[Lauren started recording late] Jonny: As long as you feed it a single set of taxonomy, then if the machine can't learn on it's own, Monica Anderson has a whole spiele that I think is correct that it's really just a bunch of scripts that the natural language parsing uses...so her approach is less than 10,000 lines of code teaching the understanding machine how to learn from the human and it sounds like that lines up with what you are describing, Aaron, where you are not so focused on the human labels but rather letting the machine do its work and making sure the ground truth is correct for your use case.

Lauren: How do we establish the ground truth? What do we need to establish?

Aaron: if we were talking psychologically, we would get expert psychologists to come in and say, "That was passive aggressive deflection" in a conversation.

Charles: the context: before the recording started we were talking about analyzing patterns of certain people within the conversations.

Jonny: this is a really hard problem. The semantic web community has been trying to do this for 30+ years, and they succeeded with Google buying a knowledge graph company. It's already happening, but it is getting regular people to tag their data is the hardest part. How does a normal person tag their own data? However it works for them? So teaching them Twitter semantics and how to label, like how to label Evernote or Gmail, if you have ever used hash symbols as tags, teaching someone just those two tools, a ?? symbol and a hashtag, otherwise it's been impossible to get people on board to tag stuff.

Oliver and Memex are getting more sophisticated. It's getting close to having these annotation capabilities. worldbrain.io If we could get it on a webpage, we could tag the conversations. At this point we could do it in our own annotations, but I don't know how that would help us with our own ontology.

Jonny: it depends on the will and flexibility of the group: who is the we? In the beginning we have to bootstrap the understanding. 95% of people won't want to do this. We is the people who are interested in creating an ontology.

Lauren: I would love to consult with Sam Vaknin, a famous Israeli prodigy who has contributed in both psychology and computer science. He was the inventor of the term "narcissist" and talks about how social media encourages this behavior.

Charles: How much of a priority is it within the group? What are the most pressing things to do? It fits in somewhere, but I don't have a sense of the bigger picture yet.

Aaron: Is this group related to the concept where you would have round tables that would be part of a production line that would produce actual products?

Lauren: Yes! This is a collective intelligence group, but the problem in CI is that there is very little practical stuff going on. The problem is that we don't really know how to do it. [Jonny: tell us about Sam's visit. He seems like he actually knows how to do it.] Lauren: Sam came to visit. He is a Doug Engelbart fanatic. He wants to go ahead and realize Engelbart's ideas on digital knowledge repositories, which we can build a lot of stuff on top of.

Charles: There was a lot of interesting stuff two weeks ago, when it got tense about the idea of recording/radical open source transparency stance about fear and privacy, and I came up with a good question, about how not to reject those who are afraid but welcome them and ease their apprehension. That's my quick comment re: Sam. I love him, he's amazing, but I think that in order us to be able to embrace widely, we need to address that.

Jonny: we need to bring each of these decisions to a document, so that they are not lingering.

Lauren: there's already been a bunch of stuff that's already been done to make it easier for us to decide what we are doing based on toolkits. Why don't we just decide on some stuff, sprint for a while, and then revisit it? Enspiral has already built a handbook on how to do all of this stuff...why reinvent the wheel? We can change whatever we want, but without going in some direction, we will just be philosophers at a pub.

Jonny: Good plan. I think that Dmitry would appreciate that, too.

Jonny: I appreciate his spirit, but you gotta read the room.

Sam sent me an article called the 9 artifacts to seed a project team. The first one on the list: A contact list. So practical! This is great. Sam thinks that this will help us in forming a digital knowledge repository. This should be a list of who, role, contact info – so that anyone can reach anyone else, whenever needed (even 24/7). Collaboration typically starts with “Let’s work together”, though after a project has been in existence for a while, “joining a collaboration” is more operational than “forming new collaboration”. Maybe what we can do is choose people to be in charge of these artifacts, or we each take one on, and we can actually accomplish them. We can pin people down, get their contact information, and have people choose a role that they want to play.

Colin: that's what I want to do. I can think of a lot of things that I would like to talk about right now, but I don't want to dominate the conversation. I would like to pick back up on the knowledge trails conversation we had on the first day, and how that might fit in to other people's tools. Jonny has the hackathon coming up. That looks interesting from a different point of view. Someone went to South by Southwest. How do you bring those conferences to remote areas? That's a dream that I have had for a while.

Lauren: the first artifact is a contacts list. Does anyone want to do that? I think that I can handle the glossary. Contacts list? Anyone? Anyone?

