Beyond Protocol: From SDKs to SDGs - How Sela is Restoring My Faith in Technology’s Potential for Social Good
When I landed in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago, I had no idea that it would bear so many similarities to Neil Armstrong’s arrival on the moon nearly a half century ago. Not only was I in celestial disarray after a two-part flight that totaled the widely prescribed dosage of time for a good night’s rest, I was indeed on a monumental mission that would come to represent “one giant leap for mankind.” I was primarily in Switzerland in a business capacity, representing Sela in a pair of events that would shed light on our work around sustainable development in the emerging world, beginning with the region that needs it the most: Africa.
Ready Or Not
In 2017, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) reported that Africa stands at a head count of 1.3 billion and that, by the year 2050, it is projected to stand at 2.5 billion. In the same report, the UN DESA reported that the global population stood at 7.6 billion in 2017 and will hover around 9.8 billion by 2050. These select figures from a rather comprehensive report indicate that Africa will represent over 50% of global population growth over the next couple decades. Meanwhile, it is clear that the infrastructure to accommodate this explosion in population is severely lacking with corruptive forces colluding to undermine sustainable development in countries like Nigeria, which is on pace to be the world’s third largest country in population by 2050.
No, this is not an expression of blind sentiment influenced by sensationalized Western media; this is a reflection of careful and unbiased research bolstered by real-world evidence and local interactions. For context, it is now publicly known that, of the $1 billion in remediation funds that have been invested in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria for the execution of oil spill cleanups since 2012, only a meager 12% of these cleanups were successfully completed. In an economy that relies so heavily on healthy land and water and with a lackluster government that is unwilling to protect these resources, this community is desperately looking for answers.
The Sela Thesis
At Sela, we are building a “socioeconotechnical” framework for the reliable management of funds directed toward sustainable development. We are leveraging blockchain technology to track the flow of capital directed toward impactful projects from cradle to grave and coupling that with personalized AI solutions that will bring this technology into the hands of as many local communities as possible. With this foundation in place, Sela positions itself to assign data-driven reputation scores to Sela Citizens (participants in the Sela network), enabling a marketplace of contractors and evaluators that transact cooperatively to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as proposed by the UN in 2015. For more information on Sela, be sure to check out our website, which includes findings from our April pilot among other resources!
Next Stop: Switzerland
During the last couple of weeks in June, Sela representatives were invited to Switzerland to host a series of workshops and Q&A sessions. Undoubtedly, many readers ought to be thinking, “Why Switzerland”? Don’t be fooled; the chocolate studded financial hotbed is becoming a crypto juggernaut right under our noses and she’s stopping for nobody! Here’s why:
Switzerland has the ideal financial, educational, and political environment for cryptocurrency
- From the ICO perspective, Switzerland is a sweet spot, due to its wealthy and welcoming business culture as well as its access to technical expertise from competitive schools such as Albert Einstein’s alma mater, ETH Zürich, which, according to an interesting infographic, “is the top research institution on blockchain technology.”
- Switzerland already dominates the cross-border payments market, which is one of the popular applications for blockchain technology and indeed has relevance for Sela, which aims to connect pools of capital (concentrated chiefly in the Western world) to sustainable development initiatives (needed largely in the emerging, developing world).
- According to Martin Eckert, partner at eminent Swiss law firm, MME, “Swiss regulators are among the few that really have a deep understanding of the technology and how it works”, a sentiment that is weak or frankly nonexistent elsewhere, at least in the United States.
The effect of these factors has already begun to materialize with a number of developments thrusting Switzerland into the spotlight. Last week, TechCrunch hosted TC Sessions, where industry leaders, such as Vitalik Buterin and some of his colleagues at the Ethereum Foundation gave their insights on the current state and future direction of Ethereum. Even municipalities are beginning to explore the potential for cryptocurrency, with Zug — a Swiss canton that has popularly been dubbed “Crypto Valley” — experimenting with a “voting pilot that will base both polling system and residents’ IDs on blockchain technology.”
Sela Meetups
In Switzerland, there were several opportunities to interface with bright minds in the crypto, finance, and social impact realms. The first and last opportunities were at the Zug-based Crypto Valley Conference and a Geneva-based Crypto Finance Conference. However, while these were great opportunities for us to share our work with potential stakeholders, our major opportunities for this were a pair of Meetups held on 6/27/18 and 6/28/18. Our first Meetup, held at Crypto Valley Labs, was designed to be technical, while the second one, held at Blue Lion in downtown Zurich, was intended to be business-oriented.
