path: root/2022/captions/emacsconf-2022-maint--maintaining-the-maintainers-attribution-as-an-economic-model-for-open-source--sid-kasivajhula--main.vtt

WEBVTT captioned by sid

NOTE Problems

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When we think about the problems of the world

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we see global warming, war, appropriation, poverty,

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and among numerous other problems,

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also the inability to make a living

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as an open source developer.

NOTE Solution?

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Now this last problem may seem a lot less consequential

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compared to the other ones,

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but what if I told you that the solution to this problem

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and the solutions to the others are one and the same?

NOTE A common underlying problem

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And it's because there's a common underlying problem

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at the heart of all of these problems.

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I'm going to tell you what that problem is in one sentence.

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You ready for it? It is ...

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the deviation of market value from _true_ value.

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Let's think about this in the context of

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existing economic systems such as capitalism and communism.

NOTE Capitalism

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And of these, I want to focus on capitalism

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because it is the only nontrivial economic system, really.

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Communism is more sort of a political means

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to achieve economic ends.

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And the other economic systems exist

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sort of on a spectrum between these two.

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So let's focus on  capitalism.

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Capitalism has as its basis of value supply and demand.

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And consequently, there is a great emphasis

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on this idea of ownership.

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Now ownership is an idea that made some kind of sense

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when you have goods and services

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that are constrained in some way,

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that are essentially finite in supply.

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But when you have things like

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works of software, art, and music,

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which are essentially infinite in supply,

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the idea of ownership and supply and demand

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don't make sense anymore.

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And yet we employ the institution of property

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to constrain supply and introduce the idea of supply

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just so that we can induce a market value

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in terms of supply and demand

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in a capitalist economic system. And it's wrongheaded.

NOTE Copyright

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How many of us have written copyright declarations

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like these on our work.

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It's a lot of work!

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Especially when we have version control.

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Now in this example,

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almost every line is written by a different person,

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so who owns the code in this case?

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Who owns the copyright here?

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Is it some of them, is it all of them,

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do they share it in some way?

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It doesn't really make sense,

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especially when the reason we're employing

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copyright and ownership in this case

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is to approximate the idea of attribution,

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which is what we really care about here.

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And that brings us to the nature of the solution,

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which is to move away from an economic system

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based on ownership and supply and demand,

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to an economic system based on attribution, instead.

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That is, moving away from who _owns_ what

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to who _did_ what and how important was it.

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And we can do this by the process of

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Dialectical Inheritance Attribution,

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which just means that we do it in a collective way

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using common collectively agreed upon standards

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that are applied transparently to all.

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And when we have an economic system

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that is based on attribution

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as the source of value in this way,

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we call it attribution based economics.

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Now, once we have that, it gives us fairness,

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effective empowerment of expertise,

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freedom through incentives rather than through coercion.

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And privacy as well.

NOTE An attribution-based economic system is efficient

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But I could tell you all of those things

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and some may still say, "Why should I care about this?"

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There are those who would say

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that fairness is not a good goal,

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and that might makes right,

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and that as Darwin showed us,

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the nature of nature is violence.

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Now I know that many of us reject this ideology,

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and we feel in our bones that it is wrong.

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But luckily we don't have to resort to high philosophy

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and gut feeling in order to convince ourselves

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that an attribution-based system is truly better.

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Because in addition to all of

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those other properties we talked about,

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an attribution-based economic system is also efficient.

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And I say this from the perspective of having

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an admiration for the efficiency of capitalism.

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So understand that that is my perspective

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when I say that this system --

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an attribution-based economic system --

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is significantly more efficient than capitalism.

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And it achieves that by virtue of eliminating the waste

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that is inherent in adversarial competition,

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while still preserving market forces!

NOTE Gyroscopes

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In addition to this property

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there is also this other property

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that I think is truly profound,

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and I want to motivate it by this example of a gyroscope.

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Now many of us have had the opportunity to play with

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a gyroscope at some point in our lives.

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If you haven't, I encourage you to go out and get one

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and try it out. It also makes a good gift

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if you're thinking about giving it

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to somebody else this year.

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But if you've played with a gyroscope

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then you've had the experience, perhaps,

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of putting it on your hand and moving it around.

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And no matter what you do, it will always maintain its axis.

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Even if you try to push it

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and try to make it deviate from that axis,

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it will fight you. It will resist you,

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and keep to that axis no matter what.

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And if you've had this experience,

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then believe it or not,

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you have some insight into the nature of economic systems.

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Because if we try to get an economic system to do something

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other than what it wants to do,

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other than what is its nature,

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then it will resist us and it will fight that change.

