All right, thanks for coming, everyone. So this session is Funding, Scaling, and Sustainable Growth. And we have three speakers. First up is Lucia Casale from Fundacion Avena in Mexico. We also have Helen Turek, a senior researcher at the Open Government Partnership. Sorry, senior regional coordinator at the Open Government Partnership in Germany. And Brandon Nolten, who's the lead digital architect in the government digital service in the UK. So each of them will be speaking for around 20 minutes and then we'll have 15 minutes at the end for questions and answers. So we'll begin with Lucia. Hello, everyone. My pleasure to be here. It's my first time in Tic Tac, so I'm very, very pleasure to be here. I will try to speak slowly because in Latin America we speak very quickly and speaking in English is not good. So I will try to speak very, very slow. I will present some lesson learned about a program, an alliance called the Latin American Alliance for Civic Technology, ALTEC, we call it, that works in Latin America. But I will start for the beginning. I'm Lucia, I'm a new Ryan that lives in Mexico and work for an international foundation that's called Avinah, that works for sustainable development in Latin America. Basically, from Latin America to Latin America. So we've been working in Latin America for 25 years. And this is ALTEC. And ALTEC supports the development of really supports the improvement in citizen participation using technology but seeing the technology not as I am. It's more like seeing like a vehicle to change public practices and private practice to accelerate impact. And when you think about our work in five years, you think, I don't know, we have supported 50 projects in 11 countries of Latin America working with different governments, CSOs, media between all those countries. And you think about diversity. You think about different realities, different languages, working with people from the cities, people from rural areas. But the real thing is that this is our community, how our community looks like. In generally, civic tech and transparency community in Latin America is pretty homogeneous. We are talking about men and women from cities that have PhD and masters and have been working a lot with transparency and accountability that is quite different to sink in a very diverse and inclusive process of participation. That is what we need when we think about the challenges of our democracy today. So we started to think a lot like two years ago, how we can get a more diverse participation in the civic tech field in Latin America how to increase the engagement of rural areas about women in different countries of the region. Most of the, more than the 50% of the population in Latin America are women. And the percentage of participation of women in Latin America is very slow because of violence, poverty, access to quality education. So we decided to start specifically to try to have an inclusive gender perspective in the developing of technology. Sorry for that. So, but it's so difficult how to create an inclusive participation without inclusive organizations. If you have like a very homogeneous set of organization it's difficult to disorganization engage different type of population. So we started to start with almost 30 organizations in 12 countries of Latin America to understand how to, or what was the feasibility to incorporate gender perspective. So we make a very long study and experiment that takes almost one year trying to understand the feasibility to institution feasibility, how the institutional where to incorporate a gender perspective. The hierarchical position, the culture also the political feasibility how the leaders of the organization will be open to incorporate this perspective. Also the technical, if the organization has the technical knowledge to incorporate a gender perspective and a more inclusive perspective of technology also the operation of feasibility. If they have the means to evaluate to really concrete like economics resources to try to implement this type of policy. After that we realize by meet about gender and inclusive technology that I would like to share with you. The first one is that in general when we talk about gender and technology the first things that we talk and we say is that when you have in the team of the organization some members that know about gender that mean that the project, the organization or even the event has a gender focus or is more inclusive because in some way we talk about gender that is completely false. The gender equity must be explicit to different means and for that is necessary that people train and develop different process inside the organizations. Also another thing that we hear a lot when we are talking about technology and citizen participation is that if we have in a room for example a workshop or events or I don't know a campaign a lot of women's and this project is automatically gender focus also in campaigns, no? Most of the person in the campaign were women so the campaign was gender focus so have an inclusive perspective and that is completely false because the organization is impossible to compare to have women in a room and to be able to create a more inclusive process. To create this inclusive process you have to think about dynamics and really review the relation of powers between the different people involved in this process. The third one is the willingness of a team of an organization to implement a gender vision in technology or an event is sufficient and sometimes and I see it a lot with government they want to create an inclusive way to participate but if you don't create the right mechanism specialize with specific protocols that take in account the difference in access to participation between men and women this process is not gender focus and it's not inclusive. The poor organization that works towards citizen participation or from the perspective of rights automatically promote the gender approach. We work a lot with human rights organization in Latin America that all the time are thinking about protecting rights but that necessarily not mean that these have a gender perspective or to have a more inclusive perspective. Perhaps we are talking about protecting access to information but no are thinking to have like a diverse access to information from the women's in the south of Chile to the women in Brazil. Finally, the gender perspective is only part of the the gender perspective is not only a part of the feminist agenda, it's a collective construction so it's not related to be a feminist and to create and to have a more inclusive technology don't have to be involved with feminists. And finally for us at the end of this whole process of experimentation is to recognize that technology is not neutral and if we want to scale civic tech we must to take in account that technology reflects our priorities, our preference, our prejudices and it's crucial to take in account this to really create more inclusive and a scaling process of participation. I think here in Latin America and also around the world. Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Helen Turek. I'm working for the Open Government Partnership. I have some slides as well if we could bring those up in a second. Yeah, it's my first time here at Tech Tech as well. I'm very happy to be here. Not my first time at the OECD, but I'm really here to learn and sort of soak up some of the information from the civic tech community because this is quite new for me. And with this presentation I hope to give you some ideas about how we can use OGP and Open Government approaches to support some of the work that you're doing and some of the projects associated with civic tech. I've heard on a few occasions that the Open Government and civic tech communities are not well integrated and I think this is an interesting thing because I imagine if you were to look at a Venn diagram of the two communities, there would be an obvious overlap. But I think we just haven't got around to sort of filling in the details of what that overlap looks like and I'm keen to build those connections because technology is really an important part of OGP's work. We have the ambition to make governments more responsive, inclusive and open with the idea that a more open government which allows public input and oversight is more credible and is more effective. And when we're talking about values like transparency, accountability, participation, it's really technology and civic tech projects that can bring that to life and make that very concrete. So through apps and through portals and platforms and really translating that into more information for the public, holding governments accountable and providing space and opportunity for participation. Yeah, so I'm going to give you some examples of really interesting civic tech projects that have taken place as part of the OGP process and I want to explain how being part of that process helped to catalyze something or bring something extra and give a bit more impact. Some of you have probably heard about some of these examples before but I want to show you how a platform like OGP can possibly help. So before I do that, just to give you some background on OGP, who's heard of OGP? Just, okay, all right, so that's quite a few in the room. So just some brief background. We are 79 members. Our newest country member is the Seychelles. I actually have some colleagues doing a kickoff workshop in the Seychelles this week. So Paris is lovely. That's... We're also working with local governments as well. So we have local members, 20 of them, and they range very much in terms of what they look like. So we're working with big cities like Seoul, Paris, Buenos Aires, but also places like a regency in Indonesia called Bojina Goro, a county in Kenya called El Goya Maraquat, also Ontario and Canada and Scotland. So we're working with a very diverse range of local governments. And part of the OGP partnership is, of course, the thousands of civil society organisations that we're working with. We're also working with multilateral organisations and other international NGOs as well. When a government joins OGP, they commit to three things. The first is a real constructive dialogue between government, civil society, citizens and other actors to define public problems which can be addressed through open government approaches. Secondly, they're committing to a two-year action plan which contains concrete commitments that address those public problems. And thirdly, they commit to an independent monitoring and assessment process. So we're looking at not only the progress on those commitments made in the action plan, but also the quality and depth of engagement between government and civil society. Before I give you the specific examples of civic tech projects that have been scaled via OGP, I want to briefly talk about Open Gov Week. So this took place last week, and I think this is a really cool example of how one OGP commitment in a country action plan was scaled into a global event. So back in 2017, the government of Italy held an open administration week where they invited other stakeholders, be it students, public administration bodies, civil society organisations, to develop their own events or activities under the banner of open government. And it was really that idea of, let's let a thousand flowers bloom. And the Italian government encouraged us to take this global. So we've done this the last two years. And last week, we had over 500 events across 55 different countries, within some non-OGP members as well. So that was really cool