Catalist Walkthrough With Vincent Arena

Uh this is the first of many youtube podcast series and i wanted to start off with you because me and you uh i think you're one of the people that i think i most connect with in terms of my kind of main goals and and where i see things going and a lot of my visions and plans very much kind of line up with where you're where you where You're heading and and you're really somebody who's like takes a lot of action on it as well you're you've really been actually you know grinding and making

things come to life um and the the fact that you know it's all kind of coming to this point where you've got it pretty much prepared uh and it's and it's almost there and you know that you're getting quite a lot of interest around it i think now is a Good time to to kind of just go through it maybe um we can talk a little bit about like how how we first connected and and and some of the reasons why you're uh why you're driven to to work on this stuff and then maybe we

can go into like a little uh tutorial of uh the tool that you've put together yeah awesome thanks alex yeah so um i think we first connected um In a game b chat and then ended up having a like four hour phone call right after realizing that we like had the exact same vision of like okay we need to create new systems in order to catalyze action for creating impact and transitioning into new systems that are more win-win and that are more conscious and how we can kind of use technology And media and i think

the things that both of us are passionate about and where our kind of talents lie in order to to create that change and um yeah i guess i'll kind of tell a brief story about how i got to uh where i am with the kind of problems that i've experienced so yeah my background i studied design and engineering And i went to rensselaer polytechnic institute when i was there i worked i was part of this fellowship program called university innovation fellows and part of the fellowship our job was basically to take a like an ecosystem

approach and make a landscape canvas of the entire university and our goal was to try to figure out where are the gaps In this sort of innovation ecosystem where when students kind of come in to the university what are the ways that they can and can't get involved with innovation with thinking creatively with um entrepreneurialism with starting projects um and what i found was that there was actually quite a few pieces and along the entire kind of process of there's a lot of Different clubs there were 200 clubs in my university there were actually a

bunch of classes there was even an entrepreneurship there was two entrepreneurship clubs the problem was that nobody actually knew about them and so there were people who were literally seniors that for four years didn't know that there was an entrepreneurship club on campus and wanted to start businesses and so after doing a bunch of interviews And talking to students realized this problem was not just within the innovation ecosystem but just in general that the amount of information and opportunities was overwhelming and it was really hard for anyone to actually figure out like what is the

big picture of what's going on and how do i get involved how do i connect with people projects organizations events that i'm interested In um in my limited time and so the what we ended up doing was creating this club called ties and it was basically an organization of human connectors and our job was to basically create a directory of all of the different projects startups research professors clubs organizations initiatives map that out and then act as and then table at different events And say hey like what are you looking for and literally just connected

people to what they were looking for based off of our embodied knowledge and based off of the technical tools that we were building to catalog all this information so it went really great except i graduated six months later and i kind of had another jump of realizing okay wait a minute once you get out of this Very rich very busy college atmosphere it's actually even harder when you go back and you move home to the suburbs or you get a job in like a rural area and you all of a sudden don't have a network

anymore and all of a sudden within a square mile there's not thousands of like-minded people i'm like wait a minute this is actually even harder to find to find the others and to find out how To get involved with with social impact work so that's what basically started the work on project called catalyst which was basically an initiative to catalog information and then display it in a way where people would be able to connect with what they're looking for in order to catalyze action and that project took many forms many Different prototypes um many different

verticals so i ended up creating a platform to connect people who went to innovation conferences with each other based off of their projects and their interests and skills and demoed that at a few different conferences then ended up pivoting and starting to work on cataloging climate organizations after doing a pitch at a climate like a Un climate conference um i realized like i actually had no idea what were the different pieces of the un and so i did this like midnight research and i i ended up creating a database of like 100 different un or

un related organizations and like their websites and what they were doing and what they were about and i was like like who is doing this and and how can i Take what i have basically curated and share this with others and so that's what kind of sparked this doing some like curation work um and then covet hit right as i was about to launch that project and ended up taking everything that i had worked on and started building a custom tool except change the name from climate to just being covered list and so we made

this site called Covadash19list.com which basically was a way to um crowdsource the collection of information in order to connect people to the maps of what was going on the coveted cases how it was spreading the best and most informational articles the different organizations and what help they were looking for we ended up cataloging about 1200 mutual aid groups across the globe Um and that project ended up then leading into actually finding a mutual aid group on long island where i live and then starting again building another tool from scratch to basically so alongside the cooperation

long island website basically building a tool to match make volunteers with people who are requesting mutual aid assistance um and so doing this kind of needs request offering And then also allowing anyone in the community or any of the um you know like 15 20 different non-profits and organizations that were really closely working with cooperation long island to basically collaboratively curate resources opportunities events and then also be able to share those needs and offers across our networks and so this kind of Theme that i feel like has strung through all these different projects is this

kind of need to connect information across silos in order to show people what's out there to basically stop the duplication of efforts and and encourage collaboration by design right right that i mean yeah that's that's um you know i'm seeing a lot of uh a lot Of a need for that i think and especially having having gone down the sort of road of trying to sort of see how i can get gathering people together and getting them collaborating um i think there's i've certainly even even for instance the uh open creative alliance that i that

i put together back at the beginning of the pandemic um what i thought was really interesting Was that when you found that you were like oh my god what is this this is amazing how are you involving it and um and i thought and it was great because it was kind of like because you really fit the exact kind of person that that would be geared for like you would be the ultimate like a alliance member because you've just you know you're coming into it with this with this realm of like you know uh Orientation

to action be really thinking about like how we can be connecting people and i guess i was coming from a very similar place in the sense that you know i just i saw all these people that were outpouring the need for you know they wanted to do something about about this but they didn't have a way of kind of connecting to the other other projects out there especially people in the creative Industries they might not see you know they might not see where they can fit in they might not see what what what place they

have and yet you know to me i saw it as quite an important important piece in the sense of like how do we bring this information to a wider audience so i i saw that as being quite important to find other um projects that were out there but going through that as a as as a practice You do start to see these barriers of of collaboration and these silos of where all that information is and you know even you know there's plenty of resources that were created at that time and you know i'm somebody who

collects a shitload of content online as well and i'm constantly kind of putting it into their mind is this useful like am i gonna yeah this again and like Some of it goes out of day as well so there's the and i think there's this very interesting interplay at the moment in terms of where how we relate to information and how we find it because i think at the moment it's very you know we're all so used to these feed-based um you know ways of experiencing information and and the the resources at the same time

