Introduction

0:00

let’s do that again we don’t have to do the clap test again

0:15

hi uh i’m uh ryan steck one of the directors here at art engine uh today

0:21

i’m here with jesse mckee who is a head of strategy at 221a who’s the

0:27

cultural center based in vancouver 221a is really a unique

0:32

center in canada not only for blurring the boundaries between art and design

0:38

but also the focus on research and infrastructure for culture

0:43

and there it happens across you know digital and physical spaces

0:50

for 221a this includes i think 14 000 square meters of culturally dedicated real estate which

0:57

if we think of that in the context of vancouver is quite impressive but one of the reasons that we’re here

1:04

today is not only the work they do generally but specifically the kind of leadership that they’re

1:09

demonstrating in the digital domain so this example of this leadership is

1:16

this research project blockchains and cultural padlocks

1:21

this is a research initiative started in 2019 a four four-year initiative to sort of

1:27

forge a path into the blockchain space for culture to challenge our understandings of value

1:34

and rethink what a cooperative can be in the 21st century

1:39

so the first phase of the report has a wide range of contributors and collaborators including

1:45

rosemary heather morale soton dimiah i think i’m saying that wrong so i

1:51

apologize eric erica wong um among many others it’s an incredible document and jesse is

1:58

the lead on this project and he’s here to talk about this uh amazing initiative

2:03

uh welcome jesse hi nice to see you again and nice to talk to ottawa a city back from you know

2:10

my 20s where i spent some time so and the art engine and then the arts court building all very familiar to me so nice

2:17

to join you virtually yeah it’s great to have you here in the space in the digital space um i

2:23

i think we can dig right into it um obviously uh we’ll have a links to the to the to the

2:30

project to the document that we’re talking about today as much some other primers if people want to get familiar

2:36

with some of the ideas we’re talking about um i think though you know

2:42

you’ve got this four phase project so i’d be interested to hear this report is

2:47

the sort of first phase it and what what are some of the key findings that have come out of this

2:54

out of this report like what are some of the central ideas that the cultural community should be paying attention to

2:59

in the blockchain space the way we came about getting into it was through the canada council for the arts digital

Key Findings

3:05

strategy fund so i think that’s important to know because the way that these funding programs kind of shape

3:10

organizations and shape the cultural sector is important so we’re it’s pretty much 100 no not 100 i’d say probably 95

3:18

funded from that that digital strategy fund um and we’re working with those guidelines and so we were challenged to

3:24

think about like how is your organization going to enter into the digital ecosystem not just be a user on

3:30

social media or kind of be a prosumer or something like that but what are you going to do to develop infrastructure

3:36

and support and provide and create value for the communities that that you’re serving in that way so what the key

3:43

findings that we had is so this project started pre-pandemic really and i’ve been thinking about it since 2017

3:49

although we really didn’t get going until 2019 when the funding was confirmed and everybody was on boarded

3:55

you know going throughout the whole kind of like 2016 onwards you know we had a great sense that things were changing

4:01

and um we didn’t want to get stuck in any rigidity traps or kind of quicksand as

4:06

kind of things kind of were you know coming apart and reassembling in different ways so

4:12

um you know this is very much at the same time that things that were coming out like there was a writer and artist

4:18

and professor jenny odell who teaches at stanford who wrote a book called um how to do nothing um which doesn’t sound

4:25

very uh informative but actually it is it’s about resisting the attention economy um so i think we’re thinking

4:31

about that and what the attention economy does uh to people and to culture and to artists and

4:37

designers and secondly thinking through books like shoshana zuboff’s um

4:43

kind of what was it called um can i just do a quick google and i’ll just mine that

4:49

there it is the age of surveillance capitalism um which is called and then it has the subtitle uh

4:55

the fight for human future at the new frontier of power so i think that was also very informative to us and that was

5:01

a very popular book as well like new york times bestseller so we’re seeing like the early starts of what later on

5:07

in the pandemic and post kind of like trump presidency kind of we see as a real distrust in web 2.0 which is web

5:16

2.0 as kind of describes what happened from like youtube onwards um you know i remember actually i was in ottawa

