Community Led Hubs

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado let's go ahead and bring up the screen chair okay let's see if screen share is working i think it is and so we'll just maximize the screen and i can't see myself but i think you guys can see me all right today sunday the 22nd yay sunday the 22nd you guys can see the screen all right i am going to be talking about some brainstorming ideas for community-led hubs all right so a little bit of history back in the day when cardano was founded there were three entities there was iohk that's my company he had this emergo company and then we had this always nebulous cardano foundation now iohk we had kind of a mandate to dev and do science stuff amergo was kind of this commercial company and their job was to basically go and get people dot protocol do vc these types of things and the foundation was loosely defined as kind of like community and governance now there was this gentleman named michael parsons who was found by iohk and americo jointly ken and i found him and i knew him from back in the day when i was the ceo of ethereum and we said hey can you set up this cf thing and he said sure so originally he set it up in the isle of man that seems a very odd choice it's an island off the coast of the uk and basically at the time in 2015 2016 there was some new legislation in the isle of man that created kind of a cryptocurrency foundation model and we were like oh okay yeah this is exciting but parsons he wasn't a very good operator and he couldn't get a bank account for that entity and there was a litany of other little issues with the jurisdiction it was just simply punching above its weight so parsons made the decision to establish the cardano foundation in switzerland the swiss jurisdiction okay and there was a pool of capital that had been raised for the project and we got contracted to bill cardano and emergo got its share for the commercialization the vc effort and a large donation went to that swiss foundation via deed to basically get it set up to worry about a lot of the governance regulatory and community components okay well many of the story of michael parsons he went a little cray and a little off the reservation and people kept leaving the council of the cardano foundation until a point where he had absolute power and then bad things happened and parsons had to go so at that point an interim board was put in and that interim board basically consisted of nathan kaiser consisted of manmeet singh domino berkey and they all agreed to come in and basically build a independent new board later on tamara hassan and nico aquarius oops let me move this right here came on board okay so there's five right now all right now the indeed the intent of this entire structure was to have an organization that represents the will of the community there's currently a telegram group and that telegram group has i think 700 or 800 people in it and they're talking about a road map a community-led road map for the cardinal foundation and here's the problem with the cf as it stands right now it has a lot of money and it has a lot of execution capacity and there are certain things that the cf as a singular entity probably could accommodate do very well for example there's this open question of who controls the blueprints of cardano and those blueprints are the formal specs so basically those are implementation agnostics so they're not written in haskell they're not written in prologue or java or javascript they're actually written in math and basically it's like blueprints of a house it gives you an idea of how somebody can go and build their own client whether that be a rust client or a javascript client or a haskell client now currently the repository for those is at iohk we have that and what we've been trying to do figure out how to hand this over to in basically an independent group and the first step of the process was the cip process so frederick johnson is doing that right now over at the cardano foundation and it makes a lot of sense to get the blueprints over to the cf other things like certain libraries exchange integration technology and things that make cardano interoperable that are implementation agnostic makes a lot of sense for the cardano foundation to to do that but then there's always been this question of community representation so we have catalyst and we have the dc funds and you guys are doing an incredible job participating in that there's almost 4 000 people playing around with idea scale and all kinds of cool stuff is coming and the funds keep growing in size they're going to go from 250k to 500 000 usd worth and just keep getting larger and more more traffic is going to come there but there's this idea of community hubs and one of the things that i always hoped for was that we could find a process to do that so my idea was that eventually we would have something in singapore we'd have something in japan we'd have something in buenos aires in south america we'd have something in south africa and so forth and basically each of these would be given grants from the cf and they're community-led and basically they're to localize cardano and commercialize cardano and do things that kind of accelerate crowd owners growth in their respective jurisdictions and these grants would just continue until the cf either runs out of money or if it has a revenue stream it would be a definite thing and there would be elections in each of those jurisdictions for each of these community hubs now the great part about that is that there's a lot of questions like how do we get cardano in spanish how do we get adoption in south america how do we get adoption in latin america how do we get more commercialization in uganda how do we get more asian representation and talk with the big banks and so forth it's really hard for a single hub or committee at the top to basically figure out and prioritize all of that because let's say they say singapore is great well that means they're probably not talking to south africa or they say japan is great well maybe they're ignoring south america and you just don't want to disenfranchise people so it makes a lot of sense to set up a collection of community hubs have the community run those hubs and give them the resources that they need to be able to get things done now in terms of how these hubs ought to be run there's a great gentleman named john buck and he talks a lot about sociocracy and there's also this concept of holocracy and i think for a community-led organization that's a really cool and novel way to do things and catalysts will very rapidly evolve sometime next year to be able to do elections in a free and fair way for ada holders in certain jurisdictions to decide on community hubs so we've started kind of an internal working group to talk around what community hubs would look and we actually know john very well he made a proposal to us and this might be something that we do some directed research for to basically figure out a governing structure that's a cf side i think that there needs to be a community board there needs