Decentralized Outcome Funding for Investigative Reporting

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the flower stage in East prag on Saturday um We are continuing our schedule with our next talk from Dean mea he will talk about decentralized outcome funding for investigative reporting who himself is also an investigative reporter so he will be reporting from inside what's going on so Applause for

Dean hey um is everyone able to hear me yeah nice um so as Khan men mentioned I'm an investigative reporter myself I don't know why these slides are not showing over here but they seem to be missing um but long story short like I've worked I like when I was in college uh I started a magazine that's how I started my journey as a reporter and after the first issue the principal banned the magazine he decided that he didn't like the content we were producing and we ran an interview where he said many stupid things like the vice Chancellor is not giving giving us enough money and other

things so we had him on video so we published it and soon after he decided to ban the magazine and I was not I was very upset at that we put a lot of effort into it so I spoke to the media he started a committee against me and they decided to suspend me a week before graduation and then I filed a lawsuit against him challenging the suspicion and I won that lawsuit so it was a real um entry into the idea of like speaking truth to par and standing up for it at some risk to myself uh after that I worked I went to the Colombia journalism school where I specialized in investigative reporting and the best part was that I was there at the time that the Panama papers came out so some of my professors there were

working on that and they ROP me in as well to help out and contribute and finally my story got published in the outlet that does the Panama papers for the Eurasia region so azerbajan Russia so I was investigating whether an Airlines owned by AER Ban's dictator had got Pentagon contracts and a loan guarantee from the US export import Banks I managed to crack that story wide open it created like fairly good impact like there were calls for Congress to investigate and other things but after I finished that story it was like okay now write your Grant so that you can write your next story and it was kind of like demoralizing like it got this huge impact but now I'm back at square one uh then after that I joined CG net swar

which you can see over here so cget is uh an outlet which believes in democratizing the media so similar to how we have uh in the in politics we have democracy we can elect our Kings but in the media we basically have uh the owner who's like the king and you have reporters who are like ministers so how do we actually start bringing democracy to these regions so what they had which was very interesting was they were operating in a war zone so I spent about 5 years in this war stricken area in central India where the tribal population would call up a phone number and they would record a message in the server saying that teachers are not coming to our school we are not getting enough food to eat um that would be

listened to by moderators who would fact check the story and they would share that with digital volunteers like me who would mobilize call up government officers tell them why is it not being solved and that would help solve the problem um so that's basically how I started and like in 2017 is when I began working with them and my University was giving a lot of grants for students who want to start their own uh startup so that was actually the motivation behind starting voice deck um so we incorporated it we managed to win some challenges from the sepa uh in Colombia University and then we the First Technology we piloted was called Learn to Earn which is a model of advertising Tech where we pay people to listen to

information and uh but that but that business model didn't work out for many reasons after that we piloted another technology for sharing news through Bluetooth because in that war stricken area a lot of the reporters didn't have um wifi or Internet so but they would often go to the market download videos and then share it through Bluetooth with people in no internet areas so we created a model to share the news via Bluetooth uh 2020 was when the lockdown happened so during that time we had a lot of calls coming in saying that we need help getting back to our cities we are running out of money and food so that was like a really hectic time for

those four five months it was like I was belly sleeping and doing a lot of work in trying to help people who were distressed during that time and connecting them with government officers and getting them back in 2021 we made a big upgrade where instead of just a phone number that these citizen reporters could call we uh integrated that same phone number with the WhatsApp business is API so that anyone with internet can WhatsApp their story and anyone without internet can continue to call the number and Report their story so so that was a pretty big breakthrough in terms of uh being accessible to people with internet and without internet and also being sustainable WhatsApp API was cheaper than a

toll-free number um 2022 was the time that I got kind of burnt out by writing a lot of Grant applications for anyone here who's written like Grant applications it can be a very Soul like Soul consuming process and I began thinking about what business model can we have which will help me never write another Grant application again and finally we landed up on the idea of impact certificates so uhoh yeah the formatting is not showing on this one for some reason but uh in in general what impact certificates are is um right now if I F if I create some impact I have to then Market that impact to as

many funders as I can get an audience with so that privileges impact marketing over impact creation because you can sell your impact multiple times what impact certificates do is you can only sell your impact one time so you create an impact you register it as an impact certificate somebody buys that impact certificate and now you have money for your next impact which will again let you create another impact certificate so it kind of rebalances the equation between impact marketing and impact creation because you're solving that problem of selling impact many times and the reason this is important is cgnet which I was working at for 5 years like