to see. And this is from Colombia. We have the Netherlands. This is Indonesia. This is Canada. This is Paraguay. And this is Secondi-Tekaradi, which is a pair of twin cities in Ghana. They're part of our local program. And a number of the activities that took place as part of Open Gov Week were civic tech-related initiatives. So there was hackathons in France and Canada. There was some open data workshops in Argentina. There was also people were rolling out tech for anti-corruption monitoring in Ukraine. So even though this broad initiative is not technically civic tech related, it's very much part and parcel of a number of the events that took place. Okay, I'm gonna jump into the three examples. This is an image from the anti-austerity protests in Madrid that erupted in the wake of the financial crisis starting in 2011. There was one particular protester. His name was Pablo Soto. Maybe some of you know him. He was a skilled engineer and he worked amongst a smaller group to help try and organize the protesters. It started off small and manageable, but they realized they needed some way to communicate, develop their tactics, develop ideas, vote on those ideas. So they built a platform to do this. And then in 2015, Pablo Soto, he was representing the Aloha Madrid, a political party, and he was elected as a councilman to Madrid City Council. And he took that software into the council and they rolled it out as a platform for Madrid called De Sede, Madrid. And this platform provides the opportunity for voting on participatory budgeting. Citizens can make proposals for how the city should be run and you can vote on those proposals. There's public debates. So this is a really holistic public participation platform that is used now in Madrid. And what is interesting is in 2016, Madrid joined OGP as part of the local program and within their first action plan, they committed to scaling this platform beyond Madrid City Council. And they did that. And now over a hundred cities and also some national governments are using this software. This is the underlying software, it's called Consul. And it's really exciting to see how this grew from one city to over a hundred and it's really built out a large community around the software and they actually have conferences and they meet to discuss how they're using this public participation tool. And I think there was three important things for the scaling of this. One was the fact that they always knew that they wanted to scale. So they built in some important factors to begin with, of course it's open source, it was free and they also set up a small international team who was going to be doing the outreach and the liaison. The Consul team also told me it was really important being part of the OGP network and that really helped them create that intergovernmental communication that was necessary for them to make the right contacts to set this up in other cities around the world. And we also have the Consul platform being used specifically for OGP processes as well but also much broader processes. And the third thing that was important was the fact that OGP helped to deepen the dialogue between government and citizens. And that was absolutely key for making a platform like this successful, to have the citizen demand and the interest to actually engage and use it. Okay, my next example comes from Kaduna State in Nigeria which is also part of our local program. In Kaduna there was a recognition from government and civil society and citizens that infrastructure projects were not being implemented properly, that money was going missing and things weren't getting done on time and getting done properly. So the state decided to start monitoring these projects. Originally it started enlisting the civil servants working for the government to go and start looking at these projects to see if what was supposed to be spent was actually being spent and actually happening but they realized they didn't have enough people so they crowdsourced citizens to do this for them. So this launched the Eyes and Ears project which engages citizens to report on the infrastructure projects via an app, via a hotline, also social media and text messaging so it's really a citizen engagement crowdsourced project. So this was actually launched before Kaduna joined OGP but with the first action plan of Kaduna in 2018 they committed to strengthening the broader citizen engagement ecosystem around this Eyes and Ears project and they did this by developing new kind of offline techniques including town halls, a radio show, trainings and really focusing on inclusion as well so ensuring that minorities and vulnerable groups are also being pulled into this broader ecosystem. My final example comes from back to Italy. In Italy, Italy is a recipient of EU cohesion funds and without wanting to sound too Trumpian but it's literally billions and billions of euros we're talking about when we're talking about these funds and this brings with it a risk obviously of corruption but it's also waste and general mismanagement but also there was a feeling in Italy that people didn't realize, didn't know what was being spent on these projects and why these projects were chosen and also what were the outcomes of these projects. So in 2012, the government launched this platform called Open Cohesiony where they put open data about every single project that is being funded by the cohesion funds so that ranges from huge infrastructure projects like highways and down to individual student grants so it was really the entire spectrum of funding. But what was interesting, they really focused on the reuse of this data and they built a couple of spin-off projects the first is called Monathon this is as you can see a combination of monitoring and marathon and this basically encourages the public to pick an interesting project from the Open Cohesiony platform and to go and self-organize and to check whether that's how that money is being spent and with that project is being delivered and then they should deliver a report to the platform. The other spin-off project which this is a really cool project this is the Open Cohesiony School which takes that monathon model but it's built out into a broader civic educational program which includes things like, you know learning about public policy, developing digital skills how to use open data, data journalism also things like they actually go and conduct interviews with people working on the projects meeting with local policy makers. So this, so as I mentioned Open Cohesiony was launched in 2012 and that was at the same time Italy joined OGP and the first OGP action plan had some commitments which supported parts of this broader project and when I spoke to the Open Cohesiony team they said it was again really important to be part of the OGP network and what was important was that they were already pretty well connected within the EU given this is a sort of an EU project and they were linked to governments working with the same kind of funding but they managed to make connections way beyond the EU so they cited a specific example where they met someone from the Philippines who was able to help them work through a specific challenge or problem. So that was one thing that was important. Another thing that was important was the fact that in Italy there have been numerous administrations since the launch of this Italian politics is quite dynamic let's say. So having Open Cohesiony connected to an international initiative and within it in the OGP action plan helped them with the continuity across administrations and got more buy-in from the rest of government and sort of had that support that was necessary to keep the project secure. And what's interesting also is then the current Italian action plan is under development at the moment and they are talking about possibly inserting Open Cohesiony's school into that platform to scale it much in the same way that Madrid scaled the city of Madrid beyond borders so that's something under discussion at the moment. Okay, I want to summarise also that's a image of the monitoring from Monathon. I want to summarise these three examples with a few observations about how OGP might be able to help civic tech projects. So one, as I mentioned, is this international connection so OGP is a huge global network of thousands of reformers and I think having the very specific connections between governments can be very helpful for some projects and others it's a more general being part of that community we can help make the connections to overcome challenges that's a big part of the work that I personally do and a number of my colleagues is trying to identify those opportunities to make connections and to support projects across borders. Second thing I think is important is the Government-Civil Society Cooperation. I had in the presentation this morning from Rebecca like we're at the stage now, the civic tech community as the stage now where it's really important to be working with institutions in a very constructive way and not just to be shouting at them. The OGP model is designed exactly for this. It is designed to build trust, to build cooperation and relationships between government and civil society. So if that's something your project needs, OGP can maybe help deliver on that. A third thing which I mentioned in the Italian example is securing government buy-in. In many countries, action plans are signed off at cabinet level and we always have a ministerial contact who is responsible for OGP at city level that's usually a mayor. So obviously that commitment is different from one country to the next but broadly speaking, it can help secure that political support and inter-governmental attention for a particular project. Fourthly, OGP offers a really strong framework for implementation and accountability. OGP action plans last for two years and we monitor those. So if a government says they're going to build a platform or a portal or something by the end of 2019, we're gonna check that and we're going to write a report about whether that happened and deliver that to the government and then they should respond to that and you could go around knocking on doors. So there is a very strong implementation accountability component. And then the final thing which didn't come up in these examples but I think worth mentioning. In many countries, donors, bilateral aid agencies, multilateral institutions are involved with OGP and are supporting action plans and the implementation of specific commitments. So putting something in an OGP action plan can help get financial support and bring that attention of donors. And something that some of you may have listened to earlier this morning about the OGP trust fund. This is a World Bank hosted fund which is our first effort at providing direct funding for the four parts of the OGP process and that could include the implementation of specific commitments. So that could include projects that were in an OGP action plan. I want to finalize the presentation by talking about what we could do better to work with the civic tech community and to support this kind of work. Firstly, I think you might notice that all of these apart from Madrid which is something of a hybrid are quite government initiated and government driven projects. We do have some really exciting citizen driven citizen initiated projects within OGP but I would like to see more frankly and so that's one thing. Secondly, I think just generally working with integrating, talking with the civic tech community. So this is obviously being present here today is one important