Is useful but knowing how you know keeping that updated you know taking the time to actually put in the the metadata that's in important can be a bit of a sort of high um effort up front and and sort of defining whether that's actually going to be sort of useful and how that could be brought back is it's something that you know a lot of people are working on and i think I've been sort of really exploring uh how to how to improve it in my you know my notion table um but i think i've

been very interested in like how to how to how to then redirect that information to the right people at the right time as well you know so people can you know as they need it they have access to those resources and Ways of making it more of a collaborative thing as opposed to being um being siloed so i think we're in that kind of age yeah we're going in this direction yeah so i think there's been a huge rise of this like a second brain um like tools like like notion or rome that are like

helping us and and this isn't new technology like notebooks and just Journaling right it's like helps us get information out of our heads so that we're able to um to process it better to remember things um and i think we have to start now going towards how can we you know not just have a second brain but also a collective brain how do we start taking our knowledge and and cataloging it in a way that can that can catalyze action for somebody Else um as well yeah exactly um so and one thing that yeah i've

been just very personally um you know kind of not wanting to be on social media because i i see what it kind of does to me and how i get caught up in this kind of like feed and like stream of constant notifications um but i feel like for me personally it's like i need to be on there because If i'm not there's no other way that i'm going to be connected to the opportunities that i'm looking for and that i need to get ahead and so almost selfishly i've been building this you know for

myself as well as a tool that i can get myself off of that kind of very um addictive type of um feed based platform and create things that are more going towards this like knowledge gardens That you get connected with exactly what you want when you want and not based off of an advertising company's you know quota that they're trying to meet um and so i guess that kind of goes into the project that i'm launching right now that we just launched on alpha about two weeks ago called trove which is really trying to take

this Concept of um like a trove is a valuable collection or store of knowledge or things opportunities um and so going from this idea of yeah like a stream and a feat of knowledge to a a kind of firmament of knowledge more similar to a wikipedia where it is collaborative and people are adding into it and it's a place that you go when you want to explore or discover um but adding on the social layer that makes it Collaborative and also really user friendly um and so it's you know basically combining the best of the

kind of user experience that comes with using something like reddit um where you know it's really collaborative and it's fun and engaging but when you're doing that work you're building something that is not just kind of getting lost And buried and it's and it's constantly going to be um added onto in terms of not only the quantity of information but the quality and so encouraging you know when you create a post um treating it more as like i'm creating a resource i'm adding a resource that i'm curating into this community and i'm adding a comment

onto it That other people can then add on but other people can also just take that post and actually add more context they can add tags to it like different topics they can say this is relevant and connect it to different communities and so what you're doing is basically encouraging people to increase the quality of the data and the information in a way that is understandable at people And is also semantically understandable by computers and what that does is actually let you do start to do what i've been calling like passive connection and so if

i say like i'm looking for events about regenerative agriculture in new york and then people are not just posting you know posting a link to an event say hey check out this event but instead the Kind of the cultural norm becomes like hey here's this event and who would this be useful for i think this event would be useful for anyone who's in new york and anyone who's interested in regenerative agriculture and also like i'm going to tag these two groups and those two groups don't have to get bombarded with a notification you that you

tagged them with a post but because I'm looking for specifically what somebody else on the other side of the earth posted then and i want that notification i'm going to get connected and so it's also how do we kind of create tools that respect our own kind of mental hygiene and and we can control the algorithms of how we get connected to information um and so catalyst is the kind of like The broader initiative of tools that will kind of to be used to passively connect people to what they're looking for to kind of help

them find their path and this platform that we just launched called trove is kind of like the community hub where the information is going and we're very much treating it like a um like a data data commons for community that also allows you to share data not only Inside your community but across communities and also inside of commons uh like commons topics like climate change so if there's a hundred communities interested in climate change if they add a climate resource a new like platform design toolkit for climate um resources and projects and they add it

to the kind of climate commons then any community That also is a part of that will possibly get connected with that information if they want it so so the goal is really trying to create something that is useful not only for communities but also for individuals to to connect people to what they're looking for and help people find the opportunities uh the projects and the other people and communities that they're really You know looking for to find that alignment and to start creating action and collaborating and working together well there's also the there's also the

fact that it's like you know it becomes quite a social thing as well in terms of like that becomes a way of keeping people connected is is by sharing information with them you know if you if you're connecting to people via information and then you're sharing things that there to see Whether they resonate with them that is an a is a way of kind of creating increasing those weak ties and making you know building actual relationships by the fact that you're kind of finding something interesting and then you know i think especially if you're able

to like really easily just just just put it to people without having to at the moment it's like you know i find something then i have to Remember like where was our last conversation was it on telegram was it on this was it on you know there's like so many different messenger apps so in that sense like just being able to just quickly sort of you know tag it with the if i can do all of that within the same within the same space and just you know give it the necessary information to be able

to retrieve it but also send it to the people that i think Would resonate with it you know almost being able to kind of create those uh those groups of of people more naturally i think there's i think that's a massive way of uh of moving things forward and i know that even in the evening the game b space the the pc we're talking about in terms of people uh you know information getting lost this This is something that you know is is seen everywhere from from slack and and other platforms but you know having

the game be uh community on facebook this was a topic that's come up time and time again it's like well yeah you know there's there's really lengthy interesting comments that people will people will take the time to explore certain things that you know and none of it is able to Get built built upon you know none of it is able to evolve um which i think especially if it was a year ago yeah yeah no one's going to scroll back that far exactly but it's so like there's some you know that's work that's people you

