Pattern Language w/Benjamin Life on Allo Capital Podcast

Transcript

We think that blockchains are going to eat the world. We think in the next 10 years there's going to be 10x, 100x, maybe even a thousandx more tokenized assets. And what does the world look like where Microsoft is tokenizing Microsoft stock and giving it out to developers who are building on their platform? You know, the way that I'm thinking about it is, you know, you have allocators and that could be a community, that could be an algorithm, that could be some combination of algorithm and human. And then those allocators are making allocations. I think that there's a lot of ability to realize a different part of the design space than was ever possible before. But first you kind of have to compost the existing systems and break them down

into their modular parts and understand the patterns. My goal with this pattern language work would be you know first me and you and then the podcast subscribers here understand the pattern languages of capital allocation. Gitcoin emerged out of this kind of first principles thinking around quadratic funding and the way in which that mechanism that algorithm allows for the kind of weighted preferences of a collected group of people to be expressed and to use as a kind of fundamental primitive for allocating capital. So a pattern language is a collection of common solutions to recurring problems that help people design things like building software or communities in a way that feels natural and works well. An example

of pattern language in architecture is this idea of having a light on two sides of every room. Rooms feel more pleasant and balanced when natural light comes from more than one direction. So that's an example in architecture. An example in maybe capital allocation is the voice of the govern. Welcome to the Aloe.cap podcast. If you're just joining us, we are in the summoning Aloe. Capitalap season. Alo. Capitalap is a new spin-off from Bitcoin that is designed to build the capital allocation layer of the tokenized internet. We think there's big upside here. Capital allocation is a multi-t trillion dollar design space and VCs, governments, NOS's, and Dows all have to allocate capital. But it's also

a place where we can start small. Every time you send money to a friend or you spend money on something that you want to do, you are allocating capital. We think that as the world tokenizes over the next 10 years, there's going to be a hundred or a thousandx more capital that can be allocated through tokens. And we are building a throughine partnering with builders, researchers, and funders to figure out what onchain capital allocation will look like and then building it onchain. If you want to learn more, you can visit our website at alo.cap capital where you can download the Alo books for free, play with some of our adapts, join the telegram or participate in the DAO. The episode today is about pattern languages and Benjamin Life joins me. Benjamin Life is a co-founder and steward of open civics,

an organization dedicated to enhancing civic engagement through participatory systems design and research. In addition to his role at Open Civics, Benjamin also contributes to research and intelligence at Aloe Capital. We are talking about pattern languages today. You can think of pattern languages as basically taking all these capital allocation mechanisms and composing them into their irreducible parts. Basically, what are the patterns in capital allocation that we can use to recompose systems in the 21st century for more democracy, more efficiency, more effectiveness than was ever possible before. So, I really enjoy the subject matter of pattern language and I think that you are going to as well.

[Music] Hey Benjamin, how are you? JMGM. Yeah, grateful to be here. Glad to have you. So, we are here to talk about pattern languages. Could you tell us what a pattern language is and then we'll move into how it applies to onchain capital allocation? Yeah. So, a pattern language is basically a way of describing the relationships between common challenges and solutions and the way that they relate to each other. And the the body of work really originated with a guy named Christopher Alexander who started off as an architect and was really coming out of an architectural school

that was for those who are familiar with like brutalism and kind of postmodern architecture. And if you've ever experienced brutalist architecture, it's really almost anti-human. And it was coming out of this period of design thinking um that was really influenced by kind of postmodernism and and Marxism that was really responding to this idea that there was kind of an ideal perfect architectural form and this idea that you know that idea of perfection of you know kind of perfectly sculpted gardens and kind of ideal forms of human relationships to space that that was you

bad and oppressive and so we need to create this kind of blank slate that would allow like the spark of the human soul to come forward and Alexander was taught in that architectural school and and he started to see that actually you know this way of thinking about architecture didn't actually support the flourishing of the human soul it actually created you know more limitations because of its abstraction and its oversimplification of you know how human beings interacted. And so the pattern language work really came out of this idea that architecture should move the the form of architecture should move from the function of creating health and

well-being and and so he created this idea of a pattern language which is really how these fundamental units within an architectural structure um could support human flourishing and well-being and that those architectural primitives to to use kind of more of a web 3 term could be combined in in novel ways depending on the environment. And so it it was a different way of thinking about design that was more focused on empiricism, more focused on the the design characteristics that create a thriving system and how those component parts, you know, work together to create higher quality of life for human beings

and and better relationship with the natural world. And shortly after he created this architectural design school, um he realized that this actually could be applied to software. And so there's this really strong connection between, you know, architecture of space and architecture of of software engineering. And so that, you know, body of work has been really inspiring to me. And and so as we started to get into, you know, this idea of really creating a a new design space for capital allocation, uh I immediately went back to Alexander's work to to look at how this idea of pattern languages

could be applied to the software that we create to allocate capital. And it's very simple and uh yet very powerful because it allows us to look at these kind of fundamental units of design and how they relate to each other. And what makes it a language is that you can compose these underlying patterns into new types of mechanism or or design. And so in the same way that you know he applied it to architecture and then web two software I I feel like this kind of underlying meta pattern of you know how patterns relate to each other and how they form a system together um is really essential for us to create this new

design space around capital allocation that makes it accessible to non-technical people. That was one of the big things that Alexander was trying to achieve with pattern language in the architectural context was these are kind of first principles ways of thinking about design that once you have articulated them in a language then allows everyday people to start speaking that language in the creation of of new frameworks you know structures and and and software. Thanks. I'm going to play that back just so that the audience can hear it in two different form factors.

