Why Web3 is important for charities

Roger on 07/11/2021

What is charity?

As a concept, ‘charity’ refers to the social contract we all enter into as members of a society. The social contract says that we have a responsibility to contribute towards the betterment of others in society even if we don’t know them.

As a behaviour, ‘charity’ is the fulfilling of that social contract. There are many many ways for individuals to commit private resources to public good. Those resources may be time, money goods, expertise, in fact anything with transactable value. Sure, some people choose to renege on their responsibilities, or even deny the contract exists, but such is the freedom of a democratic society.

As an organisation, a ‘charity’ tries to encourage people to fulfill the social contract in service of a particular cause. The wide variety of charities for the wide variety of causes allows for anyone to contribute towards a cause that matters to them.

What is web3?

Web3 encodes social contracts. It is computable law, or an executable Magna Carta.

Web3 provides a governance layer for the internet. It offers technologies and protocols that allow applications to enable a paradigmatic shift in how the transactable elements of society; money, data, rights & laws, are processed. It offers the possibility of moving from a centralised model, where we rely on an institution such as a bank to govern the exchange of money, to a decentralised system of processing money between people without intermediaries.

Web3 utilises blockchain technology as a tool for distributed consensus, or to put it another way, a means of everyone agreeing on something because everyone can see that it happened. A transfer of ownership of a unit of value is recorded, immutably, in a way that

Why is web3 important for charities?

As with all new technologies, web3 will enable charities do the same things in different ways, such as accept donation, but with cryptocurrencies rather than fiat, and run charity auctions, except with NFTs rather than physical goods. Charities will start with this type of incremental innovation. But, and far more importantly, it will empower them to do different things. Charities will create radical innovation. Charities will create dramatically different ways to achieve their charitable purposes, and enable people to contribute to a cause and fulfill the social contract.

Web3 drastically alters the need for centralised institutions. As Decentralised Autonomous Organisations become better understood, providing a means of moving the bye-laws and decision-making of an organisation into smart contracts, a charitable organisation acting as intermediary to manage the distribution of donations will be replaced with peer-to-peer networks, with governance encoded into a smart contracts, and with the supporter members of the organisation having equal voting rights about how the rules of those smart contracts are written.

This future frees the charity from dependence on other centralised institutions like banks and marketing platforms too. When the next big social network emerges to replace Facebook and Twitter it will be built on the blockchain. As users migrate to a platform that doesn’t trap them by locking-in their data so they can be advertised at, so to will charities move their social marketing and find new ways to connect people to causes.

The labour market of the web3 future won’t have employees. Charities will offer up contract work with the briefing, completion and payment all handled through smart contracts. DACO’s will have no need for large teams across multiple departments, only hiring in developers to create smart contracts that govern the work.

What might a web3-enabled charity sector look like? No one knows yet. But it will come.

Miro User Guide

Roger on 07/11/2021

Introduction 

What is Miro 

Miro is a visual working tool that allows us to draw diagrams and maps in a visual way. 

Why do we use Miro 

Humans are visual creatures. If dogs invented Miro it would be using smells, but since humans invented it, and we use our eyes lots and think in visual ways, Miro allows us to communicate things visually. Visual communication often helps us understand more quickly than written communication and allows us to show the relationships between things.  

We use Miro to do work in visual ways because it helps us think through how we understand something, plan how things should work, and communicate and collaborate more effectively. 

Getting started 

Creating an account 

To create an account, go to https://miro.com/ and sign-up using your Prince’s Trust email address and password of your choice. 

Finding your way around Miro 

Boards 

A board is an infinite workspace within Miro 

To see all the board go to Miro | Online Whiteboard for Visual Collaboration 

The side menu allows you to move between different groups of boards, and the boards within the groups are shown in All boards. 

In a board 

The more things that are added to a board the harder it can be to find the thing you’re looking for, but there are a few things that can help. 

We use Frames (more details below) to group together pieces of work, and every frame has a unique link. Any link you see for a Miro board that has ‘?moveToWidget’ in it is for a Frame. To find particular Frames in the future you can bookmark the link. 

We also use Cards (more details below) to help us find work. Cards can have tags which show up in the search. These need to be set in advance, so if you are working on a board and it has a Card in the top left corner feel free to add whatever Tags make it easier for you to find where that Card is in the future. You can add Tags that describe the work, or project or your name. Clicking on the red tag in the search results will take you to that card. 

The basics of using Miro 

Zooming in and out 

In the bottom right corner is a map of the board.  

When starting a new diagram its best to start at 100%. This means you can zoom in and out, which will make navigating around the board easier. 

You can zoom in and out by clicking on the plus and minus symbol on the map or by using the plus and minus keys on your keyboard. 

Scrolling around 

If you want to move around a board, it’s often easier to zoom out a bit first so that each move covers more of the board and then zoom back in. You can use the up, down, left and right keys on your keyboard to move around the board. You can also click on the pointer icon to change your cursor into a hand and then click and hold down on your laptop trackpad to swipe around the board. 

Frames 

Frames provide a background and a way of grouping work together. 

