Bonfires AI: Building a Collective Intelligence Graph

Transcript

Introducing Bonfires & collective sense-making

Hello everybody. >> Hey. >> Uh, I'm Joshua, uh, co-founder of bonfires.ai. I'm trying to see if my other co-founders are in here. Can't see them. No. Okay. So as these guys have very wonderfully introduced, we do have a whole technology that we're running for the next 3 days uh and it's called bonfires. And in particular, we're naming it here a collective sensemaking experience. Um essentially what the bonfire does is it aggregates data from multiple ingestion points including the telegram group chat, including the uh ETH boulder app as an API access and it turns all of this into a sort of agent queryable database.

How the knowledge graph ingests Telegram & app data

Okay, I don't want to uh get too technical with you, but I just want to quickly show you the graph so that you can see it from a visual perspective because it is very beautiful. This is just from the last two hours or so from this morning. Um this is essentially on the left a live feed of the episodes. Every 20 minutes a new episode is ingested into the graph. If you're speaking to the agent, you're likely to make it into the episode. Once you're in the episode, one of these blue things, nodes are generated. And that could be something that you're talking about, perhaps the work you're interested in, perhaps the questions you're asking, or it could even be something about yourself. And once you're in the graph, you'll be connected to other people. And whenever people talk to the agent, either on Telegram, which I'll show you

What an “episode” is & how nodes are formed

in a second, or on the graph here on the website, you might be surfaced. So, we call this a collective sensemaking experience because it's essentially creating a collective intelligence for the people that are participating. Um there's many ways that we can make this as interesting and participatory as possible. So if you're a host for example of an unconference session or even just a small little breakout room that you're you're with multiple people perhaps you could uh sort of get the consent as Benjamin mentioned of everybody in the group but record it with a voice transcription. Uh our app I'll just quickly show you right now is pretty robust and you can directly in the app here send voice notes. That's me. I sent the voice note and then it

Collective intelligence through participation

transcribes it and ingests it into the graph. So you can do that via DMs. Uh or you can talk to it in the public group chat here. If you talk to it in the public group chat then people are likely to maybe see your messages and you might inspire somebody else to talk to it. And ultimately we are looking for people to just have a bit of fun with this and use it almost as your personal journal. Right? And to put it simply you could think of three questions every single day. The first one today, if you look at the agent, it's in the group chat now. You can DM it, you can ask, you can say it publicly. If I was you, I would pin it like that so you always have it there. Um, you can today introduce yourself. Say who you are, what you're

Recording sessions with consent

working on, and why you're interested to be here. And then perhaps tomorrow you could say somebody interesting that you've met, the most interesting person, the most interesting project that you've seen over the last 24 hours. Put that into the graph. And on the final day perhaps you can say what's inspired you and what you're going to do after Boulder with this information. So three simple things. You can do your own questions but these are a nice way to start that if you just talk to the agent you're going to get yourself in this graph and then you're going to be part of this collective sensemaking experience. What's great about this is that it's a persistent knowledge artifact which means that after the event this is still going to exist. is going to be transferred to the ETH Boulder team alongside the agent and it's going to be theirs to do with as

Daily prompts to enrich the graph

they wish and that means every year this graph is going to grow. It's going to be timebased so you're going to see how things have improved from last year or changed. uh and you can actually use it for research. For example, I know that Benjamin is doing lots of things on on Ethereum localism and cosmo localism. And this becomes a knowledge asset if if we decide to give it to to the commons, right? It becomes a knowledge commons which there's lots of work being done on this which is very exciting to share. Um I want you guys to think of this as our graph and to think of the Boulder agent as our agent because really this is only going to work like in the most interesting way possible with the diversity of information. the more information, the more viewpoints, the more questions we get, the richer this

Making ETHBoulder a persistent knowledge artifact

graph becomes. Um, as Aaron mentioned, you're going to be able to use it in the hackathon. We have API access, we have MCP access. So, if you're part of the open claw uh sort of rush at the moment, which I've already spoken to dozens of you that are, you can connect via MCP very simply to this. We have a skills.md file, which we will provide to various locations. We'll probably give it to the agent to give to people as well. You feed that to your agent and it can directly query this and write to it as a source of truth. We want to be flexible with this and we invite you to invite the agent itself. Remember it's just a telegram agent here, ETH boulder_bot. I invite you to add it to your own groups.