step but I think we should be doing more of that. Thirdly, I think we can work with other organizations who are focused specifically on scaling projects. So for example, those who are funding, I'm living in Berlin, I've recently learned about the prototype fund which is a fund hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation and they work to identify new projects, new apps and give one off funding to citizens to develop their ideas and I think it would be interesting to work with them to for example see whether there are projects that could be solved with open government approaches and whether that could be integrated in the OGP process for example. And the final point I think we could learn a lot from the approaches of the civic tech community. I think the methods of user testing, prototyping are really interesting and given that OGP action plans are government owned approved documents it can sometimes be a bit risk averse and I think I would like to see a bit more experimentation within OGP action plans and I think there's smart ways to do that and to be flexible and just to build in that kind of little bit more experimentation. So that's everything I have, thank you. My name is Brendon Oltan. I have at least one hat that is as an Irishman another one as a music teacher but weirdly at the moment I have one as a civil servant of the United Kingdom where I work in the cabinet office. Which I have to say is a really good vantage point if you care about trying to change the relationship between citizens and the state as I do and that is something that I think overlaps quite well with a lot of civic tech organizations. One of the things I got to do there was to be the tech architect of data.gov.uk which is one of our open government partnership commitments in the United Kingdom to make data open but the thing that I'm doing at the moment is acting as the tech lead for an innovation fund called GovTech Catalyst. So that's what I'm here to talk about. What we've been trying to do is to try to solve a tiny bit of this problem that government tends to have when it is very good at investing in innovation R&D, early basic research on one side and then when it actually comes to buying things and scaling and making it go bigger than that suddenly all the money has gone away and it isn't the same people thinking about it and it's not really something you can put into the world and that happens over and over and over again in the public sector. So we were trying to think of a way that we would do a sort of innovation fund but focus on scaling out from the beginning and make that the main thing that we were thinking about doing. So this is a little bit of our lessons learned from the first year of trying to actually do that. We did peel off some money for it out of the billion pound government investment in artificial intelligence in the UK. We managed to peel off 20 million over three years which in government terms, six million a year to try to improve services for 65 million odd people is actually not a huge amount but it's enough that we can do a lot of experimenting and look at scale quite quickly and so the way that we actually decided to do that was to focus a lot on that idea of partnership as was just mentioned, this idea that what we're going to be doing is connecting to tech companies, connecting to civic society organizations and specifically thinking about some of these civ techy sort of things that might help government to do its job better in delivering services and as an incidental effect of that or as a deliberate effect, create the sort of data and transparency that would allow more of those initiatives to go forward.  So we crowdsourced what we were gonna actually be working on. We just kind of asked for ideas of public sector challenges and for each one we decided to ask them how well they understood what their users actually needed to do, like the person who actually needs to interact with the service, how well the public body understood what had been done in the space, so how well could they learn from what had come before and how much time and money and expertise and data and access to facilities and access to users can the public body actually put into this? So sure, we're happy to put in some of the money to do some of the work but that's kind of secretly about trying to get by and from public bodies to experiment. So we picked 15 things. I think a lot of them are very civ techie and then I'll say what we did to try to figure out how to structure this thing. So we did three rounds of five. We've picked 15 now. We're totally busy for the next two years. I've highlighted a couple that seem particularly civ techie. Finding, looking for terrorist propaganda online is difficult to find a single user for that but certainly trying to support a circular economy and understanding how waste works is actually a very civic problem as is dealing with loneliness and rural isolation, as is dealing with traffic congestion, as is helping local councils to support the people in their areas, especially more rural ones without a lot of urban areas, very tricky. Improving fire fire safety isn't necessarily the thing that matters to you until your house is actually the one that's burning but making better use of data for public sector audits is something where I would really hope to see a lot of both the resistance and the rebuilding and both the activism and the solidarity around holding government to account about whether we're spending money well and generating the data that lets people determine that. We thought that we would look at a little bit more about trying to find things that we don't want at our borders, not that that would in any way be a pressing issue for the UK. We did want to then look at our laws themselves. Can we find better overlaps between regulations that apply to a business? What is actually in effect right now? What do we need to send data to? How do you get better prescriptions when you move between different care environments that the government provides? And so we kind of found, we found 15, we funded them but we didn't know exactly what we were going to do in terms of trying to address the barriers. Like this essential problem of scale was the one that was still kind of alluding us. So being the government digital service, if you know us you probably have a sense that we're very big on kind of human-centered design in general and so we did some research. We wanted to try to figure out really framing the question in terms of like what's the problem here? Why is it hard for people to work with government? Why is it hard for projects to scale? Why is it hard to bring things from a sort of pilot idea into something that might make sense across an entire sector and would be financially and in every other policy way sustainable over a long period of time? It was all very confusing. It was all very unclear. Our funders at Her Majesty's Treasury, at the Ministry of Business, at the Department for Digital Culture and Media and Sport, these people all had different ideas of what this might be. So we figured we would have to try to unpack that a little bit. Our own team, we had the business case from the original £20 million and we could break that down into some questions but after we had kind of framed that, we did what we usually do, which is to go try to understand what are some goals of an actual discovery project and go out and talk to some actual people, which is how we do. So this is, we were trying to find places where the answer couldn't be found just by kind of reading documents but instead actually doing some interviews and talking to people. So we tried to mix, we talked to a mix of people in public bodies trying to do interesting work, trying to move on the quality of their services, use technology well and effectively, create good data and use it. And we talked to about half were organizations who had an understanding of technology and had an understanding of data but found it probably difficult to work with government. So our researchers, our user selectees, these were very tried to be evenly balanced. Of course it resulted as it always does in quite a bit of individual bits of information which we tried to lump and sort and put together. This was the first chance of one of our department for digital culture, media and sport being involved with the kind of pointy end of user research. So we got to baptize a few civil servants as well in the ways of post-its. And what did we learn? Learned a few things. So I probably don't need to tell you in any sort of surprising way that the culture of government is very tricky. Working with smaller organizations is perceived as being quite risky. Startups and smaller firms, especially when they're doing various projects, don't always have the capital and the time, the runway to actually wait out working with government. And so people say that government might do all this innovation stuff over here. We've got city labs and catapults and university transfers and R&D funds and fellowships, all sorts of stuff. But then that's nothing like the process that you actually go to if you're trying to have government invest in your project over a long period of time. So we needed to do a little bit about that. And even the people who were the best at this because in most cases, the civic organizations we wanted to work with and the tech companies we wanted to work with were way better at digital, way better at data, way better at human-centered design than the public bodies actually were. But they found it really hard to get access to the data that they actually needed to do a good job. I'm sure this doesn't, again, sound like a surprise and I'm sorry to say obvious things to a room full of experts. But I think this surprised some of our government stakeholders as well. That this was actually a barrier to keeping smaller enterprises and civic organizations from working with government. They could not compete with incumbents because incumbents had the database. And that's something that we saw a lot. And even when there wasn't a database that was wrapped up in incumbent, we found that a lot of the data that you would have needed to work with was locked up in other proprietary formats on desktops, on servers, places where you couldn't get access to. And so you really couldn't scale that. You couldn't really move out of the pilot phase. And that scalability is important because while we like doing pilots, government has to operate at scale. The stuff we have to make has to be for everyone. Really has to work for tens of millions of people at least. And this problem of scalability and knowing that you're working towards tens of millions of users, including the most difficult to reach users and the ones with the lowest digital skills and everything else about the difficulty of a universal service, that actually creates another barrier towards being able to do interesting kinds of innovation along with government. Because if you know that that's what you're going for and if the public body kind of sets up that partnership in such a way that they're saying, oh, yes, well, we'll experiment and then next year tens of millions of people, that's actually gonna be of a capacity problem for a lot of organizations who we otherwise would want to work with. And so even if you have the resources to show that an idea can work, it's very difficult to take that. And so again, gives more of an advantage to bigger companies, with bigger teams, with more money, with more runways, who can actually promise to be able to scale to tens of