Know Your Neighbors (KYN) network + local dApps

Humanity’s greatest strengths lie in interdependence and connection. Today, especially at local levels, these bonds are being eroded, resulting in outcomes like 1:4 adults globally experiencing chronic and involuntary isolation, per the WHO. This destruction of personal connection is root to numerous issues, including increased inequality, polarization, lack of civic participation, reduced health outcomes and fragile economic statuses. When individuals experience these effects, social cohesion is hit. MSMEs, local communities and institutional trust are adversely affected. 

Technology could support strengthening these real-world bonds; helping them become more robust, dynamic, safe and fluid than ever before. Instead, because of dehumanizing business models and the system designs they drive, it is doing more to hasten their destruction. 

In this age of digital and industrial feudalism, there are no solutions that adequately, scalably and portably address the fundamental needs of humans to securely and privately connect, build trust relationships with strong identities and leverage those – locally and beyond. 

We are solving this.

Expanded Background Local communities have long provided roots of trust. This has even included financial and economic opportunities. Co-located people tended to be strongly and weakly bound to many around them. Though having many issues such as prejudices driving opportunities and often having poor privacy and security, this still has provided significant utility for many for millennia.  

For decades, the United States (USA) has seen declination of close neighbor connections and the erosion of these roots of trust. Today, only 26% of Americans say that others can generally be trusted. Urbanization, increased mobility, commutes, governmental and other institutional factors and economic factors have all contributed. Even the rise of social media, so good at connecting us to communities far and wide, has tended to drive real world isolation and polarization as, in the words of a Facebook executive, its “algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.”   

This trend is global, with 41% of adults weak in social cohesion. Some of the causes are similar and others, like war and environmental refugee crises, are stronger drivers outside of the USA. The end results for many include chronic and involuntary isolation, poor health, economic instability, reduced resilience, disenfranchisement and hopelessness. As this grows, polarization increases, as do healthcare costs to communities, often alongside reduced investment and stalled economic growth. 

This erosion of social cohesion cost many at the margins any semblance of useful identity. Today, per WorldBank, an “invisible billion’ live in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.” In these areas and others, women, refugees, rural and remote denizens, people with disabilities and the homeless often have the hardest time getting and keeping an officially recognized identity.

Digital identifications, offering maximum portability, inclusivity and innovative utility, are a rising option. Per McKinsey, digital identity solutions to date have large attack surfaces, even nominally decentralized they have some centralized points of potential failure, and openness to issues like workers, state actors, and similar using them to persecute people or otherwise misuse data.

Kyn guides people through the process of building a neighborhood. We are helping people recapture the traditional benefits of their most local connections. Kyn provides tools to help a community thrive. We use the devices already owned by community members to run the software. Internet is not required.

The computers and devices of 150 people in a location can be used to establish a foundation of digital trust, onto which high trust data and transactions can be scaffolded.

This enables distributed applications of very high trust, which we exploit.

Our formation process is simple, and participation has its privileges.

Define boundaries. Invite people. Each person installs an app and scans a code. No personal information is needed. That gives them access to the apps.

Our community tools are distributed applications (dApps). They run on a privacy and identity network (KYN) which lives on the devices already held by users.

The foundation, KYN (Know your neighbors) is a virtual network with these features:

• Shared verifiable state - used primarily for the storage of hashes, this shared ledger can be used to verify that data was recorded at a specific moment in time.
• Routing and mixing - used to anonymize traffic and to provide a publicly accessible http endpoint for the community.
• Key backup - using Samir's Secret Sharing, we safely store each person's encryption keys distributed on multiple computers.
• Self-sovereign digital identity - Hyperledger Indy, an extremely powerful digital identity paired with zero-knowledge proofs supporting attribute based credentials.
• Tribe - The details of the community are set, kept, and maintained in Tribe. This is the app used to sign people up, set the boundaries, explore the map, and pick a name.
• Joelio - There's 150 people in this community. Watch Seinfeld with them. Drink Jägermeister. Joelio tries to make lots of casual connections while you are in search of a group of 3 or 4 friends you can hang with on the weekends.
• DeeDee – Discuss, decide. As a group. We use the Oxford debate model and discuss in random pairs, Omegle style.

