now. We seem to be back. Sorry for the little shuffling chairs around. We are now live with
Sid. Hi, Sid. Let me contextualize a little bit for the people because we are on Gen right now
and the talk was happening on Dev. Sid, can I ask you explaining what your talk was about in about
one to two minutes? Yes, sure. The talk was called Maintaining the Maintainer's Attribution
as a Model for Open Source Projects, and the idea is that instead of having an economic system based
on supply and demand, which is capitalism, we have an economic system based on attribution
and agreement, the power of our words, taking on incentives in the world, and that this can work
for open source projects as a proving ground, and I think it can scale beyond that, and I hope it
will scale beyond that in general. Okay, well I think you did, I'm not sure if you rehearsed
this before, but that was such a perfect elevator speech for your talk. I am beyond amazed.
Thank you, thank you. It's the adrenaline from being late and all the time zone shifting.
You're not supposed to mention this, you know. You know, the things we keep telling people,
you know, is that EmacsConf, yes, you see us rustling and being really grumpy when we don't
get prereq, but really the live event is one part of EmacsConf, but really the better part of it is
just having all the talks out of the head of people online, easily viewable, easily accessible
with subtitles and stuff like this. So don't worry, it's fine if you're all right for submitting a
prereq, it's fine if you don't show up to the Q&A, eventually we will find you, we will ask you the
questions and all the data will be out there, so don't worry about it. Yeah, the magic of editing
and stuff like that, you know. Yes, but we don't have it now, so we'll have to stick, you know,
time is going to dilute, we'll have to stick with strict adherence to chronology right now. So
starting with Sid, do you want to take the first question on the pad? Okay, let's look at them.
So the first question is, this seems to assume that there will be money contributions commensured
with the value of the project versus everyone freeloading because there's no incentive to pay.
Right, so actually there is an incentive to pay, so I think what the question is referring to
is that everyone is going to pay to other projects, or no one is going to pay to projects because
they're free anyway and you can use them and you don't have to pay, but one of the new things
with attribution-based economics is the idea that in open source projects we agree, we all
collectively agree on a fair market price for a project, and this isn't a price in the sense that
you are prohibited from using the product until you pay the price, but rather it's for an accounting
purpose, which is that if you pay more than that price, then that means you are now an investor,
and so you can sort of, that means you are now attributable in future revenues that come to the
project. So if you think there's a project that's going to do some nice things, you can essentially
buy shares in it, except these are not ownership shares, they're shares and attribution because
you contribute value by contributing money and that's attributable, so there is an incentive
to pay, and I think, but also beyond this, the financial model is incredibly complex,
it is much simpler than what we have today in a capitalist world, but still finance is a very
complex thing, and I think we're in the very very early stages of figuring out the financial model,
and I think there's a number, there's tons of open questions, needs a lot of help from people
to figure these out, so there's promising angles here, but I think we have a lot to work out as
well. Should I go to the second question? Yeah, feel free to do so, you are the master, you're
in Q&A. Okay, so the second question is, are you aware of projects like OpenQ, would that fit the
model in your opinion? I'm actually not familiar with OpenQ, so maybe I should just move on to the
next question and come back to that if we have time. Sure. The next one says, I see incredible
amounts of overlap with the source cred system, where attribution of antecedents, graph of
contributions, fair in hindsight, backpropagation. Oh, backpropagation, interesting. I'm sensing a
pattern though, so you are being exposed to stuff that you do not know, which is amazing, that
brings an opportunity to do research later on, but feel free to delay those questions until,
perhaps, I would invite the people who ask those questions in the pad maybe to describe in a little
blurb that Sid can read, what is the meaning of those particular platforms, and in the meantime,
Sid, you can move on to the next questions. Sure, but I will say one thing on the subject of both
of these things, which is that I think it's significantly underappreciated the extent to which
value is created in the world that is both independently created of other value that happens
to be very similar, as well as dependently related and that may be unknown, and this is something
that I call subliminal transmission, which is like if you think about a turbulent flow,
you know, and that's what our world is, you know, we like to have all these linear narratives and
simple stories where I think if you take all of Wikipedia, right, even a single person's life
has more information and richness than all of Wikipedia, so when you think about it in those
terms, you realize just how small our stories are in expressing what really happens and what has
really happened in the world, so from that perspective, I think there's this thing called
subliminal transmission, which is like a turbulent flow where you have little vortices that appear
here and then they disappear, they're gone, but then you see them again here and they're like
bigger, but they're the same, and then you see them in a different place and they're not the
same, they're different, yet somehow the same, and I think our world is like that, and if we have
an economic system that's capable of not saying that, oh, it should be this other way, which it
isn't, but in fact we see this is how it is, let's make sure that we recognize this and empower the
right voices, given that this is how the world is, and from that perspective, I think projects like
OpenQ and SourceCred and any number of others might exist which are creating value in the world,
and I think that we all deserve to be empowered, you know, if we're creating similar kinds of
value, then these are voices that have something useful to say for us moving forward, and they
deserve to be empowered, so yeah, it doesn't have to be causally related, you know, you can have
empowerment of all of these different projects because they work together, so yeah, very long
-winded answer to a short question, or non-question, meta-question.
