Transcript: Voice of Blockchain 2018 Recap: Part 3

Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, The Best Way to Build It, episode number 94. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. Last week, we had the Voice of Blockchain Recap, part two. I was able to hear from two past guests, one of which is Lexi Predromos.

She's the executive director at the Chicago Blockchain Center, and she moderated a panel called Interfacing of Technology and Local Government. She had on her panel Sunil Thomas, Christopher Cutter, and Lisa Nestor. That panel had a great discussion about how blockchain is able to support different government-led market initiatives based upon the needs of the citizens. The other guest that we heard from in the last episode was Paul Doherty, CEO of the DigiGroup. He participated in a panel with Lotte Moberg.

She is the author of The Political Economy of Special Economic Zones, and they spoke about blockchain opportunities in special economic zones. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, you really need to check it out because it's super interesting. Check it out at constructor.com slash EP93. In this episode, you'll be hearing from three people, they're very distinct voices that are affecting the world in their very own way, but each in a very powerful way. The person I'm going to start first with is Sharon Burns.

And she is at the Voice of Blockchain project. And she's very excited about the new project that she's launching at this particular conference. So I'm going to let her share with you here. I'm Sharon Burns, and I'm helping to put on the Voice of Blockchain project conference here. And what's probably most exciting for me is being able to launch my project at this conference.

So blockdataforgood.com. Wonderful. So tell me more about Blockdata for Good. Well, my background is in the philanthropic sector. And one thing that is missing from the philanthropy and the whole social good space is accurate reading of all the inputs that are coming in.

So donations that are made by individuals, government grants, foundation grants, microtransactions now, social impact investing, all of these inputs are coming into the social economy and we don't have any way to measure it. And because we're not able to measure it and track it, we can't tell where there's gaps. We can't tell if we're getting more or less. And it makes it impossible to collaborate around common things that they have. Through data philanthropy, so we encourage people like if you're donating to Girl Scouts, I donate to Girl Scouts on a regular basis.

So if I donate $500 to Girl Scouts towards STEM in the south side of Chicago, once I write that check to the Girl Scouts, I can turn around and create the data record and donate the data to this open portal that everybody can see. So that the next person that comes up and says, I want to donate to somebody that does Girl STEM in Chicago, they can easily find it. Right way, there isn't any way to find any nonprofit other than doing independent Google searches across every single thing.

Whereas this database would actually create a platform that allows every single nonprofit to have a standard page. So it becomes kind of like the Facebook of nonprofits, the LinkedIn of nonprofits, and then people can actually make donations directly through the portal. Wow, that's really exciting. It is really exciting because what happens right now is that if you're trying to find a nonprofit, the only way you can select them is by the data they have on their website, what they're telling you they do, when really what they're doing is in those funding records.

You know, you're funding for STEM, you're funding for research on AIDS, you're funding for social impact, you're funding for jobs. That's the real actionable data. And it's interesting because when we were actually talking earlier, you mentioned that, yes, you have to report this information to the IRS, right? But if whatever they put on their website, for instance, it could be out of date. Exactly.

You don't know if it's accurate, or you hope that they're not falsifying it, but it's possible that they may be even unknowingly, right? So, what this does is it seems to streamline that process so that you can trust the data itself, so you can understand exactly what those donations are. Okay, wonderful. It's funny because we're here at Navy Pier, and I'm familiar with the Children's Museum. They had issues with getting funding for their project, and this is an ongoing basis.

I can't say issues, but they're always looking for donors, of course. And they needed a frequent, simple thing like a construction project, you know, fixing up for the facilities and making sure that they know exactly who it was so they can get names on plaques and things like that. It sounds like what you're doing would really help with something like that. Yes, so exactly. Where it would help a nonprofit is if the nonprofit becomes part of this community, then they have access to all the other data that everyone else has aggregated.

So they would be, a nonprofit would be able to go in and say, who else is funding this type of work? Like, who else, what are the funders that fund construction projects? They would be also able to find partners that are doing similar work. Like, are there other children's groups that are trying to build the same thing I am, and I can connect with them and learn from them? So it allows you to not just find funders, but finding collaborators.