5:21

studying when youtube came out and our professors weren’t that interested in it back in 2006

5:27

but all of a sudden you know now it is the center of the world um so but that

5:32

that caused a lot of problems and so what we needed to do was think about how do we get out of this situation

5:38

how do we build out of here um and how do we start reclaiming the value that we’re creating online

5:44

and reclaiming our identity and kind of remaking civil society in this space rather than letting kind of like central

5:51

corporate platforms like you know meta or twitter or tick talk or google provide for us

5:58

because essentially what you’re trying to do when you do that is you’re trying to build your civil society inside of a

6:03

shopping mall and that’s not really going to work out well for anybody except the shopping mall owners there’s

6:08

kind of like a for you [Music] a sort of intuition and a desire to

6:14

engage those ideas and then this first the report is is really drawing together

6:22

um uh sort of a lot of these like-minded thinkers and

6:27

uh showing these possibilities so you have this like um sort of almost pointing to this like

6:32

this is real this is real and we need to to be here um i wonder if one of the things

6:39

uh we could do is is place the work that you’re doing in the context of artist-run center history and kind of

6:46

culture because for me i like it seems like this really important moment for sort of cooperative and collectivization

6:52

like how can we rethink the spirit that was supposedly at the founding of all of these different types of spaces across

6:59

the country how it you know it feels like it’s a moment of revitalization um

7:04

but also could be an opportunity that’s missed so can you put it a little bit in that context the thinking about the

Context

7:10

artist one center history is a good way to get into it um one of my previous jobs was the exhibitions curator at the

7:16

western front um and so going back to the western front in the early 70s when it kind of started up as a professional

7:22

artist run center in 72 it was kind of found as this collective building which used to be called free

7:28

call before it was called the western front and the canada council kind of found it and kind of started to

7:34

invest into it with its grants program and john and that’s kind of one of one of the earliest learner swim centers in

7:39

the country so this digital strategy program might not be incredibly dissimilar from that can i

7:46

mean 221a had gotten a little bit of support from canada council but we’re a young organization so we only showed up

7:51

in 2008 so we’re at the bottom of the pile in terms of funding priorities it feels like at the canada council um

7:58

we’re also founded by non-white canadians which probably you know was a big deterrent to funding us at a proper

8:05

rate even though we were getting there really quickly um so i think you know thinking through how do we

8:10

recollectivize is we just saw these models as not quite serving us anymore um that are not fully serving us and if

8:17

we if we if we just relied on them to to make our future we’d probably starve and

8:23

we would probably end up homeless as an organization to be honest yeah we really do need to recollectivize and that’s

8:29

what 221a really wants to do and that’s because you know 221a comes out of vancouver’s chinatown which i

8:36

think is important to know our founders have several generation relationships with

8:42

the neighborhood with the chinese benevolent societies and business in the neighborhood which is very important so we actually

8:48

look at these benevolent societies more like our elders than something like the ore gallery or

8:54

art speak might be um because the way that the kind of these benevolent societies came about in

9:00

the early 20th century was through um anti-anti-asian and racist laws that

9:05

were enacted by the government of canada the city of vancouver the province of british columbia that didn’t allow

9:12

asian people to own property or operate business or even rent property for that matter

9:17

so essentially families would pool their resources under family names like the yi’s and the fungs

9:22

and then they would start a non-profit society in british columbia which could do the business but yet the community was then

9:29

constrained by non-profit finance and that capacity for wealth generation amongst the

9:35

the population of chinatown was limited so seeing that and then seeing the kind of um property rich but kind of resource

9:42

and cash poor societies as they are now in the early 21st century they they do need support and we work

9:49

with them and we do co-rent buildings from them and share them between artists and their membership which is seniors

9:55

residences and also membership space for activities and socialization and administration

10:02

so um yeah that model of recollectivization i think was an opportunity for us to think

10:07

more broadly about how do we scale up our collaboration um to the scale of the

10:13

neighborhood to the scale of the city um to the scale of the planet um and so that’s basically kind of what blockchain

