Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Nicholas: Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas. Each week I sit down with some of the brightest people building Web3 to talk about what they're working on right now. Public Assembly is a burgeoning software development community that describes itself as a distributed collective building the missing pieces of the internet. Today I'm joined by Valerie, Salif Lewis, and Nish Chowdhury, three of the seven founding members of Public Assembly. On this episode, we discuss the barriers to growth and learning that they've faced in the first phase of their Web3 careers and how they're working together to enable more people to become empowered crypto builders. We also discuss NeoSound.xyz, the group's first project, and their nouns builder proposal to build a WYSIWYG website builder for nouns style DAOs, which was approved by the BuilderDAO. just a few hours after the conversation you're about to hear. This is the first time the members of Public Assembly have made a podcast appearance. It's exciting to get to meet passionate developers in the Web3 space with a mission to make a difference just as they begin to form a vision and a DAO. I hope you enjoy the show. Valerie, Salif, Nish, welcome to Galaxy Brain. Thanks for coming through to talk about Public Assembly. Thanks for having us.

Salief Lewis: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Nicholas: Absolutely. So who would be the best person to tell the audience who maybe aren't aware, what is Public Assembly? What's the big idea? Who'd like to take that on?

Neesh Chaudary: Val.

Valerie: First of all, I'm Val. I'm an independent educator. I'm working with Public Assembly since September. And if I had to define Public Assembly, it would be a self-defining collection of interdependent builders. And it came together when Max, who's not here, who's in like Japan, pitched us the idea of a 24-7 hour hackathon after a hackathon that was promoted by Zora in the summer. And like the problem that we kind of seen in the Web3 space was that there's all these cool products and tools with a lot of gaps and not a lot of developers being able to access the funding or access the resources to just create like freely without being tied to a centralized entity. Or so that's my short answer, but I'll pass it on to Salif or Nish.

Salief Lewis: I would say that's a pretty good summary. I feel like the energy that you imagine when you think of a 24-7 hackathon is kind of definitely what we're trying to embody.

Nicholas: Awesome. And people who listen to this show might remember 0xTranqui, the founder you mentioned, originator of the hackathon that led to Public Assembly, was on a previous episode talking about a Feltzine collab that he worked on. So fast forward a few months, the big feature of that show was partly learning about his history, learning to go from essentially zero to practicing Solidity dev as well as front-end dev in Web3 in about 100 days, thanks to Developer DAO. And fast forward a few months and here we are, a new collective that he's taken a part in creating. So very cool. Nish, I don't know if you wanted to jump in on what your perspective of Public Assembly is?

Neesh Chaudary: Yeah. I mean, I definitely mirror everything that Val said in addition to Salif, but just on the point of you bringing up Max's

Valerie: work

Neesh Chaudary: with his 100-day sprint to learn how to develop and everything he did with Feltzine, I think a big thing about Public Assembly is that when we say everything on chain, we mean everything, including education and documentation. So a big, big initiative. I mean, it's like the backbone of everything we do is to educate and open source everything so that other people can learn and build for themselves, but also learn how to be part of a building community. We want people to come to our forum and to meet others, builders, and to kind of do the same thing that our group has done under the umbrella of Public Assembly and just proliferate a world where people are building the things that they imagine, they dream up. And we're just here trying to provide those tools with everything that we put out.

Nicholas: Awesome. So what are some examples of the connective tissue in tooling that's missing for folk? Maybe you could talk about some of the projects that you've built through that hackathon and since.

Neesh Chaudary: Yeah, I think so. The first sprint that we did, Neosound, was the product came out in the form of essentially a music library for anybody to create. They can curate their own music library, and they can also hand out curation passes for others to curate that library. That's very layman terms. And the big thing though, is that we created a curation protocol and it doesn't just work for music NFTs. It works for all NFTs, but we built that and instead of just building a product, we also open source the Figma file. We created documentation on how to go through the whole process, including down to creating a GitHub account for the first time, a Vercella account, in addition to so many other things. We have a whole doc site, but as somebody who say I'm a front-end developer with limited experience and say I wanted to get into more backend stuff, anything that has to do with smart contracts, I might not know about them. I've been looking for tools like this that didn't exist before in the web 3 space or decentralized space where somebody has it all laid out how I can learn by myself. It's really hard to find the resources sometimes with how early we are, and I think public assembly is just trying to give guidance on how others can also lay out the framework for everything.

Nicholas: I took a look at the docs, which are docs.public-assembly.com and they're very comprehensive and really take you from being a little bit familiar to really being able to deploy stuff on chain and build websites. It's very cool.