I was the only English speaker in that organization other than the founder and when you're the like when you're the only English speaker all the fundraising work comes to you so it's actually very difficult for Grassroots organizations to raise money in the traditional model because they don't know English Eng they don't know how to write Grant applications other things but in a model of impact certificates like you don't fund based on a brand you fund based on an impact so similar to how when you're going and buying t-shirts you can give money get a t-shirt inspect it for quality and be like yes good I'm going to buy it and you get it immediately but in the impact field it's like you know you want to give money and then you have to just choose a menu of brand names Red Cross or UNICEF or any of that and then

you give money and you never know what really happened to the money you might be added to an email list that asks you for more money but that's the limits of it um so this is kind of the journey once we had this idea of how we actually got started with building out things so what I found in terms of the web 3 funding ecosystem is quadratic funding is great for keeping the mission alive so it doesn't give you a lot of money quadratic uh funding but it does two things one is it gives you it shows you how relevant your idea is because in gitcoin rounds you're always on Twitter spaces during those two weeks and you start building up followers you start building up uh interest in your idea you

get feedback in real time so it's really motivating you know even other than the money to just like see in those two weeks that people actually care about what you're building and it gives you just about enough money to actually um to actually just keep yourself alive so sustainable because startups only die when the founder runs out of energy and quad itic funding is great for making sure that doesn't happen but it can't really take you to the next level so what did help us was hackathons like this one actually uh at e Prague um the one we took part in was funding the commins which was a big breakthrough uh funding the commins organized a hackathon where anyone who wants to hack on public goods would come together on their Discord and form teams so I

managed to get a worldclass designer um a smart contract developer and the best part of hackathons was there's no Financial commitment all you say is that hey if we win we'll split the money and if we lose it's fine like you know we gave it our best shot and as the founder you still made progress on your product which is awesome um so we came second in this hackathon and we managed to win $9,000 which we divided between us so it was it was quite a good success with quadratic funding one thing I'll say is that it's very important to choose the round that you want to participate in because in like for example in Dora hacks in one of the rounds for every $1,000 it gave me like $30,000 in matching fund which is crazy and in

others like ,000 gives me like $200 in matching so there's a wide variability in choosing the right round to take part in and finally the progress we made in these two helped us get direct grants so the dirty secret of the grant World which I spent a lot of time in is that it's easier to get money for things you've already done and you want to scale or like take to the next level rather than than things that you have ideas for so if you just go and say hey I have an idea no one is interested if you say I've done XY Z and with your funding I can reach ABC then people are usually interested and the other secret is that you first get the Grant and then you apply for it so usually you have to do Outreach by yourself and then you

actually apply for it um so yeah like this is where I managed to get the next billion fellowship at the ethereum foundation so they are basically looking for people who are the embodiment of a good story this is an Insight that the next billion team had at the EF which is that they are not looking for people with good ideas they're looking for people who are good stories um because that's what's going to inspire new people to come on chain and to get new users on board so the support they gave was very interesting they have monthly one-on-one calls so they uh found that I was blocked by not having a team I was having to do hackathons and quadratic funding to keep things alive and they connected me with Poland Labs which is

is a team at the EF which uh moves from Project to project similar to Poland like Poland moves from flower to flower so every 3 4 months they choose a new project to work on and hack and they chose my project so we built out our entire test net so this is like the minimum viable prototype um the formatting of the slides has been really affected here but basically how it works is the citizen reports an issue the citizen Works to solve it uh when the issue gets resolved an impact report is published on their website so all of this is done by the media Outlets that we work with um where we come in is that once the impact report is published we

then evaluate it we uh mint it on chain and we find people to buy these impact reports and then we give back the money to the citizens so that's the model that we built so here's how it looks if you go on our website which is app. voic deck .org um so these are some of the stories we so we've started with 27 stories from three media Outlets that we work within India um so these are all past impacts so these are stories that are on their website which we've taken on chain so for example this one is one of my favorite ones uh there was a teacher like India has a scheme called the midday meal scheme where children

who are attending get free lunch and that motivates them to read like parents want to to reduce the feeding cost of their children so they send them to school just for that one meal like they don't care about education or any of that they care about the fun free meal um but this teacher was embezzling money from that scheme and because of that the children were not getting the lunch and the journalist found it out and reported on it saying that this teacher is corrupt and doing this sort of thing and uh that teacher got suspended after the story got published and the self-help Group which makes the food so that's the cool part about midday live that there's also a women self-help Group which makes the food so you're empowering women and you're improving education and helping

