14 - ImpactDAOs with Ale Borda

hey hey coordination how's it going this week we have ali borda who is a contributor to git coin dao 50 years capital two plus dream dao and she is a colonel alumni ally's kind of a wonderkind she exudes regen she actually recorded this episode from costa rica um and a lot of the work that she's been doing has about been about positive impact on the world she's at the intersection of a lot of different impact dials impact networks and this episode we talk about impact owls which are any dow that has a positive

externality positive force on the world i'm a big believer that the non-profit sector in the world is stagnant we've got united way which is 134 years old feeding america 42 years old salvation army 155 years old the non-profit and ngo sector i think can be disrupted by daos because blockchains allow for more transparency more community governance and they make supporting your community into a multiplayer game the way it always

should have been network in a network world i think that impact owls could win and in this episode we talk about a book that ally and i wrote called impact dolls impact owls are any posit any project that can have a positive impact on the world and as soon as i wrote green pill which was the theory about how crypto could be would good for the world i started getting challenged about okay well is it actually happening kevin are there actually projects that are doing good for the world and the answer is yes we've written a book 106 different impact dials out there are

doing good for the world and ali was my co-conspirator in creation of that book so in this podcast episode we talk about the book we talk how about the impact dow ecosystem how it could grow how to get involved coordination if you want to be involved in impact owls if you want to be creating positive externalities for the world and earning tokens at the same time this episode is for you very tactical guide for getting involved without further ado i give you aliborda if you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth optimizing your taxes

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opolis today and get a thousand work and a thousand bank tokens when you become a member of opolis by may 25th 2022 and get started working your self-sovereign life ali what's up how you doing hey i'm good how are you pretty good good to uh be recording this episode with you so we wanted to talk about the impact dial book that you and i wrote together this episode um can you tell me what is an impact owl yeah impact dials are mainly just any doubt that's creating positive

personalities to the world and any doubt that's actually leveraging what three the tooling mechanisms but also just like the mental models and shifts and mindsets to create a positive impact so leveraging that for good got it so when you say positive impact are you talking about like financial impact are there other types of impact that uh an impact out can have also no no it's i think like any layer of impact like for example for me it's never been much about financial impact it's more about like well yes

economic development but also like inter regeneration like individual growth um experiential spiritual natural impact so anything that is like more holistic and touching every point of area of life and like how we operate as a society and how we operate as different cultures together as well got it what got you into this work like how did you get green-pilled what you what got you into public goods uh well honestly that was my starting point so previously i've like i'm from peru so

i've always been like around a lot of both party but also around a lot of nature so my work has always been around like positive impact probably goods um first like volunteering making houses their cases in the muslims then like more of an educational nonprofit i needed both and then it has always been like more of um journey of like oh where can i achieve more impact in the world or achieve with others around me more change um towards those communities that i see in peru and that's what led me more to like

the us searching for that like entrepreneurial more like yeah entrepreneurial and just faster quicker more technological advances to achieve change and that's where i started also working at 50 years like helping founders solving world's problems with technology and like learning from that aspect because i was kind of like oh non-profits that i used to lead are very good and they have a lot of good meaning people but sometimes they're not as effective and slower so i

wanted to see the other side of things and then through 50 years i kind of discovered what three and i really didn't dive into it at first because i was only hearing like all my friends and other people around me like saying like oh the metaverse gaming stuff like that i don't even watch netflix so i was like oh why would i get into this um and then i somehow stumbled upon like these concepts of like oh how can we embed our values into our economic systems or

how do we actually create instead of like creating products or services we're actually re-engineering like coordination designs or like the railroads that will lead us to create positive actions just naturally so i was like super super excited about that because we could kind of like re-engineer how we coordinate as humans and just like um value what is important to us as like in the planner and also as human beings right what i think is so cool about your story is that you know as a young person looking to have

positive impact you kind of you kind of saw that there was this whole world of charities that you could go into and then there was like web 3 impact and you chose to move a little bit more towards the web web 3 side of things like was there like an instinct there or was there something that you discovered that pushed you in that direction yes it was as soon as i read i think it was a paper by seats saying how our economy is usually backed by extractive methods and by oil gas and all those industries and how we could

actually use these occurrences to engineer digital economies that are actually backed by nature and like as the ecology grows the economy grows and those concepts actually were so interesting to me and to discover and also the second leap into discovering even more of what three was actually the people so i've always been very much into not only impacts like business entrepreneurship but also a lot into health philosophy psychology like fasting different technologies that are