Salief Lewis: Yeah, I think that's kind of the bridge that we're alluding to. This like zero to one, which is like GitHub setup, learning the very basics of how to interact with alchemy and whatnot. But then it's also like, how do you go from an SDK or a ZDK? and then how do you build out a full-fledged platform? Because all the tools are there in theory, but there's not exactly a roadmap for someone who's just experimenting maybe in music NFTs and now they want to mint and sell straight from their own site.

Nicholas: Super cool. Yeah.

Valerie: I also wanted to add in that we can't really talk about why it was missing. Want to talk about why things are missing and why developers and web 3.0 independent contractors can actually be very limited in the space if they're not like building under a centralized entity or just like a large funding mechanism that allows them to be able to open source in this nature, because it was very experimental. When Max proposed this idea, it kind of felt like breaking through a paradigm. You definitely have to get comfortable with being that open with your code because they teach you that you're supposed to like resell this information. And it's actually very awkward to put an entire protocol on your Twitter in front of your friends and family. I'll just openly talk about it as if this is not like code directly from people like Ian Nash, like one of the best Solidity developers in the world. It's very advantageous to just put Harvard level code on the CEO and seeing what happens. I don't even think I would have been able to do this before if I didn't open myself up to just like the nature of open source.

Neesh Chaudary: Yeah, low key. I mean, even on the design side, like we're used to like at this point with how the Figma ecosystem works, I think people are sharing design files more than they ever have. But like to be working on a product and have that Figma file be in public while you're still in the sprint working on it is. it was so uncomfortable. It was so uncomfortable. And like really, really fast. I think Joey and I, Joey, who is the other designer for public assembly, we got over the idea of perfection, which I really enjoy now because I think that's more of like a level of anxiety I was always introducing into my design process that doesn't ever need to really be there. And now I think we just kind of like move without it, which is kind of again, like our own paradigm breaking situation. And I really enjoy that.

Valerie: I think there's something that's really significant about this space. right now is everybody on the stage. We have seven founders, seven core contributing engineers that got the DAO running. But all of us are independent contractors on the stage and we're able to move freely in web three without fitting like the box of the standard artist or like we're freelancers actually being able to sustain ourselves and be a part of the conversation through DAO work and through open source projects and repositories. It's like the first time I've seen it because I would consider myself a junior developer. And I talked to Max about the lack of opportunities for junior developers in web three and how there should be. like there's boot camps and things like that, but not a lot of room for them to fail and like just create in the open and stuff like that.

Nicholas: Do you see funding as a part of that? What I'm hearing from all of you is that building in public, both on the design side and the developments, I can be intimidating as a junior developer. And so there's a need for resources to sort of explain basic, how do you set up your repo kind of stuff, which maybe is basic, but actually very confusing and a huge barrier for people to get over. But also this social element of building in public and showing your work in progress and not being afraid to show it to both your family who maybe doesn't understand and everybody else on the timeline who maybe will have harsh criticism that's difficult to face or even internal pressure to make perfect stuff. What is it about public assembly as a structure that allows freelancers to come together? and is compensation a part of it? or is it just banding together and facing problems together? How do you think about that?

Valerie: Oh, go ahead, Nish.

Neesh Chaudary: Unless Salif go, I think he was about to.

Salief Lewis: How'd you know? No, but I was going to say, yeah, I do think that the compensation is a large part of it. There's definitely a risk appetite involved in moving through this space in this way. But at the same time, I do think this collective hive mind mentality and support from a close group of friends and contributors plays a big role in feeling confident to put things out there. So that's definitely one thing I really appreciate from this structure. And it got me thinking that one of the challenges that we're facing now is kind of how to provide this support mechanism for other people, because we've established ourselves as a Dow, which is impactful and empowering, but also provides a good degree of constraints. And now we're just trying to figure out how to help other people just achieve things that they're interested in achieving. And we can do that by establishing a culture. But there's a lot of things that we still have to figure out.

Nicholas: Do you foresee public assembly growing as an organization with many more people being directly involved in public assembly, or you see it as maybe creating a model that others can imitate or make variations upon?

Neesh Chaudary: It's like a hybrid of those two ideas. We definitely see public assembly growing infinitum. But I think the idea is to set examples ourselves as FF890E, the founders of public assembly as a working group

Salief Lewis: who

Neesh Chaudary: operates in the space kind of as like a collective freelance

Nicholas: and

Neesh Chaudary: group going to get funding from other places, if not getting funding from the public assembly treasury. And we want other people to create working groups where they can go and get proposals and get funding and like essentially create an ecosystem of people who can build and support themselves.