And one, I've spoken with researchers, they say that's one of the most important things is being able to easily find people to collaborate with. And that would be in the data. That's so interesting. Ah, so it's really building a network, which is why you mentioned like, similarly, Facebook or LinkedIn. It's understanding your network of other donors who also donate to similar causes as you would like to.

Very interesting. Yeah, so building the community first. So it's very much a startup. I want to build the community first so that the community can participate in building the platform and they can actually invest in building the platform. So the nonprofits that are going to be part of building it would be the actual owners of the system.

And that's what I'm most excited about is that it will be a for-profit company, but the owners will be the nonprofits that are involved in the space doing the work. Very cool. So tell me, how can someone learn about blockdataforgood.com? I'm in the process of updating the website. It just looks a little messy.

But blockdatafor, the number four, good.com. So what I really liked about Sharon's project is that it's just so practical and it really some simple results that really do something that has never been done before. And it provides accuracy of data in order to connect people that are circling around a particular cause. Now, the person that you'll be hearing from next is Lindsay Nguyen. She actually just finished sharing the stage with Sharon Burns prior to this conversation.

So you'll get to hear her perspective of how that panel discussion went. Not only that, but we talk about the project that she's working on and the women of color in blockchain. I asked her to introduce herself here. My name is Lindsay Nguyen, and I am the founder of Women of Color in blockchain. I'm also the chief risk officer for Stranger Labs, which is an MIT Media Lab spin out.

Well, let's start with MIT Labs. Tell me a little bit about that. So MIT Media Labs is an institution now that everybody knows is synonymous with innovation and pushing the envelope and always making sure they have an eye on emerging technologies and how that's playing out in both the technology space and in society. And so we got our start through a bunch of open source projects really being bought in house at MIT and then recently spun out within the last year to found our own company focused on privacy and identity management.

So you told me a little bit earlier that you have a background in cybersecurity. So how does that funnel into what you have done? You don't have to tell me any details because it's secure, I know. Just tell us how that connects. Absolutely.

So I think that having a background in cybersecurity shapes my perspective on how I look at any emerging technologies, be it machine learning, be it AI, cloud, and blockchain is just an extension of that. So when I started seeing this more and more as requests come in from our clients looking to do feasibility studies or security assessments, impact assessments on what this meant for their environments and their specific use cases, it was a natural fit that I could speak to both the use cases and the risk and security implications that they would need to be thinking about.

That's really helpful to kind of bridge that gap. Okay. So what do you think as far as the innovative trends right now? What are the most viable and what are the most risky? I think that the most risky to me are people putting PII, which is data that is extremely sensitive on the blockchain.

When you're approaching a project as a user or as a creator of the project, making sure that things around your name, your address, very, very sensitive medical information are all protected and preserved in a way that is going to make you comfortable as a user, but also makes you very aware of the information that you're putting out there. And if and when that system or database is exploited, that you understand what's going to be in the universe about you. So it's a matter of that permissioning, right?

Yeah. When it comes down to it. It's permissioning. It's about education, educating yourself as a user, knowing what information you're putting out. And making sure that you understand responsible operating practices online, even more so on the blockchain because of the immutability that exists in these systems.

We're not going to touch on authentication or anything like that. You sure? No. We don't have to. I'm just saying.

Oh, goodness. I know that's riveting subject matter for most of you, but. I'm sure. I'm sure. So let's transition a little bit.

Okay. Women of color in blockchain. Yes. So can you share with us about how that got started and what it is today? Absolutely.

So I was attending Consensus a few months back and I'm sure many of you have read the statistics over 8,000 people, right? And you look out into that sea of people and the black and brown faces were few and far in between. And even looking at an eye on programming where you had one or two sort of events that a pretty sad attempt at living those principles of diversity and inclusion and then thinking about how we can improve and get better in that. So we did a spot with women on the block that eventually aired on MSNBC.