to be an industrial steering committee and there needs to be people worry about the sci and tech committee okay so the industrial steering committee would represent the people who build things with cardano community board represent the ada holders and the science and tech committee represents the science and then of course you need an operator raiders panel an operators committee and that would represent the spo class the people actually running the protocol and so forth okay and then probably a good idea to have a regulatory outreach group and they worry about everything like would ada be perceived to be a security in certain jurisdictions or how do we make staking more tax advantageous and so forth or if you're running a state pool how do we make sure you don't inadvertently get captured in some weirdo jurisdictions regulation and how do we handle compliance situations with ada like aml kyc and so forth so i think there's room for a lot of committees now unfortunately this foundation is a swiss entity and as a swiss entity the stiftong structure is very inflexible in its governance and the council members do take personal liability for serving on the council and they have a bit more power than a normal governing board has and so it's probably not the ideal structure furthermore there is some profit that the foundation could pursue so it might be better to actually eventually migrate the foundation over to a more flexible structure an ag even though it's not tax advantaged it still can pursue some profit making activity like certification and accreditation and so forth or it actually might be a good idea to move it into a 501 c 3 structure and actually i would be in favor of that because the jurisdiction of wyoming is so nice and it would be super cool to actually have a wyoming not-for-profit i think it's a much friendlier jurisdiction from a regulatory perspective than the swiss jurisdiction is but at the very least it's probably good to separate governance into these buckets where you have industrial representation community representation science and technology representation operator representation and regulatory representation and it's probably good to revisit the jurisdictional choices i didn't choose switzerland michael parsons did and this was because of his familiarity with it mme partners familiarity with it who was the law firm at the time who represented the foundation and a lot of has changed in the world and there's a lot of very attractive jurisdictions that have more flexible governance structures and then the community hub idea i think we have an opportunity as a community to really innovate and do something amazing in this respect and that's why we started talking to john buck and these other guys because i would love to see cardano hubs in every major population center and on every major continent and i would love to see local cardinal community members grant funded to run these hubs and if they're viable then you have two funding sources the dc fund which is replenishing and renewing and then obviously the cf treasury in this respect and then having a centralized entity does make sense when you're talking about standards accreditation you're talking about participation with other bodies that handle cryptocurrencies for example iohk we've joined the hyperledger group and that's very important from a business perspective we're also members of the w3c which is important for a standards perspective we're a member also of the diff the digital identity foundation so it is important to have a counterparty that actually can staff people to serve on these committees to influence standards and i think that there needs to be a some form of custodial entity for the blueprints of the system so we can eventually get client diversity and also custodian of the improvement and change management process not to control it but rather to make sure that it's following the rules and almost a constitution in a sense is being enforced so this is where we started three entities we kind of did our best we went from the isle of man and then it kind of worked its way to switzerland emergo and iohk provided all the initial funding through this pool of capital to do a donation deed to the foundation and foundation's gone through a lot i the ceo of the foundation a lot fred i think he's a really bright guy and what's exciting is his background at pwc is all about checks and balances and governance and ethics and so forth and i think under his leadership we can probably as a community figure out how to get to something like this and i think that he also has the ability to build a great and independent board it is my hope that we can get to that independent board as quickly as we can and we'll see what happens with that but the community often asks me about what i think about the foundation and what should they be doing and how do they participate and do things and i think that the answer is nuanced and complicated as you guys can see here and there's a lot of moving pieces but ultimately this is probably the best way to go it also would then make it very easy for my organization and emergo and other organizations to participate in the foundation as we build things on cardano we'd obviously sit on the industrial steering committee and that'd probably be my commercial people like jerry and so forth my chief scientist and cto they would obviously be hanging around here on the scientech committee my general counsel would probably be doing stuff with the regulatory group we have a lot of community managers they'd probably be working with the community board and obviously we run stake pools too so maybe sam would be at the operating group and that's just a way that we could participate and if such buckets existed they'd be very friction free and natural in that respect terms of the community hubs that is probably the best way to localize cardano to each jurisdiction's concerns and get people to adopt things rapidly there's actually been some good work in the eos community to attempt to do this and there's been some good work i've seen throughout the years with dash and nem and other cryptocurrencies where they created local franchises and i think the most important thing is how do you get good governance and decision making and how do you do these things at a low operating cost and be able to keep a light footprint but still be able to get a lot of bang for your buck and then also because these things are kind of condoned franchises in the ecosystem we can coordinate with them on a media capacity and a surrogacy capacity and they can be a message amplifier and make sure that everything is translated into local languages and so forth and there's a lot of economic opportunity that can come from these centers so just some quick thoughts about it and i'll become more vocal about this as we enter into 2021 as many of you are aware the original contract the original scope of cardano was guesstimated to be five years so we thought about five years of deep r d and implementation work would get us where we needed to go so that was from 2015 to 2020.