You're fine, you can be as long-winded as you want, because honestly you have been so
eloquent in your answer, and the little ingestors that accompany these little vertices
do carry on with as much velocity as you want. We will be going until about
52-53 of the current hours, which means we have about 20 more minutes. Also, we have a lot of
questions in the pad, so I would prefer if Sid started answering the questions over the pad first,
but we are going to be opening the pad in about six to seven minutes if you want to join and ask
questions live to Sid, but in the meantime, Sid, sorry, I'm getting tired, it's late, in the meantime,
Sid, feel free to answer more questions. Sure, okay, thank you. The next question is,
how is this different from money? Not in some abstract ownership versus attribution way.
Open-source funding is an incentive problem, which this does not change as far as I can see.
So, on the one hand, it does add new incentives, as we talked about. I'm not sure about the question
of how this is different from money. This isn't proposing to replace money in any way.
Rather, it employs money as, you know, the mechanism by which we recognize value. I think
money is perhaps something that can be revisited and, you know, reflected upon in the future,
but I don't think we need to do that at this stage. At this stage, I'm content to rest on the
black box abstractions of certain things that we've already developed, like money,
as a means of exchange and as a means of recognizing value, and I think we can use that,
so I'm not trying to replace money. Open-source funding is an incentive program. This doesn't
change incentives, so I think we already covered how it does add incentives in the sense that you
can invest in open-source projects, which is a new incentive, and, you know, we also talked about
how there are some unopened questions. I'm not sure if this is one of them.
How would you approach a viable experiment? So, the prototype that we have, that we talked about
in the talk, so there's a prototype, for those who didn't watch the talk. We have an open-source
project, you know, it's a GitHub action, and, you know, I love to support other platforms. I'm not
married to GitHub in any way. I don't have any special affection for GitHub. I don't have any
special affection for GitHub. But it's a GitHub action at the moment, and what it will do is,
when you follow all of the processes in the Constitution, which says, you know,
open-source repository, create an issue that solicits related work reports from members of
the public, and then create this folder structure which has a report of the contributors and this
and that, once you do all of that, like initial logistical work, this GitHub action will process
fresh payments that come in, which you report as single line item files, text files. Everything is
text input and output, and then, you know, you can basically get all the accounting done for you by
this system. So, that's what the nature of the experiment is, and I think we're starting with
just one or two repos, because there's tremendous number of unresolved questions, and it's all going
to be resolved through dialogue, agreement. We all decide how this thing works, and I think,
you know, there's, yeah, so we'll see about how the experiment goes. Next question, given that
oversight is a social process, how do you constrain the cognitive and time burdens of deciding the
values of attributed contributions? Okay, this is a great question. So, first of all, you know,
let's talk about long-term vision, right? Long-term vision, I don't imagine that any of us, that is,
the actual contributors to the projects, are going to have to worry about this at all.
We're not going to have to engage in this process of what is called dialectical inheritance
attribution, which is, you know, it's a lot of work. There's all these standards and precedents,
and how do you compare ideas versus works versus the materials that went into the project? It's a
very hard problem, and I think it's something we'll be improving upon for possibly even decades.
But at that stage, I believe there will be experts, much like today's investment bankers
and lawyers, investment IP lawyers. These are the people who are going to specialize in it,
going to be professionals, and that's the kind of work that they're going to do, and we can leave it
to them. But at this stage, yes, we have to do it. We have to set these principles and standards in
place. And how do we constrain that? We start with simple heuristics. So, initially, we want to have,
you know, if you can imagine, this is, I don't know, this is probably a bad metaphor, but if you have,
like, a big hole and you're trying to patch it, you know, if you put, like, little tiny things on
it and try to focus on little tiny things, okay, what I'm trying to say is order of magnitude,
right? Let's solve the problem at the first order of magnitude and then get the little harmonics
and, like, solve those over time. So, basically, we want to have usable, workable heuristics that
are low maintenance that solve the majority of the problem for our immediate purposes and then
iterate on those over time and develop proper models, which I think we will start to do in the
next phase. The initial phase is heuristics that are easy and low maintenance and useful.