Meetup 1
Heading into this Meetup, I was a bit nervous. This was not only Sela’s first Meetup ever, it was also my very first time leading anything of this sort. However, I had a game plan and I knew that if I stuck to it, the audience would be engaged, the message would be delivered, and ultimately the mission would be accomplished.
The plan was to provide background and context for Sela, present the current state of our product, and engage the audience with open technical questions that arise as a fully developed Sela ecosystem comes to fruition. Here are some of the key takeaways from our first session:
1. Sela Citizen Vetting
There needs to be a very intentional process for introducing Sela Citizens onto the platform. This is a design principle that the team has already adopted as a priority, but speaking with the audience, we found that this was even more significant when you consider the potential for Sela to be exploited in support of illicit activity. Our approach to this problem is manifold, with the core tenets being Trust Seeding and Trust Propagation.
Trust Seeding is our partnership strategy which involves seeking out reputable organizations and institutions (either manually via time-cemented partnerships or automatically via sources like the Better Business Bureau API) that are already aligned with our first set of projects. These include the World Bank and Social Entrepreneurship Initiative & Foundation (SEIF). This process has already begun, with downstream collaborations in the pipeline.
Trust Propagation is the mechanism for diffusing trust across the platform. Intuitively, if reputable Organization A has executed multiple projects with new Organization B at a high success rate, Organization B is likely to be of high integrity. This is the simple, nuance-divested version of a heuristic that Sela employs for bootstrapping our ecosystem with trust.
2. Defensive System Intercepts
In order to thwart your adversary, you must think like your adversary and place obstacles in its path to prevent a successful attack. In Computer Science parlance, this design philosophy is known as Defensive Programming. In Sela, the very first instance of this is the vetting process from above. However, because people are dynamic and game theoretic, there is a need for constant monitoring on the platform. We address this issue with carefully designed system intercepts. To get a sense of why this is necessary, consider the following situation: Individual A is assigned to be a contractor and an evaluator for Task 1 within Project CleanDelta. This clearly presents a conflict of interest that could lead to artificially high ratings for poor performance.
3. Bad Actor Detection & Suspension
Even with all of the above proactive checks, it is almost inevitable for bad actors to slip through the cracks one way or another. To minimize damage, there is a need for reactive detection of bad activity. The exact form that this analysis will take is to be further specified, but it might inform repercussions. Like Twitter and Instagram, Sela needs to decide what to do with bad actors, whether it means locking an account for an appropriate period of time or suspending it indefinitely.
4. Multi-Step Evidence Verification
One of the key functionalities on the Sela Platform is the ability to upload evidence of milestone completion. At the moment, this takes the form of a simple image upload to IPFS via SelaBot, an interactive Telegram bot. What if we took it a step further and asked evaluators to upload multiple images for a given milestone? All of a sudden, we now have multiple data points that can be cross-referenced for a more accurate analysis. For example, let’s say the project is the construction of an affordable housing complex. One milestone that might be assigned to a contractor could be to construct the kitchen area of a house. Upon completion of this task, SelaBot would start by asking the evaluator to upload an image of the entire kitchen. Then it would prompt for an upload of the sink area, followed by the stove area, etc. This approach enhances the quality of evidence data and, hence, the quality of analysis.
5. Progressive Decentralization
At one point while I was presenting the technology stack, I was accosted by a sweet, but no-nonsense, lady that specializes in Operations. She noticed that we have decided to use MongoDB to store data and her risk-averse Operations senses were tingling, as she knows this to be a centralized database. Janet Darling — a truly befitting name — raised her concern to me mid-presentation, at which point I introduced her to another design philosophy of ours: Progressive Decentralization.
Many proposals for complex decentralized systems put developers in a tough position from the jump when they promise a completely decentralized ecosystem from Version 1. While this ideal emerges from a noble place, there are a lot of open research questions preventing this from materializing. Progressive Decentralization is Sela’s deliberate strategy for introducing elements of decentralization with each release of our platform. We expect that as the crypto community continues to mature, there will be more and more opportunities for incorporating decentralization. Along the way, we will decide which aspects of our system make sense to decentralize and which simply do not.