Aaron: Keybase is beautiful for handling contacts, but not everyone might get on.

Lauren: I can give you the names of everyone. We can get their phone numbers, WhatsApp handles, and how they like to be contacted.

Jonny: I can emphatically embrace this. I can turn the contact list into Tim Berner's Lee standardized way of doing this. It will be interoperable, and accessible by being a json LD format that is also human readable in its resting place.

Lauren: I can do glossary. Project charter: Ray that he will help us with that? Does everyone know Ray from Holochain [not officially working for them but an enthusiast]?

Josh [who just arrived, very tired]: what are you guys doing?

We are doing the list of artifacts to have a better CI environment, and we also need a ground truth. We don't know how to do that. Today we are doing practical things to help us establish this.

Jonny: this becomes a basis for which we can launch projects. They can relate back to the org design.

Aaron: Can I take a swing? There is an oral history, where we all know each other, from bopping around on FB, Keybase, Twitter. I know all of you in this room. We have an oral tradition, but how can we structure that and figure out how to progress that? We all know each other, and somehow that just happened.

Charles: I would throw in wisdom, on top of intelligence. Tom Atless said that CI built the gas chambers in WWII. I take a cue from Tom there, and I think in terms of collective wisdom. I think it's better.

Lauren: Rules of Engagement: who will do this? Chris! Maybe he can structure something for agreements. I am going to give that to him. Chronology, like meeting notes...I think that Colin and I have that one. Action item tracking system: Joshua!

Josh: I could hear you guys in my dreams. I did this a long time ago, and I got a book, and I assigned chapters to different people, and then we could read giant textbooks within a week. We could all take one chapter of a book. You only need to simmer it down to the core.

Jonny: beautiful idea. That's a club I would want to join.

Joshua: you can put me down as project manager.

Lauren: Joshua has offered to let us use his Basecamp. People are nervous about that.

Josh: further along, we can pool our money together and the group can own the Basecamp. Who keeps the money to buy the 100/month? If there is no money involved, there is no vested interest. If we are not at least putting in the money to buy the pizza, how can we even meet to eat a pizza?

Lauren: I agree that we all need skin in the game, but I want to keep it open so that people can contribute in different ways if they don't have cash.

Josh: If we don't have skin in the game, people will leave as soon as they find a better group. Bye-bye!

Lauren: people have all different kinds of things to offer: time, expertise, contacts, but they have got to contribute something. We just need to define it.

Lauren: Calendar: what happens when? what do we do with that?

Lauren: why don't we use Josh's Basecamp account for now? And then we can always move to a shared Basecamp account , or something else open source, if there is anything as good as BC that is open source.

Colin: I like the idea of using KeyBase if people are there for connecting. Basecamp has a great feature of creating individual teams. This could be your go-to-people, and you could assign them to actual projects. Flexible in team creation. Try to identify the functioning parts that are actually grinding. A team of documenters. Sociocracy 3.0 shows how to do this. We don't want one person to do all of this all the time. There are different models. Let's keep simple contacts in KeyBase and move into Basecamp when we have actual projects.

Josh: let's go into the word: Basecamp. We are going to climb some mountains, don't know which ones exactly, but we are meeting at the valley at the foot of the mountains with a bunch of shit. Our Basecamp could be anywhere: Trello, whatever, but if our stuff is in Keybase, Solid, whatever, there is stuff that is connected. We could move our Basecamp anywhere we want.

Jonny: I see Keybase as being walkie-talkies. But we are not doing core organizing there, it's where we chat and converse, and we use their file system to do things behind the scenes, the back end stuff. With the chatbots and backend finagling, it will be able to do more, but it's not there yet. We might need a Python person.

Lauren: Is there a Python developer here? My husband is a Python developer.

Jonny: there are other languages possible. I have been working with the RChain guys on a Scala implementation.

Colin: Python is a scripting language but it's got real power in the AI world.

Jonny: I will make technical documentation list.

Lauren: I did a list of people's strengths, but it was rather generalized. I think that we need a more specific list of what people can do technically.

Colin: David and Heiner are floating around this area, too, trying to make a matrix of skills. David Boville. You could be in 3-4 teams.

Lauren: Joshua had a great idea of having our own sort of "Ted Talks," 20 minute visions of where we want to go. This would be very helpful, even if they were not polished. Even if I do interviews with people. Getting those done would be helpful.