know that's really some of them are thinking it through some of them really tying things together or you know making interesting connections And uh you know i recently posted up uh one of the videos on on roam research because this is something i've been sort of looking at it's like you know how do you sort of enable this network thought you know kind of multi-player way and you know enable us to build these kind of collective uh knowledge graphs that people can uh that we can sort of uh build upon um so i'm interested to

see how these You know i think there is a there is a there is a fundamental kind of issue around um interoperability with some of these but i'm hoping that like the way in which things are going at the moment it's usually you know there is there is more of an orientation towards having it accessible across platforms and i'm hoping that you know if if if there's if there's stuff this like This that comes out and you know it's it's one of those things where there's an incentive to be connected and have it interoperable i

think as as more people are going to be looking for that then um you know there's the the possibilities just kind of amplify yeah yeah so i want to touch on interoperability but just one other point um so that post that you made on Facebook i actually saw it and i wanted to read the article and so i hit the little like save for later but the interesting thing is i've actually never went into the saved uh things like posts in my facebook or instagram it's actually like three or four clicks away to even get

there and then it's so it's super inaccessible it's not designed to make you so it's not designed to make You go back to look at the things you want to see um like like as soon as you get on the app actually the yesterday i went on instagram and it showed this really cool diagram of like something that i had been sketching out like of like a basin of attraction and then it just like disappeared to the bottom and i was like wait where'd it go And i literally spent 20 minutes scrolling all the way

through my instagram to try to find it and i couldn't find it like it's almost like it was designed to make you just like constantly scroll through yeah and so like when you get on you're immediately presented with new information and so one of the kind of things that i'm hoping to yeah turn on its head in like in the Actual design of the tools like um if i favorited uh you know favorited something that i wanted to watch or read three months ago show it to me again and say hey this was you know

out like out of the hundreds of thousands of things that you've seen and scrolled past if you saved a hundred wouldn't it be better to encourage people to read those 100 things and then not just like constantly it's like We're we're running around chasing our tails we're not getting anywhere you know and so um that's like one thing i think um that would be really vital is like helping people and this is not just with content this is how do you by design encourage and incentivize the quality connection with content and people that you already

know of but you just are not you don't have the Time you don't make the time to do it because you're caught up in this constant like novelty seeking uh it's a bit of an addiction i think so like like instead of me you know just because it's like kind of hard for me to put a time on your calendar i might just scroll through facebook at other people's information instead of like having a higher quality Conversation with you and that's not because it's not what i don't want it's because like my attention is being

hijacked and so i think like bringing intentionality into these tools is really important and that kind of i guess leads me to like the interoperability piece which is like um one of the kpis like the key performance Um indicators and like measures for success for uh for trove or for any of the tools that i work on i hope is to minimize the amount of time on site and to basically maximize the amount of connections that people want in the least amount of time spent using the technology so how can we use technology to get

us off technology and i think that's not Going to be done ever by one tool um and so i'm sure there's a bunch of people even listening to this that are projects founders or stewards of other tools and many of which that i've been speaking to and trying to figure out how can we work together and kind of create this ecosystem of tools that can collaborate to make the sort of facebook Model monopoly model a bit obsolete how do we think about really like data schemas um and open wisdom commons is another like you know

in order to basically um make it so these tools on a technical level can actually interoperate and then also i think what like the work that you're doing in like changing culture is like we also need this like social and cultural Foundation to be able to collaborate like even if our tools work exactly together even if we have like the same exact data structure and everything there's this like additional label of like oh but we have to like compete to like get uh our piece of the pie and how i see it is like especially

in a sort of like regenerative world like we need everyone to start Thinking about how to regenerate the planet we need that pie to grow so we need to be working together to figure out how we grow the pie of getting everyone on the planet to start to think about transitioning our economy into something that is regenerative and that is also decentralized and that we are promoting more you know economic equality How can we kind of just grow the pie in general and then give that pie to the commons instead of trying to fight over

a shrinking piece of it so to say so this idea of um having yeah different kind of um data comments and also in creating tools that are interoperable is really important and um i definitely don't my vision is not to replace facebook or Replace slack or replace um you know any of the other tools uh great tools that are out there already yeah but i'm not even sorry even even to like even by the fact that you're uh working on this stuff and putting it out there i think it changes the the understanding of what's

possible and it and and i think personally i i think there's a lot of potential for For tools like this to actually compete with face not necessarily compete but at least sort of present something very different that that could because i mean like even you know hearing what what some people have been saying how you know a lot of them have been saying they've been looking for this you know because because there's so much of an exodus from facebook and people kind of are Looking for for other alternatives and i think you know it's only

it's it's when those alternatives are there i think i think people will move to them and i think especially around the the piece in in terms of data ownership i think we're in for a fundamental shift very very soon in terms of how we interact with our data and how Um you know how these business models are setting up because it's going to disrupt you know these these business models that have been around for for a while now and like ingrained and you know trying to the the disconnect there and then sort of you know

creating new connections is going to be a very interesting um moment in the tech world i think Yeah definitely um yeah and i think one thing is um how do we there's a question that i've been asking myself is like how do we kind of use the best of the tools that currently exist in order to kind of fuel the transition so to say and so for example one of the tools that i uh that i recently built was very simple like a telegram or a slack bot where You know i have a bunch of

channels that groups on them in that have like a resources channel and it's just hundreds of posts of these like incredible projects and links and but it's it's it's just organized by the recent date and no one ever goes through and scrolls back all the way multiple times to try to find something or it just gets buried And so um for communities that want it um that are kind of you know in the in the initial kind of alpha tests uh so we have the catalyst bot uh listening into the resources channel and people could

use slack that's fine but if they add a resource to the channel it'll get automatically added into a data commons where that resource is now in this almost kind of like wiki of Tools resources projects that anyone could go back into and can filter search through it and find what they're looking for and also to collaboratively add to that that resource connect it to people and that data can be sent to obviously like trove the troll platform but it could also be sent to uh wikipedia somebody's notion somebody's airtable Um so being able to kind