To create a Frame, click on the Frame icon and select the dimensions. 

You can then click on the title of the frame to change its name.  

To resize the frame, click on the edge and drag it to the size and shape you want. 

To change the colour of the Frame, click on the frame to open the menu, click on the ‘fill color’ icon, and select the colour you want. 

To get the link to the frame to share with others, click on the edge of the frame and a menu will appear. Click the three dots to see all the options and click Copy link. The link to the board is now copied to your clipboard so you can paste it wherever you want. 

Once you have the Frame set how you want it, it’s a good idea to lock it by clicking on the anchor icon in the menu. This will prevent the Frame from moving around as you move Shapes and Post-it Notes around. 

Pointer 

The pointer allows you to do two things: when it’s an arrow it lets you select things, and when it’s a hand it lets you move the board around. You can change between the two by clicking on the Pointer icon in the left menu. 

Post-it notes 

Post-it notes can be added by clicking on the Post-it note icon. You can then change the colour and size of the note. It’s a good idea to add a key to your frame to explain what the different colours of notes mean, and to agree conventions like ‘Bigger post notes are for more important things’. 

Text 

You can text boxes by clicking on Text icon. Text boxes have a menu that allows you to change the font, the size of the text, its alignment, etc. As with the Post-it notes, it’s a good idea to agree with everyone working in the Frame what different fonts and sizes mean. 

Shapes 

Shapes can be added by clicking on the Shapes icon and selecting the shape. Shapes can have text written them and have a menu that allows you to change border colour, background colour, text colour, etc. 

Connection lines 

Connection lines can be added by clicking on the Connection line icon and selecting the type of line, or by clicking on a Shape or Post-it Note and then clicking on a blue dot.  You’ll then be able to drag the Connection line to the blue dots of another Shape or Post-it Note. Making sure the Connection lines go to a blue dot means that if you move the Shape or Post-it notes the line will move with it. Connection lines have a menu that allows you to change colour, thickness, etc. 

Systems-shifting design for charity products and services

Roger on 06/11/2021

I have a hypothesis about product success: users are far less important than we think. How and where a product intersects with other systems is far more important for achieving outcomes.

Human-centred design, the dominant mindset for product design, places the user as the most important consideration, but this, I think, is built on the assumption of the user as separate from the world around them. If we think of the user as just one actor in the network of systems that makes up the product, then this

Rightly or wrongly, charities are often held to a higher ethical standard than commercial enterprises for how they design and build products and services, and I think as the ideas around systems-shifting design take hold we’ll see more charities designing for how to products interact with other systems to affect change and achieve outcomes rather than the user-centred approach for products that seek to change behaviour.

A bird in or out of the hand

Roger on 06/11/2021

Sculpture of a bird and a hand in Highnam Nature Reserve

What does this sculpture say to you? ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, perhaps? Seems an obvious first reading, but then this place is a nature reserve for birds, so perhaps a work of art about gaining benefit from trapping birds isn’t as fitting. Maybe it shows a human hand releasing the bird, setting it free, letting it fly in this place with fear of being trapped.

Everything is connected – Design accordingly

Roger on 05/11/2021

We should design products based on what systems they interact with, rather than how they change user’s behaviour.

Every product connects to and interacts with other systems. And when we realise that everything in the world is connected in some way or another, we begin to be able to see how the products we design and build can play a part in changing systems.

“In an unstable complex system, small islands of coherence have the potential to change the whole system.”

– Ilya Progogine.

Rather than producing products that distract, nudge, isolate, we can produce products that intersect meaningfully with other systems to create those islands of coherence.

Weeknotes #275

Roger on 05/11/2021

Photo of the week:

This week I did:

Accept change

Had a couple of interesting chats this week that made me think about the assumptions we carry into our interactions and how they are always hidden from us until a situation makes them apparent, and more broadly about how we think about change and flexibility. The first conversation was about how we’d ‘missed’ things from earlier discovery work, which reveals how much of a engineering mindset we still have where we expect to be able figure everything out upfront. If we’re approaching problems/projects/work/life with a design mindset then we should know that we’ll never know everything and should be trying to discover new things all the time. The second conversation was about an expectation of using a certain way of working, to which my response was that we don’t have fixed ways of working and favour flexibility. There’s still a long way to go with feeling ok about accepting change.

October retro

I wrote my retro for October. The main lesson was that my interest in new ideas tends to follow a power law distribution. I put lots of time and energy into exploring new things but quickly have to fit them in with all the other things I’m already working on and so the pace of progress slows. The answer, obviously, is to get better at throwing out ideas sooner, so I need to work on figuring out how to identify the better ideas.

#NoBloPoMo

My attempt to write a blog post every day for November is going well. It always feels like there’s a bit of tension between writing just for the sake of maintaining the habit and actually having something vaguely interesting to say, but so far I’ve had plenty of ideas for things to write about.

So far, I’ve written:

I realise I’m a few years behind the NoBloPoMo trend but I’m ok with that.

