Why the Blockchain Space Needs Better Access - Alexis Gauba, she(256), Mechanism Labs

Transcript

hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers this episode is supported by 21 lectures 21 lectures mission is to bring more developers to the Bitcoin ecosystem with in-person courses lectured by world renowned Bitcoin and lightning developers courses teach participants the fundamentals to work with blockchain technologies to learn more visit 21 lectures calm this episode has support from core ledger core ledger is a

blockchain based peer-to-peer transaction infrastructure provider it enables businesses to document tokenize and trade any type of assets in a reliable and flexible environment core letter make anything transact about literally anything to learn more about core letters technology and how you can transform your business on the blockchain visit core logic net that cor e-l the ger dotnet core ledger dotnet my guest today is Alexis Galba alexis is a co-founder of she 256 a nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity and breaking down barriers to entry in the

blockchain space she is studying Electrical Engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and has been actively involved in the blockchain space as a co-founder of mechanism labs conducting research on distributed consensus and usability and now to the conversation with Alexis Galba hi Alexis and many thanks for taking time today thank you so much for having me Alexis you're part of several blockchain projects including G 256 so let's maybe start with what you're doing there 56 is a nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity and breaking down barriers to

entry in the blockchain space and so the thesis of the organization is that we believe that blockchain technology will fundamentally form a basis of our financial and governance based futures and as such it's crucial that the people building these technologies are representative of the global diverse population which they are to serve and so along those lines we have a couple of key goals one to increase awareness about diversity and inclusion in the blockchain space and two to make all of this very very accessible to people who haven't even heard of blockchain before so it's a lot about raising awareness building community and providing education ok cool how did the project start so the project just started in

February of 2018 and it was really organic it was you know I was studying Electrical Engineering meter science at UC Berkeley and um you know I was very pretty to all the ratios in the diversity in my cs classes and I didn't necessarily think it could get worse but and kind of avoid a bunch of blocking events and it was worse and I was you know pretty much taken aback very shocked and I found that other females in the space had a similar experience and so there was just one event in Berkeley and it was me and a couple of other friends who were there and we realized that we were the only females in the room like just the four of us out of what 60 people and then at that point

we we kind of got together after that event we were like okay something clearly needs to be done like this is not okay and so we started thinking okay what can we do to introduce this technology to more people at the university level and then we're like okay why stop there like there's so much more we get you here so many more people who we can bring into the space and and that's kind of where the impetus for our first conference came from okay what are some of the activities that you have you know you have I think I mean I spoke with a partner with your co-founder about it a while back and and she mentioned there is mentorship programs yeah but I don't think we spoke about conferences sure yeah so a part is my co-founder with mechanism labs and Sarah and Mehta are the cofounders of G 256

they're absolutely amazing and I'm so glad to be able to work with each and every one of them and so we do have a whole host of initiatives with XI 256 so we we have our annual conference and the goal of our annual conference last year was very specifically to feature the groundbreaking work of female of researchers and innovators from the block chain space and to really highlight the amazing work that they were already doing to inspire the next generation to know that they could do that as well but since then you know after after seeing how the conference went and how the community received it which was super super supportive we we realized that there was a lot more that we could do here so this fall our last fall now we launched our mentorship

program and the goal there was to pair female identifying individuals of all ages and backgrounds so you know we have some people participating or high schoolers all the way you know it's like mid-career professionals who are looking to potentially change careers and are trying to export watch-chain so any one of these individuals would get paired with a professional in the blocking space and that way they would have someone to help guide them through this journey and make it less intimidating and what I think is really important and you know the program currently has around 500 participants which is super super exciting oh cool yeah you mentioned you know that it can be intimidating to people blockchain technology when they first get into it

so what what is one specific advice you know that you would give someone who's interested in getting started with this technology for sure I think one key thing is to kind of have that frame going in where you know that there's a lot of content and a lot of material and a lot of jargon so you you're aware that it can be intimidating but not to get this partner by that because there are so many resources out there and so many ways to get involved and what I would say to anyone who is definitely looking to get into the space and might be a little intimidated is that even though there is all this jargon in this initial barrier to entry it's not like other fields where you