The foundation enables applications to be trustworthy and secure. We use this foundation to enable our dApps.

These dApps and network features are sufficient to begin the process of developing trust and interdependence in a neighborhood. They are also sufficient to begin interconnecting neighborhoods.

Other potential dApps will perform specialized functions for the community, depending on need.

• Market – goods and services.
• Share - Keeps track of personal and community assets
• Clique – Meet random people anonymously, rotating every month.
• Eos - Economy of scale. Combine resources and buy stuff cheap.
• Emergency - A big red button. Alerts everyone or just your close friends.
• Walled garden - Integrates with security devices, especially cameras and gates.
• Tournament – Make a ping-pong league. Challenge the other leagues in your city.

Save the neighborhoods… save the world.

Our work will help all humans effectively claim and assert their digital sovereignty. It will help individual neighbors and MSMEs interconnect themselves and their resources as effectively as actors that centralize resource control (e.g. large businesses and institutions) and with less overhead. Like WeChat, as KYN scales, so too will its utility grow.

Pilot Targets

For practical reasons, including capital building potential and accessibility, we will begin with populations physically near us that have previously expressed interest in our work and have population numbers and densities that we expect to easily work well with our technologies. These include 15 neighborhoods and 6 apartment or condo complexes. There is a mix of socioeconomic and demographic markers.

Special Utility Targets

As KYN develops, we will seek ways (community id programs, grants, et al) to specifically target groups we see particularly strong, even existential, utility for.

• The identity vulnerable. Members of the ‘invisible billion’, homeless, refugees, mobility limited, et al can have significant trouble both getting an identity (e.g. need a state identity to get one, prohibitive cost or travel) and keeping one (e.g. more likely to experience violence that results in identity loss.) Immediately, with the help of a random set of neighbors, KYN can provide a socially verified identity and friendly dApps for any people to engage with neighbors for personal and economic profit more smoothly. As KYN builds, inter-neighborhood utility will grow. As these vulnerable actors engage with their communities on more even and visible footing and gain opportunities, any sense of powerlessness and self-dehumanization will reduce. They will find agency.
• Families with dependents. Childcare costs, eldercare costs, food costs and other fundamental cost of living drivers for many families have skyrocketed recently. With that in mind and the lack of built-in village that many families face in their neighborhoods, we see special utility for building high trust neighborhood care circles to share space, stuff and time resources more effectively and more safely.
• Privacy conscious. There are no solutions that are both so privacy conscious that the developing organization cannot track users sans community consensus and user-friendly and useful enough for wide-spread adoption. Our work is that and can bring the 25% of the population who refuses
• MSMEs and Institutions. Everything is being consolidated right now, with most industries hit by ever more megalithic companies eating up the competition. This hits everyone, but especially local concerns that have a hard time competing on price or efficiency, on their own. As KYN releases its B2B suite, it will help them compete by forming robust dynamic resource networks with voluntarily and explicitly surfaced offerings to improve everything from sourcing to delivery to maintenance and more.
• Community ID programs. Communities such as Johnson County, Iowa and Washtenaw County, Michigan have rolled out identity systems that can be used intra-community to support identification for people impacted by traditional government id barriers. Web42 will seek to partner with these groups to support more robust, flexible, and private intercommunity identities.

The idea behind the name, Web42, is that many versions down the line – a framework that completely supports real humans with effective technology will emerge. We are beginning with the end in mind, and creating a foundation on which a distributed analogue of WeChat, the everything app, can be supported. Foundations, from virtual systems that are both ubiquitous and empowering, to the tangible interpersonal connections which drive community health, are our passion.

We have been working on variants of this project, looking for the right alignment of social winds and technology, for a decade and a half. Originally, device access prevented feasibility. More recently, limitations of digital identity technologies and distributed systems have been the sticker. This past year, major interoperability and performance strides have taken place and co-founder Joe Hammer has been in the mix, mind melding with key experts in mesh technologies, distributed systems and identity and participating in ToIP. With the most recent (April 2024) w3c release of verifiable credentials data model, we believe that the technological underpinnings are in place.