10:20

will enable you to do is to kind of create more mass collaborative networks that are more um definable and

10:27

self-designable by communities themselves um and i think it’s a way to kind of

10:33

personalize not personalize but in individuate how finance works in certain conditions for certain communities with

10:40

different cultural protocols than maybe what the canada council or the government of canada kind of might expect as as the way it goes yeah it’s

10:47

interesting you you you describe a kind of a narrative for the organization where it’s outsideness

10:55

like a kind of uh beginning late uh in the sort of history of artist-run culture and the the cultural aspects of

11:02

the of the organization sort of almost um positioning it to be more flexible and

11:08

to be more thinking outside of this kind of core stream um do you do you think um

11:16

that and like do you see within the wider um cultural sphere that you engage with um

11:24

a kind of excitement and a warmth towards this idea of new collectivization or do you think that

11:29

there’s kind of um more of a fear around what the technology is

11:35

bringing like is it happening to the cultural world or is the cultural world you know imagining a place that they can

11:41

actually play within it i think it’s both um i mean it depends how you define the cultural world i guess but anyone

New Collectivization

11:47

dancing on tick tock or creating video games kind of fits under that umbrella for me um so

11:53

i think that the way that culture developed in canada was quite

11:58

you know settler-centric let’s put it that way um so i think that the culture

12:03

is expanding beyond that narrow definition of kind of what culture is and so i think culture is doing this but i

12:10

think the state-funded kind of settler-centric culture in canada is not doing this because

12:15

the it’s an incredibly you know hard culture to kind of distribute

12:21

resources in because there is such a scarcity of resources already so there is already such a fear and such a lack

12:28

of um of support for people that they don’t know how to get along anymore and that’s what kind of like ever since i’ve

12:34

entered the sector in canada you know that’s the reality that i’ve known it’s just kind of got less and less and less

12:39

um since you know the early 2000s so um with that in mind i think like the

12:45

professionalized culture is having a real challenge they need to figure out what their legitimacy is kind of in the

12:51

world at this point um i think 221a is pretty confident about kind of what its legitimacy is because it’s not beholden

12:57

to just that settler-centric culture um i think we talk to it we think we learn from it i think we debate it and

13:03

criticize it um but we’re working in many different strands as well um so i

13:09

think yeah there’s there’s tons of people using this technology for cultural perspectives and what’s really

13:15

been interesting and there’s an artist based here in british columbia called ria myers she’s an incredible early

13:20

proponent of kind of blockchain cultural practices um and you know i think she’s

13:26

what she’s been saying is kind of like oh it’s interesting because art lets you kind of experiment with this technology

13:31

you know it is not the food chain it is not the supply chain it is not the medicine chain so if something goes

13:36

wrong um we you know it’s not immediately going to be kind of a catastrophe it’s going to die

13:42

necessarily well not yet but you know i think we can say that but we can also see how culture can shift the digital

13:49

space and we saw that over the past five years in the web 2.0 space and so that long tail or that kind of heavy impact

13:56

of how that um kind of cultural uh you know forking that kind of happened over

14:02

the past five years um so that you know we live on different planets basically now than some people who believe certain

14:08

things so that’s a very dangerous side too and i wonder about um some of that that role of experimentation and

14:15

imagination that you were describing um and we certainly see that with um

14:21

uh you know arts uh artists and arts uh organizations engaged with technology

14:27

for us we’ve always felt like we’re at the sort of tumbling breaking edge of things in a way that makes it sometimes

14:33

different difficult to make the organization and its vision completely transparent to people because we’re

14:40

we’re trying to always fall as things are changing and but this is

14:46

you see artists do that a lot but organizations tend to um

14:52

are not oriented towards that kind of change and i think there’s this interesting moment where the technology

14:58

even if it’s not actually enabling genuine innovation in

15:03

organizational form there’s something about the way it’s transforming the imagination is for certain people and

15:09

allowing this space of play um so i think that’s a really um you know

15:15

sort of exciting part of what’s happening of course you know there is like

15:20

there is there is a history of the of web 2.0 as you say which kind of describes something