Nicholas: That's definitely the vibe. This is reminding me a little bit, it seems kind of like a cross between two former guests. I had Nader on from DeveloperDAO, which has some elements of the education and developers coming together in order to find work and upgrade their skills. And also Shreyas from Lama, where he told me about how individual contributors in large DAOs like Uniswap and ENS, Aave, have trouble having enough tokens to have any kind of power and just getting their voice heard in the absence of tokens sufficient to make a proposal. So they banded together to create Lama in order to have a larger collective voice, but allow these independent contributors in what he calls a contributor DAO to provide services through the collection of their labor power, but without being sort of committed to a traditional job. It sounds like public assembly is kind of in the neighborhood of these things. I also get a sense through the aesthetics and maybe the association with Zora that there's like a cultural angle that's maybe not as prominent in other projects that have some similarities.

Salief Lewis: Yeah, I would agree with everything that you just said. I started thinking more heavily about that angle of looking at the founding team as maybe like a smaller contributor DAO after actually listening to the episode that you talked about with Lama. So I think one of the interesting parts and like kind of where we're at now is thinking about longevity and thinking about different ways that we could potentially make ourselves useful for other projects. And one thing that I will say is that I just want to acknowledge that like we are all definitely aware of similarities and like people that have come before us to do things in this space. And I feel like with DAO formulation and governance as a whole, that's definitely super important to keep in mind. And then we're just trying to be super transparent about the things that we are learning and the places that we're looking to to learn those things.

Valerie: We also wanted to expand on just the concept of being just a contributor. When people approach me in Web3, because of my vast knowledge, they do expect me to hold like a founder position. But I tell them all the time, like I don't want, I specifically don't feel like I think everyone should have the autonomy to just stay a contributor in Web3. I feel like sometimes people participating in this market don't feel like they can have access to capital unless they assume that position or grow a large community. And it's like, yo, there's all these communities. Why can't I just start working for my friends that are founders that need help? A lot of founders right now need documentation. They need hands on people that can like contribute time. I think because people cannot sustain themselves and be part of the conversation, especially like in a bear market, they do fall into kind of the pipeline of just looking for funding, growing community, doing all these things that they maybe not want to do. They just want to explore and actually have a higher level of experimenting here as a playground, because the dream that they do sell is that we are able, it's permissionless and we are able to do those things. But how come we actually don't ask permission? There's so much like pushback. There's so much pushback. There's so many like, that's one of the things I've been thinking about. And I've also been kind of angry about the Web3 space. So it's like, yo, if I just want to do this, why is it like this gatekeeping stuff? If I want to launch a platform tonight, I'm going to do that because like the tools are open and free and you say this is permissionless. So why are you not empowering more people to attack this? And why do you feel like they cannot just go ahead and use these tools and have the agency to do that?

Nicholas: You don't need to name names or anything, but like what kind of gatekeeping is it? Informational gatekeeping or actual power suggesting that people shouldn't do the kind of experimentation you're interested in?

Valerie: I feel like there's a lot of bright minds in Web3 as individuals. I feel like there's a lot of people that experiment and code on a daily basis. And there's a lot of projects that may hit the cliff of being like super impactful, but they just don't get that full takeoff because of the other structures that are in Web3. And that's like, I think that's more of like a social conversation. I've noticed it and I've been experiencing it as someone that feels like, oh, maybe I should be doing this or maybe I should build a whole S-Corp and legal entity just to participate and have my opinions heard in Web3 because obviously my future is going to... I'm going to be the user of people using the internet. Junior developers now are going to be the ones sustaining the products in the next 10 years. So why can they not participate now? Why is it so risky? And that's where my passion kind of lies. I don't know if that answered your question.

Neesh Chaudary: One thing from what you said earlier on is, it's something that I think about often. It's just

Valerie: what

Neesh Chaudary: we're talking about in this room and what I think a lot of people in here have probably felt and also

Valerie: think about

Neesh Chaudary: and what public assembly really wants to do is it creates a friction point as to where the ecosystem is right now and how people think. We're still letting go of Web2, if you want to call it that, habits. Just habits of how the working economy is. The creator economy is in such infancy right now that what we're talking about is the creator economy, but the more advanced version of it that we are slowly working toward. I agree with everything that you said and why aren't things like that? And it's like, something like public assembly is one of many groups right now making baby steps towards that. And I'm personally really excited to see what happens in the next five years with the creator economy and see it grow into itself. Because those frustrations, as somebody who freelances in this space, those frustrations are crazy there, especially for me trying to get better at developing. I want to get more advanced and I, no matter what I do, no matter what project I work on, I always hit a roadblock and I feel like there's something being gated. And I think that'll slowly go away as more pressure comes from more people wanting to use things and organizations who just don't realize they're gating will get that pressure and they'll start open sourcing as it becomes the new norm. But for now, I think we're all going to keep hitting frustration points and we can just keep calling them out.