Irregular

Sent out my second Irregular Ideas email. I’m interested in figuring out the difference between writing blog posts and writing emails. There are quite a few dimensions the comparison can be made on, including a known/owned audience vs unknown/organic audience and immediate vs longevity and which bests meets the audiences outcomes. I don’t suppose I’ll ever settle on a single channel but it would be good to settle on a strategic understanding of how the channels/platforms fit together.

And I thought about:

DACO

I invented a new type of organisation. A Distributed Autonomous Charitable Organisation. One of the blog posts I’ve been writing is about how closely aligned charity and web3 are, and it got me thinking about what a web3-based charity of the future might look like. Future.charity is on my list of projects to pick up again so now I’m thinking about how I can build a proof-of-concept DAO that operates like a charity.

Online courses

I’m quite interested in online learning and the increasing variety of ways to approach online courses. The standard logic for creating a course is to teach what you know. That doesn’t work so well for me because the stuff I know is too niche. Who else wants to know what I know about product management in charities? Regardless of the content, I’ve been thinking about the timing and spacing of an online course. Is it better to be self-paced or for the pace to be set, or is there a way to have flexibility in between? I like the idea of using emails for delivering learning content. It plays into the current newsletter trend and they can be far more easily accessed than a dedicated platform. Maybe I could reuse my idea about how to learn Nesta’s Future of skills as the basis for an experiment.

Disorganisation

I’ve been wondering if things like the creator economy trend and the remote working trend are part of a mega-trend of shifting the economic power from organisations to individuals. The fundamental idea of capitalism is that the power is in the hands of those that own the capital and not in the hands of those that do the work, and there are lots of ideas about what the future of capitalism might look like, but if those power relationships are shifting slightly then it may decouple having capital from having power a little bit.

Read this week:

The Obstacles You Don’t See

The Hidden Brain podcast episode on how to get new ideas adopted or get people to do things says that often the better approach is to remove the friction that is prevent progress rather than pushing harder to force progress. Our tendency is to do more in order to achieve the things we want, especially when it comes to lasting change, when it could be that removing the barriers would be more effective.

Undecidable problem

I’ve been reading about and trying to understand problems better. Mathematical and computational problems have a clear expression, and I think in modern product work we think all problems are expressed in this way through problem statements, but I suspect that tacit knowledge which cannot be expressed in that way forms a large chunk of how we experience and understand problems.

Minimalist entrepreneur

I started reading Sahil Lavingia’s book about being a minimalist entrepreneur, which ties very closely with the trends we see in the creator economy, things like ‘build an audience before you build a product’.

Metaverse

I’ve been reading a few things about the metaverse this week, and what I’ve noticed is that it’s hard to find anything that isn’t tied up with a moral judgement about Facebook. Ideas aren’t neutral, of course, but it’s more difficult to discuss what the metaverse might or might not be critically if no one can present opinions that aren’t viewed from a position of moral panic. My opinion at the moment is that metaverses (plural because all the big tech firms will develop their own and they won’t be interoperable) will become a thing over the next few years but given that technology business models won’t have changed much by then they are really just the next level of data collection from wearable devices for that data to be used in advertising. So, more of the same rather than anything radical.

Growth area for this week:

Where to point attention

I’ve been more consciously choosing to point my attention at things that don’t have much attention. If something already has four people working on it, me adding my focus only increases the attention that thing has by twenty percent, where as if something has no one working on it and I focus on it, now that thing has 100% more attention than it had before. I haven’t explained the maths of that very well, but I know what I mean.

Retrospective October 2021

Roger on 05/11/2021

This month’s lesson is that my interest in things follows a power law distribution. I’m really interested in exploring new ideas but the level of interest quickly drops off. Some things, like writing weeknotes, I maintain over time so it isn’t a problem of not being able to follow through, but perhaps one of enjoying the initial exploration more than the building. Maybe the answer is in finding ways to identify and drop bad ideas more quickly.

Contributing to the digital transformation of the charity sector

We’ve been focused on completing the definition stage to get ready to start development, and its all going to schedule. One of the interesting things I found was in how we group up work in different ways and how this can cause confusion. For example, in discussing work with stakeholders we talk about the different things a user does, but when the developers talk about the work they group up all the APIs that are required into one. There doesn’t seem to be a way to talk about complicated things in a consistent way.

Learning about innovation, technology, product and design

Didn’t do any work on Adjacencies but still think there’s a vaguely worthwhile idea there about learning about the skills of those you work with on cross-functional teams. I think the thing that stopped me working on it, other than my usual thing about going onto the next idea, is the conflict between providing training that is about work but asking people to pay for it themselves.

My tweet100 tweets about innovat100n.com aren’t getting any interest, and I’m losing interest in the idea of writing a hundred essays about innovation. It’s looking likely that I’ll be dropping this idea by the end of the year.

Completed a few more Foundations of Humane Technology course. I slightly lost interest, which I tried to renew a bit by taking notes on the module I was studying, but I still intend to finish it.

I continued to write weeknotes on schedule every week.

Leading an intentional life

I continued to wander around the coastline, which is really nice.

I reached my financial target for the year two months early, which is nice.

I’ve been ill so didn’t get out running, which wasn’t nice.