So a pattern language is a collection of common solutions to recurring problems that help people design things like building software or communities in a way that feels natural and works well. So uh an example of pattern language in architecture is this idea of having a light on two sides of every room. Rooms feel more pleasant and balanced when natural light comes from more than one direction. So that's an example in architecture. uh an example in maybe capital allocation is the voice of the governed. So basically a system that allocates capital according to what the everyday constituents in that community will feel more legitimate than something

where you have like a technocratic elite generally uh that's a pattern language for democracy in capital allocation. So as I play that back any reactions to to that is that shoe reductionist? No, I think that's the appropriate level of of simplicity because this is actually trying to take something that's really vast and complex and distill it down into its kind of base level patterns and and a big component of of this design philosophy is rooted in empiricism. So things that are actually happening you know what are from a first principles perspective how can we look at the dynamics that are already present within a system and help to distill them down into their components so they can be

reconfigured and I think it's really cool and beautiful in a way that you know Gitcoin emerged out of this kind of first principles thinking around quadratic funding and the way in which that mechanism that algorithm allows for the kind of weighted preferences of a collective group of people to be expressed and to use as a kind of fundamental primitive for allocating capital. And to see that evolution from Gitcoin and and going multi-mechanism and now we're in this much more pluralistic and open-ended design space, you know, I think Gitcoin as an example of kind of one of these essential primitives. Um, now we're looking at, you know, a much more open-ended design

space that takes, you know, the the affordances of that, you know, original pattern of quadratic funding and starts to see how they can stack and interact with other patterns in in the form of new mechanisms. Yeah. What I love about this design space is how vast and broad it is. But the the part of trying to distill these different mechanisms and ideas into their discrete parts, it just mirrors a lot of the ways that I was taught to think in terms of software where you have composability and modularity. And so if if we can break down different ways of building political economies into their composed composite parts, then we can kind of build modules that allow builders to recompose them in new configurations

that we've never dreamed of before. And especially now that we've got crypto and especially AI, I think that there's a lot of ability to to realize a different part of the design space than was ever possible before. But first, you kind of have to compost the existing systems and break them down into their modular parts and understand the patterns that are there. And then you can kind of build a toolkit that people can recompose new types of systems that are that are hopefully better. And we we we hope that they're better, but I think that we're really just scratching the surface at at this point. So my goal with this pattern language work would be you know first me and you and then the podcast subscribers here understand the pattern languages of capital allocation and then once we do

that we can kind of build a ground swell of support for builders in building better onchain capital allocation tools and there's there's just so much here because I think that we're we're just starting to scratch the surface of what's possible in this design space. Yeah. and and I'd be happy to go into you know some of the thinking that we've started to coalate and this is really intended to open up a conversation around you know how do we distill these discrete components um I think one of the beautiful things about web 3 is that it can be modular by its very nature and so the the positive some feedback loops

that we can start to see once we have these distinct primitives and are able to start stacking them together there's a combinatorial explosion of possibility that you we wouldn't have access to if if we didn't have modular software that we could build on top of. This is intended to begin that conversation around how can we look at the the kind of patterns that are at the core of these different mechanisms and and start to you know distinguish between how are how is decision- making. Is it you know through weighted preference? Is it through conviction voting? you know, what are the signals that we're taking in from either a community or from like onchain data or from like market pricing

and conform those signals into outputs. Um, so that's one one area of like how are allocators expressing their preferences? Um, and this can be communities or institutions um, or some mix of algorithmic uh, decision-m and human decision-m. And because we're able to take those different components and look at them side by side, we can say, "Oh, in this context, it might be more appropriate for it decisions to be made purely algorithmically or here's where we need humans in the loop and here's the kind of signaling mechanism that we want to provide to this community to provide

input into the decision around how funds are allocated. And so, you know, within the domain of of capital allocators, we can look at them as communities or institutions or algorithms or markets. Um, and those are kind of the distinct units that I'm starting to see is, you know, who are the allocators making these allocation decisions and then trying to break down the allocations themselves. you know, are these, you know, proactive funds that are being allocated before work is taking place or is this more of an ongoing drip of continuous funding based on some kind of input of signals whether that's you know onchain reputation or bounties um or is this retroactive? Is this happening

based on attestations like hyperserts or retro PGF for example? And then you know are these investments like are you are you allocating with the hope of recouping that? What is what are the mechanisms that allow you to to get that back like a RevNet or like dependency funding where you know you're making an allocation decision to predict some outcome that you hope to recoup some benefit from and then you know are those signals that you're using to make those decisions based on reputation or you know onchain claims or some kind of performance indicator are these like conditional allocations that are happening based on certain triggers within the system. So those are

the kind of you know underlying mechanisms uh components that I I would love to to work with the Aloe community to start to get a little bit more granular and define in terms of how we're we're describing them so that we can have a shared language because this is really only effective once we start to have you know larger groups of people using the same language to compose mechanisms. So this isn't something that can be designed in a vacuum. This has to be done, you know, through the community itself. If you're enjoying this episode, please check out the remainder of the episode on the feed hosted at aloe.cap.

You must be a allow. Capitalap patron NFT holder to hear the rest of the episode. Alo. Capital Patron NFTs give you access to the Aluminati, which is a private community that has access to the Aloda's evolution, novel capital allocation, intelligence, and research like this episode, like this podcast, and also research reports that we are publishing at Alo. And early access to builds and other innovations in the Aloe community. Thanks for listening. If you want to hear the rest of the episode, check it out at aloe.cap. Peace and love.

[Music] [Music] Hey hey hey.