have to go get a PhD to be able to contribute or anything like that it's still such a young field which means there are so many problems to be solved so many ways to contribute all across the board whether that's you know development or design or policy or economics and so the biggest thing is not to get disheartened but to use the wealth of resources that are available and so many of these so many people in this space are pretty open and welcoming and open and receptive to answering questions and bringing new people in okay but what is what is somebody something specific you know let's say let's say I haven't really heard much of what block chains are what cryptocurrencies are and I somehow want to learn more about it I mean what's the

first thing I should do I'd say that definitely depends on you know how much what like how do you how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go like if you've if you've heard about crypto currencies and blockchain and you know that it's something you really want to learn a lot about I would recommend a blockchain at Berkeley's EDX course I think it's a really really great introduction to the space but obviously taking an EDX course requires a little bit more commitment and other than that there I think there are some really amazing medium blog posts to take a look at which would be a good introduction so Zubin cotija has a really awesome introduction watching through crypto economics creepy cos already has some great introductory blog posts and there's a bunch more that

are floating around a medium and so I think that's a really good way to just you know start by reading one article figuring out what you know learning what you don't know and then deciding what you have the bandwidth for whether that's you know a full course or maybe looking at some books if that's your thing so blockchain at Berkeley has a lot of course notes so they have like I think a botching textbook sort of thing on github there's the Princeton textbook there's obviously mastering Bitcoin and mastering etherium so I think these are all some great introductory resources and to 256 is gonna be putting out a more comprehensive beginner's guide to help people answer the same question hopefully in the next month or so and so it should if they have subcategories so

if you're a designer it'll have a design focused resources or an economist economics focused resources versus they're just being this intimidating boss of you know medium posts articles and all these things okay interesting you know in your experience what is the wrong way to get into it I don't necessarily think there's like a particularly wrong way to get into it I think with anything it's definitely like a journey and you're learning and going along each step of the way I think it's just important to keep an open mind and understand that there are so many different variables or you know factors that are playing into this space and different subsets so there are people interested in research there are people

interested in trading there are people interested in development and all these different sub communities and you know just just like human beings themselves these sub communities can tend to be pretty aggressive when I'm talking about maybe like their own particular viewpoint or something like that so I definitely think the best thing to do is to keep an open mind to explore and to come into this wanting to learn what do you think is the main hurdle you know for people to get familiar with blockchain technology and crypto assets and usually it's just you know the the way that we explained Bitcoin in the

way that we explained blocks to technology can often be confusing to people and I think you know and I think people have realized that and have been developing you know things like these courses or these blog posts that do a better job of explaining these things but finding the signal in the noise is still a bit difficult so you know if I'm new and I just Google search like Bitcoin or blockchain is the number one hit gonna be the best explanation probably not you know the better way is probably through like word of mouth or talking to a friend who is maybe more experienced in the space or looking at another like reputable source and to find a resource that can explain things

better so I guess it's definitely also a little bit of this like like search complexity and I think this probably goes for most fields in general like if you're trying to learn a lot about a new field the best way to do it is probably to ask an expert depending on how niche the field is so you know if I wanted to learn about some sort of historical event then maybe like Google and Wikipedia would do like an amazing chocolates like explaining that to me because that's knowledge that's been around for a while and has already been ingrained and categorized in a specific way but when it comes to newer things so say I wanted to learn about like preserving privacy in machine learning algorithms a Google search probably wouldn't be as helpful to me as

talking to someone who's working in that space you can recommend a more introductory article or something about nature and also it's I think this whole space obviously so saturated with you know some kind of obfuscated advertising and marketing yeah how do you how do you deal with that you know when when somebody wants to read into the technology and then they'll just end up with a whole bunch of you know articles on medium that were written for the sole purpose of spinning some kind of coin or something like this yeah I think that's frustrating I think that's why it's really important to look to like reputable sources or sources that you where you know their incentives are you know to educate so organizations like watching at Berkeley or she 256 or

