I’ve added this to the marketing category for various reasons I hope this becomes clear if you take the time to go through👇
I’ve been developing various ways to get people aware of SAFE in the work that I do. Why? It seems obvious to community members here but I’ll state the obvious.
This project is the most ambitious one I’ve ever come across. A game changer for humanity in ways beyond what most people can fathom. To also make privacy not just a “right” (legal fictions play an important role) but to bake it into the network where data, information, knowledge and insight is created, stored, retrieved and transformed into positive outcomes is so critical to our survival as a species.
It’s even more important in this collective metamorphosis we’re going through currently. Never waste a crisis they say…
Because the project is complex and has been intangible for most people I’ve had to change tact many times. I’ve had various attempts to build on or promote the SAFEnetwork.
A little chronology of these attempts
I’d planted many seeds amongst people in the entrepreneurship college I helped setup in 2013 and throughout my 3 years there.
Then was metame which I did get started on but was too early to turn into something (software engineering is not my strength so I’ve steered away from trying to do things myself).
That then transitioned to trying get the team at the personal information startup mecco interested in the project. We had a meeting with Nick at that time but it was still too far off in the future to take action. The confluence space I’d setup for them faded out.
I’d then tried to bring it to fruition in a short lived startup on personal wellbeing. The lead dev from mecco came with me on this journey and was pumped to build something on SAFE. We did early discovery work but failed to get funding before we ran out of ‘personal’ runway.
Meanwhile I’d failed in attempts to get momentum on the Sydney meetup. Timing and just personal bandwidth contributed to this failure.
I then took a role at crypto exchange Bit Trade Australia as head of product and growth (they’ve recently been acquired by Kraken). I’d brought it to the team many times even to get the proxy token listed, but alas, timing was not right.
More closer to the work I’ve been doing over the past 2 years I’ve tried to continue planting seeds in whatever way was easiest. Mainly just bringing subtle frequency of exposure to the brand and project. This was at times just wearing my SAFEnetwork shirt to workshops or while I’m recording videos. Other times it was calling it out as Privacy Enhancing Tech to explore in discovery work of clients we’d worked with or referencing it in a blog article we’d publish. Those seeds may grow, they may not, time will tell.
In my new venture I’ll continue the planting of SAFE seeds…
Greater Than Learning
Me and my business partner have worked on various iterations of this over the past 2 years. Different names, different architectures but all with very similar aims. In some sense this is to help transition businesses to using tech like that of the SAFEnetwork. But this is hard, there are soo many tiny steps before that even happens (i.e. a senior decision makers says yes, let’s fund a dev spike to figure this out). There are various systemic issues that make it hard to do. To close the gap between what “companies” say they want to do when it comes to privacy and human agency and what they actually design and deploy. This is usually referred to as the intent to execution gap.
So now we’ve got a distinct place to continue planting seeds and also have others fertilise these seeds to help them grow 
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You can learn more about it all 
here
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What does this all mean?
Words are poor and lossy compression for thoughts and concepts but it’s what I got for now so bare with me…
You might be asking yourself a few questions like:
- “what does this mean to me as a community member here?” or;
- “why didn’t they just build something on the SAFEnetwork now?”
You’ll likely have many more questions. I’ll do my best to help answer them over time. But I’ll try and articulate answers to the 2 above questions briefly now.
Question 1:
This might be seen as what does this mean to you as a advocate/evangelist of the SAFEnetwork and a community member here…
As part of Greater Than Learning we’re are going to have a variety of members. These will range from product managers and designers, UX designers, software engineers, security consultants, data protection lawyers to legal designers, VCs, entrepreneurs and people working in data and consumer protection regulatory areas. In fact these are some of the early people involved in our current group about to help with testing. So this audience needs to know about SAFE but how will that work? To be clear we will not be directly promoting SAFE, I have conflict of interest as a cofounder owning safecoin. This adds to my biases. But we have early areas being covered in our courses and social learning across topics like Data Trust by Design and Operationalising Data Ethics. These two in particular are super relevant. As part of the micro-learning experiences there are forum discussions related to aspects covered in the course. This is where people will be discussing technology choices, doing buy/build/partner assessments and covering topics like data security and privacy and the agency of the customers they are meant to serve. Ok, so just a little to the dynamics we’re are designing in. Various providers of tech like SAFE, Holochain or blockstack, SOLID, uPort etc will be progressively involved. This is important. We want to enhance competition and cooperation (coopetition). We’ll eventually have a community curated portal of tech and services to explore as people in business work through learning and doing. It’s a long game. We are also giving free and discounted membership to all our vendors we’ve chosen to use and clients from our previous services business. But the tiny steps have compounding effects. We’re bootstrapping, designing for outcomes and engineering properties to create more of a self organising system.
Question 2:
This just some brief reasoning as to why we choose the “status quo-esque” tech stack.
We’ve used an analogy concept for this that was shared with me by a wise engineer a while back. Basically when you try to build a technology business you only have 1-2 “innovation tokens” out of a possible 3 - you have to be wise where they are spent. We’re you devote your time and effort, and leverage your network and core competencies. It is a make or break decision. We chose to spend our 2 innovation tokens on the overall experience and ecosystem strategy design. It is a useful metaphor for decision making.
There is a summary of this decision in our key decision log amongst many others. I’ll leave it at that because this has turned into a wordy post.
Given this, how can you help?
Register to be part of our beta, engage in our courses and thoughtfully share as objective perspective on SAFE as possible when relevant to the learning experience. Call out and disclose your financial stake if you own safecoin (this is important, but you don’t have to disclose all the detail if you don’t want to and realistically we can’t enforce it in any way. It’s an “in good faith” agreement). Don’t spam, I’ve designed in automated reputation points deduction if you do, you’ll lose. Just plant seeds and nurture them, it will compound.
How I can support further
I’ll devote some time to coming in here every week and responding to any questions. I’ve actually built a solid habit that is almost automatic to engaging in this forum. It follows a tiny habits “recipe” from the work of BJ Fogg I’ve been following for several years.
Basically every Friday when I wake up (along with a distinct mourning routine I have) I put on my SAFEnetwork shirt which acts as a prompt in itself to engage in the behaviour of coming here to read the weekly updates. So I’ll just tweak this recipe a little 
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I’m excited to continue planting SAFE seeds and helping them grow 
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we do what we can with what we got, sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t.
- My Monday morning was waking messages on this one. Probably a routine I’ll have to deal with for the foreseeable future. Destress Mondays has been a great resource I’ll be leveraging more 