also like technologies but in a different way like how we eat how we behave the sports we do and different things and i've always kind of like kept separated both sides of me and now as i go into a three like it's kind of like a mesh of arts culture um like philosophy system thinkers and a lot of people who are actually thinking deeply in systems like not only just like solving the most obvious symptoms but i rather trying to find out like the underlying issues that are causing

everything like all the problems in the first place and i think that that excited me like very much because i could kind of like bring my whole self to the table and like those solutions that incorporate every curiosity i have and do so with people who also have like from very very different experiences backgrounds and curiosity that also bring all aspects of human life into the table so that greenfield me like twice okay amazing yeah i mean i think that

you know um it's kind of nice to hear the background of of of what you've been up to and and i think that like the way our paths meet is that in january when i was writing this green pill book about how crypto could regenerate the world we started to talk about how impact owls were the atomic building block of this movement so you have an impact dial that creates a positive externality for the world and um around that time i kept getting challenged like okay

kevin this is all nice in theory but is are any projects actually doing this um are there any projects that are actually truly having impact these days and then and um i think that was around the time that you and i met uh i think around like east denver and and i was like man i kind of like feel like we should do impact out cartography like we should figure out what's out there and like create a database of uh of of impact dials so that i can you know have an exhaustive resource to answer that question of okay is green

pilling actually happening are we actually creating uh are we actually uh creating positive impact for the world in this space and so that's how you and i got connected and uh we put together an impact-dell book and a notion database that is a registry of different impact owls so can you tell me uh about that um how many impact owls are in the registry and tell me about tell me about the book yeah definitely it's it's kind of funny because like at the time i was like i had no idea i had never met you right so

it was very much of um oh like i'm i was i started building this list of projects back in december like with 50 years we were trying to see do we want to get involved with three or not like it's like what are the projects that are actually making something meaningful because like 50 years as a background is mostly just like investing in f supporting founders like solving problems with good impact so it was oh what are the projects out there that are actually achieving uh positive impact and i was mapping them like for that

purpose kind of thing to like mentally understand like like how are is crypto or three being used in different ways and it was so funny that you actually made the call for the cartographers and i had my notion with like a hundred projects and the descriptions and i was like oh like i have all this information i have always data and i was already a huge fan of git coin like it was kind of like one of the main organizations that greenfield me with the grants and seeing how people were actually excited about like donating to

projects and riding the community to support party goods for me that was super inspiring because it was not a oh i'll give away some of my money as donations it was kind of like a rally and like being very supportive and co-creating with each other uh whenever people participate in the grants so it was kind of like a perfect matchup of like me already having the projects and then like that gives you bitcoin spirit and community being kind of like an inspiration and and something i looked up for up to so yeah um um

where were we oh yeah on the impact our book and the different the different projects are out there i kind of like we kind of see them as so when i paint the picture of the space it's easier for me to paint in different kind of like diagrams or or different pictures and if i know we're in a podcast we don't have actually any diagram but how i look at it is kind of like as a tree um so if you think about it like in the tree you have the roots so you have the impact dials that are actually

building the infrastructure layer that are allowing other impact house to build on top of so that's like the layer ones and and even like some tokenomic models or some like ipnfts that people can use in decentralized science different things that people can use on top then you have the like you have the trunk of the tree on top of the roots and those are the ones doing research and then applying that to actual use cases so you would think about for example protocol labs that's doing research right now in different

ways which we can find public goods like interoperable ways such as like retroactive funding or or like the grants or impact certificates in different ways and then implementing that on different projects and then you have like of course the whole entire tree with all the different areas of um impact dials that like of course many of them tend to vary different areas of life and like a lot of them like for example git contents to

financial but also social and experiential but like i try to map them on like the primary area that they focus on such as regenerative finance uh decentralized science um region communities that are this kind of like eco villages and restructuring how we operate as little society their own economies and their own tokens and then finally the last one will be common spools so i refer to common spools as any new way of

like funding and rewarding party goods and different projects i'm happy to go more on how like if they're within the tree it's because like all of them are kind of like interoperable symbiotic and work with each other so they're part of the same tree although they serve different purposes and they tend to different areas of social capital right yeah i mean i think that you know there's there's a lot to dive in on there i guess like the tldr is that uh you and i have launched a book called

the impact dao uh registry and it's it's just the april 2292 edition i think there's a hundred and something impact owls that we discovered in carter cartography in there and you can get it at store.getcoin.com check the show notes if you want to pick up a copy of the book and it's worth it to see the visual of that tree that you mentioned right there with the trunk being the tooling in the infrastructure and then sort of the leaves being all of the different projects that are impactiles in the space um and i