Looking back on that, it was extremely interesting because five of the women in the group were in that spot realizing that we do exist. We have ideas that are just as innovative and groundbreaking as our counterparts who are in the majority, but needing to fill that gap in organizing and making sure that we could be just as intentional and effective in how we entered this space and how we attacked some of the projects and goals that we have as a community. So that's how you got started at Consensus and that's been the goal.

So where are we now? So where are we now? We have a really active group on Telegram. Literally, it just kind of blew up. In those few short months, there are over 80 active women spread across Ghana to Georgia to London to Puerto Rico.

And so that interesting and unique flavor that the group is taking on is just something that's extremely exciting to me. So what do you intend to achieve? What are the next steps here? So the next steps for me in making sure that education is readily available and resources are aggregated in a way that's very easy for people to grab onto, whether they're a new developer coming into the blockchain space and what some of those smart contract languages and things like that might mean for them as they navigate their career.

Also connecting founders with other people of color or women who could further their projects. Right? And also building that community and fostering that community where we can talk openly and in a safe environment about what we need, what we want to see put out there in the world and really unpack some of these concepts that are going to uniquely affect communities of color. That's all important and we want to make sure that we do that in a very intentional and organized way. So you just stepped down from speaking and it was a panel on diversity and inclusion.

Can you share with me any of your big takeaways from that discussion? Oh man, it was great. I think some of my big takeaways are the CM Winters, the moderator brought up the press of capitalism and the press of really being laser focused on making money and being out here to further our professional interests, but then being faced with the very real dilemmas of how we deal with some of the concepts that might come up. When people aren't necessarily inclusive to women or there's ageism or comments that are made online that make it very clear that this is not a person who aligns with those principles and how you deal with that.

So we said that bravery is one piece of that. Being intentional is also another piece, but being okay with passing on opportunities that don't philosophically align with who you are and what you're trying to achieve. So you have to be very connected with your own core values and understand them very well. Absolutely. And then Sharon also said, building a big tent, making sure that the people who you bring along with you, people that you include as advisors, people that you include as engineers on your project, also live and breathe those same principles.

And then I didn't get to hit on this point specifically, but when we start talking about diversity and inclusion, being more action oriented and making sure that we're not just paying this lip service. So I would challenge people to go beyond D&I. So I mean, what does that look like? What does actionable look like? So actionable for me is when you get called to be a speaker, if you're a male, say you want to include an inclusion rider in your contract.

Say I'm not going to participate on a panel where it's all men. Or saying that when you go into a meeting within your company and you recognize that there are no women in the room that have been invited as stakeholders for these important initiatives, be bold enough to stop that meeting and say, we have a very big gap here that we need to address before we can move on. Right? So there are tactical ways that you can do that. I in my meetings that I run like to appoint a devil's advocate also to check my own bias and making sure that, you know, whenever we're unpacking some of these subjects and thinking through our strategies, that somebody is appointed, literally your whole job in the meeting is to poke holes in my theory and poke holes in the argument about how we go about it to

make sure we come up with the most sound solutions. I love those tools and approaches. Is there anything else you'd like to share? Yeah, I mean, I would challenge people to do away with paper based programs just for the sake of checking a box of corporate social responsibility and get to authentic programs and initiatives that make sense in your own organization. And if you don't know how to do that, partnering with people who do.

So go beyond D and I and get to D, I and A. Diversity, inclusion and accountability. Yes, I love that. I actually have a client. I do construction projects and I have a client.

She has to be a black woman. And she mentioned as I'm supporting her developing RFPs, you know, she said we need some language in the RFP to articulate. Yes, this is something that we're looking for. We're looking for diverse contractors to work with us. If there's a specific metric, just kind of piggybacking on your point, if there's a specific metric that you want to target, you know, list that I think if it's just trying to sandbox and figure out like who are the specific people who can support in this way and like how do we make sure we don't exclude by asking for other specific things.

