A hard position?

I do like Watchout. Are you offering?

It’s just...

Only when you make money do you get money, do you get to continue building. Sorry, that was a little, that was ranty.

I’m curious whether we can do it in the civic tech sector. I feel pretty certain that that would keep it...There was a talk by Clément, a guy from France, about if we’re not careful, civic tech will get appropriated by gov tech.

Then the work keeps happening, and the work continues to happen after they don’t get any more money. I’m really in love with that way of putting money into open source communities, and into internally motivated communities.

It actually, it keeps going well after you remove the incentive. That feels like what the Secure Scuttlebutt Foundation is doing. They’re paying for social change in their community. They’re paying for new shapes of the network, for new culture.

They distort the culture around whatever people are doing. Then when they remove it, the things that were making the actions happen is encoded in the social fabric. It’s encoded in the relationships. It’s encoded in the ways that people work together in the space.

It’s not continuing down the path. What the Secure Scuttlebutt Foundation does is they, instead of applying the incentive to the node, they apply it to the edge of the graph. They apply it to the relationship. They apply it to what Alex calls the social fabric.

I feel it’s really connected to something that Sandy Pentland talks about. It’s about, don’t apply the incentive to the person. Don’t apply the incentive to the node in the network, because then, when you run out of money, you stop paying, and you remove the incentive, that little node ...

Because they valued the certain social aspects, basically the money always went to building community, either because it was they were funding the thing that everyone was most excited about, they were giving them latitude to experiment.

In some places, it’s way more. They want to keep it simple. They essentially developed a process where there was no focus on the deliverables. It wasn’t about feature development. It wasn’t about needing anything.

How do you talk about it? It’s the chunks are meant to be enough time for, it’s $5,000, and it’s supposed to be one month of work by one person. That’s not true everywhere. Some places, like in San Francisco, that’s a week, tops. [laughs]

Was it inspired by the Awesome?

They didn’t want to do that. They invented a really loose social process for giving enough...

They started trying to spend this in a way that didn’t burden them with monitoring, which is very un-grant-like. Normally, grants, the good ones, start off with, “How do we evaluate the success of this? How do we know if we got return?”

This is the kind of thing I was hoping for. I was like, “All these new money people.”

That’s wild.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I forgot.

Sorry?

A friend got a grant from the Secure Scuttlebutt Foundation, which is a hilarious word. It’s a protocol for social networks. They receive money from cryptocurrency, from Bitcoin. I think that’s how they got this chunk of money.

Pay someone who is 100 percent interested in that. No, maybe that’s bad. Maybe it’s bad to pay someone to build community.

You could pay someone.

What if we want to pay someone in honorarium, or start giving someone a little bit of a wage, or an amount, an appreciation?

There’s a few things that that money can be spent on. What if there’s like, someone has a different idea? Is there clarity? How do we spend money together?

The whole space?

That’s awesome. Collaborative food-making.

How do people...

This all sounds great.

Those are sweet glasses. [laughs]

That’s amazing.

Oh, hey.

What do I get back, if I put money in here?

Whoa.

Oh, not good.

How about money?

I wish I could be in all the places.

Maybe more vTaiwan, just since I think it’s its own thing.

An empty, do I have to ask a specific question, or do you just have thoughts and feelings on community building?

This was a really good event, the summit. Can I ask thoughts on community building, and can I leave a blank space for asking, and just put things there? [laughs]

Anyway, I don’t know. Lots of loose balloon thoughts. I don’t know where they live. [laughs]

Somehow, it seems to fit in this place where we’re building overlapping communities.

I feel like I accidentally put this into practice by getting really excited about the ideas of others. I will get animated, even though I know, I’ve heard this before. I’ve seen this. I don’t know. It’s like I still give them, “You invented this. Go with it. Run.”

I wonder what the relationship is between having that feedback of creation, like creating a thing from things you take out of your surroundings, like ideas, when you think you created that the world has already invented.

That’s cool. I love there’s a word. There’s a word for it.

Social bricolage?

Then I’m like, “Oh, this is great.” There’s this energy that I own this idea. I made it. It’s like, I felt like I built it from pieces that were around. There’s a stickiness to that. Just more so than if I just read about it, and didn’t have any ...

I’m trying to think. That was around social forces that maybe make us more inclined to dig into ideas that feel like they’re our own. Like, if I make up a life hack, it’s like, oh, every time I go to bed, and I have something to remember, I’ll hang ...

I always answer the questions wrong when they’re like, “Ask questions of the audience,” raising it for question two, when I’m on question one. I feel like every conversation I’ve had this past week has been one that I wish there was an infinite number of people in the conversation ...

That’s so cool. I heard her lightning talk, but I missed a lot, I think, in translation. Everyone was speaking very fast. The interpreters were keeping up.