you know what gets really interesting to me about this impactile space is like you said the the fact that everything in this space the impact l space by definition is creating positive externalities means that it's creating this ecosystem it's not like a machine where all you have all these parts that are just sort of like transactionally interoperating with each other you actually have this infinite garden of this rich fauna and plants that are all growing on top of each other and nourishing a common ecosystem through which the sum is greater than each of its parts and i

think that that's what's really cool about impact owls is how they stack and you know i think of like git coin which i'm the founder of and i work on git coin works with quadratic funding which is a way of democratically distributing funds to the ethereum community that's a positive externality that get coin has um and we rely on proof of humanity another impact dow for civil resistance for quadratic funding and so git coin derives civil resistance from proof of humanity and proof of humanity actually raised money on git coin so there's this

sort of like symbiosis that happens in that one-to-one relationship but also the one to many the many to many in this ecosystem and so if we can nurture this ecosystem of impact dials then i think it becomes really cool to think about what we're building towards is this sort of diverse fauna of different ways of creating pluralistic support for human communities and in shared needs so i'm really excited about how impact al's stack is is um you know i guess where i

was going with that but um yeah i mean what else do you want to say about the impact dial book what what's the highest order bit for you yeah i think there's two areas i'm most excited about with the book uh happy to dive like in order actually there's three right there's the first that i talk about more the theoretical like shift in mental models mental frameworks and how we view impact which i think is the one that actually fires me up the most and then the second one will be this impactile stacks which is

both cool i offer a perspective of like how i think six different impact dials including git coin proof of humanity collectivo astral and radical drapes can like operate with each other and then there's a final aspect of the book would be the different case studies and just trying to merge both the how do these impact house operate like their strategy their mechanisms how they're using web3 but also grounding that into how they're impacting like human lives so that actually almost any

kind of reader can understand it they don't have to be like super super into web3 to be able to get a sense of that so it's a i'm trying to achieve a good balance there between the human aspect and also the technical aspect so happy to dive in either of the three yeah i was actually thinking um that it might be good to just talk about a couple of the impact owls in the book just to ground the listener in what an impact dow actually looks like in practice so you mind if we get like real tangible and then we can escape into the theoretical from there

yeah yeah absolutely do you want to go first and and tell us about uh a couple impact dials you're excited about and what they do yeah i think the well first like how we chose impact just for people to get a sense of that um it's mainly just like a few a few points there would be that there have been proven to have a strategy that's like sustainable in the long term or at least until now like a very sound strategy on achieving impact in the world and they don't only have positive externalities

on their individual outcomes but they're also enabling better outcomes for those around them so like in this impact i'll stacks and finally there we try to in include all the ones that have like never like there are attacking leverage points in the system where like one small change has like rippling effects on the rest of the system um so like for like for example i can think of like it is not a completely serious dial but one example that i really really love um is like the

cello ecosystem because they're like building for a inclusion first so what they do is take their mobile uh they're a layer one um like yeah proof of stake but in general like anyone with a cell phone can actually access um different ways to transact money with like valora app and different applications within cello and what what this enables is that people around the world like in the philippines in kenya in peru in everywhere around the world

can actually um get rich these ways to transact money and like we can actually finding funds there without almost no extra fees and without like any delay on the operations but what's mostly exciting within the cello ecosystem is that they're doing a lot of different projects around for example in impact markets are giving daily uvi to a lot of different people um there are also like have a project called the climate collective that is

trying to back 40 percent of cellulose reserve currency with um natural capital assets so like it serves as a carbon sink where most of like percent of the sale reserve will be based on equal on like actual trees so like this means that if they're enabling tooling for the unbanked to actually have ways to transact money the more people who are unbanked that now i'm are transacting cello c cellular dollars euros or like other tokens within the cellular network then

there's more like yeah there's more flow of money and there's more ability to actually to um plant support planting of trees so as the ecology grows the economy grows and i really really like that concept um of like redesigning our currencies and i think another layer of that would be that they're enabling other projects for example collectivo uh which is part of like the the same network of the daoist who are

and prime dao collectivo is kind of like an experiment in curacao where they're integrating their own digital currency they're first establishing like what project how do they want to see their economy grow like such as with regenerative projects or other community initiatives and they're like uh launching their kura dai in the se on top of the cell network and this um allows people to transact value within just with their their cell phones and actually build like a