15:26

um that is you know basically a concentration of wealth a kind of uh

15:32

like a further in sort of uh implication into all of the aspects of our lives by sort of platform

15:39

capitalism and it feels like um if we don’t if we don’t involve ourselves how do we how do

15:45

we transform it in this way um i wonder if you could speak a bit more to maybe some of the how you

15:52

understand some of these anxieties that um many cultural organizations and and

15:58

people in culture might express i think there’s an anxiety around the digitization of everything and the

16:03

feeling that this is somehow inextricable from the financialization of everything um and

16:10

you know it’s obviously i think somewhat reasonable and justified um and you know particularly with

16:16

blockchain it’s inextricable uh development with uh cryptocurrency but how do you understand

16:23

these anxieties like what might be different about what’s happening now um than what has happened before that might

16:30

make new things possible first i would say those anxieties are totally legitimate um i mean we we don’t live in

New Possibilities

16:37

a very secure world so i think you know um this is where we’re at a point of

16:42

ecosystem breakdown not just in terms of the ecological system but the the financial and the

16:48

kind of social mores as well are also going with that so you know it’s that everything change moment but what

16:54

happens when an ecosystem breaks down doesn’t mean extinction for everything it means like a new ecosystems get built

17:00

and this is where things kind of recompose where new energy new agents new actors kind of encounter each other

17:06

and then they have to decide how to build out what’s next so that’s really what i see in the long arc of this technology

17:13

and that’s the kind of why i’m invested in it um you know i think thinking through this idea of the fear

17:19

of the technology i think there’s something there too about you know the north american brain or the settler-centric brain

17:26

being somewhat um [Music] how i mean akilemebe calls it like a

17:34

western paranoia um because there has been such a lack of ability to build

17:42

ourselves for so many generations whereas he’s talking about his context he’s cameroonian

17:47

i believe um and so in afrins in kind of central africa he’s thinking through kind of you know how does um

17:55

how do you how is this different because everybody is engaged in building something nothing

18:00

comes pre-made nothing comes ready to go nothing comes bricked you have to make your business you have to make your

18:05

community you have to make your home you have to make your system yourself so i think we’re going to have to get

18:11

back into that mode and to kind of reignite those parts of our brain and just start to rebuild start

18:16

rebuilding ourselves and building out what works for our communities and so that’s what i see as a real

18:22

potential in this technology because it’s a chance for us to kind of reset how finance works through the digital

18:28

space for communities that’s not just what’s happening on the website but this is going to be connecting to physical

18:33

stuff as well we’re just seeing how this works with kind of digital assets now but pretty much there’s going to be this

18:39

kind of connectivity and this dance back and forth between what happens in virtual space and what happens in physical space and they’ll be linked and

18:46

and they will influence and kind of co-evolve together um i think there’s other things in there to

18:52

think about in terms of someone like benjamin bratton as well who says that you know we we don’t live

18:58

like in cities anymore we live inside of an accidental megastructure so as humans what we’ve done is we’ve built a global

19:04

system that we live inside that is so big that we no longer have total control

19:10

over it or no one has a single point of view on what’s happening and at the same time

19:16

this has also started to kind of deteriorate the conditions of our planet um however we wouldn’t know our planet

19:22

is deteriorating unless we had developed a world computer so advanced that it was able to model and give us an

19:28

understanding of what this planet is doing or going under so there’s an epi like an epistemological kind of hurdle

19:35

you have to get over here which is like there’s no way to solve this issue by going backwards you can only go forwards

19:42

and further deeper into it to kind of start to kind of connect the dots better well it’s like a continual unbreaking of

19:49

the modern fallacy of of there being a sort of human control over things right

19:54

that it’s like there is a it’s it’s almost like uh when you speak to people who do

19:59

um uh their phd and that the deeper they get into their phd they realize how

20:05

little and little they know like every step is to learn how much you do not know um about the world so that and that that

20:12

has always been a kind of reality of of life and so to figure out how to exist within that

20:18

um i wonder if you could also talk about um in the report you mentioned

20:24

the exploration of values so talking about this financialization um in terms of the blockchain that seems