Nicholas: Yeah. So it sounds like it's about empowering people who are in this kind of junior developer position, but also maybe, we haven't talked about it exactly, but some of the sort of mysterious aesthetics of public assembly make me think that there's also like cultural connection that people may be, people who might otherwise be working in like creative software technology, art worlds, but that are interested in crypto want to, it feels like public assembly is maybe a rallying place for people who don't identify as Silicon Valley style devs, but something

Valerie: else. Oh yeah, I would say creative technologists to the bone. All the founders are multi-hyphenates everyone on the founding engineering team. And also I want to emphasize this is not a celebration of the founding engineering team, but I would like to just point this out. Crypto, I talked about it with Niche. If you want to attract the multi-hyphenate, Web3 is your place because it gives you so much freedom to expand and build the thing that you want to build without being boxed in, not to be cheesy, but that in its own and.

Neesh Chaudary: I just want to say art is super important to public assembly. Very, very important to us.

Nicholas: Awesome. So we talked a little bit about public. I just want to clarify for people listening. So there's public assembly, which is this DAO recently launched with nouns builder, and we can't, we should get to the proposal that's active currently. And by the time people are listening to a recorded version of this, we'll have been settled, but it's looking very good. We'll talk about that in a minute. And then, so there's public assembly, the DAO and there's FF890, 9D or is it nine zero E or nine D E.

Neesh Chaudary: It's the hex code for the pink color that we used in our first sprint for Neo sound. And we decided to keep it very cool.

Nicholas: So that's FF89DE.eth is I guess the multi-sig that y'all organize out of. Very cool. And also on Twitter under the same name. And so that group is you three, Valerie, Nish, Salif, as well as Max, who we mentioned, Joey, who's a designer at Zora and Dane, who's a product engineer at Zora. And it sounds like you have, I mean, essentially all of the skills required for a traditional startup, pretty much. Would all of you think of yourselves as kind of junior developers and that's kind of why the coming together happened? or are there people of varying experience on the team?

Neesh Chaudary: Of definitely varying experiences. Dane is a insanely, insanely talented full stack engineer. And I'd say that, I don't know how Salif wants to describe himself, but I say Salif and Max have probably moved on past junior dev at this point. Joey and I on the design side, I think we're both got a lot of experience. I think dev Val is way more than a junior dev. She doesn't give herself credit, but there's definitely a range, which is really nice because we have so many different opinions based on experience that we bring to all the products we build.

Salief Lewis: I was just going to say the seventh member of our founding team is Javier, who recently joined the catalog engineering team, but we can't forget him.

Nicholas: Cool.

Neesh Chaudary: Never.

Nicholas: Yeah, it feels like a Zora mafia kind of.

Valerie: The anti Zora mafia at sometimes because we're here to check Zora.

Neesh Chaudary: I would not call us the Zora mafia. I think that we're very much our own entity, but we are definitely homies with Zora and we will check them constantly.

