the usefulness— the usefulness of the interoperability between platforms. 13:12 GainForce also is building a platform to help the communities fundraise directly. 13:19 This is called Boomysearch. 13:20 So we have here Boomysearch. 13:22 Where you can see kind of the different communities and you can fund them directly here. 13:29 So BoomiCert is a HyperCert and you have basically like a very familiar interface, but it's based on the adproto shared records. 13:43 Another use case, Protocol Labs. 13:45 So I actually started the project about HyperCert at Protocol Labs. 13:49 Then spun it out to the Hyperserts Foundation. 13:51 Protocol Labs will actually use Hyperserts in their platform or like use it right now already. 13:58 If you apply to a grant for PL research, you actually create a Hypersert. 14:04 Actually, I— because we have like how much time do we have? 14:10 17 minutes. 14:12 Second? Speaker B 14:12 17 minutes. Holke Brammer 14:13 17, okay. 14:14 Then actually, because the Boomy Research platform here can also show it to you directly. 14:22 There's, for example, bees and trees, and then you can see the site boundaries where it actually is. 14:30 You can donate to it. 14:32 And so this is still in beta, but this is like one of the platforms. 14:38 Then when we have proto-collaps, you can actually see that I can sign into the grants platform here with my Proto account, which is cool, and then start an application. 14:53 And here you see it was saved as a Hypersert on their personal data server. 15:00 Then another application is some democracy. 15:05 Democracy is the idea that The decision-making mechanisms is like painfully, painful and costs a lot of time. 15:17 So what if we would have just a digital twin for ourselves who acts on our behalf to make, to have all the discussions and make the decisions for us? 15:27 So we ran an experiment at Funding the Commons in San Francisco 2 weeks ago where there was— I don't know who knows Frontier Towers, but it's basically a coworking place. 15:39 There are multiple floor leads that organize the coworking space. 15:43 And we distributed $5,000 to things that happened in the coworking space. 15:49 And the way it was done is all of them had like a 30-minute structured interview that created their AI agent. 15:56 And then anybody could— propose things. 16:00 Every proposal was a HyperCert. 16:02 Then the agents were actually discussing among themselves what should be funded with a complicated mechanism that's called the S-process, which is a really cool process where you aggregate different marginal utility curves, which most people cannot do. 16:20 But it is actually, like, in theory, like, an amazing process that's used by the Survival and Flourishing Fund. 16:26 And then the result was— we then compared the result to what the humans actually would have decided themselves. 16:36 And there was not a clear, this is clearly better. 16:39 But it was a reasonable thing that the AI agents actually decided. 16:44 And the exciting part of this is this is a really bare model of this. 16:52 And it will just improve over time. 16:54 And that's the cool thing. 16:56 That's like we have a model that kind of works already, but it only has possibilities to improve. 17:04 So that's democracy. 17:05 And so we had the Frontier Towers. 17:09 And you can actually see all the AI agents. 17:14 And you can also chat with them to get to know them. 17:17 They have a constitution, values. 17:19 Et cetera. 17:22 Another application, and this actually comes out of the idea of if you have a conference like this, we have the beautiful signs of like who funded this conference. 17:34 But actually in the background, there are lots more contributors that are not on there, like the volunteers. 17:41 And so can we actually, when we have work in a HyperSuite, can we show not only the financial contributors but also the in-kind contributors, the volunteers. 17:52 And this is in that way just a different view on kind of the, the work and the contributors. 18:02 So when we take, for example, a GitHub repo here, and I paste it in here, we can fetch all the contributors. 18:17 And I guess this is actually the repo for the website. 18:21 So we can see— I mean, this is like— I don't say this is the actual contribution because this is just based on the GitHub commits, but you can see who actually contributed to it. 18:29 And if you now say, actually, we all know that Boris actually didn't do it, then we can Decrease. 18:39 That's right. 18:42 So, and now you can think of, okay, what is the community mechanism to actually do this right? 18:47 And you can also say now, okay, actually the financial contributors are also meaningful. 18:51 Let's add them as well. 18:53 And then, I mean, there are some settings to make it beautiful. 18:56 You can have like a background, et cetera, et cetera. 18:58 You can share it anywhere. 19:00 But you can also think of like, Every open source project could have that on their website with a donate button. 19:05 And if you donate, you also come to the Hyperboard. 19:11 So I think these are some of the use cases. 19:23 Some of the use cases. 19:27 Now I switch gears again, except I maybe pause here if somebody has a question in between. 19:33 Um, there's a question about whether you have looked at value flows. 19:38 Value flows? 19:40 Yeah, I mean, if there's a specific solution, I think there are like quite a few projects that have thought about how like value flows, um, and also like Sourcecred and others. 19:52 There have been like projects for attribution. 19:57 And I think this is something where we want to really focus on the context layer. 20:02 And then lots of different attribution mechanisms can be built on top of it because we are not the ones who can say, this community should use this. 20:12 It needs to come out of the community. 20:15 Can you explain more how the project data How the Lexicon records work in that way, or? Speaker B 20:29 Like how does an organization— yeah, like how does an organization that wants to be funded, right? 20:35 Like what— yeah, kind of what does that dedicated collection look like? Holke Brammer 20:39 What do they use? 20:41 Yeah, so this would be, for example, like this would be a specific platform that is built on top of this. 20:46 So then you would talk about MyEarth, Gainforest, Simocracy, and how they would implement it, because we are just implementing kind of the lexicons that can be used by them. 20:56 And in MyEarth case, for example, in the first round, so it's basically 100 projects will be selected by like more classical selection panel, or like actually like together with partner organizations. 21:10 That there's a minimum quality that we already know about the 100 projects. 