Joshua: I support quick. Not 20 minutes. Maybe 2.5, 5 minutes max. If you look at Alexar's 1.5 minutes, that was nice. 2.5 minutes would have been perfect. There are like 19 people in the FB group. Multiply that times 5. How long is that to grok everybody?

Lauren: I am much less concerned about high quality and much more concerned about it being DONE. Each person can have their personal page, their two-minute video, and we can paste their comments/links around that. A page of everything that they have contributed.

Aaron: I am not sure to what degree that we are trying to scale, but that's what I am very concerned with, and a part of collective intelligence. At Conversation Community we were talking about the number 300,000 people. So then, yeah, we need 5-second video bytes to get a sense of someone. With Keybase, we can create identity at scale. Who is a bot, who is real? We can't automate everything, but we could come up with basic protocols to have digital identities for large numbers of people. No identity feature in Basecamp. Would that scale, Jonny?

Jonny: absolutely. Anything that GitHub can do, Keybase can do. You are dealing with GitPulls that you can bring into open source Git clients. I can set up a chatroom for us to see. If we were working on our core governance rules for the group, we could sign that as an encrypted Git. We are all signing off on what the rules are, and you can program what is required to change the rules. If you think about scale, we can front vision it and convert stuff into json files or other markup languages where you have a personal identity page. It needs to be something readible by clients. That's an approach that's valuable for us to pursue so we don't have to do this stuff across different platforms. Each person would have their folder, and it's useful for 20 different protocols that could read that file. This will require some work. I need some help.

Aaron: Keybase could become the ground truth, which points elsewhere to where we manage projects.

Jonny: we could do that by writing a message and signing it, a signed cryptographic message. As a group, say, we are electing someone to be an admin, we are signing it, and it will be a record, the ground truth.

Aaron: a lot of us have been in groups that go over a thousand, and the origin story remains unclear. The value of encryption rigamarole is a pain right now, but it will come in handy if we scale. This would have already solved problems that we are currently bumping into in some groups

Charles: listening has been the protocol from the beginning of the meeting. This is maybe coming from a side angle. Is there a quick way of understanding how that relates to the actual content we are creating?

Lauren: the best people to answer that are Chris and David Boville.

Josh: in our first meeting we talked about a club. I don't want to do the GCC mishap of not defining what the club is. BAsecamp philosophy: there are many things that we want to do, but not all of this wants to get done. You say what you want to do, assign it to people, and then see if they are rolling the ball up the hill. If it can reach the top of the hill, it is a to-do item and can get done. There is a person resonsible for that. There is an automatic schedule. If Lauren is the project manager, she can ask the people if they are doing what they said what they are going to do. If it's not getting done, she can reassign it, but the work that has been done to that point is not lost, it's still in the thread. It's great for accountability.

Lauren: I like that because then we don't get into fights about who was supposed to do what.

Josh: what is really important and what is missing. When we are in this space face to face....this is special time! this is 1,000 $ time....let's not spend it talking about to-do's.

Colin: let's get back to the maps. With the things that have been forming over the past few weeks. Did we decide on a Basecamp Calendar?

Lauren: conversation space: where does this happen? Keybase. I was having a conversation with Sam: maybe not everyone will be on Keybase, because they are stubborn and might want to stay on FB, so it's partally a matter of having an org structure where we can deal with people where people already are and like to be, and we can take the knowledge that is being generated there and put it in one place.

Jonny: we need to get past privacy concerns of the group and get an agreement, so that we can do a log procedure. Every day the messages get exported from different places into one place, and then we can extract from that into Keybase/Basecamp. That woiuld then be acceptable to communt

Lauren: Rules of engagement: can we agree to use Enspiral's handbook to make changes to our charter? They are a group of people who started having dinner together, met regularly over years and got to know each others. Eventually they started working together and expanding. They are a flat group with little hierarchy, but they get a lot done, so I trust that their ruleset would be good for this group as well. That would help us develop a procedure for rule-changing, without reinventing the wheel. Enspiral handbook

Jonny: something that they have demonstrated can work is getting money. Mutual credit: the blockchain ICO craze is terrible. There is a sliver of projects that are not taking that approach, like Holochain. That's something that I see with Enspiral, pinning livlihoods to each others. Ad-hoc microcollectives. Let's try some of those ideas to get initial grant capital.

Lauren: Jonny, Michale Linton is one of the world's experts on mutual credit currencies, just so you know.