of um you know let information go where it needs to go in order to to do the do the work that we need to do yeah absolutely and when like you know i think even me and you have both kind of spoken about the need especially in these areas these spaces of people that are trying to do big audacious things who are trying to Solve some of the big problems you know there's there's uh we're all suffering from very very much the same same issues you know there's definitely that siloed aspects of of people working

on their own little thing and not being able to collaborate with somebody else and you're absolutely like so that kind of the combination of our inability to sort of coordinate and collaborate With the tech uh environment that is constantly getting us to sort of you know seeking novelty and and and and distracting people i think those two combined create like a a very kind of big challenge that sort of to me underpins um the the sort of the the other challenges above that in in the sense that we've got to figure out a way of

like Coordinating ourselves and and actually working working together like you said and and and making it so that we're not um you know we're not duplicating our efforts and we're actually moving into a place where you know we're setting aside our egos perhaps and and being able to to to work together because i think when it comes to uh you know our purpose and what we what drives Us we we need a way of being able to organize ourselves and be able to define what is most important what is what is what is you know

where there is there needs to be almost a bit of a hierarchy in in terms of you know what should be some some kind of focus and we almost need a bit of a kind of governance to figure that out uh or at least some kind of way of doing it because we don't have the mark we Don't necessarily have the market to be able to um to be able to completely rely on for that so um yeah it's um it's it's it's definitely one of the the the meta problems that we like to call

uh you know underpinning this all yeah collaboration and and um and i think ownership is like just this this very interesting there's there's a shift happening but it's We're still in this kind of liminal stage where i think it's uh it takes some like personal work to be able to be like okay i'm gonna take this you know database of a thousand different startup funding resources for example that i've curated over the last few years and just put it out into the commons versus keeping it in my private database where it's not actually helping anyone

and not doing anything um and so like i Think it's how do we also encourage that by saying like okay we do need to recognize people for the work that they do and so like facebook is like you know people do all this work posting on facebook and facebook is kind of just extracting it um and so i think it's like okay how do we encourage people to like you know um work collaboratively and Also get rewarded for for the contributions that they've made um and and make that make that kind of part of the

culture too to like have this like gentle reciprocity where you know you are kind of helping others and getting help in return um so there's a lot of interesting design decisions that come along with With trying to create that culture um right so anything from you know if somebody um curates a resource um kind of them being uh tagged as like a curator of it if somebody kind of improves the quality and adds a tag to something than being like an editor and then if that resource is really valuable and a bunch of people get

use out of it being able to also kind of share um You know whatever the currency of the platform might be being able to kind of compensate people for for the the work that they've done to be able to connect people to opportunities i think a lot of the um a lot of the connectors and the community builders they're not recognized for their work and it's so important and so vital um right so how do we also do that Um how do we there's there's so many i guess different groups that do a lot of

amazing incredible work and don't really get there's no easy way to get compensated for it um so that's that's something i'm interested in thinking about too yeah there's some there's some huge potential i think once once we can start be bringing in some of these tools that that can facilitate that and and those Are like those are like very ready as well they're like they're you know they're they're maybe not necessarily a sort of easy plug and play at the moment but i think you know it's not long before before these kind of things can

be easily kind of weaved in so i think there's a lot of there's a lot of potential in terms of you know how we how we uh you know how We create interoperable reputation and and we're able to actually kind of um have some way of defining who's who's done what and and but at the same time not get too sort of like specific into the tiny little my new details i think that's an important yeah um but yeah uh you know it would be it would be good if i think it now might be

a good time to To maybe jump in because i think we can probably uh talk about some of these um these big possibilities and things uh with with where it goes but i i think it yeah be cool if you can um give a bit of a tutorial going going through it and i can walk through some of it as well if you if you need me to test anything out so the domain name will change but i'm just going to jump right in and show you guys what the the dashboard Of of the trove

platform looks like so the the mission is to help on two sides on the community end is to help communities build collective intelligence and um coordinate collective action and on the end of kind of individual change makers it's to be able to help find their path to communities people projects events that will help create action Uh work on things that you're passionate about and and just find out what's going on in a big picture and um and really just stay in the loop and so um so right now um this is the kind of initial

dashboard which kind of has like the main like call to action items um so you have a profile each person has a profile Um you also have uh you can have like different like saved projects saved events um so really encouraging you when you first go in not to just get lost in a stream but just to have like intentionality between what you want to do whether it's to like go to your groups or to actually start exploring some of what's on the platform so i'll show you the projects explorer So let's say you wanted

to like see what projects were out there so how the projects work and this is also across kind of all the different types of data on the platform is that each project has its own privacy permissions so a project can be either public in which case anyone going on the site even if you're not logged in even if you don't have an account Can see that project um if a project is restricted then when you're logged in you'll see it only if you're in communities that person who posted that project is in and so it's

a way to find the projects that are kind of close to your circles and then any project that is private can be shared with specific people or people in specific communities And so um the projects each have their own um basically little cards you could see at a glance what each project is about the sort of different what i'm calling common so like sustainability collective action and you can also filter and search for projects based off of things that are in your profile or that are relevant to Each page so right now the main filters

are by skills so for example if you're a software engineer and you want to look for projects that might need your help you can see all the different projects that are looking for for software help um you can also um based off of different kind of like main categories um see like okay which projects uh are looking for like a team And are looking for to find other people and so filtering is one of the first steps in kind of like how do we put the power in the hands of the user to find what

they are looking for and to kind of be able to control the algorithm and so very much kind of um trying to use this like filtering sorting find what you're looking for instead of feed-based approach Um but we have the ability to basically take this information and show it in many different views depending on the context um and so for projects there could eventually be a feed where if there's thousands of projects and it's overwhelming to post in this kind of like curated way then you can have a feed of projects but you would be