Valerie: That's also something that people that should be a role that literally should be a role to be like disrupting and giving blind spots to these large. I feel like there's just a circle jerk sometimes. And it's like, there's people that do have opinions, but maybe not have the power to go against the wave of people. And it's like, yo, like we should bounce to you just to kind of be a hater and like build the thing that you think is way more impactful and things like that. But it's like, how can they do those things? But shout out to Zora because I mean, I love Zora, but I've also been like a, my specific entry into like the Zora ecosystem was just like, as an observer for a long time. I've been watching the Zora ecosystem since their first permissionless auction house, which is like Doge and stuff like that. I've seen Punk's house and I've seen them kind of like open source their entire protocol. And I really got involved when they launched the, their API. That was my first hackathon that I got involved in through Zora. And I was like, okay, it's making sense now because before I didn't see Zora as like an entire ecosystem. I kind of just seen it as like a platform and things of that nature. And I'm, it's an onion, but my problem is that to be able to create what's missing in web three, unless you're deeply in the niche of something, I'm deeply in the niche of Zora and how they understand metadata and how they really like to scale products in their design systems. I know exactly what their brand is, but that took time. And for a lot of that time and those lived experiences and experiencing some of their projects be successful in some of their projects fail. That's like something that's very valuable to the ecosystem that people should be compensated for. There's a lot of people that are researchers in, I also would consider a public assembly of research through practice organization, I guess, because I feel like a lot of time when I'm like in the DAO ecosystem, I'm cosplaying and I'm like role-playing with people because like, we're obviously not there yet and where we want to be. But if I don't give the entire energy of like, yo, we have to take this as if this is a reality right now, because it is going to be. a lot of the projects that we see now wouldn't have happened, but can people assume those positions without the resources? Can they actually participate in learning a very complicated multi-sig process if they don't know what's going to happen at the other end and who's going to dedicate, not even dedicate their life to like those types of practices and just making and have the faith that those things are going to be there and not face risk. So we need more DAOs of people. We need more people funding those characters because they're very important. There's a lot of people that want to contribute through labor. That was like a huge conversation. Like my first entry into DAOs was through Bounties because I did not have the capital to buy these tokens. I've been participating in DAOs since, I guess, the launch of ENSDAO. That's not that long, but I've definitely been a student of the game. I guess it's also like empowering the students to then go off and make their own reality too. Like don't just stay a student the entire time. When can you activate yourself and go ahead and make your opinionated DAP and make it like aggressively disruptive? You don't have to keep on making a DAP. You can really just expand or like in 3D, you know how Blender, they have like the donut tutorial. I feel like Web3 keeps a lot of people at the donut tutorial and they don't give them the resources to build an entire protocol. I never thought I could build a protocol. There's a lot of people that build a donut tutorial over and over and over. And they're like, why am I not getting these full stack engineering jobs? Because that's not all there is to it. And that's how they're like, kind of like gatekeeping the abundance of the other side of Web3.

Nicholas: Got it. So what I'm understanding is that public assembly is a experimental practice around empowering independent developers with unique perspectives to learn enough to be dangerous and to feel confident enough to do so in public. And speaking of which, you do have this proposal. So I guess we should give a little bit of background. There's an active proposal. At the time of recording, there's four hours left. The title of the proposal is Flexible DAO Interfaces. And this is a proposal in the nouns builder DAO, which for context, nouns builder, I'll give a brief one and you can embellish upon it if you'd like. But basically nouns.build or nouns.builder is a Zora sponsored effort to turn the nouns DAO model into a protocol, maybe protoform, Jacob would say, but something like a protocol with a front end so that anybody can launch their own noun style DAO. They've done so for themselves. It's called nouns.build. You can participate in nouns.build by purchasing one of their daily auction NFTs. And those funds go to a treasury in addition to I think a thousand ETH that they received from nouns.DAO to sponsor subsequent proposals and grants to organizations like public assembly. And so public assembly's. this proposal is in this nouns builder round that's going on currently, and it has 22 votes in favor and three against. So it's looking pretty good with only four hours left. Could one of you speak to what this proposal is about?

Salief Lewis: Sure. And just a brief, not correction, but nouns.build is the front end for the protocol. It's not specific to builder DAO.

Nicholas: Okay. So builder DAO is bigger than the one interface you're saying?

Salief Lewis: Yes. Ideally, I would imagine that they would want to move away from that interface and that's kind of why they did the whole prop house. And that's kind of where our proposal also becomes relevant. But yeah, I can definitely speak to the proposal. So kind of going back to NeoSound, we started experimenting. This is definitely an effort led largely by Dane with the idea of creating front end architecture that could be pretty easily broken down into different like NPM packages. And so that's kind of the gist of the way that we're thinking about building these flexible DAO interfaces. We obviously nouns protocol is open source, ready to be hacked on. And we've already started looking at how different front end components and hooks can slot into the protocol. And so the idea, I guess, is just to create kind of like reusable little chunks of front end architecture that anyone can go ahead and then spin up a website that will serve as the auction interface and proposal interface for their DAO.

Nicholas: Got it. Because currently, so nouns.build as a part of this broader nouns builder effort provides a site that looks something like the original nouns.wtf site, pretty simple, big NFT of today's auction, ongoing current auction. You can page back through prior NFTs to see who bid and who won. And there's a governance proposal activity section at the bottom of the page, but they're kind of generic. And so it sounds like this flexible DAO interfaces idea is to allow people to create DAOs without necessarily being technical, but to customize websites to suit their DAOs style.