Right, Sid, I just want to barge in a little bit. I just want to let people know that we have opened
up the Q&A BBB window right now, so the same spiel as usual. If you want to join Sid and ask questions
directly, we still have some questions in the pad. Don't worry, Sid will get to them first.
But if you want to join and have a discussion with Sid, we have until about, we've got about
20, 18 minutes left of discussion there. So, please do not hesitate. This is a very interesting talk.
We have a very interesting speaker as well. So, use this opportunity, please. In the meantime,
Sid, you can answer more questions. Sure. Should we take one from the field?
I guess while people are thinking about it, I'll take one more question, maybe.
Okay. So, the next question is, how are the attribution amounts calculated?
Okay, how are the attribution amounts calculated? This is going to be done through standards.
So, there is a, there's a repo, you know, if you go to the github.org account, dream-org,
d-r-y-m-dash-org-slash-foundation. This contains the founding documents of how we will manage this
process. And it can, it is, it will contain more standards. It has a few at the moment, very high
level ones, but we will keep adding more standards there that are general enough to be universally
applicable, and that can be specialized to the individual projects. And the attribution is going
to be decided by these standards, by the members of the public, members of the community.
Yeah. And they calculate, they must add up to 100%. So, it's, you know, and that's okay, actually,
I should say. One of the mechanisms by which attribution will be done initially is this heuristic
procedure called the Analyze, Appraise, Anonymize Attribute Loop. What that means is we first
analyze the project, decompose it into its components, and we can do any number of such
analyses, any number of people can do these analyses, and there can be a decision procedure
for combining them. But that, I digress. We'll keep it simple first. We analyze the project into its
components, then we agree on the proportion of value contributed by each of those components,
then we analyze the activities done by the contributors, and then we analyze the
activities done by the contributors and anonymize them. And we say, this was done, this was done,
this was done, this was done. This is how much proportion of value these activities contribute
to each of these components. And then once you have this chart, this graph of all of these
connections and proportions of value, then you anonymize and you aggregate the sum of proportions
of value by contributor. And contributor is not necessarily a person, a contributor is a
project, it can be an antecedent, it doesn't have to be a direct contributor to the project,
it doesn't have to be someone who wrote code, it can be a person who created a bug report,
or a person who had a good idea for the design. And anyway, so once you do this, you aggregate
by contributor, you have a set of proportions that total up to one, or a set of percentages
that total up to 100, that dictate how the revenues that come into the project are to
be divided amongst all of these antecedents and contributors. Let's see, what's the next question?
Okay, the next question is being written down as we speak.
It's fine, we can wait a little bit. In the meantime, I'll just mention,
so actually, when we keep track of presentation for Emacs, we do have slugs for them. And this
year, the slug for your talk, Sid, was made. And it was not an anodyne choice, because last year,
we also had another talk by a maintainer, or well, the org maintainer, or one of the org maintainers,
Bastien Guerri. And it feels like Bastien's talk was mostly geared towards sustaining
maintenance, and your is more about maintaining the software effort in general. And it feels like
the two talks are related, but yours seems to be more, I wouldn't say visionary, I think they are
very complimentary in nature. I'm not sure, have you been able to watch Bastien's talk from last
year? I have not, but that sounds very interesting. I'll definitely check it out after this.
Right. And I will now stop my blabbering, and you can answer the last question.
The last question is, what are your assumptions about human nature,
vis-a-vis self-interest versus altruism? The funny thing is, I don't actually feel like
we need to opine on that, from the perspective of an economic system. I mean, yes, we have to
recognize that, you know, some people will say, oh, human nature is fundamentally selfish, or,
you know, we have to be good, and we have to help each other. And I think both of these perspectives
are not necessarily, you know, I don't know if they're necessarily the right way to think about
it, because you have the idea about, well, capitalism assumes people are fundamentally
selfish, or they have to act that way in order to be rational in the system. That's one side of it.
The other side of it is this notion of altruism, right, that somehow you have to help others,
and that, you know, there's like a charitable component, and you have all these people who
make billions and billions of dollars, and then, you know, start giving that away. Which,
you know, if you're going to make billions and billions of dollars, and you give it away,
and like help the world, that's better than not giving it away and not helping the world.
On the other hand, the fact that you got those billions and billions of dollars in a capitalist
economic system, which fundamentally skews the value recognition in ways that, you know, is very,
very subversive and very, very minimizing of the source, the true sources of value,
means that you've led yourself to go down this path and essentially unwittingly and inevitably
ended up causing a lot of problems, too. Like, it's not necessarily the case that if you're
wealthy in a capitalist economy, that you've created a lot of value, because yes, you have,
but at the same time, the net value is not guaranteed to be above zero, really,
because capitalism can't express all forms of value. So I don't think thinking about self-interest
versus altruism is the right way to think about things from the perspective of economic systems.