Along the way, we have conducted numerous informal surveys with households around our area, which we have lived in for over a decade and are thoroughly integrated into. We have also conducted several national surveys with Centiment and several rounds of long-form “Mom test” interviews with households around our region. With these we have sought to learn about factors such people’s relationships with their neighbors, social cohesion, and the most useful starting features.

We have learnt that ~66% of surveyed people would strongly like to know their neighbors better and reap the potential rewards of village building. In this era where people rarely even answer their doors unless texted first, they are not sure how to take the first step. Most are enthusiastic about functionality that would improve the fluidity and safety of neighborly hangouts while being as easy and ubiquitous as texting. Around 25%, which is a very important cohort to capture to maximize social cohesion, are adamant that this only happen in a context that is privacy securing and keeps them in control of their digital identities.

Guided by this and our social and behavioral research, we determined that our first dApp would be focused on getting people back into the habit of hanging out with neighbors. Our second will be focused on helping them discuss and decide together – everything from group meals to neighborhood identity to project and even tetchy topics.

Once the technological underpinnings are developed, we will reach back out to the neighborhoods we have worked with before and see which both still fit our numeric requirements for pilot interested parties. We will reach out to more, directly and through the local Rotary clubs as is apt. We will seek out neighborhood ambassadors who we will train to assist in both spreading the technology and surveying their neighbors. KYN ecosystem function and design choices will be done pursuant to our neighborhoods’ feedback.

• Several dApps are written and are in alpha testing. 
• The foundation underneath them is incomplete, so no onion routing is currently enabled and they are not fully integrated with the identity system. For example, DeeDee currently uses a standard userName/Pwd for identity. This affects the privacy of communication.

• IPFS and WebRtc have been tested.
• Inviting people to the community and communication channels have been prototyped and tested in a few iterations of a mobile app.
• DeeDee, which holds discussions has been tested and is in use with a pilot group. Approval voting is currently supported. This is a WebAssemby application.
• Joelio, the main social app, has been written and tested. Some features, like contributing food to a potluck, are incomplete.

Applying for Solve, a program we have long admired and eyeballed but haven’t quite seen the right challenge fit for was an easy choice this year. The chosen challenge seemed tailor made and many technological barriers stymying our design have fallen by the wayside, some as recently as early April. Further, there are winds of societal change such as renewed interest in neighborhoods, broad understanding of the pitfalls of current social media offerings actually causing people to leave them and more openness to decentralized and distributed solutions, that bode well for KYN.

That being noted, our big project has a number of big challenges. In fact, it has challenges that are a little off-book in most areas; business definition, novel monetization models, technological and adoption challenges such as building that first leg of the hockeystick without relying on the Internet and scaling beyond boots-on-the-ground approaches, finding funding beyond bootstrapping without giving up key principles and going against primary stakeholder interests and more. Reviewing Solve’s lists of judges and other partners, as well as solver teams’ works, we feel that a strong portion of these barriers could be helped by Web42 becoming a Solver. We have worked with VC minded mentors before. We look forward to working with mentors who are more focused on social enterprise; putting key stakeholders’ interests as primary over shareholders while supporting a lasting and self-sustaining enterprise. 

In particular, we expect to access:

• Exposure via media and conferences
• Credibility
• Marketing assistance
• Cybersecurity planning and review
• Legal; particularly IP and utility tokens
• Help with clearly and effectively communicating the value of KYN’s unique monetization models
• Help deciding optimal monetization strategies for MVP through the first several years of rollouts
• Leadership coaching, especially related to social enterprises.
• Business planning – especially scoping per stage
• Recruitment
• Mastermind group
• Partnership finding: labs in human happiness, digital identity, civil technology, et al.

If everyone had a modern digital identity like Hyperledger Aries, a world of opportunities would emerge. Privacy increased. Identity theft, eliminated. And, oh, sweet convenience.

At the same time, people would also benefit from the utility of a traditional community, like we have lived with for ten thousand years before the industrial revolution.

Since these two goals are highly synergistic, we are tackling them together.

Our solution combines the best of social technology with the best inventions of computer science.

Here are a few of the social design considerations.

We make it easy to get together to eat, talk, watch, game, and build - because that's what people like to do.

Rather than try to be an enticing online space like Nextdoor, we want you to spend thirty seconds in the app, and then to go do something with friends.