Salief Lewis: Yeah, exactly. That's definitely a part of it that we're leaning on because like kind of, as you mentioned before, in this whole like radical art empowered direction of also bringing on like a diverse array of organizations on chain, we need to have interfaces that are able to reflect some of that culture and identity. So it's important that I think the work that we're doing is important for realizing that vision. And at the same time, nouns.build, at least the front end is not open source because it fits into Zora's, I guess, proprietary architecture. So we do need to create an open source version.

Nicholas: Yeah, got it. I noticed in the proposal text mentions of this on-chain storage of themes. What is that and why is that significant?

Salief Lewis: Well, yeah, let me talk about what it is first. But so I guess on a very high level overview through the use of CSS selectors and an on-chain theming registry that keeps track of, I guess, like the associated styling data for a specific site, you can kind of adjust some aesthetic parameters such as the font size for a website, some primary colors. We're going to play around with, I guess, like expanding that feature. But there's this idea that public assembly has really leaned on, which is kind of like doing these CMS-y type actions through on-chain transactions. And so this is just kind of another instance of that.

Neesh Chaudary: One thing I just want to add to everything Salif said, he covered it beautifully, was just to put emphasis on the componentry and the fact that everything getting built in modular packages by the developers

Valerie: means that

Neesh Chaudary: as the functions that nouns build

Valerie: offers

Neesh Chaudary: scale, so can the component packages that we're offering in this template. And beyond just like customizing the aesthetics of a site to give DAOs their identity, it's also going to allow for customized functionality on their DAO websites. And so not everybody needs to have a website that has the option upfront on the homepage if that's not relevant to their DAO or their mission. So that's another huge part of why we're building it this way.

Valerie: I also want to add that just modular templates in general, and just not even just modular templates, even the NPM packages that we have live, they're made to make opinionated use cases for anyone. I want to say that I would say modularity is kind of our meme in the way that we want it to be. If you look at NeoSound, we specifically attacked this prop house because it's us. We've done that before. We kind of already did it with NeoSound when we launched that template. Right now people can deploy their own contract factory and a full stack website with one click deploy. So we said that, hey, we already kind of have the repositories for this done and open sourced like in our first four months of being a DAO. So let's just go ahead and expand on it. And I think that's really cool. Even the design system, like the way that NeoSound was kind of like just architected, there was no specific choices made for just a streamlined process for people to be able to change the website. You go to NeoSound, the art changes based on the on-chain data. that's like coming in. And it would take somebody to know a lot about Web3 to know how to make those choices. I'm kind of just gassing up niche right now.

Nicholas: What's the link for NeoSound? if people want to check it out?

Valerie: It's just NeoSound.xyz. I pinned up a lot of things, so make sure to go to those pins, but I'll repin it. I'll repin it. So if you go and explore that website that's fully decentralized already and on-chain, all the data that's coming in is aggregated through EtherScan. I mean, in general, all the songs that are on that are coming in through curation contracts that are made through registries of existing music NFTs and even the ENS names. Those are things that just relate to that site being completely composable. I don't want to like shill the hyperstructures. I say, I don't know how many people are familiar with it. That's a big part of our ethos. And that's kind of like we're Zora gang with that. That's like our foundation, modularity, creating hyperstructures that are open access and free. And when we did this, we already started the DAO website template with our own tools without anyone asking us to do that. But if you go to publicassembly.com, which I can pin up to the top as well, you can see how we already have our auctions on our page. We already have that there. So.

Nicholas: Yeah, cool. So I see you're also working with a group called Entropy. What's Entropy?

Neesh Chaudary: We're not working with them per se, but you could call it a horizontal collab because they found the open source code for what we're working on right now, the componentry, the auction, specifically the auction componentry that's going to be going into this template. And they spun out from our code, essentially like their own template, which was really cool to see that somebody just kind of went and like did this because that is how easy it should be. And like, that's our work being validated that we're actually building this open source enough that somebody can go do that. So it was pretty much just them taking the initiative and going, hey, like, let's spin up the site.

Nicholas: Got it. Very cool. And I was curious, just offhand. So the themes are stored on chain and a lot of the data is sourced on chain. Do you have any ideas around hosting? I guess currently the site's hosted on Vercel, I imagine, or something similar, or do you think Fleek or something like that is the future?

Salief Lewis: What's Fleek? Definitely Vercel. Yeah, we're on Vercel. So I can't say fully decentralized in terms of the whole stack, but yeah, tell me what Fleek is.