20:30

like it’s so solidified in our minds but i think there’s uh you know

20:36

something interesting to be said about the different ways we think about value and how to like connect these to the

20:43

digital which is i think something again to your point of art being a great place to push an experiment in the blockchain

20:50

because we can think about how these different ideas connect to this digital technology it’s an incredible technology

20:57

that recognizes the value of the social and it recognizes the value

21:02

of um of the labor that we do together that might not have been quantified previously that provided so much in our

21:10

lives um but yet people like us who work in the cultural industries who really kind of lived off of relationships and

21:17

and the strength and the validity of those relationships um now in in 2021 um

21:22

you know we’re struggling to find places to live because our incomes are pretty stable but yet our cultural value has

21:28

kind of risen to such a point that um we’re able to kind of um use it kind of

21:33

within this blockchain space and so just as an example for that there’s the the social token community is really interesting i think because that’s

Social Tokens

21:40

that’s a space where you can start to build community and like the earlier you are in that community and then the more

21:46

that you put into that community then you’re able to kind of ride that updraft um in that community as the

21:53

value of what that community is doing your place in it um starts to rise and you know you might not see a difference

22:00

in terms of like what you’re doing day to day for that community over the year one to year five

22:06

but yet the value of what you’re doing for that community can increase because that community grows out there’s more

22:11

people who are bringing value to that community you’re kind of closer to the center and um i think it’s also just kind of

22:17

remembering that you know you’re not not everything is going to be given to you um you know like at a bar like you can

22:25

just go up and order your culture you can’t just go up and order your your relationships um it’s not tinder you

22:31

know you don’t have this for artists in the art world um so it’s kind of like you got to work at it and you’ve got to

22:37

create these bonds and you have to build trust and you have to build legitimacy and i think um that’s what we lost over

22:43

the past 10 years and why things have broken down so much so it’s people are there’s a big shift too so that

22:49

anonymity that kind of came out in the early blockchain is kind of going away now so i mean there’s still some

22:54

communities who really like their anonymity but there’s some other communities who really prize like you know presenting yourself what do you

23:00

bring to the world who are you um what relationships do you hold and so i think you know this is going to encourage

23:06

younger and younger generations to think through that very carefully and um you know i think it’s a real big remedy to

23:12

kind of posting and and and the kind of vitriolic behavior on kind of web 2 of the past couple years yeah can

23:19

can we even go a little bit further into you know outlining the edges of what a

23:25

new cultural organization that integrates this technology kind of looks like like maybe um you know combining a

23:33

little bit of fantasy and desire of what you would love to see and then a little bit i think you have a very uh a great

23:39

sense of the sort of state of the art of the technology can you sort of sketch us out something that what it

23:45

actually might look like in some of the mechanics and form totally yeah um so it’s not just me who

23:51

are thinking about this but it’s everyone under the umbrella of our of our project in the first phase and we’re

23:57

just going into our second phase now and so we’re actually doing a design sprint for the next couple of months that’s

24:03

going to kind of imagine exactly this like what could 218 do within this kind of like dow landscape

24:09

or the decentralized autonomous organization or you know distributed organization kind of scenario and so

24:16

essentially that’s that’s the core idea and that’s what we’re seeing as like the organizing structure online

24:22

and so it’s basically it’s just people who want to build together and who want to share common resources together and

24:29

who want to distribute those resources together and so how that looks right now it’s a

24:34

lot of people on discord uh managing kind of communities and channels and administration channels and activity

24:40

channels and games and meetups and live events and publishing and you know music

24:45

recommendations and making music videos within the community um and that sort of thing and so it’s very different than a

24:52

facebook group i would put it that way um it’s it’s got a lot more capacity to mold it into whatever you want it to be

24:59

221a is part of a pretty interesting community called friends with benefits that’s kind of coming out of this space

25:04

and they’ve started doing real-life meetups and they’ve actually started kind of self-organizing

25:10

in kind of the kind of denser cities where their membership is found right now like new york los angeles and london

25:16

to have more regular kind of cyclical events and then there’s the kind of global community that kind of connects through but this isn’t that different