There is no community-wide chat where anyone can post nonsense. Private messages. Private replies. Few exceptions.

Our signup process is easy because people have very little time or patience for new apps. We don’t even require a person to supply a name, because some people are that private.

We target group sizes of 150, because people flourish at 150. Group sizes are 2 for productivity, 3 for brainstorming and 5 for fun.

We manage tournaments, because game and sport are fantastic ways to build bonds.

On the technical side, our approach is powerful.

To really empower a package like Hyperledger Aries, you need a root of trust (e.g. Sovrin) and you need some mechanism of verification (e.g. the post office or DMV).

A real-life community is perfect for both needs. Peoples' devices can keep track of all the data, and the people themselves can be the mechanism of verification.

Since these are devices which are in nanosecond communication range, a host of other services can be provided to all users. For many online services to function, all you need is a publicly resolvable address for people to send messages to. A local network can provide that address, and since there are many, perhaps hundreds of devices on the local network, it will be highly available. You don't need Google to receive emails.

Further, our monetization models are honest - and, in being so, disruptive.

• For a small monthly fee, you get a premium badge and access to premium content.
• We take a very small fee (<1%) for financial transactions.
• We will never pop up an ad unless the user asked to see one.

The only way to regain our privacy is to fix digital identity. The only way to fix polarization is to get people talking in a more productive way than Twitter. And that happens best face to face, casually.

We want to help the world improve itself, and this is a great place to start.

Web42’s theory of change aims to support neighborhoods that are interconnected by KYN and the real-world interactions it facilitates, fostering inclusivity, social cohesion, and resilience while reducing loneliness and polarization.

This will be achieved by:

• Developing distributed neighborhood networks and an inter-neighborhood network, supported by social proof digital identities with attribute-based credentials. KYN dApps will promote real world interpersonal (e.g., Joelio), neighborhood civic (e.g., DeeDee) and local MSME interdependent network building. We will help ensure the success of each roll out through boots on the ground outreach, neighborhood identity building services, neighborhood ambassadors and strategic local partnerships (e.g., neighborhood associations, community id programs)
• Connecting individual actors who rarely have a dynamic, effective and consensus-based voice opens the door to well-incentivized partnerships with both private (e.g., HOAs, AirBnB, warehouses) and public (e.g., community organizations, town councils) sector actors for better tailored services, cost savings, cooperative projects and more.

Targets will include building robust digital identities for each member, fostering 3 quality local relationships for each verified used, and improving social cohesion in fragmented neighborhoods by at least 20%.

These targets will have significant benefits for all neighbors and particularly benefit vulnerable groups such as isolated work from home workers, overstretched parents, invisible shut-ins and fragile homeless; surfacing resources they can share and promoting self-worth and interdependent connections. Each group member will gain further value by having the resources they can most easily afford to share (time, attention, space, stuff et al) surfaced. Having heightened opportunities to be of value while also directly receiving value will promote self-worth and interdependent connections that support bond building.

As loneliness subsides, so too will polarization. Neighbors will experience increased horizontal cohesion, with stronger facets of their identities and their community’s identity being built collaboratively with those physically closest to them. As more face-to-face interactions occur, more awareness of people at the fringes, such as area homeless and shut-ins will result and, due to natural social and KYN network incentives, reach out will happen. Resilience will increase for all neighbors, including these vulnerable populations. As the KYN network and its dApps grow in scope and utility, a voluntary and dynamic resource network will, too. Long term, many of these empowered and interconnected neighbors who naturally engage in neighborhood civic participation will feel freer and more interested in engaging with broader real-world communities and the civic participation trend will continue to grow. Web42 will roll out MSME centered dApps and bring local economy drivers into the network, improving their resource sharing opportunities and resilience plus opening new identity utility to all users. In these interdependent communities that value individuals and their places within the whole, homelessness cycles and crime numbers will be reduced and health outcomes will be improved.

The first 2 dApps that will roll out will be Joelio, which helps people make 3 friends in their neighborhood and DeeDee, an anonymizing video and voting platform that acts as a discuss and decide engine for large groups.

After MVP is rolled out and for the next several years, our main audiences will likely be B2C. So, that metrics focus is what is described here. Broadly, success will be affirmed if social cohesion is improved and that correlates well to the usage of the KYN ecosystem.