children so that women self-help group got back their money the children got food and the teacher was suspended um so this is one of the stories that people can directly support they don't even need to know who the media Outlet is you like this impact you can just directly go and support it so here's another story and if you click on a story this is the tab that you would see um so human this was a story about a human trafficker who got arrested because the journalist went and exposed that human trafficker and reported on them and then the authorities were forced to take some action because of the outcry and uh so if you click on support this report then you would get metamask and you can directly support it and also leave a

comment at the end like the market we want to tap is the gifting market so uh we've seen a lot of Trends in the effective alterist community that we we don't want gifts for our wedding or baby shower or a birthday we want only blessings but no one really wants to go empty-handed so what they do is they buy a save the child gift card and they say I made a donation in your name and other things so we're trying to tap into that market where you can support reports and uh do it that way um yeah and then we also quantify the impact benefit cost ratio this is quick calculations that you can see on uh app. voic de.org where you can click click on a report this is the last slide so this is how we need

help from here so if you're an evaluator we have many more hypers search that we want to quantify hypers search are the web3 protocol to take impact reports on chain built by protocol labs and the hypers search team uh if you're a developer we are an open source project so definitely check out our GitHub and see if anything's interesting to you uh operator that's the main work I'm doing now like Outreach to New Media Outlets writing Grant applications if you're media Outlet more impact certificates always looking to bring people on chain um and with a funer like just if you see voice deck in any qf round in any gitcoin round please throw us a dollar that always goes very far um once we launch we are on testnet now but we plan

to launch on op main net um so like you know even like make a few purchases of impact certificates or even direct Grant and if nothing else just follow us on Twitter at voice Tech da or the Devan meta I tweet every day so um yep keep you updated there thanks thank you very much Devan for this insightful talk um do we have any questions for Devan we have one over here the mic is coming thank you thank you very much uh what's your opinion on how to address

issue with the biased fact Checkers right uh biased fact Checkers um so there's a difference between investigative reporting where a journalist might spend one year on a story and what I call situational awareness journalism where I go and I write a story what's happening in Ukraine what's happening in Russia all of that is giving awareness to people whereas with investigative reporting I'll be finding out that Vladimir Putin has these particular Assets in malova or in some other region uh so it's very specific so fact checking then for investigative reporting fact checking is exis existential because you're speaking

truth to power they will always be looking for mistakes that you make which can invalidate your entire story so like you know when I was working on the Panama papers and that's a nor star trying to bring the Panama papers on chain um their fact checking is is they themselves want to be very thorough in fact checking but when it comes to the other model of Journalism there they want to be less thorough because they want clicks and eyeballs so actually being wrong on the facts but getting a lot of eyeballs is profitable to your business model so it's really about the incentive structure difference between Solutions journalism which is what I'm dealing with and situational awareness journalism which is what CNN and others are dealing

with and another question I think there was another one questions okay if there are no other questions then thank you Dean and oh oh last minute there's always a last minute question be brave take it easy say it again earlier yeah there we go yeah I thanks it's very interesting talk actually I was wondering like for the impact certificate um so I guess it's it's like it sounds like it's very crucial to to kind of quantify it in a in the right way and like to be kind of like not biased and like even verifiable so what is the approach there that you

follow yeah that's actually a really great question um with f like with evaluation the approach we've taken is initially what our thinking was that if we have many evaluators who are quantifying the impact and we take the mean or the median value then we prevent bias because there are many evaluators doing it and each of them are doing their own calculation but when we tried to actually do that approach it didn't work out well in practice at the early stages what actually worked out better was similar to ethereum's governance which is consensus that I produced a set of evaluations I sent it to the media outlet and they got back with like a detailed spreadsheet saying this is why

your analysis is wrong and this is the correct analysis and then we incorporated that within our final version of the the analysis we did so actually getting that consensus was better because the media Outlet agrees we agree there's like no like no one is going to complain after that so that's how we've approached it so far at the early stages great thanks yeah any other questions we still have a bit of time yeah like one other quick point I would say is that the reason of why it's important to quantify in the first place is that many funders don't want to select individual impact certificat KS to buy because they just don't want to like know they don't want to go through that effort justifiably so when you quantify impact you can create

a central pool of money which anyone can put money into and that automatically goes to buying impact certificates from highest to lowest benefit cost ratio so if you just put money into the pool you automatically get back the highest rated impact certificate and that's kind of why it's important to quantify it in the first place like we know that blockchains are good for for solving trouble spending problem whether we can also use that to solve the trouble selling of impact I think that's like the main play over here yeah questions for the last time if not a big round of applause for Devan thank you

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