others that are really trying to educate and don't necessarily have like some sort of alternate purpose like another great resource are a lot of these conferences that are put on like you know MIT Bitcoin Expo or the crypto economic security conference which have some great videos and and again these are more reputable sources then another project that might have different incentives so looking at like you know the mission of the project and kind of using that as a lens for yourself okay cool in XI 256 you know um the mentorship program that you're running there is it mostly geared toward people in academia you know students or

are there all all kinds of people from all walks of life in there they're definitely all kinds of people from all walks of life I mean and I think that's one of the things that makes the program so special so it is pairing up someone with a mentor in the blockchain space who is the professional in this field but also very specifically like us like a subfield so maybe they're like a blockchain developer or a blockchain designer so if you're new to the space and you have some like design factor I'm saying you want to understand watching from that lens then you can get paired with someone who's been doing watching from that angle I'm so it's definitely meant to cater to as many people interested in as many different things as possible okay let's say somebody is studying at the moment and isn't quite

sure if he or she wants to work as a researcher or in the industry as a coder or developer how would you advise students to position themselves so they have the best options in the future I would definitely say you know regardless of what you're doing currently or what you've done in the past what you're doing in the future - but follow what interests you most where you want to learn and where you want to grow and definitely not to be boxed in by a particular role or a particular current state even if you're you know doing development at one given time and you want to do design at another time then

definitely go for it I think it's it really useful to look at these things as journeys it's like learning and growth more than being particularly bound to positioning a certain role on a certain way yeah excellent Alexis before we started recording we spoke about some of the upcoming initiatives that you're planning with she 256 I wanted to ask you again to you know explain some of these initiatives because I think they're really interesting for sure we have a lot of exciting stuff coming up and I'm really looking forward to it so one of the initiatives that we're starting pretty soon will be fundamentals and development boot camps for

underrepresented high school students so we're going to be doing a pilot program for this in Berkeley in Oakland for these next couple of months and seeing how that goes and then hopefully expanding based on that and the curriculum is being developed by a couple of people within the organization and will be completely open source so hopefully anyone will be able to utilize that and hopefully that will be able to be helpful to them and so looking forward to that we also have a UI UX design hackathon coming up in March so that will be March 9th or 10th and that's also focused on high school students and you know the expectation there is people can come in not knowing anything at all but then leave understanding you know one the design

thinking process and how to problem-solve and to how to apply that to blockchain technology yeah I'm really about as well and I think I think that kind of thinking would be really beneficial to the blockchain space and a really accessible way for people to get involved without having to you know dive into any particular code bases or anything like that and then we have our annual conference coming up again at the end of April which I'm really looking forward to this year we're gonna have a workshop track as well so there'll be some more educational opportunities that are hands-on and then we'll have our primary speaking track similar to last year will feature research talks technical talks talks about design open source law social impact so we're definitely

expanding the scope of what we're going to cover and it'll again feature there's some really amazing women researchers and innovators and so we're really looking or tonight as well we also just recently announced fireside chats which will be a weekly newsletter and chatting with a different woman in the blotching space and talking about their journey and what they're working on now and their advice so I think those will be great as well and we're we're always looking to do different kinds of smaller educational events and and we don't ups and things of that nature so there's a lot we can do here and we're really looking forward to it cool excellent I mean it's it's interesting you know of course she 2:56 mostly gears

toward you know people who are female and are interested in in blockchains but the narratives I think right for for males or females are probably similar right what fascinates people about blockchains or do you see there a difference between if somebody's a man or a woman I think she 2:56 definitely started off as a woman and watching focus organization but we really do recognize the need for a truly diverse set of people working on these technologies and so we're trying to focus more of our efforts to cater to all all underrepresented minorities now obviously that's like a very large net

to cast and our familiarity is with women in particular and so a lot of our events are still women specific and providing those opportunities there to close those gaps but we are also actively working on learning and figuring out how we can help other individuals who don't necessarily access to these resources so for example the development boot camps and the UI UX design hackathon the target audience for both of those is is really anyone who wants to learn but we're specifically reaching out to underrepresented minorities whether male or female and you know people from lower income backgrounds who maybe don't necessarily have access to the same resources as people from other backgrounds and