Giving the graph back to the commons

I know I spoke to somebody earlier who has their own small sort of coordination group here. Feel free to add that there if the participants allow it. Then that means that your group is part of the collective group and it's all very exciting. Um, I want to highlight the excitement of a graph, right? Basically, the graph is structured data, which means that AI can read it and produce really interesting outputs from it, not just text, which is great. Uh, but you can also say, hey, you know, generate me a video of uh the ETH boulder experience from day one. And it's going to look at that structured graph data and using one of the fancy models is going to produce some graphics, right? So, you can get really creative with this. And one thing that we've done uh is we've created this

AI-readable structured data & creative outputs

thing called a hyper blog. You'll see some posters around the place and essentially a hyperblog um is a piece of content which is generated from the graph. Okay. Um these are on the website on boulder.app.bonfires.ai. Sorry for the dots. It's also linked on the on the app the ETH boulder app itself. Um you'll come here. You'll be able to see the homepage. You'll be able to see the most recent episodes. These are every 20 minutes these are created. So you can get like a live view. Uh you'll see the graph as I just showed you. And if you scroll down, you'll also see hyperblogs. You're not seeing anything right now because none have been minted. But hyperblogs are essentially content that you generate from this graph. And we are going to from our side provide topics which allow you to choose. This one here is people

API & MCP access for hackers

of ETH Boulder. We'll have public goods. We'll have DeFi. We'll have privacy. And you can basically create content from that using this very simple process. You say, "I want to learn about Okay. I want to learn about Sorry, Benjamin. You've been quite active on the graph, it seems." Um, so I'm going to make one about you. And you can pay using X42 payments. It's 25 cents, guys. Uh, we're doing this as an experiment. 25 cents, not a lot, on base USDC. And we're going to do something fun with the winners. So, we're going to pull the funds together, rate the blogs, there's a liking mechanism. We're going to look at how like how many people have

Hyperblogs (minted for 25¢ on Base USDC)

been looking at them, and we're going to do something fun with the winners. This is a live demo. So, I apologize if that doesn't go well. But, uh, this is the first the first hyperblog from ETH Boulder ever, and it's about you, Benjamin. Okay. Um, we'll wait for this to generate. And one other thing, we are also willing to give away personal agents to people who are particularly interested in this, right? So not everybody, please only put your hand in for this if you are very much interested in this sort of thing. But essentially this is a group agent, right? Which is anyone can participate with and it's creating episodes from everybody's input. But we're also giving let's say you know VIPs uh a individual agent which is their personal journal. And so

Live demo walkthrough

what it will do is it will create its own uh episodes. So there'll be we've given one to Benjamin and it's going to be the Benjamin episode. Okay? And so if anyone here is like a really deep researcher and wants to make this their 3-day sprint experiment and get really excited about it, please find me, find Carlos, your hand up higher. Higher. There you are. Thank you. Head of AI, the guy behind the brains behind the the brain. Um and we'll give you one and it's super exciting. I'm just going to see if that hyperblock has been minted. I want to learn about Benjamin life. We'll give it 30 seconds. Hopefully, it will work. Um, but yeah, this is the There we go.

Personal agents vs group agent

Benjamin life, the visionary known as out the heart of ETH border 2026. Initiating the B open civics, Shelling Point app, quadratic voting. There you are. There's a simple link that talks about Benjamin. And you can create these yourself. You can get fancy with the prompts. uh it's 25 cents per thing. Now, of course, the graph has been alive for two hours. Okay? So, there's relatively limited information in there about everybody, including Benjamin. But as the days go on, as you guys contribute more, this is going to get richer, more exciting, and the blogs are going to become very uh let's say uh robust. So, thanks. Please participate.

Call to participate

There's QR codes everywhere. Appreciate it. Heat.