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Now, I don't know about you,

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but I'd prefer to avoid fighting these gyroscopic forces.

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I'd rather have these forces work with me

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rather than against me. Now in a capitalist system,

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there is another problem, which is that

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not only do you have these gyroscopic forces at work,

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but these forces aren't even all working together.

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They're working against each other, in many cases.

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They represent misaligned interests.

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And indeed, these misaligned interests

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are the very means by which these forces operate at all.

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So in a way, war is not just

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an inevitable consequence in this system

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but is rather the very nature of such a system.

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In an attribution-based system, on the other hand,

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by virtue of the source of value

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being collective attribution,

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we are able to achieve alignment

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of all of these interests at every scale,

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so that at every scale of society,

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from the smallest to the largest scales,

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the interests will be aligned,

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will be consonant and harmonious.

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I think this is a very important, profound quality

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that I think is the fundamental problem of economics -

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the fundamental goal of economics to solve.

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And I believe that an attribution-based economic system

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addresses it and solves it.

NOTE Prototypes

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So without further ado, I want to bring it home

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to the prototype that we have in mind

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for the Emacs community.

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Now we want to start in the Emacs community

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because Emacs has a long tradition

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of exploring better ways of doing things

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and pursuing better alternatives to the status quo.

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Now, to give you an overview of the prototype

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that we've implemented for open source projects.

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The prototype is composed of two broad phases,

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that is, the appraisal phase and the accounting phase.

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Any project is composed of ideas, capital and labor.

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The appraisal phase is involved in assessing the work done

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in terms of how much value was created

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and who created the value and how important that value is.

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The output of this stage is an attributions file.

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And the second phase, of accounting, is about, you know,

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how do you handle payments that come in

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and how do you pay people out.

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Now the first part has more of a social component to it

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and the second part has more of

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a technological component to it that can be automated.

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So in order to implement this prototype,

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we have two things.

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We have founding documents that describe the social aspects,

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and an accounting system that automates

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some of the technological aspects.

NOTE Founding documents

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The founding documents, in the noble tradition

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of the Gayaneshagowa and the US constitution,

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include a constitution which describes

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the guiding principles of ABE,

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and the two main prongs are forward-looking empowerment

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and backward-looking fairness.

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This means that we want to empower

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those individuals and groups

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that are most likely to create value in the future,

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while also recognizing and fairly compensating

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those who've created value in the past,

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to set a good example and incentivize others

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to take chances in creating value.

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And it describes high level principles of

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dialectical inheritance attribution

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as proceeding by means of

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common, collectively agreed-upon standards

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that are applied to all.

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And the key thing here is these improvements feed back

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to the whole and apply to everyone.

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And this is an important quality

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to ensuring fairness and accuracy.

NOTE Declaration of non-ownership

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There's also a declaration of non-ownership.

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We saw already that ownership is an overused institution.

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This just codifies that and allows us to shed

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the baggage of this idea of ownership

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where it doesn't make any sense.

NOTE The financial model

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A third document is the financial model

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which describes how payments are to be treated,

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and a key idea here is that when you pay money

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to an open source project, you know,

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today you don't really have an incentive to do so,

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and it essentially is kind of like a donation.

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But in this model, in an attribution-based model,

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when you pay money to a project,

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you're creating value in a way.

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You're contributing value to the project

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and that itself is attributable.

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And the manner in which we'll treat this

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is in terms of the fair market price that, again,

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we agree upon collectively.

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And any payment that exceeds the fair market price

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is going to be treated as investment.

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And the goal here for this financial model

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is for the system to be self-sustaining,

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so I think there are many open problems here

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and any finance experts or any other experts

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who are interested in contributing here,

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your help is needed, certainly.

NOTE The attribution model

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There's also an attribution model document,

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which describes some of the theoretical ideas

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that would guide dialectical inheritance attribution,

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and there are many interesting ideas here.

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One that I'd like to mention is "backpropagation,"

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which is the idea that

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as we're improving the standards over time

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and they're likely to get more accurate and fair over time,

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we'd like these more accurate and fair standards

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to "backpropagate" and calibrate the value assignments

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that were done in the past.

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And this means that some people might have been

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underpaid in the past

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and we would pay them what they were underpaid,

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or the balance,

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and some people may have been overpaid.

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Now in that case we're not going to go and say,

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"hey we overpaid you, give us the money back."

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Instead the system as a whole is going to bear

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the cost of being wrong,

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and so it's kind of an insurance policy.

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But I think another more interesting quality here is that

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the system in practice wouldn't really

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absorb any negative impact here

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because there is an incentive

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for these people who've been overpaid

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to reinvest that money.