millions of people even if they don't even really know what the product or service is going to be yet. Working with government is an advantage. The actual sort of badge of working with government was something that a lot of people found very strong. It was, oddly enough, seen as being, deploying something in actual partnership with a local authority or an arms like body or an executive agency or a regulator or a rule maker, actually deploying something, it was assumed that whatever you had done must be much better tested and very rigorous. Anyone who has seen and worked with government technology probably knows this isn't always the case, but it is something that at least is the perception. So there are some advantages to actually working with government that actually help organizations to move on. Government doesn't really want to be an early adopter in many cases because of a somewhat natural conservatism of being able to, in the sense of needing to know that something will work, not being able to forward a lot of expensive failures at scale, but also more prosaic concerns like numbers of browsers you support and types of mobiles and ability to support and call centers and all sorts of things. It's tricky to jump into the newer things. And so the newer bits are perceived as being more risky. That makes it harder to come into government with an idea of partnership that depends on something that's kind of on the leading edge of how that technology might be developed. So government, I'm not gonna talk about blockchain and governments, it's its own thing, but if for some reason government did decide that this was a really important thing that we needed to know a lot about right now, it would be very difficult to do because it's tricky. The regulations are hard. In some ways, government actually has quite a bit of flexibility in buying things. We can do research projects, we can do innovation partnerships, we can do lots of ways of things that are not just typical contracts that are all written down with 50 pages or requirements at the beginning. There's nothing in the regs that says that you have to over-specify your projects. It's in the culture, though, that gets built on top of the regulations that people say, ah yes, we must over-specify our projects because that way it won't be our fault if something goes wrong. This obviously is a giant problem when you're trying to do something for the first time. And I would say that lots of people think that there are lots of more regulatory problems than there actually are with government doing something different. People think that state aid rules are really, really difficult, that that's the limitation. But in many cases, departments don't really understand that at all. It's not actually all that bad. And the procurement process, of course, is seen as being risky if it's new with the result that tech companies tend to avoid government altogether. But this means that instead of avoiding government, it means that, again, the bigger players, end up being the ones who come forward to meet the needs, which means that those bigger players are the ones who are able to build strong relationships, which means that government then has a bias towards working to people they already know personally and then companies without those relationships and organizations and societies have a hard time building them. It creates a vicious cycle from that. Knowing that you win tenders based on the personal relationship rather than an understanding of what you're trying to get done can be kind of a problem, which really brings to the last area of risk, which is what this really is all about. Citizen critical areas are tricky to innovate around. They're tricky to do new things because the financial risk and also they tend to be the really sensitive policy areas. Like these are almost the last thing that governments want to experiment with when they're trying to improve a policy or service because it feels like the hardest bit and the bit where if it doesn't work exactly as you think it's going to work, you'll be in the most trouble. And one thing that governments generally around the world say is that they really don't want to be in trouble or at least perceived to be spending money badly. And indeed we should not spend money badly. We should be good at what we do, but also crucially need to understand how to balance these different kinds of risks together. So we have a hard time with public bodies not really because they can't see the whole thing of what it looks like five years from now not wanting to start with it and not wanting to start with it because it seems difficult. So what have we done with this? We've designed our, at least this tiny experiment that we're doing from Cabinet Office is about continuing to try and continuing to make a couple of structural changes that we think will address some of these aspects of risk. So the process that we've tried to start with first instead of starting from the sort of technology and then working back to who in government might need this particular kind of robot instead crowdsourcing the actual policy challenges and then selecting those based on the ability of that kind of public sector team to be able to support a real design process. That I think is something that we are finding is very difficult to build up that skill but is also resulting in challenges that we think have a pretty good chance of actually getting out there into the world because the team's behind them. And even after we go through the whole kind of mechanical bits of putting stuff out to a challenge and evaluating all that which by the way is still less time than government often spends to do things. We're kind of forcing a certain understanding of risk by funding five organizations simultaneously to try showing the feasibility of whatever it is you're trying to solve. Knowing that you're not gonna end up turning all five of them into something that you do for years and years but just simply to say we're going to look at the program space. So we've been funding in our program five companies simultaneously giving them 50K, 10 week development program just to show the basic feasibility of their approach of what they want to try, of the way in which the platform or the civic network or the activism platform is going to work before we kind of go into saying this is something we could do a sort of private beta. But even there, after doing those show and tells to see all of these different groups we keep going with another half a million to each of two companies to actually spend 10 months really building out the product with actual users, with actual data, building things in very much in partnership and co-designing with the public body. Again, as a way to try to make sure that we keep that diversity of thought to make sure that the different ideas are still being considered. And then with what should be a better mix between the approach and the need of the actual policymaker we're trying to make sure that well before we get to the end of that second phase that we actually focus on the mechanics of making it possible for government to continue to invest in this platform or technology or team by helping teams to get onto frameworks for purchasing by helping them to establish a commercial route to market by helping them find subcontractors or other relationships that will help them meet the needs of scale that the public sector knows that it will need kind of a year from now. And so we try to make it so that the actual mechanics of being able to not only sign a contract with your one lead customer at the end of this one innovation challenge. Yes, that should be doable, but also it should be something that is almost immediately can be bought by any public body, at least in the UK. Any public body can invest in it and start getting some of the advantages of that approach. So I know it seems very technical and procurement based, but the results of our research kind of suggested to us that it was actually a lot of those bits that we needed to kind of fix more than to try to just kind of come up with better ideas because everyone has really, really good ideas. There's lots and lots of good ideas out there and they can really succeed very well. So this is our, you know, very, very small team and we are somewhat regretting commissioning, you know, 75 simultaneous projects right at the moment. But we are definitely learning a lot by doing that and thinking especially about and that forces us to focus on our own kind of multiplier effect which is to help public bodies get better at doing the sort of user centered projects that will in the long run be, you know, quite, quite virtuous for everyone involved. So, you know, please do take a look. We would like to learn very much from what you're trying to do and what you're experimenting with and would be very happy to get in touch at any point. So thank you very much. Definitely appreciate your time and attention. Cheers. Thanks very much for seeing Helen and Brandon. Do we have any questions? We've got plenty of time for questions, so let's start. And if you could just stand and say your name and your organization or affiliation, that would be great. Yes, so I'm Eric Ries from Johns Hopkins University in the US and my main question is for Lucia. So when you're thinking about the kind of gender work and perspective that you're doing, I'm just curious about how you start and how you and your organization started doing that from a very tactical perspective, like what did you do with the folks in your organization and the folks you were working with? Thank you. I would try to answer as I was saying, I work in international foundation and I lead an international alliance that's called Altec. And Altec spent like five years working with civic tech organizations in Latin America and one of the main problems in civic tech projects and organization and platforms in the region is the lack of engagement. For example, we have very successful project but at the end, they have like thousands of participants of in on the other hand, for example, you have like a very good moment at the beginning of the use of the platform. And after that, the use of the platform go down a lot, a lot. And when you start to analyze, sorry, the use of the platform and the different people involved, you realize that the type of participation is more or less the same. We are talking always about the same type of population related to the use. So we started to work with the organization and trying to know and understand what type, how they develop the workshop, how they develop the campaigns, how they try to engage with government, how they develop the commitment of OGB in the different countries. And thinking about that, we take a lot of information about that. So we develop an action plan for 30 organizations in Latin America. So we work with them for a year, trying to improve the way they develop technology, the way they started to sync in workshops, the way they develop campaigns, trying to include a gender perspective and a more inclusive way to engage people in general. So yes, at the end we have these meetings, but also we have like a very specific cases of improvement in, I don't know, like seven countries. Thank you. Many thanks to the panel. I would like to start by asking Lucia about a point you made around diversity, which I think is very important and inclusion. And to further ask, how you address the challenge of diversity within diversity? So for instance, we're talking about citizens, very important, but not a homogeneous category. Younger