Nicholas: Fleek is IPFS based hosting using IPNS, as far as I understand it, to allow you to update the underlying content, but have a consistent like pointer at it. I'm not sure that that stack is ready for primetime. I know the devs at Juicebox were on Fleek for a long time and have since switched to Vercel just for performance reasons. But I'm curious, given that you're demonstrating an interest in storing parts of the website data on chain, I'm personally very interested. I don't think it's maybe the solution for websites in general, but I like the idea of especially controversial kinds of dApps having fully on-chain hosted HTML for accessing them. And I'm really excited for all the stuff that's coming out of like the Mathcastle's community, dHaf and all the on-chain maxi kind of people who have recently had Frolic on, we were talking about that the other night, the ethfs.xyz project, which is, I think like in the spirit of a lot of different things like S-Store 2 and all these projects that enable you to put data on chain in efficient ways, allowing you to store even JavaScript libraries and G unzip compression and decompression libraries on chain in a composable way so that you can store significant assets on chain and have them decompile and render a page. The Terraforms is an example of could be rendered on chain entirely in an HTML page, going from SVG to on-chain HTML, and then potentially even having the libraries available on chain. So you can have like ethers in the page. And so you could even be triggering wallet interactions from a fully on-chain hosted page. I think the reality is that there's a few missing parts, especially with regard to like TLDs that are both decentralized and can conveniently point to make contract calls from a browser. I think that's really missing. And probably also the performance of Infura or Alchemy is nowhere near a CDN like Cloudflare or Vercel, whatever Vercel uses for the equivalent. So I don't think it's probably equivalent in speed and efficacy to a regular website, but given last year, TornadoCache, et cetera, it does seem like DAOs, especially ones that are purveying controversial software might be in a good position if they were to have at least a backup website that was fully on-chain.

Salief Lewis: Yeah, we'll definitely have to check out.

Neesh Chaudary: Yeah, a hundred percent. Just as a backup.

Valerie: I wanted to add that, yeah, just our experimentation and just on-chain everything. So right now, like I know we're not going to, this is like probably down the road, like near the end of Q2, we're experimenting with more on-chain metadata, just like an extension of like what Zora's already created and what people like Ian Nash have already created. And like we're experimenting with Markdown specifically and being able to just like, you know how like Jacob is obviously one to put his diary posts and just like his open thoughts and mint them. We also want to create that type of culture too. And those are like the foundation that like we're organizing our packages to support those things currently in the background of this DAOs sprint. And I think I also wanted to say, this is kind of like when you dig very, very deep into the Neo7 repository, you can see our attempt at giving a high five to the Artblocks community and all those like experimental SVG experiments in our Neo7 mints. Because if you look really closely, when you are curating on the platform, you get Providence back and you get an NFT back that's minted from everything that you carry on those sites. And those sites are made from on-chain SVGs based off of the protocol information. And I feel like I never get to talk about that part because it's so niche, shout out to niche, but it's so niche in like the topic. Everything is, our ethos is everything is going up on Ethereum. Like we're never going to, well, I'm not going to say we're never going to need a database, but like, Hey, it's one of the parts I'm most excited about.

Nicholas: So it sounds like 2023 is shaping up to be a pretty fun experimental year for discovering what public assembly is able to do. Are there any specific plans you'd like to mention or ways people can get involved?

Neesh Chaudary: Discourse. I don't know, Val, if we linked it up, we have a discourse forum that's been active now for about a month or so. And it's really awesome. There's conversations about building on chain. There's a book club that started talking about movies. We're sharing art. That's the number one way for sure to find out what's going on with us. And then in regards to just like the journey of 2023, nothing is cemented, but just putting the vibes out there for like public assembly sponsored hackathon, public assembly, curating some really cool art and if T drops public assembly and super high just in general, because we love them.

Valerie: All the alpha. Okay.

Neesh Chaudary: We got nothing's confirmed like at all. Literally.

Salief Lewis: I would also say, yeah, check out our GitHub for sure.