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So I think they would want to invest the money

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in other places that the system has valued

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as being valuable and showing potential.

NOTE The accounting system

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The second component of the implementation

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is the accounting system. All accounting is public.

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All payments into the repo are public

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and all payments out of the project are also public.

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We can do some things for privacy,

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and again, the basis of this system is dialogue.

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It's not a fundamentally technologically system.

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It's a fundamentally dialogue-based system,

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and that, to be honest with you, is everything.

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It's all systems that we have in place.

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But by embracing that, it means that

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we can do whatever we want to do by discussion,

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and if there's something

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that we cannot achieve in a technological way,

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we'll achieve it in a non-technological way.

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But anyway, the point is, all accounting is public,

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and text files in the repository

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form the inputs and outputs of the accounting system

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which is implemented as a GitHub action.

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So typically a source repository will have

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an ABE folder containing these three inputs:

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attributions, payments,

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and payouts. And we'll see how that works.

NOTE drym.org Github account

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This is the drym.org Github organization account.

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This is an example of a repository that uses

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the GitHub action accounting system.

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So there will be a payments folder, a payouts folder,

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as well as an attributions file.

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The payments: essentially each file

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just represents a payment that's made to the repository.

00:14:26.760 --> 00:14:29.079
Payouts is the same except it's payments

00:14:29.080 --> 00:14:32.359
made by the admins of the repository to contributors.

00:14:32.360 --> 00:14:37.159
And the attributions file breaks down

00:14:37.160 --> 00:14:40.679
the attribution of the value in the repository

00:14:40.680 --> 00:14:47.559
by contributor. And then the billing system runs

00:14:47.560 --> 00:14:50.359
on every relevant commit,

00:14:50.360 --> 00:14:53.679
which is typically changes to the ABE folder,

00:14:53.680 --> 00:14:57.239
generates a set of transactions

00:14:57.240 --> 00:15:00.519
that are owed to various people from various payments,

00:15:00.520 --> 00:15:05.079
and then creates an issue with the outstanding balances

00:15:05.080 --> 00:15:07.279
that need to be paid out to contributors,

00:15:07.280 --> 00:15:09.519
and tells you what those balances are.

00:15:09.520 --> 00:15:11.799
So for repository or project maintainers,

00:15:11.800 --> 00:15:14.879
it automates all these accounting details

00:15:14.880 --> 00:15:17.599
and you just have to worry about fulfilling the payments.

NOTE Expanding the boundary

00:15:17.600 --> 00:15:23.519
An interesting property of the prototype

00:15:23.520 --> 00:15:28.399
is that boundary incentives expand the boundary,

00:15:28.400 --> 00:15:33.959
and that is that the incentives in the system

00:15:33.960 --> 00:15:38.439
are so constructed that those on the periphery

00:15:38.440 --> 00:15:40.439
of the attribution-based economic system

00:15:40.440 --> 00:15:42.079
have an incentive to join in.

00:15:42.080 --> 00:15:45.519
And we'll see how that works.

00:15:45.520 --> 00:15:51.359
Well, as I mentioned, we're starting this prototype

00:15:51.360 --> 00:15:52.919
in the Emacs community with the

00:15:52.920 --> 00:15:59.599
Symex repo. Symex is a structural editing package,

00:15:59.600 --> 00:16:05.319
and this prototype will recognize direct contributors

00:16:05.320 --> 00:16:08.159
as well as antecedents and related projects

00:16:08.160 --> 00:16:09.799
through the process of collective attribution.

00:16:09.800 --> 00:16:14.839
We all decide how financial contributions to the Symex repo

00:16:14.840 --> 00:16:18.759
are going to be distributed to the direct contributors

00:16:18.760 --> 00:16:21.039
as well as to antecedents and related projects.

00:16:21.040 --> 00:16:23.679
So the power is yours!

00:16:23.680 --> 00:16:27.159
And that's what I meant when I said

00:16:27.160 --> 00:16:29.519
that the boundary incentives expand the boundary,

00:16:29.520 --> 00:16:32.359
because projects that we agree are owed money

00:16:32.360 --> 00:16:37.959
from the Symex repo now would have an incentive to join,

00:16:37.960 --> 00:16:39.959
because once they join they would get that money.

00:16:39.960 --> 00:16:43.199
And we'll also be implementing this in the

00:16:43.200 --> 00:16:47.199
Racket community. Racket is a Scheme dialect,

00:16:47.200 --> 00:16:50.959
and Emacs has great support for Racket in Racket Mode

00:16:50.960 --> 00:16:52.159
so I encourage you to try it.