Key areas of impact will be:

Neighborhood metrics

1. Improved social metrics. We will likely use a combination of short and targeted surveys plus longer form standard surveys, such as the UCLA Loneliness Scale and UNICEF’s Compilation of Tools for Measuring Social Cohesion, Resilience, and Peacebuilding to check in with neighbors about their perceptions of well-being and social cohesion.
2. Neighborhood development outcomes. Until KYN usage is widespread enough to cover a zip code, macro statistics will not be possible to track. Instead, we will be relying on neighborhood surveys to help us understand its impacts on homelessness cycles and similar.

KYN ecosystem metrics Privacy is baked in, by design, to the whole KYN ecosystem. We will not have a mechanism for gathering usage and growth statistics as one typically would with a centralized SaaS. We will be able to request time-boxed and explicitly limited access to track network statistics et al. If a strong majority of the neighbors agree, using baked in network mechanisms, we will be able to gather data in their demesnes.

1. Network growth. Over the initial few years of use, KYN adoption will be largely controlled and we will be able to track growth granularly easily. As KYN grows we will rely on self-reporting in neighborhoods to understand neighborhood network statistics. This will be provided in an automatic certified packet when a strong majority of the neighborhood agrees to that and the cooperative nature of the inter-neighborhood network, which will provide benefits to more highly certified neighborhoods, will naturally incentivize that. Regardless, we will be able to see the effects of neighborhoods coming online and leaving the inter-neighborhood network pursuant to their impacts on the inter-neighborhood network.
2. Human-centric usage and satisfaction. KYN dApps are designed to support the lowest possible screen time to meet a real-life goal. We’ll be tracking traffic factors like percent of users with verified identities and typical times to get that and amount of time spent per dApp session. We’ll further be working to determine real life impacts through surveys and usage data. Examples might include neighborhood projects worked with the assistance of DeeDee, which will also be indicative of neighborhood civic participation, and neighbors finding 3 good friends within a walkable radius using Joelio.

We are using modern digital identity solutions hosted on distributed mobile, mesh and IoT networks to create hyperlocal (150 people) identity networks that can easily interconnect with real life social proof baked in. We are pairing these with friendly dApps that are all about getting real life connections to happen better, off-screen. These dApps, such as our first dApp, Joelio, will drive adoption and network building, both real life and virtual.

Through utilization of these, neighbors will build real world social proof networks that will include strong, shareable and secure digital identities. As real interactions build, the digital will build. As the digital underpinnings build, the opportunities for real life uses will grow. And so, the virtuous cycle will continue.

Our identity solution is courtesy of the Hyperledger suite. This is a peerless self-sovereign identity with features like w3c verifiable credentials with zero-knowledge proofs. Hyperledger also provides the distributed ledger for shared state.

For network level privacy, we will be making use of a modified TOR implementation. WebRTC powers peer data transfer, including video conferencing. IPFS is utilized to store files.

The stack runs on top of plain old Tcp/Ip. Bluetooth is used for low range peer connections.

Our financial model is Zcash, because I love saying "snarks" - and it's great tech.

We make heavy used of verifiably random numbers. 

Samir's secret sharing is used to back up keys.

OpenId allows our identity to interface with classic identity systems.

Our interface is a WebAssembly application. (Plus all the other boilerplate that every modern software package has.)

Then, of course, there's human tech… social tech.

We utilize Dunbar's number, centrally. Social choice theory informs our voting platform. Our discussion method is based on Oxford debates. We select executives, when needed, based on sortition - an ancient Greek idea. We resolve disputes by using a double jury. We have applied game theory principles to the bits that people will want to cheat, and we've used gamification to make the signup process pump a little dopamine. Many of our principles are stolen from the Burning Man theme camps that pioneered them.

Similar to Signal, we have had varied team makeups at different surge points and are focused on staying aptly lean. Right now, we have 2 team members and are consulting with 2 Hyperledger and identity experts.

15 years for the co-founders. Organization is 5 years old.

As we build our core team, we will be open to the best applicants regardless of classification factors. We expect to have a broader set to draw from than most projects have the opportunity to do, by nature of the work. As we expand to new communities, which will inherently require us personally taking a boots on the ground approach for some time to come, we will always be on the lookout for team talent. 