In an economic system where the incentives are so set up that the maximum value to all
is recognized the most, then it's inevitable that people want to do that. And it doesn't mean that
you're a naturalistic person or a selfish person. You're just going to do it because there are
incentives that are set up that way that everybody agreed on. And I think in such a system, your own
sort of spiritual inclinations towards this are secondary. Not secondary. I don't want to say
secondary. I want to say that they are up to you. And your actions in the world will be rewarded to
the extent that you help others. The more you give, the more you will be empowered. So from
that perspective, you could say that the system rewards altruism. But at the same time, if you're
just giving and you're not in a position where... I mean, the system ensures that if you give,
you're also taken care of, so that you don't have to choose between altruism and selfishness.
Altruism is empowering yourself. So that's kind of the beauty of this system, really. That's the
beauty of an attribution-based system is that you become more empowered by giving more. But we don't
have to get into the spirituality stuff of it, really. It's beside the point as far as the
mechanisms of the economic system go. All right. I think that was the last question, unless I'm
mistaken. That's the last one I see. Yes. Well, you did a fine job answering, however, many
questions before. Again, very lengthy, as you said, but very eloquent, as I will say to you.
There is one question that appeared on ISE, which was the URL of the project. You mentioned
dream.org. Would you be able to maybe type it out in the chat so that people can
check it, and I'll place it on ISE for the person that was asking? Or on BBB, it's fine, too.
It's actually dream-org. Oh, that's why I did dream.org, which was the problem.
It's the GitHub repo. And actually, sorry, you should also check out
dream-org.old-abe. That is the billing prototype, which is the GitHub action,
which you can add to your repo. And it's got all the startup instructions for how you can
set up attribution-based economics. So I'll let you type it out. github.com slash dream
dash org slash old-abe.
It's good for you for remembering it. I will place this in BBB right now. Sorry,
not in BBB, in the pad so that people can click on it. Sid, is there anything else you'd like to
say? We are about at the end of the Q&A right now. I guess attribution-based economics is open for
business, as it were. So if you can go to some of the repos at the dream-org GitHub org account,
many of those repos are starting attribution-based economics. And simx.el in particular is one for
the Emacs community. So I encourage you guys. And of course, old-abe, that's another one that
started. And that's the only one that's actually ready to accept payments and distribute payments,
because we have done the attributions already, given that it was written in the last few days.
But the other ones, we might start payments out, I think, on January 1. So between now and January
1, we'll start doing the attribution process and deciding the antecedents, who's owed what,
what proportion of value came from whom, and all that stuff between now and then. And then we're
going to start paying out from the repositories January 1 is the plan. If you can contribute to
these projects, then that would help prove the model out, and that would create incentives for
people to join. So I encourage you to do so. Thank you. Well, thank you. You've definitely
made a very nice case for it, and people can make their own minds now by checking the link.
We really encourage you to follow up on a lot of the talks. It's one thing. One thing that we always
say with Sasha to the people, be they speakers, be they user group members, is that Emacs can't,
and user groups, any kind of community activity for Emacs is about curiosity. And it's one thing
to ignite the flame of curiosity in some peoples. It's actually much better to actually follow the
fuse and see where it leads you. Because, you know, it's a little fuse, a little tiny flame,
a flicker of a flame, a flicker of light going in a direction that might explode so much curiosity
later down the line. I was talking earlier with Blaine about, you know, oh, last year he was
presenting, it had only been six, it had only been, I can't speak English, it's 10.45 a.m. in
my time zone. I'm starting to tire. But he had only started using Emacs six months prior to
presenting, and he was already so proficient in it. And it feels like, it's kind of like in Lost,
you know, when you have the rope and you pull on the rope and it brings you so far away. Well,
do follow this curiosity, be it for what Sid has presented to you today, but for any of the topics
that we've presented to you today. So thank you so much, Sid, for all your time, all your
presentation, and your answers. Thank you so much, Leo. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Great. I'll still make some last-minute announcement. So we are still running,
sorry, the elves are yelling in my ears again. We will be waiting a little bit for the track,
development track to finish, which should take about five to ten minutes, and we will reconvene
in seven minutes in this channel for the closing remarks for day one. So see you in a bit,
and thank you again, Sid. Thank you. Okay, Sid, we are not live anymore. Thank you so much. I need
to get going. I need to prepare the closing remarks. All right. Thank you so much, Leo.
Appreciate it. Where can I watch the closing remarks? Closing remarks? You go to emacs.org
slash 2022. You'll have everything over there. Watch. I'm going to give you the page. I have
the time to do this. 22, watch. Check on BBB. We will be on the general channel in about
six minutes. Okay, perfect. Thanks, Leo. See you in a bit. See ya.