women, older women, women with disabilities, elderly women, we tend to forget that, they are part of community. I just want to understand better how you might respond to that or how you're responding to that in your projects. Helen, thank you for that example about Kaduna. I just want to understand a bit better because I live there in Nigeria and I've got some shared affinities with Kaduna State. And one of the lessons we're learning is that change will happen where you have changed champions, people in power, in government who want to do things a bit differently and they want to build systems. What are the lessons you're taking away from Kaduna State that you think we could scale up or replicate somewhere else? And thank you, Brendan, also for your intervention. This is not to put you on the spot. This is just a very honest question I want to ask because you mentioned the fact that sometimes maybe SMEs might not be able to get a big push in the door as much as the big multinational corporations. And interestingly, what got my attention was the last slide where you had a very hard-working team and the gentleman who had a post-it on his forehead saying how hard you work and I respect that. But it just occurred to me to ask, maybe your team might not also need to be a bit more diverse to replicate the diversity of the United Kingdom because sometimes it's about trust. Trust is also a function of who is talking to me and how I perceive their relationship to me. And so if we have a bit more diversity reflected in the team, might we be able to get more trust going? Thank you. First, thank you for the question. It's something that we are working on a lot and perhaps I don't have a complete answer. Avina is a quite diverse organization. We work from the Amazonia to Mexico City so the contexts are quite different and always I receive questions related to that. We try to develop some lines of works in order to be able not only to think in the gap between men and women, but also to think and to be more close to different environments. For example, we have a line of work related to civic tech in water and water. And other, for example, in biomass that we caught in Latin America is El Chaco Americano and La Amazonia that allow us to understand better and to develop civic technology thinking in a specific context and also in a very close alliance with the organization that have been working for many, many, many, many years in this specific context. For example, in the Amazonia, in Brazil, you have organizations that have been working for 30, 40 years and developing knowledge about the, for example, the forest, I don't know how to oversee the La Tala de Arboles. I don't know how to say it. And things like that. So we work in a very, very close relation with this type of organization and trying to engage with the, yes, with all the sector that work with them. Just about Kuduna, I'm sure you know far more about this project if you actually live there. But I think the key lesson that I wanted to extract from the example was that a project like Eisenhears, the sustainability and success of that depends on the broader ecosystem of participation. And I think that's really important when you have an exciting new project where citizens are asked to participate. How do you keep that enthusiasm going? How do you ensure the sustainability of such a project so they don't just report once and then say, oh, that's my job done, but they're motivated to continue. And I think that's why within the OGP Action Plan, it was interesting to see how they wanted to build out that ecosystem with online and offline techniques. And I think once you have that and you're working on that, then you can also develop new projects on top. And the issue you mentioned of champions, in every single OGP member, this is absolutely key. When we have political champions or champions within civil society, they can really help drive and push something forward. So that's absolutely key. And I think once, if we have champions in each sector that we're working with, that's the ideal situation, but that doesn't always happen. So identifying them, cultivating, nurturing champions, providing them the space and connecting them also with other champions and other countries is also really important. I'll just pick up the SME point quickly. I think what we're finding is that if we set small enough things to start with and then build from that rather than starting with the whole amount, we can actually set levels where the really big companies aren't interested in working with us because the small amounts at the beginning seem like they're not worth them doing a proposal. Whereas in fact, it does work fairly well for SMEs. So while we don't have a, in what we're trying to experiment with now, we don't have a cut off for organizations of a particular size, but 90% of the organizations we've been signing contracts with have been micro or SMEs in Britain and the larger companies just haven't really been, haven't been interested. I definitely take the point in terms of diversity of our own team. In our organization and the directorate we work in, our diversity is a bit better than the tech sector in general for both gender and ethnicity and other balance. The belt the same as the UK as a whole, but it's still nowhere close to where it needs to be. And I think that's a constant area of effort and something that we need to do very well on. We've made a conscious effort. I think we've done some, by doing things like having diverse hiring panels and, you know, requiring and reaching out to other sorts of communities to find people. We've increased the representation within our various teams quite a bit. We found that actually it takes some work, but very much pays off in the diversity of thought around the table. But as always, it's something to keep working on for a long time. Thank you. Just a question for Brendan. The, I mean, the process is really impressive, but I guess it also builds on the fact that in the UK there's been a lot of experimentation with kind of digital services and designing them and procuring them for a number of years. And some of us are in sort of contexts where it's like, you know, it's still like 15 years ago, you've got a monolithic IT department that signed a big contract with SAP and everything breaks three years later. So where would you suggest somebody start? Because this is like the end point of a number of years if a local government or a national government wanted to get better at this kind of procurement, what would be a place that they would start if they didn't have all of those years of experience? And the second thing was just one question on the bigger and smaller. I mean, one of the things that big companies do do is sometimes register branches that look very small. There was a story recently about AWS getting SME support from the UK government because it looked like a small company. How do you kind of filter that kind of gamesmanship out? So the question of where to start, I think if you know what you're going for, if you have a sense of a standard, either that you've kind of created yourself or have a way to adapt, that seems at least for the digital service has been the starting point is to say, this is what we think good looks like. And then we just look for every possible opportunity to apply that. For organizations with a lot of legacy IT, the places to do that are usually when contracts are ending and when you know that they're gonna end a year from now, that's the time to kind of say, well, we could just renew this contract with the supplier or we could actually look at whether what's being proposed fits these new principles that we think are important and that may level the playing field enough. It still takes time. It has taken many years in the UK government. We're very, very far away from having solved that. It's just, you need to have people. I think I would say that the actual spend control and assessment kind of assurance power in government to say what good looks like instead of just kind of being an innovation lab in the corner. That's actually what's allowed us to make whatever progress we have even though we have so many miles to go. And the question on gaming the system, I mean, sure, lots of people can use Microsoft as a subcontractor and yet that's be fronted by a company of two people. That does happen. We try to set up the structure, I suppose, the landscape such that we get the kind of people that we want to work with. And if really big companies want to create approaches within this idea of iterative user-driven development and if they're willing to not come in talking about a lot of proprietary both software and data standards that we can't support and don't fit our standards, like if they're actually willing to change what they do. Yeah, we're happy to work with them. Not in the sense that we want to get relocked into a new set of standards, but just that if someone's willing to actually make a significant progress towards being more open in both their code and their data, sure, they should definitely work with the public sector.  We have time for a couple more, so. Hi, thank you very much. So I had a question for Helen and one for Brendan. So for Helen, you talked about the thousand flowers idea and I think that's a really good approach and it's kind of underused because people want to avoid duplicating work when quite often it's valuable. But how do you prune perhaps unsavory flowers or ideas that might not fit either like your ethical standards or the other standards? And then for Brendan, where civic tech is quite often not-for-profit, how do you encourage kind of local government and central government to integrate not-for-profit? So free civic tech. So rather than procurement, just get them to use stuff that's all free to improve service to the free. It's a very interesting question pruning our flowers. I mean, the whole premise of OGP is this, let the thousand flowers bloom homegrown. OGP is voluntary mechanism and within a country how the OGP process looks like and what goes in an action plan is driven by the actors in country and I think that's really the beauty of OGP. We do have some mechanisms and channels for dealing with, I would say countries or governments that are acting contrary to what we call OGP values. So for example, civic space is always top of mind for OGP. Without the space for dialogue and action, the process itself doesn't work. So we do have a mechanism whereby, for example, civil society organizations or other actors can file official complaints to the OGP support unit if, for example, there is a serious case of squeezing civic space and for example, that's in process with Azerbaijan at the moment.  We can't go around and check on every tiny little interaction. Of course, we're not policing anything, but I think this is called the response policy we have at OGP. I think this is really the key way for addressing those major concerns that might crop up within OGP. And I suppose a point on the nonprofits to your question. Of course, government behaves as a nonprofit and in many ways would rather work with nonprofits. If you're working with government though, there's something nice about a contract, even if it doesn't involve money, because it kind of establishes who's responsible and sets an expectation for how you're going to be working together into the future. If you need a public body to invest in, to continue to support your platform, whether they actually do work or someone else does work, you probably need to know about what its sustainability picture looks like into the future, how it's going to be maintained and patched and continue to be made secure, but also how you're going to continue to learn more about the problem space and how to adapt it over time. In many cases, when the value is accruing to the citizen, you have a kind of a very classic public good problem where it actually is in the interest of the state or the local authority to invest in keeping certain platforms going, even if that's just to support the sustainability of a nonprofit. Most public services absolutely need to be free at the point of delivery to citizens, but because all services need to continue to be maintained and patched over time and changed and adapted, someone should pay for that. And in many cases, it really ought to be government and is actually better for the overall ecosystem in the long run to partner with organizations who can do that. So I think it's entirely reasonable for nonprofits to ask government for money at the same time government very much is interested in lots of different kinds of business models for sustainability. And sometimes signing a contract helps us to say what we'll do on our end of the bargain over time. Anyone for a final question? No, then we'll wrap up and let's just thank our three speakers again.