25:23

than the way that i lived in culture in like the last decade you know what i mean it’s kind of like you

25:29

it was just more diffuse but this is like a more structured way to kind of understand what’s going on um you know

25:35

whereas like in the past someone would just kind of recommend who you kind of hook up with like in the city that you’re going to

25:41

they’ll kind of give you a connection to some venues some people some producers so well and i think of like like you

25:47

know we were once a kind of traditional production center a little bit where like the idea

25:53

was to have physical resources and educational resources that centered a geographic

25:59

community around it that you would collectivize and get access to you know

26:04

things like projectors when those were really difficult to access same with video co-ops throughout the

26:10

the country that these kind of collectivization so but um i mean other than say like

26:15

shifting the focus into you know into the digital realm which which gives it a

26:21

little bit less geographic aspect although it’s interesting that it starts out to kind of be sort of this

26:28

this you know pan geographic kind of thing that then starts to ground itself in in in community-based things but

26:34

other than this um sort of uh networked aspect of it what do you what do you see as like

26:40

let’s say five years down the road like what could you imagine in your you know in the best possible case of something

26:46

that happens an organization that takes shape yeah that’s also why we’re doing it is like we think long term at 221a so

Land Trust

26:53

we’re also working on a land trust um at 221a which is going to assemble it’s not going to be owned by 221a but

26:59

we’re going to kind of give birth to this land trust and so we’re looking at how we’re going to assemble properties in different parts of the city

27:05

essentially so that’s kind of we’re pursuing that with kind of traditional finance right now

27:10

and kind of traditional means um setting it up as a separate non-profit but you know as this technology will

27:16

allow for um we’re gonna start to connect the dots between kind of what this model could be and then how this

27:22

model can evolve into something that can be common or how the governance of something like this could be broadly

27:28

distributed and so the surface area of governance of all the people involved in those properties could be better

27:34

captured rather than just having like a board of directors that’s a representative of certain aspects of

27:40

that organization actually your governance is distributed to hundreds of people and and they’re involved in

27:46

making key decisions about the organization and how it allocates resources so that’s like an interesting side of it and i don’t think it’s about

27:52

doing away with the physical at all again it’s about making the physical more secure and more stable and allowing

27:58

it to link up with kind of digital communities in more kind of organic and kind of productive ways and so you know

28:04

kind of these plans for collective ownership of physical assets this is totally going to be managed through distributed autonomous organizations

28:10

it’s already beginning there was city city dao which is its own thing

28:16

they just purchased their first plot of land in wyoming where wyoming has made a law available so that dows can exist as

28:23

legal entities basically you could have a llc or a limited liability corporation that’s controlled by a distributed

28:29

autonomous organization for the first time in the world and that’s in wyoming and now they’ve bought a land preserve and they’re going to start developing

28:35

that kind of as what they could see in as as the future so all eyes are on that

28:41

we’re working with us with a group coming out of kiev called doma which is a as a cooperative housing

28:47

platform as well um for this sort of thing so it’d be a way to kind of manage equitable and

28:53

affordable housing at city scale but it could also exist in different cities so those more expensive cities could lend

28:59

equity to kind of less expensive cities and vice versa to kind of even out the conditions between a certain community

29:05

as well so there’s all kinds of potential there there’s thousands of people building

29:11

this future they’re some of the brightest most creative and curious people that i’ve met so i’m excited about it so is a land trust um is that

29:19

of an already given kind of uh legal entity that you guys are thinking of how to

29:26

um like adapt it to a new sort of digital governance model yeah it’s it’s

Governance

29:32

we just incorporated it last week um as a bc society which is great and then i

29:37

think what we’re going to be looking at is like what’s the potential here for developing out this technology to provide for better governance to help us

29:44

solve some of the human coordination and and the challenges that we have in trying to kind of create a land trust

29:50

that is equitable and that has a really strong kind of anti-racism plan around it too

29:55

um so i mean that’s what’s interesting about this too is you can mold your finance your equity and your governance

30:00

around the cultural protocols that are valuable to the community that you want to serve um so here’s and