whole community from the ground up with their own digital currency and one of their use cases for example is using yet another impact dial astra protocol to actually a store protocol as an as a background is just um kind of like geospatial referencing data which just means like a lot of like details and like more grounded experiments but in general they have this uh sense of like a satellite image that can actually trigger behavior on the smart contract

if there is kind of like positive transformation of the ecological state of of a place so for example if there's farmers they can get instantly rewarded by their good actions if um the oracle which is asteroid protocol uh kind of like sees the or triggers the reward after and positive ecological outcome so that was a lot but it's like kind of like how cello collective and astral are kind of cooperating to allow communities grounded in this ecological growth when

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now within your grasp and i just think it's so cool that each of these impact dials for a lot of their impact it's verifiable on chain um you can go look and peer into these digital organisms through their governance structure see what they're focused on see how they're funded and contribute to them so as opposed to like ngos or charities in the old world where they might um not have that base layer of

transparency the all of these impact dials are accessible just from a web browser from anywhere that you go in or digitally native impact organizations so that's one of the things that i think is just so neat about this budding ecosystem of impact owls is how accessible they are to people who want to have impact and um in some cases get tokens for for creating them really exciting and i think also like we've been talking a lot about nature and those digital currencies but the same thing happens in science like

with molecule and vital for example with their model of ipnfts they're enabling they're actually redefining incentives for science and enabling collaboration across scientists with their patients and also enabling better yeah just to make more accessible data from anywhere for this like ip so it it's streaming away from like this pharmaceutical monopoly type of things into more of a collaborative ecosystem of biotech dials so you can see that

across like many different aspects or industries amazing all right so now that we've covered some of your favorite impact dials we'd love to get a little bit back into into the theoretical so um what else do you want to say about the impact ow ecosystem or the impact dial book that you can get at store.getcoin.com yeah i would say that there's two aspects of it uh that i'm really excited about one is the first uh just like what three is just a tool within a

broader shift in mindset away from like these old structures of like sacrifice or lack or control or like these instructors that are like oh we need to work for these big industries or we need to strike value from the world to actually um make thrive our economy and i think like what is most exciting about this is we can actually go away from all these mental models and build kind of from scratch or choose to take like whatever we want to take from that the old

systems into the new so with impact thousand with web 3 they are actually like triggered kind of like a realization that now we have the ability and the agency to design these new economic systems to redefine what we value how we value what we reward even like things like coordinate for example it allows us to to reward people at a more human level and with their for holistically for their human contributions to the data or the projects so they kind of like give us

this yeah this realization that we did not have before in which you actually can build these systems in a way that is um perfect for human thriving for um nature thriving and for ours connections with ourselves with others and with nature and like that our space is kind of like a blank slate to actually like if we have the ability to redesign organizations why don't we design them with humans at the score with nader nature at its core and like just

like yes like the systems the structures um even the rhythms of the dials like maybe maybe we allow for people to take a break in between different seasons to like react reassess what they want to contribute in how they want to contribute in and with all this opportunity in west 3 where you can actually contribute almost anywhere it kind of like it's kind of like a stopping so like it it forces you to stop and really think about like okay where do i want to give my energy where will my energy be done

the most useful for impact and and things like that so it's away from yeah away from just like following a certain path into like being more intentional with the work and one final uh thing that i'll mention of impact house as well is that it's no longer about one winning strategy or like i'm gonna be the one doing the most impact or even like trying to convince donors it is more about like this mesh of networks in which we all bring more value to the ecosystem as a whole

than working individually and in the sense of like achieving great change like there's huge problems in the world right now right so we all want to change the world and there's also this sense for example for me like oh i need to contribute to like 15 different projects because like we need to solve like this 100 problems in the world and stuff like that but then again it's like no because like each one of us like is doing their own work and they're the thing they are best at so

each one is like think about it like each person is following their own path on their own trail in the area where they think it's them the best one so either if it's nature if it's science if it's economics if it's organizationally signed people things so everyone is going in divergent paths but the cool thing about these networks is in things like a setting like conferences like sharing point or things like the outcome that i just went to or different like um twitter spaces this course we always

converge back and like share our learning share strategies increase the feedback loops between each other and just like here at a human layer like as humans just like create relationships so we are always in this divergent and convergent path of achieving different missions but all towards kind of like this um better futures outcome right yeah i mean i think it's a beautiful vision so say i'm i'm in an and on out there and i want to get involved in impact owls maybe i want to create an