reaching out to basically more people who people aren't necessarily reaching out to right now so I think that's a big thing for us like figuring out what is most effective and I'm talking talk going to these communities like talking to people figuring out what they're interested in and really just trying to be as welcoming as possible to make this basically make this as what can be pretty intimidating as I guess less intimidating as possible and but clearly not that's verbiage but and that's that's what we're thinking right now in terms of like the your question going back to your question about about narratives I don't necessarily think

that the narrative that gets people excited differs based on like gender specifically I usually like when we introduce the topics the different people will talk about you know the potential that this technology can unlock so we'll talk about when you're really exciting breakthroughs like the ability to have decentralized autonomous organizations or stable coins or to be able to send felis cross-border transfers or the other very high-level very exciting promise is that this technology kind of can unlock and I think that's a really good way to bring people in because then you get them excited you get them invested they start to care and once people start to care

about what's going on here and that's when the problems become really really interesting because they realize that there's so much that they can do and contribute you right now to help build that up cool half those narratives have they changed in the last few years for you personally I think you know for for me personally I got I initially was really interested in this technology because it was intellectually stimulating and I had been interested in like the intersection of you know game theory and computer science for a while and this presented a lot of really interesting like technological problems in this space but you know the the more I've I've been in this space it's definitely been more than that like the

ethos in this space is something that I think is really really unique that I haven't been able to find elsewhere and and the potential that a lot of these technologies cover Mach for underserved populations globally is is really high and so I definitely did for me to change from from just being something that was clearly intellectually stimulating to also like philosophy and ethos turbine let's take a quick break and we'll be right back this episode is supported by 21 lectures 21 lectures mission is to bring more developers to the Bitcoin ecosystem with in-person courses lectured by world-renowned Bitcoin and lightning developers courses teach

participants the fundamentals to work with blockchain technologies 21 lectures covers cryptography the structure of transactions and blocks and how they are chained smart contract language a lightning protocol as well as software and toolkits to develop on top of the blockchain and lightning to learn more visit 21 lectures calm this episode has support from core legend core ledger is a blockchain based peer-to-peer transaction infrastructure provider it enables businesses to document tokenize and trade any type of assets in a reliable and flexible environment core ledger makes anything transactional literally anything with

core ledger is highly dependable fast to implement products businesses can reduce costs and improve processes individuals can benefit from the full ownership of their own assets and make transactions directly with another party to learn more about poor Ledger's technology and how you can transform your business on the blockchain visit core ledger dotnet that's Co re led ger net core ledger that net let's speak a little bit about one of your other projects mechanism labs I spoke with with your co-founder Aparna about it a while back and and she explained already a few things there but I'm interested in you know some of the

current questions that you're working on yeah sure sure absolutely we've been thinking a lot about usability and how these technologies can actually be useful to a lot of populations who would maybe benefit them benefit from them the most and so we've been thinking about questions along that line and we've been doing some field research in India I've been talking a lot of different populations there to understand you know what their particular needs are and what their what the payment infrastructure currently looks like in that country and where this technology could even be applicable I think it's important to balance like the theoretical research

with also talking to people who this could benefit working with communities to understand their particular problems and so it's definitely a balance and I think it's really important to be well-informed on either end what are some of the specific research questions that you did you examine at the moment yeah I mean so this where we're starting this this new study after our deep dive into distributed consensus protocols so it's still pretty early we're doing a lot of like very exploratory research and generative interviews with individuals to build this initial understanding and that'll help us figure out like where to narrow down and ask even more specific questions so but with with mechanism labs do you think it's a