It's really assessing and testing the waters and making sure that you understand like the community at large. Absolutely. I was just talking to somebody at the Harvard Leadership School about potentially doing a case study about this because there's a whole field called open source intelligence, right? There are some companies who say, oh, yeah, we believe in diversity and inclusion. But then if you do an open source search and, you know, start to mine some of the things that they've got out there, right, like their job descriptions, right, their company mission and vision, like things that are very public, it'll say something very different just by the nature of the language that they use.

So it's making sure that you come from a place of understanding where you can be most effective when you challenge people on those things. That's right. So you have to educate yourself as well. Make an effort to educate those who are around you. Yeah.

And I think that like also capturing research areas where we need some further research and some further analysis is going to be huge, right? Like, what does it mean when you have biometric data or data about, you know, race and things like that captured and stored in these systems? Can police access these systems? Are they doing so with a mind towards fair practices and just practices? How that plays out, not just in the technology, but also in society is very, very important for us to capture and start to track.

And then we can make better decisions with that information that we've collected. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Lindsay. This has been really fun. Yeah, it's been awesome.

I had a great time. So Lindsay and I wrapped up our interview and guess who walks by? Paul Doherty. So we're just having a bantered conversation and at some point I say, you know what, let's start recording because I'm really enjoying the two of you just chatting back and forth. So Lindsay was asking Paul here to share his opinion about Portopia rebuilding of Puerto Rico.

Just because you have money doesn't mean you're smart. It's not about buying land. It's not about cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a immature technology that very immature people think that they have a handle on. Rethink what you're doing, especially when it comes to the transference, because the cryptocurrency, especially the way that drills down, Puerto Rico doesn't have enough electricity to keep and sustain their own lifestyle right now.

When you start to put that type of thing into it, what are you going to build, create that type of power? Think it through. It's like on the surface, trying to build a city sounds really good, but the people of Puerto Rico, there's a reason why people all don't live in San Juan. They like a lifestyle that's more rural. They like that type of thing.

They don't want your utopia because first of all, you pushing your own ideas on top of that, Spade, you should have went in there and done research about what the people wanted. I think that's why there's so much conflict between the local population and these newly minted millionaires trying to build Portopia is because they haven't taken the time to understand the culture. They're just going in and enforcing what they want, which is basically a new age of digital colonialism. Some small tidbits that people don't know about me.

My dad lived in Puerto Rico for enough years to become fluent in Spanish. He was actually in high school and I think he started college there. He did a lot of translating, but my family is originally from the Caribbean and this is actually close to home for me. When you talk about countries that have disaster take place with them and there is an outside organization that doesn't understand a particular culture thinking that they know what is needed, then it can be a real problem. I read a story recently about a village and they didn't have a well that was close to them.

The kids would have to travel to and from a well to retrieve water on behalf of their families. So there came in an organization that wanted to help this village and build a well that was closer to them. They did that and it actually turned out to be a real problem. The parents were unhappy because the kids were playing in the village all the time. They had nowhere to go and provide for the parents a little alone time.

That's something that the parents actually really depended on and it provided for the village to grow. So not understanding how a community operates and why they do things, it can really impact them and that's just one small example. So Paul goes on to explain the dangers about going on with this process and not listening to citizens who actually live in the country. So Paul, he actually gives three tips on what to think about when designing a smart city. I was just on the phone with the CEO of Waterfront Toronto about two days ago.

He was responsible for bringing in Google sidewalk labs with about a billion dollars worth of investment in an area that takes up maybe about 20% of the entire Waterfront district called Keyside. Everyone loved the idea because they were talking really big. They'd have these town meetings. We want autonomous vehicles. We want this.

Meanwhile, people who don't know what they want, which is why it's a constant layering system when you're talking about a smart city. It's not Insta-city. Well, two things happened over the past eight weeks. One, someone realized on social media that sidewalk labs is really Google and all the crap going on right now with people questioning both Facebook and Google. How are you managing your personalized data?

All of a sudden the people in Toronto, they're in the streets protesting with signs. They're the nicest people on the planet. So for them to get upset, this is a big deal. The second thing was they finally put out their artist's renderings about what this thing's going to be. If I had ever stepped foot in architectural school in my first class and shown what they're showing as professionals, I would have been kicked out of architectural school.