30:07

it’s not going to be easy either because the regulatory for environment for this stuff doesn’t exist yet um so it’s also

30:13

organizations like us who want to get in early who want to talk to partners across the board

30:18

from communities to the non-profit space to the technology space to the development space to the city planning

30:23

office um and start trying to connect those conversations and try to you know we’re moving into becoming what’s called

30:29

like a systems convener at 221a and we’re trying to get different systems to talk to each other

30:34

to solve similar challenges and similar problems between each system and so that’s really what i think this

30:40

technology kind of can help us do the last thing you said there was what was going to be one of my follow-up questions was like where

30:46

where where are the impediments to thinking um uh and putting things into action in

30:53

this domain like trying to do something like what um you’re doing with doma is that is it

31:00

like is it really a question of the kind of legal structure is it the sort of

31:05

sort of i don’t know the tax implications for for an organization that is like because we basically have

31:11

kind of two models in canada right we have you’re either a for-profit company or you’re a non-profit

31:17

and you could have a non-profit with a charity but like outside of that there isn’t really a lot of formal

31:24

infrastructure for those models but is it there or is it other places where you’re seeing some of the largest

31:30

impediments to making this happen for us it’s definitely in the regulatory space i wouldn’t call it an impediment it’s

31:36

just like untouched space it’s kind of it’s not dealt with it’s like so but they know

31:42

they need to deal with it um but you know but that’s also our governments are incredibly stressed right now they have

31:47

no idea um how to move forward in a lot of situations they’re in bc we have a

31:52

lot of problems to deal with the opioid crisis covid we have the climate which is breaking down here so but at the same

31:59

time the provinces in the past couple of months hired an amazing economist mariana mazucodo um who wrote the value

32:05

of everything and kind of thinks through mission economics and so what she’s seeing is like it’s not about this kind

32:11

of cold war scenario of the market and the state and these are these two polar economies

32:17

that we have to keep separate well that’s been a myth that’s been breaking down my whole lifetime um but at this

32:23

point we’re kind of um we’re looking at she’s kind of been hired to kind of advise the government in bc kind of how

32:30

we get to an integrated economy or how business and and and community um is

32:36

able to kind of think through how do you just bring value to this scenario so that people are able to build out of it

32:42

how do you kind of meet shared goals around climate around technology access around housing and how do you make these

32:48

very high benchmarks that the entire society can get behind and start kind of working towards is what’s called mission

32:54

economic so that’s the kind of future we’re seeing we’re seeing it as a very messy kind of lumpy place right now but

33:00

that’s also where like a theorist like someone like keller easterling who’s who’s would kind of look at this

33:06

technology too is that it’s it’s here to connect those lumpy imperfect um hard to

33:12

manage um silos kind of in our society together and we’re able we’ll be able to

33:17

kind of like fine-tune it and bootstrap it so that things just start connecting better and then once that happens you

33:23

know we’ll get towards things that are just working and once something works communities will start using it and then

33:28

it will start getting better um so at this point we do have a lot of impediments because it’s not so much the regulatory space i would say that the

33:35

protocol stack within the blockchain space is too large and the application stack is too small so the protocol stack

33:41

is only going to be understood by 10 of the community who understands what blockchain is whereas 90 of us are going

33:47

to be on the application stack receiving the benefits using the dapps um that sort of stuff so we haven’t had that

33:53

experience we don’t have those stories we don’t have those narratives yet to tell um and you need to be pretty bold

33:59

and not afraid of embarrassing yourself with some of these technical tables sometimes to kind of ask basic questions um so

34:06

there’s that but um and i think yeah around that regulatory space that’s also a challenge for us but

34:12

we’re seeing it more like someone like the mcconnell foundation in montreal kind of is thinking through what can we do to get communities into these

34:19

regulatory experimentation spaces to try and think about how do we start solving challenges and then once one community

34:25

learns that then let’s broadcast that and share that information across because i don’t think we’re going to

34:30

find global solutions right now but at the scale of neighborhoods or communities of that scale i think we’ll

34:37

be able to find small incremental solutions that can build on top of each other and it can be shared