able to kind of control exactly what you see in that feed so There's also a kind of like long long view that's awesome if you're on like a really big screen to see what's happening and there's also a map view where you can zoom into your area and try to find projects that are better local to you so i'm in long island um i made a project before for catalyst on the platform so i'll show you What that one looks like so can you filter on the map as well you can yeah the filters the

filters and also i just searched so that was a search just by name so the filters in the search works across so right now it's showing only one project so the filters in the search work across all of the different views okay so um so yeah basically you could favorite a project Um if you want and then it'll add it to your saved projects and you'll be able to basically stay updated um and you can also go to the project page so each project page each project has their own page with their own kind of

url and so this is something that i've seen a lot amongst like early initial projects where they're so early on they don't Even have their own website so this is also like a really cool way for a project when it first gets started to have a bit of a a landing spot to be able to um you know have a home for that project in terms of updating some basic information keeping people in the loop um and each project page has this kind of like modular approach of okay so you can add opportunities so this

is like all the different help That we're looking for what skills we're seeking um and so this is a big piece in this like collaborative design it's like okay what is this project open to so we're open to like merging projects with other ones or federating our data or being part of different cooperatives and so when you're looking for if you are a project owner you'll kind of get shown projects that Are similar to your project that are open to to merging efforts and so it's a way to kind of help people find each other

but on their own terms so then there's different yeah thank you so project categories there's different relevant communities and so this project will show up in all of these different communities dashboards as well as in the kind of like public project explore page and then each Project also shows the different project members so a pretty easy way to basically like figure out how to actually get in touch with people and so this is the profile which similar to the project it has different privacy permissions so it can be either public restricted to people in your

communities or private um and each project and each link on your profile also has That level of detail and privacy so one thing that even we were experiencing as a problem today is like hey send me your zoom link or like you know what's your email again like lost in my facebook chat and so um i have this basically list of links on my profile where uh my telegram is shown by anyone who is my friends on the platform um my facebook or my email is shown by anyone who's in my Kind of communities and

then there are things that are like my portfolio or my linkedin profile that are public where anyone who finds my profile will be able to see those links um and and then within the kind of um about you also are able to specify like your preferred contact method so people know like what is if i want to collaborate with vincent how do i actually uh How do i get involved um and then the different the different projects that you're working on as well and later i'll you'll kind of have the ability to add like your

project opportunities and like what help you're looking for here as well and so i'm gonna go to basically the the main probably the main piece of the platform is the community hubs um That's what we've been working on the most and so i'm gonna go to kiko lab which is the collective intelligence collaboratory so they're one of the first communities that started using trove for trying to catalog their members having a member directory a project directory so people can figure out what's going on And then also a shared event calendar and a call repository and

these are all kind of like modular features that each community can choose to turn on or off depending on their their needs so at a glance the home page kind of has a summary of of the you know new members upcoming events project opportunities but the real kind of main part is really like the intention Of these like different community directories um so the member directory basically lets you also similarly search by people's name um or filter by skills that you're looking for and similar to the project director you guys saw before um you can

change the view from having like a card layout or having a map view of the different Members um and you can filter by let's say software and it'll show you that it seems like the west coast has most of the the software um people and you can also search and i'll show you a little preview of someone's profile so these are my offers my skills and you can go to someone's profile and figure out how to contact them there Then any projects that are shared with the community will basically show up here um and you're

able to change the view as more projects are added then more filters will be kind of turned on so like after 50 projects you'll be able to filter by location after 100 projects you'll be able to filter by like categories and like topics so we're trying to kind of keep the design really Clean um and in the back end have all these abilities to basically just like modularly in a modular way turn on different filters to to deal with complexity as it emerges that's really cool i really like that approach because i think that's one

of the main things is that everyone experiences these kinds of platforms in very different ways and being able to have some there's always That trade-off of simplicity versus you know control and and and features so by having having that you know sort of approach to it i think is is really good that totally um yeah that totally allows for anyone to sort of like slowly evolve something as opposed to and learn as they go as opposed to just having to sort of you know have a big learning curve yeah exactly it's it's Definitely um harder

to do it that way but i think it'll it'll pay off because um you know i've been trying to design for the last few years tools that can be used by my mom basically if it passes the mom test then it's go and so um you know i think i think when it comes to like open source projects right like um i the the concept of open source to me i think should be taken a step Further because open source is really only open for people who know how to code and who also have a

certain level of tolerance to like user interface because if there's an open source project that doesn't have much thought or effort put into the design like that's most of why people use a tool and so trying to build tools that anyone can use that are very kind of Intuitive and that also people with a non-technical background are able to interface with and collaborate with and build on top of is really important yeah i very much agree yeah that's a really that's the thing yeah so this is the um basically communities like event calendar uh and

the cool thing is that these events Um can be not only in one community's calendar but can be in basically you know across five ten different communities um and so this is a filtered view of all the events that that are either hosted by kiko lab or that are relevant to this community um and you can filter by the kind of different topics like design um or sustainability you can filter by like a Date like if you're trying to see what's going on this weekend and then you're also able to directly add anyone can add

an event and be able to share it with multiple different communities with multiple different like networks and you can change the privacy permissions of each event um and you can also create reoccurring events as well And uh and the call repository so this is something that lauren ngn charles from kiko lab have been really working really hard to establish is this like call repository of all their different notes and so we've been collaborating on basically taking this information and then making it actually visible and embedded inside of the community so it's really easy to like

