Democratizing Resource Allocation for Social Movements Using DAOs

Transcript

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okay uh i am talking hello hello one two three might check one two three four might check how much longer do i need to keep talking okay cool will you let me well can you give me like a five two three or like you know like a countdown um

so hello everyone my name is daniel marquez and i'm a graduate student at the mit

media lab when the black lives matter movement resurged with the murder of george floyd a year ago i became aware of the great power a collective can have to push their beliefs forward a lot of times this power manifests in the form of donations maybe you can't fly out to minneapolis minnesota to protest in the streets but you can donate to a fund that helps bailout minorities and underrepresented groups in that community when you expect protesters that you support to be arrested in fact this is exactly what happened the minnesota freedom fund received over 30 million dollars of donations when the protests started that is an immense amount of money that anyone

would be happy to receive especially if your annual budget was two hundred thousand dollars but unfortunately the minnesota freedom fund had only one full-time employee and did not have the bandwidth or resources to manage the influx of funds with less than a quarter million dollars used in the ensuing month and considering that of the 570 arrests from the protests in minneapolis all about 44 were dropped and that there were over 17 000 arrests in 50 cities around the united states a lot of people including myself thought that this was a poor allocation of resources for the movement in fact even octavia smith the board

president of the minnesota freedom fund admitted in the npr interview that she wished the fund had received all that money how could this be solved well i'm talking at an ethereum conference so the answer might be a little bit obvious use a doubt however most dallas that we see in action today act as vcs that expect a profit or governance for protocols with tokens that have value based on the network's effects of the protocol or attempt to create somewhat convoluted token values based on the work done for the dao in a situation such as the resurgence of the black's life matter movement such schemes seem impractical when all people want to do

is give money without expecting something in return the idea is a simple one create a pool of funds associated to a new or resurgent social movement and create a token that allows people to vote on proposals instead of the minnesota freedom fund receiving over 30 million dollars they could have proposed to receive the quarter million dollars they needed and all the other bail funds around the country could have had the ability to receive money as well from the spurt of donations and not just bail funds but artists painting murals organizations doing community outreach and much more things could have been done

with grassroots organizations that are trying to push forward the black lives matter movement i wanted to apply this idea and concept to something a little bit closer to home and since i'm from colombia and was born there grew up there until i was nine years old before i moved to the united states i wanted to do something to aid in the efforts to help sustain peace there after the peace agreement that was signed between the government and the farc the largest guerrilla group there i previously said it's a simple idea and it sounds great but just like anything in the space even simple things are not so simple when the world is catching up to the

possibilities of ethereum how was i going to reach out to grassroots organizations that haven't heard from me how how will these crypto they haven't even heard about cryptocurrencies or blockchains but they didn't though they wanted to maybe know how people that don't own cryptocurrencies don't know what ether die is donate and then vote on proposals for the first question i reached out to the united nations multi-partner trust fund for sustaining peace in colombia to see if they were interested in reaching out in

running a pilot now with me they already work a lot with grassroots organizations at columbia and can help guide me through the communication with them something that i really needed considering that my background is in computer science and software engineering and not in participatory research with the help of the multi-party trust fund we contacted and agreed with organizations to participate in the pilot they are they the katakumbo farmers association who are working on reconstructing the social fabric to a dignified living conditions and development for the people of katakumbo colombia the association of afro-descendant women of the north capcom who are working to defend the rights of after descended

women and communities in the north of cauca the association of ecological producers of planets who are designing their own farm conservation model to guarantee resources for future generations and the universitavana and who are supporting peace building by strengthening one of the roots of social inequality in rural areas of colombia education to partner with the un and these organizations created another issue that wasn't mentioned before and it's that they needed to receive us dollars for this pilot in order to give to the organizations and for them to be able to follow up on the use of funds

while different parts of the un have been able to receive cryptocurrencies and donated such as unicef because the un is so decentralized not every organization can manage them and knows how to handle cryptocurrencies and this was one of them so for this pilot we needed to do that this meant having to figure out how to donate to them in usd based on the final votes of the pilot proposals at first i thought it could be as simple as getting mit to donate to convert to donate the converted funds but mit administration had questions about kyc and ml they made it difficult to do i was fortunate to be able to reach out to the blockchain education network and they were more accommodating since

they know that technology a lot more than the mit administration and the flow of donations were solved obviously pending real world contracts that need to be signed between all parties for the second question i knew i had to educate organizations on blockchain networks and ethereum and it was really awesome that in the first video call i had with them they were all very interested in learning more about it so through workshops i've been teaching about bitcoin ethereum dows and much more much more things that can be done with smart contracts so they know what they're getting into and that they can be able to continue with this after the pilot

so the third and final question inspired by cover lab 19 i've been working on a telegram bot to help onboard people into the dow so they can be guided on how to donate and vote because maybe people are interested in donating and voting but for some reason they're not interested in investing in ethereum or investing in some other cryptocurrency and so how can it be done as easily as possible for a non-technical community that is interested in a social movement this is all something that i've been working on in the past six months and we haven't launched yet but when we do gofundme.org will be a dow that aims to help sustain peace in colombia by creating a pool funds that helps

grassroots organizations sustain peace in my home country and hopefully other social movements around the world could use something like this to help them allocate their own resources in a progressively decentralized world thank you okay so there's some questions

i'll answer them as i see them pop up in the chat uh how many down members can you have on ethereum i guess the answer is as many as you as you want it also depends on what you mean by down members

if you mean organizations or people that donate and the answer is however many you want for the pilot we decided to go with four so we can kind of see where some issues might lie before we scale it up to more than four organizations um but the idea is that anyone can donate and anyone will be able to vote based on the allocation uh based on their how many votes they have um to be able to kind of have like a say on what a pool where pool funds goes yeah this is uh there's

really not much reputation here from like the donation side um because there's no work being done by the donors other than i'm giving money and so based on how much money i give if i get some token and based on the amount of tokens that i have i'm going to be able to um and so i guess well that's one of the things i was talking about uh earlier regarding establishing like a dao when like i said you know when a social movement kind of screws up which is like thinking about it in the sense of reputation and all these things um is it really exciting as an idea but at the moment maybe not practical when there's already so there's such a large barrier of entry when it comes to just like

what is blockchain what is ethereum how do i buy it how do i donate how do i vote and so adding a layer of like well if you do certain amount of work then you have more reputation you can book more you know it just complicates things a lot a little bit more when the purpose of this is to get donations and give them give you know give organizations that are doing things that you support uh in in a movement that you support um yeah yeah so the on-ramp process is uh

you know if you know how to do it it's pretty simple you'll be able to like um it's like it's a dab it's on the website you'll be able to just like donate if you don't know anything uh the thing that i was that i mentioned er uh was i to create um a telegram bot that kind of gives you very just like piecemeal step by step process i'll ask you a question and you answer it and based on what you answer it'll tell you what to do um the idea being that if you could you can you can give people kind of like all that information in like a like a like a one-pager uh but you know people have difficulty building and i ikea furniture um and so like now so following like

this like guide and so it's like same thing with any type of onboarding process in the space it's like you can give it to them and if you know it you're like in the you're like deep in the weeds you're like oh it all makes sense but you have no idea about any of it then it doesn't make sense and so um you know approaching it in a way of doing it through a telegram box so that they can do it you know like little by little like uh you know if this then that kind of stuff and so they just see one thing at a time instead of like all the information at once that might overwhelm them and again it's like it's a very simple process because there's no reputation there's no kind of like layering on top it's just figure out how to donate and figure out

how and when to vote okay everyone well this pleasure uh talking to you guys and answering your questions thank you so much it

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