34:43

and then relocalized kind of in kind of in a particular community depending on its values and and its protocols yeah i

34:50

think that’s i mean a really key point to um and one of the reasons why

34:56

you know we want to have these conversations uh in our digital space so that we’re um trying to figure out

35:04

where the interesting things are happening that can be shared across the cultural landscape

35:10

and that that landscape is kind of like this you can’t disentangle it from

35:16

you know the social and political landscapes of every city um and we’re not going to come up with global

35:21

solutions necessarily but how to create these networks of of communication and sharing

35:28

and stuff like that which is i think this um you know one of the going back to where

35:34

we started with the canada council one of the challenges of this uh that i see in this in the in the digital

35:40

strategy fund which is this exceptional research project for um organizations across the country but

35:47

how we’re able to share that information because of the way the canada council is structured as a kind of you know arms

35:54

length government agency where like all of this stuff is going out in this siloed way and

36:01

the amount of research that is not being shared and not being communicated and not being you know shared in common

36:08

is is quite sad and how we kind of overcome that um is sort of i think a really key point to the success of

36:14

everything so it’s interesting to see and it’s amazing to see what you guys are doing with um you know not only uh putting out

36:22

um the information in like in these kind of report things but being out there yourself and speaking with people and

36:28

seeing some of that conversation happen yeah i’m glad to do it it’s part of the part of the funding guidelines we got to

Digital Strategy

36:33

share these find i mean they they put it on us basically the digital strategy fund was you have to share your findings

36:39

with the sector but of course it takes organizations that used to who can send around media kits with nice cameras and

36:45

microphones to interview us for that stuff so it’s really appreciated um we’ll have some more stuff coming out in the spring so we’ll have a public

36:51

documentation of that design sprint where we’re down modeling so that’ll be there and also stay tuned um and i just we

36:58

just went through the whole list of digital strategy funded projects to find anybody working with blockchain and

37:03

we’re about to contact them to kind of call everybody together just to kind of see what we need as a community

37:10

and then later in the spring probably second half of march we haven’t quite scheduled it or got it

37:17

totally together there’s not a call yet but we’re going to be offering a free to access kind of multi-day workshop with

37:23

um we’re organizing it with blockchain at ubc which is canada’s largest blockchain research cluster and the

37:29

ethereum foundation but it’ll be a workshop designed specifically for cultural non-profits to kind of just get

37:34

their feet wet um say what they’re curious about say what they’re challenged by and just to start learning and doing a

37:40

few things kind of within this workshop scenario we’ll be working with some amazing kind of professors and students

37:46

from the research cluster at ubc as well um to kind of support us on the technical side of it and some folks from

37:52

the ethereum foundation to help us put together some of this because they’ve been doing some of these kind of workshops within the european um within

37:59

european cities as well for much larger non-profits like unesco or or you know

38:04

or even non-profit that’s kind of like a u.n organization or like oxfam or something global of that scale but i

38:10

think this is the first time in canada we’ll see something like this for for non-profits so we really want to drive

38:15

that and kind of we want to they want to just be the ice breaker organization that can kind of help organizations get

38:21

into this and talk to partners and regulators it’s interesting it it makes me think

38:27

that like one of the key components we’re going back to that part about the collectivization that would like whoa

38:33

you you know you needed access to a really expensive camera so everybody had to pull together but now it’s developers

38:38

like what we need is to be able to basically have a kind of you know a small staff of developers that an entire

38:44

ecosystem could could because you know there’s all of these small organizations with two three staff across the country

38:51

which could do really innovative things if there was a kind of collectivization of some of the back-end technology

38:56

expertise that could be a really interesting place to move for sure well yeah i really thank you a lot for

39:04

the time it’s so exciting to hear what uh 221a is doing now and and the arc

39:09

that’s coming um we’ll be sure to try and amplify all those things some of them will hopefully be

39:15

ready to be linked by the time our conversations online so i hope so stay tuned follow us on

39:21

instagram twitter our website tutorial.ca to find out more

39:26

great thanks [Music]

39:43

is

No results found