Research Institute or a think-tank or more like a launchpad you know maybe for projects that can be commercial pretty like flexible organization it really it though it's more of like an ethos than anything else like making research open-source and letting anyone contribute no matter what their background is and so people can definitely you know take that as they see fit I think you know lately we've been just focusing on like figuring out what the next interesting research questions are for us and then of course you know once we're a little flesh thought out a little bit more sharing it

with the community and getting feedback and it's I think it's a pretty organic process and evolution there were we're not necessarily trying to build out a think tank or an incubator or evangelize research of any sort it's more of just this ethos of your collaboration that's just the answer to cool questions in that in that field yeah still you know the technology I think blockchain technology is kind of like a glue I think you know between many applications and domains you know like finance supply chain identity insurance and many others right almost every business sector can at some point employee block chains I think but how do you then you know

introduce these other domains for example from economics or maybe sociology in the more hardcore math and and cryptography research yeah I think this is a really interesting question and and fundamentally a lot of these like watching projects and protocols really do require a lot a lot of knowledge from this really interdisciplinary set of fields so you know for example if a lot of projects right now we're looking at decentralized governance and for that need people who understand economics and sociology and you know how we built up governments in the past to figure out the best ways to implement decentralized governance it's very much

a non-trivial very difficult problem and and you know that's where you know just understanding how algorithms work isn't necessarily going to be helpful as helpful or if you're looking at incentive design in in proof of state systems for example like how are you going to incentivize stickers to you know participate in the protocol and how are slashing conditions going to work and that's when you know economic modeling becomes very very useful and be able to think about all of these different actors and what their incentives are and model that somehow I think now that's a really interesting area of research in a very new field in itself and so you know there are definitely a lot of interdisciplinary

thinkers required from from that point of view and then you know obviously there's from the development and from from the getting products in the hands of the user side you need strong development you know software development practices you need you know people who are able to design new products that users can interact with and ensure that you know the journeys are like understand what users are thinking about understand their journey and then build products that best serve them and then people to manage these projects so I definitely think that there's a really interdisciplinary skill set both on like the research side and the implementation side and and room for a lot of different people to get

involved how many people usually work on a project in in mechanism labs so far hmm okay how do you guys I mean how do you what are some of the processes that you're using you know for exchanging ideas you know maybe then also writing I mean are there any best practices that you found work quite well you know with a diverse and and multidisciplinary research topic like like blockchain technology yeah yeah I think I think similar processes to the normal research what those work pretty well so the way we've gone about it in the past is we'll start by brainstorming a lot of different you know thoughts and ideas and having these

recording sessions and trying to understand what problems are interesting and then after never get on a problem looking at what different solutions could be then will you know go off and explore those on our own look at previous lips during the space come back together brainstorm some more and then eventually once once we gather all of the information and you know done a lot of the simulating and all of like when it comes time to put the information together what we'll usually do is put it together in a very understandable accessible way like we did with the chart comparing all of the different consensus protocols and then after that only after that will we write it up into

you know some sort of paper format I think a big thing for us is also making sure to make the information accessible and as easy to digest as possible which is why for the last paper we also tried to write a series of blog posts that kind of dove into a lot of the topics that we touched on in those blog posts are definitely a bit more accessible than the paper itself okay but that's something that's not really happening in academic research is it I mean it's pretty much locked up indeed ivory tower there that's true I definitely I think it could be really really helpful if every time someone wrote a paper and they wrote an adjoining blog post or put together a resource that would help people understand it yeah that would be really cool I'd love to see more people

doing that yeah exactly I mean just a little side note you know that's how I started making my movies I had a research project in Singapore and it was an open data project and nobody understood what I was doing there and so somebody as a joke you know said why don't you make a video like something like an advertisement or a you know like an ad or something for your project and I did you know and a few days after it was online there was already like people you know calling from the World Bank interested in collaborating and that would have never happened with just a book you know I published two books on the topic and nobody read those but the movies like almost a million people watched them so

yeah interesting you definitely have to you know meet people where they are and keep up to date with the mediums of information sharing yeah absolutely personally what which phase you know off the research projects do you enjoy most Oh honestly I think it's different with with each project or each topic like I'm sure it'll be very different from this more you with this more usability focused research then when we were looking at distributed consensus I've tended to enjoy most parts of the process just because I'm learning and growing in a different way at each stage so it's brainstorming it's a lot about being very creative and no truck trying out lots of different ideas and testing