They're fitting 5,000 different ideas into a sack of potatoes and it's horrible. There's only three things that you can worry about right now. You can worry about people's safety, people's security, and starting the process of understanding what their needs are for improving the quality of life. That's the three-legged stool. Everything else is fluff, including the cryptocurrencies.

Why would you have cryptocurrency when you can be using blockchain protocols for much better things like finding the proper healthcare, starting to identify people what they need to how many people you have? Let's get down to brass tacks, right? Because great things are going to happen and there's some great minds. Paul talks a little bit about the experiences and observations he made in his educational experience and he talks about how urban design doesn't necessarily equate to human-centric design. You'll hear Lindsay challenge Paul a little bit about how to take into account humanity at large versus just a subset.

I was on the red line through school and although I was at the Harvard GSD, I spent most of my time at MIT. Why? Because they were doing cooler things, especially with the meat labs. Well not for design but for technology. But that red line was the back and forth between that.

And the one thing that I will never forget is not so much all the cool designs we got to do but watching nascent technologies in the labs go to Stanford become product. That's what happened. MIT came up with the cool stuff. Stanford brings it to market. At the end of the day, they always talked about the human-centric piece.

Everyone is all about human-centric today. Human-centric this, human-centric that. But when you're talking about complete urban environments, it takes on a whole different meaning because you could be creating environments for strife from the get-go. The haves and the have-nots. All that type of stuff.

I love how you say that everybody is all about human-centric design now. What does that really mean? And I'll take a saying from my father. Don't talk about it, be about it. So how many people are actually about it in their action?

I think it's important to really get together diverse study groups to see how it affects their communities, to see what they want as far as usability, to see how they see extending the technology in ways that you might not have even thought about. So when you talk about human-centered design, really understanding the tactical approach to engineering for a bunch of different users, it is absolutely imperative. And when you don't have these people represented in your engineering teams, how do you expect to be able to pull their perspectives in when you're talking about usability studies?

We got to think about these things. We have a feasibility study that was just completed for China, and it was very typical. Deloitte did their job. Demographics, because we're putting up this virtual reality industrial park that have a theme park associated with it. Sounds very benign, right?

I pushed them further, and we started to do real demographics of people, socioeconomic. Because one of the things that we saw is that when you're starting to talk about what happens in a place that they can force things to happen and then spin the news, fake news, to make sure that it seems like something else. Case in point, in Shanghai, they wanted their version of the World Expo to be the best of all time, and they felt their measure was the most amount of people. For 500 miles, concentric around Shanghai, during the six months that Expo was open, they would shut down complete cities and complete towns and bus people in with free tickets to go through the turnstiles.

So they were the most successful, but it didn't matter if they lost money, because the measure was how many people do you get through there? Shanghai, Disney is going through a very similar thing. Universal, when it opens up in two months, and Beijing will go through the same thing. I didn't want that. I wanted to make sure that real people were doing things, like Tencent that owns League of Legends.

What would happen if we could actually make it so that the competition just isn't for having to have the console and things like that, but any person that has a device that can be in a browser, start to democratize in a communist society the different levels of caste systems based upon economics? And when you break that down, now the kid that is the butcher's son can be competing against people that are of the affluent bourgeois, and they're doing it on their own terms because they're kids.

What we've done is part of our feasibility study was to put in the world's coolest arena so that we would have these championships. Last year in LA, League of Champions at the Staples Center brought in a little over 20,000 people a night for four nights in a row to watch gamers play League of Legends, and it streamed out to over 84 million people live. It's an entire subculture I know nothing about until my son showed me Roblox, Fortnite, and I knew about Minecraft. I'm like, we're all over this.

So it's trying to find what that commonality, what's the taxonomy that breaks it out from being typical feasibility study and typical stuff that people want to see, blah, blah, blah, blah, and get down to the heart of it because I'm building things greenfield, and it's dirt. People want to feel like they own it. What's the soul? What's the mythology that we can create around that, but not make a pop-up city like we did in Australia and the US that resulted in a car-centric society? One thing also is right now on the block stage, two in a row about Chinese cryptocurrency.