When you're in the community to not just always be focused on the new thing but to go back and like you know re-watch and see the kind of call summaries and be able to have a quick link to the meeting recordings and to find the kind of like golden bits of nuggets that came out of all of the work we've done in the past and not just be focusing on like kind of just running ahead to make the next call Instead of actually taking action from the previous things that we've done and the previous things

that we've learned um and so and so that's something that you know i'm hoping other communities as well um will to kind of take the lead of what kiko lab has been doing and try to um take this practice of curating their um their content and the learnings that they've had and kind Of adding it into this commons where anyone can access it so is it is this managed by uh by lauren and kiko lab like are they the ones who are adding in the information yes okay and do they do that through uh via

sort of air table or do they they do it sort of directly into catalyst like do they have to upload things or is it more of a case of you know they're just putting so we started And the great thing about um airtable is that it's something that's pretty people are pretty familiar with and it has a lot of power and so this um right now these calls are all being curated in air table lauren has a team of people who are helping basically take the information from a different type of like a kind of

more of a google doc into an airtable database um And so as this database is kind of very repeatable and the the data structure gets a little bit more solidified then we'll be building a kind of even easier way to like after an event is over just go to that event page and upload the recording and then have it kind of added into this repository and so right now we're kind of like building off of a lot of no code tools to be able to get things Done and start to you know have this work

be out there and in the future we'll be building tools that are even more kind of streamlined that have an even better process and a better experience for people to kind of collaboratively do this work a lot of people don't like spreadsheets and so making it really easy to like change the view and be able to let anyone edit a call Upload a video recording add topics um so maybe i'll go to the events page and show a bit of how that might work so basically this is the kind of um repository of like all

the different events that have been posted on the platform that are either public or because i'm logged in that are shared with me or my communities um and so similarly you can change the different um the views you can filter by the Available event types if you're not in a mood for a zoom once we start kind of adding in a bunch of clubhouse rooms you'll be able to find clubhouse rooms conferences zoom meetings and you can also filter by the different categories the date and then i'll go to the systems innovators page so this

is uh one of our clubhouse one of our clubhouse events that Everyone should definitely check out if you're on the platform tuesdays at 4 30 eastern and so uh once an event is over um anyone who's kind of a you know an admin of that event we'll be able to then add information to this event to kind of add it into that repository um and for any future events right now you have the ability to add it to your google calendar Um and to be able to um to edit it as well if it's uh

if it's an event that you've created so let's see if there's an event um so it's a it's a one-way um integrations to the to the google calendar right you send it to the google calendar it doesn't sort of go back so uh this particular button um will is a one way we'll just add this Event to your to your google calendar um right and that's just a really easy way um similar to how kind of clubhouse does it just like all right put this on my calendar so it reminds me of it um yeah

and the ability to like sync up with a google calendar and when you make um edits it edits it on the event page on the platform that's something that's probably like a Month down the road in terms of our development timeline um but this is like a super easy way to just kind of get started to um get people to be you know attending different events and putting things on their calendar but we do have the ability to basically um on a bi-community basis like pull from their communities calendar into the shared calendar and then

be Able to add on top of those events to add different communities to add categories add types so to make those events more findable and not just you know when you have like a bunch of shared calendars it's just like 100 events on your calendar um so yeah because this event is happening right now the join link is available and you can also go to the event page even though it's not actually happening Because we're postponing it yeah yeah yeah it is it is happening it is happening it's just not happening today but but it's

it's it's a good example it's uh the fact that we have this up is um yep exactly so so yeah right now um so this event has like the website event agenda um and then you can edit the event if you're the one who created it You know what here alex i'll add you as an organizer um so yeah basically you can you can put different hosts co-hosts of different communities and you can also um you can also add communities that you want to share the event with that would kind of like want to see

it and so yeah each each event each project each profile each community has their own page and i guess kind of like the last piece Is i guess the i guess i'll go to the dashboard and just show a bit of our of our timeline hmm yeah yeah and then um and then once you've once you've kind of um showed this last piece we can kind of do a bit of a wrap up as to uh you know what's what's your kind of next steps and And what you might need some help with and things

like that yeah that'd be great so yeah i've been working hard to kind of also incorporate into the design a really easy way to um get people who are really passionate about the work that we're doing involved in it and also to be transparent about how we're developing and Trying to kind of put like the hundreds of hours of these sort of like ethical conversations about creating social technologies um putting that out there and letting people um see it and letting people also add to it and and engage and so um to start we have

a kind of like frequently asked questions where we're starting to put out like you know all the information about how Data's treated how can i download my data we work with who's behind the platform um and then we have our like features and changelog so like all the different features that we just launched in the last few weeks um and we also have uh basically a list of features that we're working on that anyone could go in and say um yep i want to like upload that Feature um or add add a question add a

comment add a discussion start a discussion um add an update or even like um like a feature request or an issue or a bug right here and then this will basically go into um the change log and we also have a a kind of community on the platform for for new members to start to kind of like discuss how it's being built and Working on figuring out exactly what our legal structure is going to be whether or not it's going to be a non-profit or a cooperative is still up for debate but definitely we know

that there's going to be like multiple levels of kind of ownership and governance in terms of uh users of the platform community members which are really like our key partners like people who are instead of trying to build their own Platform helping us grow and and working together are going to be like key stakeholders and also um involved in the governance of the platform and partial ownership as well and then obviously the the you know people who are working on it the advisors the founders um how do we kind of like make it in a

way that it makes sense for everyone And you know focus on not growth um but and not like quantity of users and communities but quality like how can we create these like initial clusters of communities that are able to really synergize and help each other and and kind of get over this problem of like um you know i'll go to the the communities explorers i guess to wrap up um so like i what i see so much is like I go on facebook i join a community of software engineers and they're all looking for artists

and then a community of creatives are all looking for technical people to help with their projects and so our i guess our strategy is to focus on initial like clusters of communities in the social impact space design being one regenerative agriculture and climate being another And then collective intelligence and kind of like system thinking being a third and i think even those three clusters of i guess networks alone being able to interconnect i think will be able to help each other work on projects where they have shared values but complementary skills um and so being

able to um instead of having to join a hundred Slack groups because you're like well i need help from a software engineer i'm gonna have to just join all these software groups to like get help or like you know i'm looking for resources for this i'm just gonna have to join this group well you can be in your kind of close communities but then be connected to other communities that um have the kind of complementary processes Skills people that that you're looking for to to collaborate with cool amazing uh this is super exciting uh it's