everyone. Thanks for joining us today. It's Jessica here with Cointelegraph and today I'm hosting a special AMA with not one, but two companies, Occamdow and HumanNode. Occamdow and HumanNode have partnered to bring democratic voting and civil resistance to the community. Today I'm joined by Victor, co-founder of HumanNode, a crypto biometric authentication network built on the principles of one human, one node, one vote. And Christina, contributor of Occamdow, a leading Dow government incubator with a suite of D5 products which benefits from the strategic partnerships across the ever-expanding crypto landscape. Hi, Christina. Hi, Victor. Thanks for joining us today. How are you this afternoon? Really good. Thank you. And thank you so much for having us. Hey, hello. The evening is great. Or morning to those who are in the US. And thank you. That's a great opportunity for us. We're going to tell you everything we know. Absolutely. Well, before we get started, I just want to remind our audience to please send us your questions in the chat and make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel. I'm really excited to be here with Victor and Christina and learn more about their partnership. But first, here's a quick intro video of HumanNode and Occamdow. You know, we just saw a quick intro on HumanNode and Occamdow. Christina, can you share a little bit more on Occamdow and your background? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Jessica. Thanks, guys, for preparing that lovely intro to Occamdow. So, as the video mentioned, Occamdow is a leading Dow-governed incubator, and we offer a variety of DeFi products. So, we actually started off about one and a half years ago growing a community of early-stage investors and DeFi enthusiasts. So, probably one of our best-known products is the Occam Razor, which is a launchpad. And the launchpad initially was Cardano-centric, but has since moved into chain, and we're now working with projects from really a large spectrum of networks. Since the launchpad, we have come a long way, and we have established ourselves as a Dow-governed incubator, through which we onboard projects at various stages of development, basically helping them develop and launch and making sure that we benefit the crypto and DeFi ecosystem as a whole. Amazing. And Victor, can you share a little bit more about HumanNode and the inspiration behind its unique crypto-biometric network? I'm sure. The inspiration was pretty easy. Back in 2017, when we were researching crypto, we clearly understood that the technology is indeed decentralized. You can fork it, anybody can use it, but the power, meaning who holds the infrastructure, who has the major vote in decisions of the network, including Treasury or the consensus participation, they are all pretty much concentrated in the hands of the biggest stakers or miners. And the more the network grows, the more centralized it gets, usually. And crypto has become an elite club, I would say, where small users just played games on BNB chain, things like that. And we always wanted to change that. We had no idea how, but while we were looking through different sciences, my founder actually proposed how about combining biometrics, privacy and blockchain. And that's how more than two years ago, HumanNode was born. Now we made it to the main net, the first blockchain where you don't need stake, you don't need mining equipment in order to become a validator, you just need a small server like $20 maximum per month. And you need to privately verify through facial recognition your real and your unique human being. So that's how you can become part of the network. And if you look by how many nodes it takes in order to change the rules of the blockchain or deciding the voting, we're already the most decentralized blockchain if you compare it to other proof of stake networks, I would say. Absolutely. Thank you for that, Victor. And just to draw on what you mentioned regarding partnership in the ecosystem, I wanted to ask you both, how did Alcom and HumanNode come together to form this unique partnership and incorporate HumanNode into the Alcom DAO? Victor, do you want to ask about that? Yeah, sure. I participated a lot in this process, frankly speaking, because it was before our main net launch. So it was pretty much the decision of the team. Well, actually, the Alcom DAO contributors found myself themselves in different resource chats in crypto, namely named LobsterDAO. And that's how we started talking together. And yeah, the value proposition was pretty exact. We are pretty agile, like a small team. We do build our protocol. We do build the core infrastructure. But there are so many projects who want to use HumanNode tech, either to deploy on our chain, or to use our private biometrics in order to fight like bots, multi-accounts, and basically make sure you have one person behind one account that it's pretty much impossible for us to help them all. And it all started with us formulating an on-chain, just a forum, first a description of our proposal of why we want to be in the Alcom DAO. And then it went to on-chain voting after we got enough attention from the discord of Alcom, which is pretty active. One of the best TMA we had was in there with a lot of in-depth questions. Like two hours non-stop, and I was just typing and typing. And then we had an on-chain voting in Alcom DAO based on stake of the Alcom DAO like early backers, anybody who holds the Tokyo. And yeah, that's how it went through. And we're now officially incubated, getting new partners almost every week, which is great. New projects building on us. Amazing. And Christina, is there anything you'd like to add? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd actually like to add to that, maybe like take it one step back a little bit. So to talk about our governance system, how it is that we work, and why human node had to go through this whole process of the AMAs and putting in a proposal before we were actually able to announce our partnership. So we implemented a new governance system. And basically the reason that we wanted to do that is to make sure that our community is able to participate as much as possible in the governance system. So we wanted to incentivize participation. We wanted to make sure that the people and the stakers who are participating are also being rewarded for their efforts. We wanted to make sure that everyone's vote counted as well. And we wanted to stimulate our DAO members to really get together, put forward proposals. And we wanted to make sure that we're putting forward for them projects that they would be interested in, and that would benefit them and us as a DAO in general. So this new governance system was then voted on by our stakers. It went through. And off the back of this governance system, we developed a structured process through which projects that wanted to either be incubated with us or wanted to work with us would have to go through. And human node is actually the first project that ended up going through this whole process. So thank you so much to Victor and his team in general for bearing with us and being the first ones to test out this process and being such good sports, being so open to every step of the way. And really the first thing that needed to happen and that we need to make sure every new project that wants to work with us does is being introduced to the AUKUM ambassadors and to some of the core contributors. And we do this via our Discord channel. We have a special AMA channel that's called the soapbox, where essentially projects that want to work with us get up on stage and answer the questions that are put forward by our ambassadors. Anybody can watch, but only the ambassadors can ask questions and really probe the projects to understand in depth what it is that they can bring to the AUKUM DAO and how we can help them in turn as well. So what's the win-win situation here? If that goes well, which it did with human node, then the projects would put forward a proposal, something that we call the OIP, AUKUM Improvement Proposal, where this happens on the AUKUM forum. It then needs to pass a certain threshold before going on to stake-based voting, at which point our stakers then vote. And if it goes through, which again, it did with human node, obviously, we can then officially partner. And in this way, we basically make sure that there's a certain due diligence that happens before we partner with somebody and that our community is fully behind the people that we partner with and work with together. So I took up so much time. Sorry. I hope that made it a little bit the process that we went through and huge thanks once again to human node and to Victor for going through all of those steps because they were so important. And now, you know, our community knows human nodes so well and can really get involved with all the projects that they bring forward as well. Amazing. And Victor, what did the integration of human node to AUKUM Dell look like on your end? What steps were required from you and your community? Well, as I told, actually, there was not a lot required from our community because we were not on yet on mainnet. So basically, the steps were, as Christina described, all the things were passed through forum proposal, then official and open AMA talking to a lot of people who are really good feel that they're AUKUM Dell contributors because they're pretty experienced and have pretty good due diligence. And eventually, it was an on-chain voting that passed. And later on, as we are like a new chain, we're getting integrated into AUKUM launchpad. And later on, hopefully, after another on-chain proposal into AUKUM DAX, the integration is really smooth because all we need to give is just our documentation and AUKUM team just integrates it. It's pretty easy on our end without nothing to do for us later on. So what else we did together is that we started working with a project who won in our hackathon, which was like four months ago.  