My biggest fear, because they have all the money, China's looking to reposition itself because of all the trade powers of being a technology independent and a technology leader in something around the world instead of having to just China-size it. And what do we say about cryptocurrency and its use of energy? Yeah, yeah, that's a national issue right now for everyone. So I think that a lot of people are as concerned as you are, and we've brought up these issues of people rushing to the technology without really understanding the social implications.

So my question, my challenge to us as socially conscious technologists is what now? How do we build coalitions and partnerships that are going to stop the slow creep of the type of power structures that we don't want, that we're tired of in the traditional sector being transitioned and implemented carte blanche into the new blockchain economy? How do we do that? Follow the money. Right now, there's funds being put together that I know of, because I'm working with two of them, that are blossoming out of what's going on in Jackson Hole this week, the central banks and the sovereign wealth funds.

There's a changing of the guard going on. We're seeing it inside of the design and construction real estate industry, where the different associations are fundamentally changing their executive directors, their leadership, because, well, it's time. It's like, finally, the old pasty white guys get the hell out of the way, right? And truthfully, like, CSI, its average age is like 70. And it's like, diverse?

Yeah, right. No, you're spec writers, which was great back in the day. But you as an organization failed to recognize that you needed not just age transition of generation, but diversity across all things, such as why are you just thinking about buildings, maybe a little infrastructure when we should have had at the table the car manufacturers, people from the energy sector, the water sector, because you don't build a building in the middle of outer space. It's connected. So when we're talking about socially conscious, we have to start looking at biology, biomimicry.

And understanding that we got to learn from nature. And it goes all the way back to Alan Turing, because he was forced in World War II to come up with something. We came up with bits and bytes and rows and columns, right? And then he was brought in at the very end during the whole Princeton University hydrogen bomb thing, which they had to prove everything every month that they were moving forward, especially when all the thoughts in Princeton went out to New Mexico, they had to produce.

But Turing was always very regretful at the end of his life that he knew that that was only one type of computing. The next stage of computing is actually going to drive and be driven by the money people. And that's where blockchain is a cow path. We're just starting to see the grass being put down. It's going to take a little time for blockchain to morph into something else.

When we start to stop taking data into account that it's bits and bytes and that's part of an element, it's like water being ice, liquid or steam. When we start taking a look at data like that, suddenly now we're going to be giving power and the money people are going to come thriving into it so that that cow path becomes a superhighway. That's the hope. Data by itself and the telecommunications powers that will be behind that, speed won't be an issue. Our issue is going to be how do you control it?

And that's my question to you guys is you guys are building out these wonderful thoughts and think tanks. I think private sector, public sector and the thoughtfulness of academia has to come together in order to solve this problem because each one of us can't do it ourselves. So we had an amazing discussion, as you can tell, about what it really means to have human centric design in cities, which is really the discussion about smart cities and citizens. To wrap up this episode, let me know if you liked it.

Let me know if you found it valuable. Share it with your friends and colleagues. You can let me know you enjoyed the discussion with all of the guests here on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn or you can email me too at Brittany at constructor dot com. That's B R I T T A N I E at constructor dot com. We're going to be continuing the discussion with our next guest about the organizational perspective, namely the private approach on how we support humans in order to enable them to be fulfilled, to have better well-being and wellness as a focus.

Rex and I talk about his newest book called The Healthy Workplace Nudge. He's also written Change Your Space, Change Your Culture and The Real Estate Revolution. You know, the focus around shifting your mind set to take into account all the cultural implications of an organization to then make those smart steps to enable people to work and live and operate in their scenarios so that they do give their best selves to the work at hand. But it's not for the purpose of giving themselves for the work at hand.

It's simply giving to them because they're people. I'm really excited to share this upcoming interview with you next week. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at your favorite podcast player. And I look forward to talking with you next week.