out different things when it comes to putting all the information together it's you know thinking about the person on the other side so what is gonna be understandable to them like what's the best way to break down this information and put it together so it's the most useful and that's also you know a different kind of primitive thought because then you're you're not just you're not thinking necessarily about the specific technical problem at hand but how to convey and communicate um and I think both sides of that process are important I wouldn't necessarily say I prefer one to the other but yeah because it's it's just a different you know set of learning and thinking and on each on each side you know with both with with

mechanism labs or also with XI 256 how important is it for you to be in the Bay Area I think being in the Bay Area is definitely helpful because just like being able to get out to different meetups and and meet people is useful but I definitely don't think it's a necessity at all I think both of these organizations would have been able to exist and have pretty much the same instructors I have now even if they weren't necessarily started in the Bay Area just because this base in itself is so distributed so you know people will hop from conference to conference and you'll meet people in Europe the newly people of Asia and the new only people in the Bay Area and and it's also super

digital so you can reach almost anyone over the internet nowadays so I think geography is a lot less limiting than maybe it was in the past and so that that's pretty great and we definitely want to try especially 2:256 to like not have geography be a limitation so open sourcing as many of our materials all of our materials recording as plenty of our events as we can with the mentorship program it was completely global which is which is so cool they're people who are partners you know from like the United States and Asia or Europe and South America which is which is absolutely amazing and more and more we want to be able to support events in different

parts of the globe and but you know all this will come as as we're able to you know have the bandwidth to do all these things ok awesome Alexis did you always want to be a researcher myself getting into research but and I I don't really know it's like so the interesting thing about research is that I think like formal formal academic research like or getting a PhD or something like that was definitely not something that had actually appealed to me previously now I definitely find it very interesting and it's definitely like a something I would potentially consider but I'm also very flexible and

like my thinking and ideas and pads I don't necessarily think about things in like a certain way or like a certain pathway it's more about like the knowledge gained and like the way you go about different things like most people like out there could do like a folk history program by finding you know an advisor working on the thesis themselves and I think more and more we're gonna see people kind of stepping outside of institutions a little bit and forging their own individual pathways and so for me it's I think it's more learning and growth than solving problems that are interesting to me and developing the

skill sets necessary to tackle those problems in your work or also in your life I mean who are your role models that's a good question definitely a difficult question I I think I mean I'm inspired a lot by the people who I'm working with and that people are on me I think there's so much I can learn from just about anyone and and and so I guess yeah I guess most of my inspiration comes from like the people around me and that doesn't you know necess I just mean the people physically around me but also like you know the the people like all across the globe whoever able to interact with because of the internet so whether

that's on like you know like Twitter or any other kind of discussion forum I'm gonna able to talk to people with different ideas and different perspectives and I think that's definitely something that's what's really cool in the forms am I thinking okay what is one thing you're currently learning for yourself well recently we've been learning a lot about user research and how to go about that process as we've been conducting that usability study and so that's been a new thing that I've been trying to learn and so understanding those processes and how people have been thinking about them has been definitely pretty cool and there's definitely a lot more learning I have to

do there but you know it's excited as always what about the work-life balance I mean is that ever a problem for you work like I mean I that's an interesting question I think I mean I I definitely do what makes like what I find the most fulfillment and happiness with and that for me happens to be like like working on she took 56 and working on mechanism labs like these things don't necessarily feel like quote unquote work like these things are like what thing with fulfillment happiness and so I spend most of my time like all these things or like reading or learning okay so yeah what's you know Alexis what's a what's a

totally selfish wish for your own future oh that's an interesting question a selfish wish for my own future I guess like to continue to be able to have the opportunities to be able to like learn and grow and perceive problems out I'm interested in and not necessarily be hindered by like real-world constraints as much as possible like if I could you know be able to do that for the rest of my life I think I think that'd be pretty amazing Alexis this was great many thanks for taking time yeah sure thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on

a podcast web site the blockchain and us comm to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel staggers and I thank you very much for listening you [Music]