We created groups with AUKUM where they could work together to formulate all the necessary things for project to start at least, not as a demo or MVP, but as a real company. And they're still working so far in a pretty precise fashion through all the steps that the project has to go to get from just MVP and demo to the real company through their acceleration. That was pretty much all our cooperation was about and even more because AUKUM are great at marketing. There's nothing to say here. Sounds like a partnership made in crypto heaven. Well, I would just like to remind the audience that this is an interactive show. So if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share them in the chat and we will ask Victor and Christina to answer your questions directly. Victor, modern decentralized governance verification systems rely primarily on proof of stake and proof of work. Can you share why human node has chosen a different approach and any potential risks or benefits for this? Well, we have chosen a different approach because we believe in original ethos of crypto and decentralization where people participate in these networks from their home when they don't have to build a billion dollar companies to become part of the crypto infrastructure. And of course, they don't have to have a few million dollars to be heard in terms of on chain voting. That's what happens right now. I recently was presenting it at DEF CON DAO East, the latest statistics of on chain governance. And they are pretty well terrifying. The governance is really centralized. Sometimes it takes just one person. It's usually the founder or a group of founders to overcome the rest of the votes. It happens on layer ones. It happens in protocols like maker DAO, which is considered the most decentralized stable coin in terms of the assets it holds, but in fact, not at all. And we have seen a lot of attacks on the governance, which led to not hacks, but it's exploit, which is written in the rules of the protocol where an attacker could take tens of millions of dollars out of the protocol. The most recent attack was mango markets, where he took like 60 million dollars. If I remember it correctly, what he did, he just not even purchased the tokens to participate in governance. He borrowed the tokens to participate in governance. He voted to transfer part of the treasury to his own wallet. And that's it. As easy as that. It can happen to any protocol. It just didn't happen a lot, but it will happen more when the market prices are back to the highs. And of course, there will be exploits like that. So that's why we started building Humano to solve the problems both on the infrastructure level on the layer one blockchain level. The thing that we already launched, which is working with 270 validators at the moment. And we're going to solve it for other protocols as well, so that decentralized organizations, grant programs like Gitcoin or universal basic income protocols could use our civil resistance to basically make sure that there is one person behind one account. And you could, well, knowing that you could actually limit the power of the whales who right now control the protocols or can attack them. Absolutely. You know, one of the unique things that I was reading in one of your documents and white papers was your integration and use of liveliness detection algorithm. I was just wondering if you can explain why that is so important in this ecosystem. Oh, okay. Well, frankly speaking, biometrics don't work without liveness. One part in biometrics, it helps us compare like data privately from people's faces between one another. But lambs detection, it started its development only in 2017. That's why it was not possible what we're doing now five years ago. And what it does, it tells us like 50 different methods to neural networks or other methods as well to tell us whether there's a real human being in front of the camera, or it's a photo, or it's a really precise 3d mask printed for 10k USD, or it's a hacker trying to bypass the camera feed and inject the deep fake. So it is all necessary so that even if we have our kind of photos all over the internet, this is not actual biometric data, because you have to have real person in front of the camera at the moment for it to be biometric data. And if you have just a photo or something else, it doesn't matter. So you can still easily post on your Instagram without fearing that somebody will use your photos to steal your access or money. And well, it has become pretty accurate, especially in the world of deep fakes, you understand that it is necessary. Otherwise, anyone could come and create a lot of non-existing identities and create a Sibyl attack again. So that's all to defend against Sibyl attacks, which are the attacks where one person pretends to be many people and he basically subverts the rules of the decentralized system. Amazing. Yeah, so basically someone can't just go in and make 10 different accounts and vote 10 times to change the outcome of OccamDAO or any of the the voting. So how important was that for you, Christina? I mean, the technology in general is so important and I think one of the things that we really liked about humanoid is their innovative approach and it's something that you know, their ethos and making sure that we don't have that elite within the crypto space that Victor has mentioned previously as well is so important. And that's something that we're trying to achieve with the DAO governed approach as well. So I think there's a lot of synergy there. Yeah, actually, frankly speaking, like OccamDAO is helping our chain develop its ecosystem. But OccamDAO is a very special example of the structure where they can fight Sibyl without even using biometrics because in their pretty complicated governance system, it is not in your interest to hide that you're a whale. So that's how they fight it in the core with the latest upgrade, which I really liked, which works for the Occam case perfectly, but it doesn't work for many other cases in crypto. As Victor mentioned, we do have quite a complicated kind of guilt system that anybody interested can definitely go on our forum or on our medium and read a little bit more about it. We have quite extensive documentation about it, but essentially, our stakers, and this is something that we're working on at the moment, will receive an NFT based on their stake. And then they are then able to delegate their vote to a guild. And that's how the voting system happens. This is something that we haven't yet integrated just because we are still working on the technology behind it at the moment. But it's something that will be coming soon. So something really exciting to look forward for in the new year. Amazing. Now, Victor, who and how can someone become a human node? What is this process like and what are the benefits of becoming one? Well, it's not very hard actually for people who know the technical, we developed a desktop application so that you could launch it. So the easiest way is to download the desktop application then either locally on your PC, if you're ready to keep it 24 seven online, which is really hard, or in the cloud server, you launch the server that synchronizes with our blockchain with all the blocks that have been before. And once it's done, you got to go through private biometric verification. You just scan the QR code with any mobile device that has three megapixel camera or more. And five 15 second facial recognition session, where we scan your face during the video session. We don't actually take your photos, we just retrieve the biometric data, which is anonymized. And after that, we encrypt it on your device and well, you basically send it to the biometric nodes. And that's it. In about four hours time in the next epoch, you become part of the consensus. You start as many layer one proposing blocks, finalizing blocks. And well, what you can benefit number one with the time you will gain more power in the decentralized organization, completely democratic where money means nothing, stake means nothing. And well, finally, normal people can participate in layer one governance. And mainly all the fees, like collected transaction fees, smart contract and biometric verification fees, they are once a week distributed to human nodes equally. So in the end, you're becoming part of the completely new financial system where nobody can bite out with money, but only through human coordination. It works. So yeah, that's that's pretty easy. The server costs from 10 to $20. And, well, you can actually earn more. But I would say it's not your lifetime earnings. It's more like universal basic income that can buy you, well, some food for students especially. But mainly it gives you power to participate in a new decentralized network. Amazing. Well, let's take questions from the audience audience. Just a reminder, if you have any questions, please make sure to send them in the chat and we'll ask Christina and Victor. So we have a question here, who owns the biometric data and is it secure? Okay, here we go a little bit technically. So as I told you, there are human nodes, right? These are people who launch these small servers and participate in the consensus. Then these human nodes vote for those people among them who will actually hold the biometric nodes. Because biometric nodes are pretty heavyweight servers. They will have to have a lot of memory because we want to eventually scale and give these biometric identities to millions of crypto and even non-crypto users. But these servers themselves are with secure enclaves, meaning that nobody can actually get inside the memory and see the biometric data inside. So how do we secure it? First, the biometric servers are decentralized. They're not controlled by any company and they're controlled by multiple people in our decentralized organization. Next, the biometric data that is sent to the servers are anonymized. So even if you somehow break into these servers, breaking Intel or AMD technology, you will get anonymized data and you won't be able to do anything with it. And third, even this anonymized data, we still encrypt it on hardware level. That's what we have for now. But we've done extensive R&D to make it even more secure and to create the biometric neural network, which is cryptographically secure, not just on hardware level. But this is a really long-term project for us, version 2, I would say. And Christina, how can foundations and ecosystems benefit from ACUM services, specifically incubation services? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's three main parts to this question, really. And one is they can benefit through our expertise. The second thing is our network of contacts. And the third is our community. And just to go a little bit more in depth into each. In terms of our expertise, we can help with everything from concept formulation to technology consulting, your utility tokenomics to help from our developers as well. So we have a strong team that has a lot of expertise in building projects, developing projects. So from start to finish, this is something that we can help with. Then, of course, it's so important to know people within the industry. And sometimes that one contact can be life changing for a project. So we help projects by sharing our vast network of contacts and making introductions. This pertains to not only the technology side of things, or investor side of things, but also to PR and marketing. And then, of course, community. We can help with your community building. And we have the ACUM DAO members who are there to help with your diligence, to share your project, to learn more about it. And yeah, these are kind of some of the main ways that we can help. And in terms of incubation, there are two approaches that we have. So one is where we act as a consultant, and we can tell you kind of what we recommend. And then there is another approach where we kind of handhold and our team gets involved with your team as well to make sure that you get the best possible outcome. I hope that answers the question. Absolutely. And if anyone wants to get involved with ACUM or reach out and learn more about incubation services, how can they do that? So on our website, there's a contact us form. That's probably one of the easiest ways to get in touch. It's ACUM.fi. That's our website. Alternatively, you can reach out to us on our Twitter, on Telegram as well, or on Discord. We're active across all of those mediums. So feel free to reach out. We will make sure to get back to you. Perfect. Victor is biometric verification a new trend. Will all DAOs have biometric verification systems in the future? And how do you see civil resistance evolving in Web 3? I know that's a lot of questions all in one, but hopefully we can kind of touch points. So will all DAOs have biometrics? I don't know yet. But I think, well, as I told you, there is one way to attack the protocol when one person just masses enough tokens to have any vote he wants to and make all the decisions. This is why it is important. And in proof of stake protocols, well, we don't even know how many people stand behind each node, or maybe it's just one person controlling all the major nodes already in one of those proof of stake protocols. So here biometric verification might help as well. I mean, right now, DAOs are really, they do need it to protect themselves number one and to get more decentralized number two. And if it's really hard to rebuild the whole governance system from token-based voting to something else, they could at least have the signaling voting by the community to understand that the direction of the company direction of the company is the same as the direction of the broader community, not just those who hold most of the tokens. Will biometric verification be the future of crypto? Well, that's what we're working on because you can make crypto more human-centric. It can bring more power to regular people, not just the Elite Club that controls the crypto right now. And well, people will understand that it makes sense to participate in it, not just to speculate on it. So that's how we can bring into life universal basic income protocols, more inclusive decentralized organizations, and even more inclusive decentralized finance protocols.  And you're left as a project without liquidity and without reward pooling your tokens. This is something you can stop by limiting the number of rewards per one identity. So identity space, it's not yet here in crypto. Why? Because identity is useless without sable resistance. You can just have 10 identities, one for my passport, one for my identity card, another one for my driving license, another one for my Twitter account.  And yeah, I think we will see more of it adopted because biometrics were not private, biometrics were not accurate. But what we have now is both private and accurate. And now it finally makes reason to adopt it. Will it be a new trend? Well, let's set it up and it will be a new trend. Absolutely. Let's see. Well, I guess, let me just check if there's any questions from the audience. You know, before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't cover that you just like to state or mention to the viewers? I mean, from our side or Victor, do you want to go first? What I want to state is that I think we should a little bit rethink what we were doing in crypto over the last two or three years, especially during the previous bull market. Crypto became really financialized. And the token models that were created led to huge inflation, constant inflation of tokens. That's why you can see many especially defying game five projects falling down a lot. And sometimes we have to think in another direction. And what I mean by that is that before that, it was all positive loop cycles. Like you use, take more tokens, you get more tokens, and then you put them in a liquidity pool, you get more and other tokens on top. And when it all falls down, it falls down, well, 10 times harder than it could, because the positive loop cycle went too far. And we now have to think more about more stable systems, systems with negative loops, because all we have now in crypto is the same stuff we have right now in the financial world. It's equity based, it's token based, it's boom and bust cycle and in crypto, it's even like worse than traditional finance. So I think that we should we should go a little bit in another more stable direction. It will be less speculative, and maybe it will have less returns in the short term. But it can lead to a real long term change. Christina, would you like to add anything? Yeah, I just want to say thanks for for that point, Victor, and kind of going back to your idea of being more human centric. I really like that. And this is something that I would encourage people to do is not just be involved with a project for the mere rewards that you can get off the back of them, but to really try and contribute. And especially when it comes to DAOs, things like becoming ambassadors, promoting a project, putting forward proposals, all of these things are going to help the whole ecosystem get better and have better performing projects as well, and have more quality rather than just quantity. And a huge shout out to our ambassadors from the Occamdale because they're doing such an amazing job and just wanted to say we really appreciate them. And yeah, I think that's pretty much it from our side for for any foundations or projects that would like to find out more about us or how we can help them move forward. As I mentioned, our website is there, get in touch with us, and we'd be really happy to help. Awesome. And we did have a couple questions come in. So just wanted to ask some questions from the audience. One of the questions was to Chris, can you update on the chakra pool and will human node contribute to this? Yeah, absolutely. So the chakra pool is our tokenized liquidity pool. So essentially the projects that we incubate and some of the projects that launch on our Launchpad Occam razor, we kind of request them to contribute some of their tokens to this chakra pool. And basically they it acts as like a weighted basket of the different project tokens that get deposited in there. And human node is one of the projects that has deposited. So thank you so much human node. That's another one of the ways that we try and reward our stakers and our contributors and make sure that we give back to them. And the way that the chakra tokens are distributed is something called a double root fashion. So essentially, even though the largest stakers and the stakers that have been sticking for the longest time, they get the most rewards. New members or basically, yeah, members that would start staking now, they get higher APR percentages. So we're kind of trying to balance things out between the really high tiered and the smaller tiered members of the DAO. Amazing. Well, thank you, Christina and Victor so much. I know we're running behind on time. So just wanted to thank you both so much for connecting with us today. Today we've learned how Occam's integration with human node leverages the capabilities of crypto biometric authentication network to produce a fair, accessible, egalitarian and truly decentralized autonomous organization. I just want to say thank you again for joining us today for the AMA and thank you to our audience for being interactive and sending along your questions. I also want to remind everyone to please subscribe to Cointelegraph's YouTube channel. We do AMAs like this quite frequently. Thank you again, Christina, Victor and thanks again to our audience. We'll see you next time. Thank you, Jessica. Thanks everybody for watching us. Thanks everyone and thank you, Jessica, for hosting us. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.


Hi there, it's DJB, and in this video I'm going to be teaching you how to make realistic and easy veins on your model horse customs. This was a frequently asked question, but this technique was actually stolen from Raven Maddock of Chrysalis Studios. The medium I use to make veins is Pabio Cern Relief. Not sure if that's pronounced correctly. And the one that I have is the color imitation lead. It comes in a variety of different colors, it doesn't really matter what color you get. I picked the lead version because they didn't have the translucent one. It shows up a little better if it is a darker color, so that's entirely up to you what color you want to use. This is a product that is used in glass making of some kind. It dries to a firm enough consistency, but it's almost like a little rubbery. So if you do mess with it, it will kind of move around. It has a fine point needle head, so it's easy to use. It's going to take some getting used to when you first get this to get a consistent line and a line that's not too bulky or thick. And knowing horses, they have a really prominent facial vein that runs through both their cheek and over the side of their face. So here I'm just applying that to this Hamilton model. You want to make sure that it's not too thick, and if you end up with some weird balling in any areas, you can smooth it out with the tip of this product. And then I'm adding the second facial vein here that goes over the bridge of the nose up to the eye and down to the nostril. So studying exactly where this vein goes is very important. I would recommend looking at photos for reference when doing this. If you have any problem areas, you can take a fine point nail q-tip to remove some of those lumps or harsh edges that you're getting, because this will show up when you prime the model. So you want to go slow. You want to make sure that they're not disjointed and you should be able to create pretty cool veins. There is another vein that runs along in the armpit of the horse. I like to add this. It's an additional detail that a lot of customizers forget. Depending on if the horse is really elevated and running a lot, the veins will stick out more than if the model is resting. So you can just watch my process here of adding these veins in. There's not much to it other than it will take some practice. If you do mess up at any point, you can just take a piece of paper towel and wipe it off. There's also quite a few veins that reside in the crotch area of the horse through the butt and around the belly close to the genitals. So you can study these in reference images as well. Looking at real horses is super helpful. Horses that are very elevated also get a lot of veins all over their body, especially in their necks. Thor breads are prone to these that are off the track or after a race. They're very, a lot of blood is running through their body. So the veins are very prominent. So you can add those little detailed veins as well. This stuff is also a great tool for chestnuts. It creates kind of a textured little glob that represents a chestnut really well. So I love using this stuff for the chestnuts. This technique works really great and we've created some really awesome veins using this awesome stuff. So thank you so much for watching. Give Raven Maddock of Chrysalis Studios a follow and happy veining. Please subscribe for weekly Wednesday uploads. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at DJB Studios. Check out my website and sign up to my newsletter to be the first to know about commissions, tutorials, and sales pieces. All of the tools used in this video are in the description below. If you have any questions, feel free to message me.