00:16:52.160 --> 00:16:55.999
And we'll be prototyping it in the Qi repository.

00:16:56.000 --> 00:16:59.599
Qi is a language written in Racket which is, you know,

00:16:59.600 --> 00:17:02.719
it's for functional programming and things like that.

00:17:02.720 --> 00:17:06.239
And once again, we'll recognize direct contributors

00:17:06.240 --> 00:17:09.239
as well as antecedents and we all decide

00:17:09.240 --> 00:17:11.559
and agree on how those are done.

NOTE Adopting this idea

00:17:11.560 --> 00:17:14.119
So how do you adopt this?

00:17:14.120 --> 00:17:18.559
You can add the github action to a repo

00:17:18.560 --> 00:17:20.239
that you are a maintainer of.

00:17:20.240 --> 00:17:23.319
You can financially support an ABE project.

00:17:23.320 --> 00:17:25.199
This is important to do

00:17:25.200 --> 00:17:26.919
because the system won't get started

00:17:26.920 --> 00:17:28.119
without money as an input.

00:17:28.120 --> 00:17:31.119
And it also has network effects, as we saw -

00:17:31.120 --> 00:17:33.479
the more money you contribute,

00:17:33.480 --> 00:17:35.239
the more incentive there is

00:17:35.240 --> 00:17:36.799
for other people to join the system.

00:17:36.800 --> 00:17:39.879
And contributions are also attributable,

00:17:39.880 --> 00:17:41.079
as we said earlier.

00:17:41.080 --> 00:17:43.719
Some of them can be treated as investments.

00:17:43.720 --> 00:17:47.999
Any help you can provide with funding

00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:50.519
would be attributable and very helpful, of course.

00:17:50.520 --> 00:17:54.079
And yeah, if you can help us achieve

00:17:54.080 --> 00:17:55.839
the goal of self-sufficiency

00:17:55.840 --> 00:17:59.039
without relying on capitalist entry points,

00:17:59.040 --> 00:18:01.759
that would be very helpful as well.

00:18:01.760 --> 00:18:06.319
I'd like to acknowledge the help of many individuals

00:18:06.320 --> 00:18:09.399
for this presentation

00:18:09.400 --> 00:18:12.759
as well as many of the supporting things

00:18:12.760 --> 00:18:14.919
that have gone on behind the scenes for years.

00:18:14.920 --> 00:18:19.679
And in particular for now I want to mention

00:18:19.680 --> 00:18:25.559
Jair and Ariana who wrote the accounting system

00:18:25.560 --> 00:18:28.319
that we saw earlier, and Salim who encouraged me

00:18:28.320 --> 00:18:32.799
to take this social approach to the prototype.

00:18:32.800 --> 00:18:36.559
And so many more people who have believed and invested

00:18:36.560 --> 00:18:39.159
in the cause of "attribution, not ownership!"

NOTE Closing thoughts

00:18:39.160 --> 00:18:42.759
I want to leave you with this closing thought.

00:18:42.760 --> 00:18:46.159
The electromagnetic attraction between two objects

00:18:46.160 --> 00:18:49.919
is 10^42 stronger (!) than the gravitational attraction

00:18:49.920 --> 00:18:51.079
between these same objects.

00:18:51.080 --> 00:18:53.879
And yet, a stone falls to the Earth

00:18:53.880 --> 00:18:56.679
under the influence of gravity, not magnetism.

00:18:56.680 --> 00:19:00.879
The reason is that the e/m forces are polarized,

00:19:00.880 --> 00:19:04.079
much like our world, and cancel each other out.

NOTE Taking care of one another

00:19:04.080 --> 00:19:07.719
Now in this world, we are told

00:19:07.720 --> 00:19:09.559
that we should look out for ourselves

00:19:09.560 --> 00:19:11.879
because no one is going to look out for us.

00:19:11.880 --> 00:19:14.039
That we should take care of our own

00:19:14.040 --> 00:19:17.359
because we can't rely on others to care.

00:19:17.360 --> 00:19:22.479
An attribution-based economy is nothing like that.

00:19:22.480 --> 00:19:23.959
We care about each other,

00:19:23.960 --> 00:19:25.439
we take care of each other,

00:19:25.440 --> 00:19:29.879
because taking care of one another is valuable,

00:19:29.880 --> 00:19:32.559
and an attribution-based economic system

00:19:32.560 --> 00:19:39.079
is capable of recognizing that value, in financial terms.

00:19:39.080 --> 00:19:43.879
And as a result, we are safe in the embrace of the world.

00:19:43.880 --> 00:19:56.240
So, um, yeah. Let's go!