actually it's actually amazing seeing seeing this version i've only you know it was only like maybe two but like a week or so ago that i that i saw it and already it's like you know there's all these extra little yeah thanks yeah and i had a feeling it would be fun so yeah it's a bit of a jump which is good Um making progress pretty quickly yeah totally totally and i think i think it's really uh you know um bringing bringing an important tool to some of these some of these communities i think by

the way in which they're so interconnected already you know there's i think one of the things i've almost noticed about sort of getting into These uh these online communities that are thinking about these these large-scale problems and and issues is that you begin to start seeing the same people come up time and time again you know you start you know this starts performing these these mutual friendships and things like that which i think is very unique and i haven't really experienced that in too many places on the internet when There's separated communities or people will

come from different places and to me that kind of feels a little bit like you know uh finding the edge of the internet a little bit and sort of you know finding this nice little group of group of tribes so i think by you know having having this coming out at this time i think is a really sort of right for the moment that we're that We're living in so yeah it's going to be super exciting to see it see it grow and i'm looking forward to kind of helping in in pitching it and putting

putting it forward and just in terms of like you know is there any sort of things that you're you know yeah i think some specific people there's a few different kind of key areas where in the short term it would be really Helpful to collaborate with others and to also bring other people on who want to start working on the project more of kind of full-time so one is i guess in the kind of marketing social media creating content in which this has been super helpful as like a first step in in starting to kind

of get out there right um been focusing so yeah been focusing so Much on the development um but definitely looking for um as much help as we can get with that um with with um starting to um create events in order to um i think alongside a lot of the events that happen in this kind of space are this particular subtype of events which is like collaboration events like people hey come share your project share what You're working on how can we connect this has been a huge like centerpiece of our systems innovators club it's

you know uh what we're going to be doing at the changemakers consortium and a lot of other communities have been hosting these kind of events where people can see the big picture and what's going on and so um helping with uh planning and managing those events or people who can kind of like go into Events virtual or in-person conferences and like start to curate or help people curate themselves these projects in order to make sure that like after the after the conference people actually have actionable items and things to do it's like okay after the

conference here's the project here's the event page and here's all the projects that presented that conference and what they're looking for help for as a quick Little summary and then you have people's contact information you could go right to their profiles and so i think the power here lies in the kind of like ecosystem of these different pieces working together right like having not having the event page be something you go to just to sign up and then never go there again having that then tie into the the kind of commons of knowledge and tie

into the Tools that are used to connect people to um to opportunities to get involved um so definitely with the kind of like event planning and then obviously software and design help as well as we're going to be kind of yeah i'm sure growing um different communities that are looking for these sort of tools that want to give it a go It would yeah be awesome especially if you're kind of in the game b space um because you'll probably be able to get a lot out of seeing the different communities that you might be like

kind of fuzzy connected to and now get a clearer picture of what they're working on and how to connect and um i think the yeah the last thing is um definitely advisors for the kind of like Ethical and governance development of the platform um making sure that we build in the right way make sure that the business model which i didn't mention um will definitely not include any sort of like data selling or ad targeting or or targeted advertising um making sure that there is a sustainable business model behind the platform even if it's a

non-profit so that we don't have to rely on strings Attached funding or grants um we are going to be basically doing a big search and like looking for grants in the next coming months over the summer to kind of start to to gear up doing this stuff um and potentially a crowdfunding campaign um but yeah i think before we do that being really set on okay what is going to be the way that we do Or don't monetize the platform um and and you know one of the main kind of goals for me is to

be able to um have enough of a kind of like revenue coming into the platform that we can we can basically um put a big piece of that any of the profits kind of in this like commons pool which then gets distributed to the communities and the individuals that are Doing the curation and the connecting and um and actually doing the work because just building the tool and then stepping back like that's that's step one the the hard stuff comes with actually um you know doing the connecting the curating the um the the mapping and

being able to you know do that quickly so we can start to find each other and uh and and really work on the projects That are going to have the most impact into starting to tackle the climate crisis tackle the you know epistemic uh crisis that daniel schmuckenberger talks about with his consilience project um talking about the um you know economic situation we're in with covid and how to kind of make these projects work together Or at least see each other in a way that they can synergize and be able to start to work together

to solve these problems and not in a like silo absolutely awesome yeah i mean this is uh you know this is a bit of a call from for me really to to also sort of step step up and and and start to sort of really uh add to this as well because i know that there's a lot that um That i've been sort of mulling over for many years to that i think can can certainly kind of feed into this and and hopefully i've kind of got some of those um some of those skills at

least in in terms of the um you know putting it out there and maybe some of the some of the event stuff as well i'm hoping i can um bring a lot to this and to me it's it's it's one of those things where It really um it really gives me a sense of kind of not only sort of hope but also a sort of relaxation in the sense that like oh great okay like i don't need to go and you know try and sort of offload my brain to somebody else to try and come

up with something like this or try and develop it myself you know i was thinking around doing these kind of things in Uh you know in notion and and some of the other aspects but i think you know being having something that is is custom and and can be developed and added on but also is able to kind of feed into these things at the same time i think is fantastic so yeah i'm super excited to uh to sort of you know um see this kind of come together into that into that place In in

some yeah i think it'll it'll tie in nicely with uh with a lot of yeah i i have a lot of one i have one question maybe for a wrap so um imagine spring yeah maybe you could share a bit about one's collective and yeah maybe how how you might see this fitting in um with the kind of work that you've been doing especially around um the community aspect Um and potentially the in-person aspect of things too um yeah i'd like to kind of hear a bit about your updates as well um and if there's

if there's any new ideas that have been floating around from this this conversation yeah i mean it's funny because it's actually like you know this is this is a bit of a clear example really of uh you know we're sort of facing this situation At this time where it's like you know i've been in my little silo making you know making something that i see as being really important and you've been in yours you know uh creating this and it's it's one of these sort of challenges that we are finding in ourselves at the moment