Josh: we could share money and scale it to millions of people. I did this exact thing with Occupy. We met in a circle, picked Robert's Rules of Order. There was a person with the check for $500,000, but we didn't have the tools to divvy that up. If we would have had that, we would have had 14,000,000$. How do we share value? There is nothing stopping us except for a baseline. We are all jamming out as musicians waiting for the basepaper, with a cacophony of noise. We need to baseline it with Enspiral's rules of engagement. Let's grab that PDF and compare it to nondominium. We are agreeing to meet and have rules of engagement, but the ownership is something that's really clear. We have the tools, we just need a baseline to play well together.

Lauren: Ray also volunteered to help us with a charter. Maybe he can do that next week and we can go through that, but then we can come up with a basic agreement. We can also do little circles, a club of clubs. We can have tighter clubs where we put in money.

Jonny: If Aaron's script for connecting DAO's...that's a missing piece that can be put together with back-end Keybase stuff and interoperable identities, and have a grant template, and refine it for each blockchain company. There is 200,000,000 on the table. We can make it specific to each protocol. This is what we are going to do, but relative to your project, here is how it relates to your community. We will prove that your platform is valuable beyond its walls. I am confident that that will work, and we can get money quickly that way. Ask for $10,000 from each blockchain, with $5,000 in airdrop tokens. We are unpacking a concept that will be valuable to tons of organizations. In a folder that explains how we came to this order.

Charles: Jonny, it was nice to hear that in one place. Is this in linear outline text form? I think in terms of mapping, laying it out in a visual way.

Jonny: I have a mind map I can share with you. This week I will share a couple of dates where I am in a Zoom room. Help from the outside would be appreciated. I could use help unpacking it. I have actually filled out grants for Stellar, Aragon, and DAOSTack that are reuseable. I would like to submit small reusable one, and a large one that is inclusive of lots of different groups, that we can do what Josh wasn't able to do with the Occupy project.

Josh: everything in the group worked, we just couldn't agree on the gateway of the bank account. I wanted to use PayPal, another guy from Anonymous wanted to structure it a different way. There needs to be someone in charge of forming a triad of three people: one person to make sure it gets done, 2 people to do it or to hire other people to hire it. When that thing needs to get done, those 2 people can say, "If we had an extra 300, we could do it by Monday, and the third person could go to Loomio and try to get that money. They then maybe work on spec.

Jonny: Colony has tools for this, so if you don't follow through you take a hit on your reputation. If you combine Colony with Aragon, you could have the GitHub push/pull thing next to Basecamp, so that the liquid democracy of voting on items works well. Dash has been doing this for years, spending 4-5 million a month. The tools are all there, we just have to select them and commit to using them.

Josh: if you tried to build something and it was easy, it's done. But until we try to build something, we don't know the pain points. If you can learn from the first time you don't have to learn the lesson again. One person sometimes has to bite the bullet and go through pain. Let's spread out the pain so that we can handle it

Jonny: If we turn ithis into a checklist, and see what happened to Josh's group and see where the pain points are, we can figure out what tools to use, and we can do it with lower hanging fruit and toy examples or a 5,000 grant. This is a valuable experiment. We are not launching a coin but want to use these tools to move forward as a group.

Lauren: he is an expert in flow and community currencies. We need an accounting expert, like somseone from Colony who can guide us.

Lauren: she co-developed the budgeting tool for Enspiral.

Lauren: we went through 9 artifacts to seeding project teams. We went through that list and everyone took something from that list. If you are looking for something to do....

Onboarding Leina: I would like to bring up the subject of onboarding. It takes a lot to figure out why you know something. What is intuitive to you might not be to somebody else. We are lacking mentoring here. I think that in our space, because we are fighting for grants, we need to develop a friendship. It is not a rocket science, but you have to do it. Single out people who can do what. I can come with my strengths, but I really need that we understand that we are coming from different countries and education and cultures.

Leina: I am a generalist person. I am good at collaborating with people with specialized skills.

Leina: I am good at getting shit done and coordinating, but recently I have barely been able to coordinate my job search. I would not commit to anything

Josh: Leina, we are doing everything backwards. WE are coming with our specific tools and skills and techniques, but we don't know what mountain we are going to climb. We need someone to go through people's backpacks and see their tools and make sure when they go up the mountain they don't die.

Jonny: very soon we will have the content for major grant outreach and will need help with that. That generates funds pretty quickly. That could be a quick turnaround of action to money. Track down grants and organize stuff. There are 200 grants we could apply for when we are ready.

Joshua: Lauren, I am holding you responsible for making people safe when they climb up the mountain.

Alexar: I am assuming that you are talking about what is the best way that we can do something productive, and financing, and keeping it open. Who is the next person that needs help?