As we move into new communities, this project will naturally require working with ambassadors from them to help build the groundswell of support needed for technical connectivity as well as human connectivity. It is, by its nature, as diversely representative and inclusive as the neighborhoods it supports. 

Technologically, it will function best if the densest possible portion of people in a given area participate. This design naturally incentivizes people to reach out and be inclusive of those around them. 

Once on KYN, factors like interactions with anonymized but verifiable identities produce maximum possible equity of opportunity for engagement and utilization. Building on these robust identities plus future dApps for trading and even simply requesting resources, safely, privately and effectively, will help to level many playing fields. These will help to draw engagement and opportunity to all participants. 

Our approach innately surfaces humans as the highest possible resource in any area. We even have plans for helping people without device connectivity of their own have opportunities to leverage the network and be of obvious enough value to their neighborhood to naturally incentivize their inclusion. 

The KYN ecosystem will provide value to its customers by helping them smoothly and effectively capitalize on the resources (people, spaces, stuff) local to them. It will help each neighbor build a better life with a strong digital identity and the regular social connections we are hard-wired to need that bring economic, health and satisfaction benefits. It will help neighbors do more together more easily, building social cohesion and civic engagement alongside neighborhood identities and projects. It will help neighborhoods do similarly, driving better area conditions including heightened inclusivity throughout. This will have special impacts for groups such as homeless and shut-ins that are often left at society’s periphery. It will do all of this with methods that are privacy and agency respecting.

KYN will be delivered across networks of computers and devices within neighborhoods. Most neighbors will only ever experience a sort of Everything dApp for Neighborhoods that will be split into specifically functional dApps to suit their current purpose. We will provide updates through baked in mechanisms that leverage inter-neighborhood update broadcasts, IPFS or anonymous intra-neighborhood relays and regular noise-mixed client side pull requests.

We see that this is needed to help turn the tide against factors like exploitative technologies destructing real life connections and the growing epidemics of homelessness and loneliness. We see that this is wanted because of our research and survey results as well as simply observing what makes everyday life fulfilling and what factors are getting in the way of that fulfillment right now.

KYN is, by nature, extremely flexible to monetize and to do so ethically. Revenue plans are described in the plan for becoming financially sustainable.

Business model planning is an area we would like help with, particularly from people with social enterprise backgrounds. We have worked on this with venture capital centric mentors but have not come up with just the right fit yet.

KYN is, by nature, extremely flexible to monetize. Ethically and due to intentional technological constraints, there are industry standard monetization opportunities that will be eschewed altogether or strongly modified from those typically seen today.

KYN allows for multi-sided business models. It will begin B2C and grow to B2B and B2B2C.

Our rough plans at this time look like:

• Bootstrapping and grants seeking. This is where we are now. We are entirely self-funded so far and expect to seek funding grants for specific uses as the technology develops and needs present themselves.
• Honor bar subscriptions. Our MVP will incorporate an honor bar style subscription model. Similar to Signal, badges will be provided for supporters but we will neither block features nor track subscriptions to identifiable individuals within the neighborhood network. Support subscriptions will start at $3 per month and have several tiers possible.
  • Product line cross-subsidization (gift subs). Supporters will be able to easily gift these subscriptions to other members, providing both with badges.
  • Freemium. As the inter-neighborhood network develops, we will be exploring freemium options, especially for business and institutional users.
• Transaction fees. We intend to partner with local banks to support near zero cost tokenized transactions among network members. We will each take a small transaction fee for each transaction.
• Advertising-on-demand. KYN provides a unique opportunity to connect customers who are fully validated to have advertiser desired attributes completely privately to ads they directly indicate they want to see when and how they want to see them. It also provides unique feedback mechanisms for improving future ad spends. Advertisers get high quality watchers and can even incentivize their ads. Potential customers get the information they want in the contexts they want to see it. The ad industry becomes less hated; able to work its magic without exploiting people.
• Platform as market intermediary. Over time, marketplaces will be created for individual and MSME offerings. Some of these transactions will incur fees. Services. Neighborhood-in-a-box. Lightly customized getting started packets with neighborhood business plans, etc.