is like okay well you know there's it's it's undeniable that there's that there's a synergy here And that there needs to be some kind of combination and and yet even you know even even with i think this is what sort of presents the kind of scale of you know the difficulty in the problem is that even with this it can still be difficult for us to you know not only synchronize in terms of you know have it having regular calls or being able to like really align on certain things or making decisions or You know

or or sort of yeah seeing how these these these parts can really fit together you know what what bits can be what what bits can be cut what bits can be combined you know that kind of thing so yeah i mean i think um where i've been really looking at is in terms of the uh the how to how to essentially build the the community uh the community the community aspect in a sense that it Will enable you to curate people based on their content i see there being a really big uh potential in terms

of you know by the fact they even say we connected based off of content based on the things that we were interested in um so being able and and to me how that sort of fits into the physical world is that you know if if we're able to get this like really high Level connection that we're that we're we're sort of working on the same frequency we're paying attention to to similar things you know where we're able to sort of find the signal and the noise from from all these places and and and have it

that um you know find these these these networks that that are so specific to the way in which we see the world i think there's going to be a real potential in terms of how you can Start bringing some of that to the physical world and start combining it how you actually are able to um i think i mean obviously the physical is kind of where i think it ends up and that's obviously limited by where we are and and how we can move around and things like that so obviously like you know to me

i am sort of paying a lot of attention as to how we might do this Online how we might build community online how we might be able to sort of solve some of these synchronization problems how we might be able to uh you know actually and and i think that's where a lot of this comes in is like you know how do you share the information with each other in a fluid way how do you how do you bring data ownership to People i think to me that's yeah that's a really key aspect to to

to what it is that i've been working on um all of the all of the talk about people curation um it's it's based off of this opportunity that i see in terms of the development of tech that would enable people to be able to own their own data and be Able to use it in in the right way and then but it's being able and the problem with that is that it sort of enables enable solutions on a horizontal way so it doesn't necessarily kind of fit very easily into anything else like once you can

get people into this place where they they have you know full control over their over their full sovereignty over their data And maybe that and probably their identity as well then you're able to really start building these um building these connections and stops it stops being about uh you know how do we make sure that the you know where we're protecting our data from all these other um these other companies instead allows us to actually see the benefits of what that could do for us Which i think is where a lot of this comes in

which is how do you connect people to the projects they need to find how do you connect them to the people they need to find um so i'm sort of exploring ways in which we can be giving that use case to to people um you know in the physical world or online uh and yeah in in the efforts with that i guess i'm hoping to sort of Uh try and solve this yeah i mean that's where i started like on campus trying to it started with some dinner parties just like getting like 20 strangers together

around the dinner table to talk about startups that's what started the whole thing um yeah and yeah i think like it's kind of connecting based off of similar content it's interesting Um like i probably would resonate more with less over like topics of interest like climate change and like more over the like the values of like how we actually go about thinking and talking and about solving climate change so like for anyone who's like read naomi klein i'm like yes we connect on this fundamental level because we have this like shared Understanding and like and

values right so i think there's some really interesting things to explore there yeah because it's essentially like your your digital you know it's like a fingerprint you know in terms of uh in terms of who what what you've experienced online and what you've what you've taken in and i think you know that's that that counts so much in terms of what You know what knowledge we have what skills we can bring to the table you know and and it really allows us to to be able to connect with people so i think if if we're

able to really uh you know take these fingerprints and help us connect with other people then we're gonna start seeing something that's uh that's really interesting obviously still useful to have people that are Outside of those networks you know it's it's still useful to be able to you know seek some some kind of diversity but i think by us going through this process of trying to understand what it what it means about us and our values i think that would then enable us to really be connecting uh people on a far greater greater scale so

yeah um uh there's there's more that i Could go into i think in terms of how i see these these two things fitting together but i think you know from my point of view it's like you know i want to be creating community and yet you know it's it's around that kind of thing of like the purpose the the reason you know what is bringing people together and all that kind of stuff where i think you know there's You can be creating communities of every different piece of content but we only have a finite amount

of time so in that sense you know it's better if i can be creating a community that sort of serves multiple multiple environments you know so so people that are going to be giving wanting to give feedback to you people that are the you know and to the development of catalyst and trove uh you know and also The uh you know you could you could do the same thing for future thinkers or game b or any of these other other ones in which you know it would they would benefit from having uh you know events

or or connections and i think for me to me that that kind of starts from something like this which is essentially the kind of connector between them is that then we can We can yeah yeah that's exciting in the middle and acts as the kind of glue so yeah that's i guess where i'm what i'm sort of hoping to to really add to this sweet okay um we're well over i've uh there said most of what um i would like to or need to share at the moment um yeah i guess in closing um i

would say yeah we're like very open to People who probably have like like how we met was like hey we have the like similar very similar ideas and so yeah it's it's been interesting um i feel like i've connected with more people in the last year that are working on similar projects than any other like category of of people like like the people who i end up getting connected to or who i reach out to are people that are Like oh they might be working on something similar let's see where there's where there's synergy which

is great but and now also so yes i'm continually going to be open to that so if anyone's working on something similar and doesn't want to do it alone reach out to alex reach out to me and then i think the other piece is like i definitely also uh i'm realizing it's probably going to be more helpful in the Short term now that we actually have like launched to start focusing a bit more internally on building our uh internal team um because the amount of like partnerships and like external facing connections that we have is

like far outweighs the the kind of like core um internal team that's driving things forward so so looking for for both of those but now especially People who want to um to really collaborate um and you know potentially help help working on a really cool ecosystem of of social tools and that you know are are interested in learning a lot along the way and and i i don't think um you or i have all the answers um but i i the reason why i really love working with you and talking to you always is i

think we're always There's this openness to being wrong and to completely kind of uh shifting trajectory so having strong beliefs loosely held is that's my motto