Jonny: we are close to that. Good to know that you are ready and waiting.

Colin: If you don't finish your profile within, say four months, we can get someone else. There can be token or badges given. [shows map]

Lauren: if we could agree on an overall document, then we can start having sub-clubs, and there might be a certain number of things that you need to do in order to do the stuff. You have to do X tasks to be in this club. This makes it less argumentative. We can keep this Saturday meeting place for discussion and newcomers.

Jonny: that's exactly what we can do in Keybase. The subteams where people are receiving more stake--recieve more. Subteam of co-founders: you can put in special rules. And this is how token-curated registries work.

Leina: I don't know how you motivate this at the initial phase. Maybe structure it around knowledge hubs, where people are interested in the same thing. Maybe that would motivate people when there is no money yet?

Jonny: yes, and we just have to make some hard choices about how to divide up the time. It is hard to do an initiative with more than 20 people to start.

Alexar: you have people who want to be a part of a startup but don't want to commit. In this analogy: we define 2-3 week sprints. The founder makes it clear that the newcomer need not commit for longer than 2 weeks. They don't get equity until they start doing more. At the same time, they start building up their stake, responsibility, etc.There is always a need for a founder doing the hard work and who might not get anything. Maybe we can just see who needs help with grants, helps them, and if the grant is received, we save some of that for the group.

Lauren: we can develop a grantwriting procedure and pulling in the right people. I like the focus on bringing in money.

Jonny: I have been collecting economic opportunities. I have been advising hedge funds on how to use blockahin, opportunity zones, etc. I know how to connect these things, but I need someone who can vet these intuitions and appy them.

Colin: the maps are kind of doing this. What are the best of the best that we have?

Lauren: I would like us each to get crystal clear on what we ourselves need and want to do, so that the group can help us.

Colin is doing some sort of algorithm in his head. Totem: your self-sovereign idea, space to assert your goals and interests. Daniel Estrada: how do you take my goals, your goals, group goals, so that the group goals match the people's goals. Leads to matching without constant conversation by more advance signalling, so that you don't activiely need to be protecting your values.

Lauren: There is something called the Virtues Project, where the people have combed throughout the worlds' religions to find common values. Maybe people can fill out their own values charts and we can match those up.

Jonny: I just uploaded a video about this subject. We can deliver this via the software. Josh has put up a link as well.

Jonny: I'm not saying we need to work in Basecamp, but I am giving a link. This is a place to put the 9 rules of engagement. Start dumping out our backpacks. Once we all dump things out, I can work with Leina to clean up. I made a place in a field in a valley. If we want to look at everyone's stuff and discuss it, we can. You can create another separate club. We can organize it in any way. Easy to take information from folders. We start forming triads of mentorship. We don't have to lose knowledge and artifacts. A way of organizing all these thoughts while we are forming.

Alexar: I am working on this concept to facilitate a situation where professionals, when the have availability, can broadcast that. That creates a virtual team where other projects can hire the team. I may not be available for the next two weeks...we need to be able to jump in, jump off without distracting the flow.

Colin's idea of onboarding. If you are inviting everybody, you have to realize that everyone has issues. If you are not ready, you have to take time back to figure out why. You make it through and you are ready. But if you are not ready, we need to build video. Method A: build 2 minute video. Method B: write out some documents. Then you go through a getting ready mentoring loop. If you don't like it you can leave, or you can take a break. We could put an onboarding flow chart. If each person had a version of this, you could recognize the symbology of what the person is doing.

Jonny: that's great, and that seems like a storyboard for a simple web app where that's appearing to you in screens. Some people have a hard time following mind maps. but they are used to chat flows or scroll. This could be a good project for the ITP workshops. What ITP would deliver is a toolkit. Here is a storyboard for a game that Colin's building. Figure out what the IP looks like, and people could build it in a weekend.

It's a great chatbot engine. This is the kind of moderator. It's hard to tell someone that they need to land the plane. I tend to drift at 50,000 feet sometimes. It's not easy to be the person to say it or to hear it from someone. If the underlying rules can be poked....

Colin: the bot could say, not only is this not working, but it could tell you what to do next. As facilitators, we are doing a sort of a script. Finding alignment is so important in a group. We as knowledge workers visualize repositories. For some people this is needed. For cognitive gaming, you need a map.

We need onboarding, and we need a signalling system as well when people need help.

Colin: I have been working with Joachim. He has a Talk Time tool to track conversations.