21:15 And then on the, on the side, the projects can add more of their own data. 21:22 Then we will work with like trusted evaluators that we know that can also add data. 21:28 So this is in that way the choice of MaEarth, how they want to use the, the HyperSearch standard that we are proposing. 21:36 So it's not that we like, it's kind of the platform's choice. 21:39 Yeah, but happy to chat more about it afterwards. 21:43 Cool. 21:44 So changing gears a little bit into what is, what is the underlying technology that we have, because we had some challenges from the user experience where how do we actually build for land stewards? 21:59 How do we build not only for land stewards in the US and Europe, but actually for land stewards in the global majority? 22:06 And how do we explain to them what that proto is, or can we just avoid that? 22:11 And so what you see here is basically the— we have, of course, here defined the lexicons for the projects, et cetera. 22:24 We have the personal data servers, but we have also something called the certified group service. 22:30 I will go into that in a second, what that is. 22:33 This is something that has not been built, but the project was originally very Web3 token-centric, and there might be still a use case where you want to add kind of an on-chain component to it when you, for example, similar to carbon credits, when you want to make sure that somebody really can prove that they funded exactly how much of an impact. 22:57 I think we can also find solutions that are more at Proto-native, But potentially there's a part where on-chain data might be useful. 23:06 And then the platforms I have talked about already. 23:12 Something else that we built is kind of a login experience that is just passwordless because the user experience for MyEarth When you go to MyEarth, you log in and it tells you something about that proto, it tells you something about a different service that you don't know, you actually already lose users. 23:39 And so what we did is you basically sign up, you put in your email, you get a one-time password, you put it in, you have signed up, you have signed up and you have a user account. 23:50 And then later on, You can set your AdPortal handle. 23:55 You can set your password afterwards. 24:00 So this is kind of certified. 24:02 Yeah, it's just like the login. 24:07 It's not from the UI. 24:08 It's not very— 7 minutes? 24:10 From the login, it's not very exciting because from the UI, it's just like very, very basic. 24:17 But it's not something that— is that easy actually to do in the Adproto ecosystem. 24:24 And this is something where if you want to know more about the technical details, talk to Adam. 24:31 It really is about reducing the friction during onboarding. 24:36 And what you saw actually on this slide, if somebody comes to any of these platforms, they still can just sign in with Adproto or Bluesky. 24:46 With their normal way, but they can also use our passwordless login. 24:55 Cool. 24:56 Certified Group Service. 24:58 And I will switch briefly 'cause I think I can also show it to you. 25:05 Actually, I will show you the exciting way to log in with OTP. 25:35 So I think— I don't know if there has been an easier login to the Atmosphere before. 25:42 But here you can see there are different groups. 25:46 There are some groups that have been— some groups that I have publicly acknowledged. 25:56 And I've just created a lot of test groups. 25:58 Some others that I have not publicly acknowledged. 26:00 So publicly, it's not known that I'm part of it. 26:03 Here, the Hyperset Foundation. 26:05 And kind of the very common UI as well. 26:10 I can just like switch to the Hypersuit Foundation, logged into the profile. 26:14 I can see the members. 26:17 I have an activity log, what happened in the group. 26:21 I can add different users in a very familiar way as well. 26:30 And that's kind of the certified group service. 26:33 And this is in that way, there's an overlap with what we heard today. 26:37 I don't know who was there from Brittany, Brittany. 26:41 So, and we will check how we have built it, how they have built it. 26:47 But there's definitely something where I'm very excited about how we can allow groups to have accounts. 26:53 Because in our use case, when we have land stewards, they have projects, They might have volunteers. 26:58 The volunteers take pictures of tree planting and they should publish that for the organization and they should potentially not be able to interact with all the other data entries. 27:14 So this is kind of the, the interesting role-based access control that we can implement here. 27:23 And 2 minutes. 27:27 All right. 27:29 This is how we implemented the group service. 27:33 So when, like, the group has a vanilla PDS, that also means they can transfer the data whenever they want to anywhere else. 27:44 And the user, when they want to write into the group repo, just ask the PLC registry because the group is also registered as a normal DID. 27:55 Um, and in the PLC registry, there's a service that the, um, the user that knows, okay, this is a group service that I have to ask. 28:05 The group service checks, can this user act on behalf of this group? 28:10 If so, then the group service has the app password to actually write into the group service, and then it's also recorded who did what for, uh, on behalf of the group. 28:21 Um, and this is interesting for role-based access control, but also for so many more use cases. 28:27 If we have, um, private spaces, then who is the owner of the private space? 28:33 Maybe it should be a group, and maybe the governance mechanism should be in addition to the group service. 28:43 Cool. 28:43 If you want to build with Hyperserts, we have built a couple of things, a scaffold app that's easy to use as an example. 28:51 There's a CLI. 28:53 You can also just point your agent to hyperscan.dev/agents. 28:59 There's an indexer who indexes our data. 29:02 I introduced Certify as an easy login experience, but you can also use any other. 29:07 And hyperscan.dev gets you to an overview of everything that happens in the Hyperserts ecosystem. 29:18 And additional tools also like Badges and Identity Link, which potentially links like a Web3 wallet to your identity that I haven't really talked about, but all of that you can also find on Hyperscan. 29:32 Yeah, and we are here to talk If you want to build with us, please reach out. 29:37 It's here on the bottom. 29:39 Or just talk to us right after this or while we are here at the conference. 29:45 Where are you based at? 29:47 Everywhere. 29:48 I'm based in general in Berlin, but traveling a bunch. 29:52 And then we have London and Zurich, Paris. 29:55 We have a developer in Bhutan. 29:58 And then also the MyEarth crew that we are building very closely with. 30:02 They're also kind of global. 30:04 Yeah. 30:06 Thank you. 30:13 Any questions? 30:16 All right. 30:18 We talk. 30:19 Perfect. 30:22 Thank you.