Valerie: Check out the GitHub. I think that's the central source of truth of whatever we're going on. But more recently we've just been moderating this forum just to kind of like attack. just no discord, no discord. I'm kind of missing discord a little bit, but it's definitely what we want to build the foundations for right now. Like I see public assembly kind of like, in

Neesh Chaudary: one year,

Valerie: I want to be able to say that public assembly can host similar IRL experiences to ETH global where those junior developers that are waiting to become more dangerous, as you said, they like have a place after their, you know, their six week bootcamp and stuff. And after they're like bored of like the daps and stuff, and we can have those really exciting faces and online education too. I had something to say, but I brought up 3D because he's a member of the community. And I also want to say that this is an open space. Anyone that has questions can come up. We also have some members of the community that hold tokens in this room. And I think it would be like, I don't know how much time we have left, but I want to make sure that they get to kind of like talk to us and stuff. Cause this is like our first public conversation because we've been working pretty hard.

Nicholas: Yeah, we can go for a few more minutes and welcome 3D and everyone from the community. I'm going to have to run to a concert. Forming is putting on in a few minutes. Yeah, 3D. Oh, you're going awesome. Let's all go hang out. So that's for people who aren't in the know that forming underscore underscore on Twitter is running a concert in collaboration with Songcamp. Starts in a few minutes. It's in CryptoVoxels. There's a Twitch stream. There's a bunch of musicians. Everyone gets paid at the end of the show, splitting the funds generated from the performance. So we'll be heading there next. 3D, how's it going? Welcome.

Salief Lewis: Hey, I just came to tell Valerie that she's amazing.

Valerie: Yeah. As far as like the Stu for Public Assembly and, you know, you guys are curating artists and stuff like that. I'm really interested to see how it goes. You know, I'm a part

Nicholas: of two other artists organizations

Salief Lewis: making it and burrito down.

Valerie: I have my own 2700, where it's just like a lot of one of one. artists are really trying to find new curation tools because I'm really excited to see how this all plays out. You know, shout out to you. Yeah. One thing about Neo Sound is it's the first use case for the curation protocol, which is underlined, which lives under it, is that it's just not for I think a lot of times we attracted like more music community, but the use cases expand so far to where you can use the curation protocol to organize JPEGs, anything that basically lives on the Ethereum address, on an Ethereum address you can curate. And that was like our first attempt of just like making something that can give more on chain reputation for curators because they do so much work in the Web3 space. that kind of like goes undocumented. They have to rely more on like just social capital in the space when we just want to make sure it's documented. So thank you for reminding me of that. I got to. Yeah, I'm sad. For the greater good.

Nicholas: Awesome. 3D, are you a token holder in the community in public assembly?

Valerie: No, I'm not. I'm a gigantic fan of Val.

Nicholas: That's why. Val Dow.

Valerie: Shout out. It's coming soon.

Salief Lewis: But I should be. I should be.

Valerie: Yeah. So it started as an open source collective. Like everything's open and free. There's specific perks for the Dow holders, but as of right now, anybody can submit a pull request and things of that nature. So I consider a lot of people outside of token holders still people that have valuable opinions and stuff.

Nicholas: Awesome. Well, I think we've come to the end of the hour and normally I would be very happy to go over, but we do have this concert to get to, and I don't want to be rude to our hosts. Val, Salif, Nish, this has been wonderful. 3D also, thank you for coming through. Maybe when the results of this proposal are ready, we can have you on and maybe some other members of public assembly, community members, other founding team members to chat and see what progress you've made.

Salief Lewis: That would be dope. Yeah, we definitely have to do this again a little bit later on in the year, but this was a lot of fun. So thank you, Nicholas.

Neesh Chaudary: Thank you.

Valerie: Yeah. Thank you for holding the stage for us. I really appreciate it.

Neesh Chaudary: Thanks everybody for coming too.

Nicholas: Yeah, totally. Thank you all again. And I'm sure to be in that discourse, I need to juice pill all of you. We need to make the public assembly juice box collab happen. Awesome. Well, if anybody's willing to follow, someone said, was it Nish who said that they're coming to the show right now? Also?

Neesh Chaudary: Yeah. Yeah. I'll be there.

Nicholas: Okay. Let's do it. If you're not aware, it's thinkforming underscore, underscore, we'll have the link. So please come through. It'll be fun. It's, they always have these crazy concerts with like, really, I know web three music. It's like, no, no, this is actually good music. Yeah. It's awesome. Cool. All right. Well, I hope to see you there.

Valerie: Peace.

Nicholas: All right. Thanks y'all.

Salief Lewis: Peace.

Nicholas: Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of web three galaxy brain. to keep up with everything web three, follow me on Twitter at Nicholas with four leading ends. You can find links to the topics discussed on today's episode in the show notes. podcast feed links are available at web three galaxy brain.com. web three. galaxy brain airs live most Friday afternoons at 5 PM. Eastern time 2200 UTC on Twitter spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.