Meetup 2
With Meetup 1 under our belts, we now had a reference point for what to expect heading into Meetup 2. Led by Chi and moderated by Stephanie Tauber Gòmez of SEIF, the setup of this Meetup was a conversational one, aided by a visual presentation similar to that of the previous day as well as appropriate business and platform questions by Steph and the audience. Much of the points raised from this session were already addressed in the previous Meetup, but here are a few of the additional takeaways:
1. Incentive Architecture
After giving context of the challenges of investing in the developing world, Chi received an earnest question from a young university student. Her question was around how Sela tackles the issue of collusion. In particular, what is to prevent a group of local community members from uploading fallacious evidence about milestones or, worse, intentionally sabotaging impactful development projects. Part of the answer to this question is addressed by Defensive System Intercepts from Meetup 1 takeaways above. The remainder of the answer lies in Sela’s Incentive Architecture.
As we develop the Sela Platform, we are not only thinking of different ways in which people might look to sabotage our platform, we are also looking at ways in which we can align incentives in such a way that it is against the will of participants at large to behave destructively. The very first example of this is in the fact that we are leveraging local community members to serve as evaluators for projects. After all, they are the ones who are suffering directly from the lack of sustainable development in their communities.
Another force that prevents corruptive behavior of this sort on the Sela Platform is the very nature of capital flow in the system. In general, we are dealing with large investments into big infrastructure projects. However, each transaction draws only a modest amount of funds, so that one must diligently contribute toward development projects and become a known quantity before they can reap the benefits from their investment in time, labor, and good will. In short, Sela is not your favorite crook’s get-rich-quick scheme.
2. Compensation Segmentation
There is a lot of talk about how to account for price fluctuation. “What if I am a well-behaved Sela Citizen that has direct day-to-day needs?” “What good is a Sela token for me if I cannot use it to buy a bag of rice tomorrow?” These are legitimate questions for any Sela user. Enter Compensation Segmentation. Recognizing that individuals have varying levels of liquidity needs, we are employing a mechanism of compensation that delivers a fraction of compensation in Sela token and the remainder in stable digital currencies, so that users can provide for their direct needs while building up credit on the Sela platform.
Conclusion
My experience with Sela in the Switzerland ecosystem was eye-opening for a number of reasons. For one, it was interesting to discover how mature the crypto community is out there. With the financial, educational, and political structure in place, Switzerland has strategically positioned itself to lead the charge in the way forward in this space. Less surprisingly, of all the startups, and initiatives that are emerging, there is little in the way of social impact, which is what makes my final finding most stunning: people actually care about wielding tech as a tool for constructing social equity.
In spite of the common inhumane narrative around tech and the disproportionate representation of projects for social good, I found that the attendees of our Meetups had a sincere interest in our work, with many voicing the desire for more of its kind. It was humbling to find this because, while market and industry validation are good for business, social and personal validation are good for humanity.
Acknowledgments
I would be remiss not to acknowledge the amazing cast that made this trip both possible and successful. Special thanks to Sela CEO, Chi Nnadi for authorizing and sponsoring my trip to Switzerland. Being in this new environment added a lot of color to my professional and personal outlook. Thanks to Hassan, Dara, Boma, Dotun, Julie, and Stanley for being such an amazing team, providing palpable support for our Meetup sessions from afar. Thanks to our advisors, Ralf Kubli, Henry Erimodafe, and Andrew Dell for constantly sharing your invaluable insight and domain expertise throughout the trip. Thanks to Stephanie for being a constant presence throughout the trip and for organizing and moderating Meetup 2. Thanks to Corina and Lytto for being amazing Airbnb hosts. Finally, thanks to everyone else that I met in Switzerland, from the bright and enthusiastic Meetup attendees, through to the experienced technical and business experts, all the way to the local residents that bailed me out in more ways than one. You all truly embodied Switzerland’s age-old motto: Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno!
Beyond Protocol is a blog series by Sela taking readers through the journey and thought processes involved in using cutting-edge technologies to drive tangible impact in the world.
Kayode Ezike is a Master’s student at MIT where he conducts research with World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. His research focuses on verifiable credentials and decentralized web protocols. Kayode is Sela’s Head of R&D and brings an academic perspective to our engineering efforts.
Sela is a technology company building the digital infrastructure to create communities of transparency in the emerging world.
