Health Public Good Encoded

In 1948, Claude Elwood Shannon gave us the Mathematical Theory of Communication published in The Bell System Technical Journal, from which germinated and proliferated the information age. Shannon explained that everything is information and information is everywhere. Even in Africa. Shannon explained that Information is captured in answers to simple yes and no questions, or binary questions, where yes is 1 and no is 0. The binary digit was born, to be known by its acronym Bit, which is the progenitor of the science of information, or information theory. Information is encoded in Bits. Shannon defined information by digital bits, and measured it by the concept of information entropy or surprising bits As suggested by John von Neumann. Today, information is??encoded and transmitted through broadband web of glass and light, reaching every part of the world. ?Information in Africa mostly remains uncaptured, uncoded in a manner that it can be transmitted on the web of glass and light. Uncoded and untransmissible information decays rapidly, and becomes dead capital, ?as ?Hernando De Soto explained in the Mystery of capital, published in 2000, and as I explained in the article Universal Basic Income is Universal Health, in Wyathi. Dead capital produces disease, disability and death which increases the global burden of disease—the main problem of global health. ?Automated governance on the third generation of the Web (Web 3) provides a magnificent solution to health production in every community in Africa, creating sustainable one health communities, and therefore global health. It is all in translation of tacit knowledge, made possible by new economic governance models of decentralized autonomous organization in which health production will be encoded.

Information Science

George Gilder explained in the book Knowledge and Power, published in 2013, that, In its full flower information theory while dense and complex, its implications in economics can be expressed in simple and intelligible propositions. Everything is information. All information is surprise.?Only surprise qualifies as information. Information is the difference between what we know before the transmission and what we know after. From Adam Smith day to ours economics has focused on the nature of economic order. Much of the work of economists has been focused on ??the observation of how markets confronted with change restored order by stabilizing prices to reestablish equilibrium. By contrast, information science is a science of disorder, and disequilibrium. It is measurable by the concept of information entropy, which differs in detail from thermodynamic entropy.?More about information entropy in future article.

Metacrisis

The Metacrisis of the science of economics is a crisis of information.?This crisis systematically leads to Daniel Schmachtenberger’s coordination failures?, ?with eventual tragedy of the common in global health, as I?described in Emergencing: Discovering the Tacit Dimension of Global Health. This Metacrisis of global health can only be grasped by science of information.

The Internet

Shannon’s work on information theory UNDERPINS the internet. Following its inception, people have been hard at work, creating new and more powerful uses of the binary digit. We continue to witness rapid, and amazing revolution through the decades, that produced mainframe computers, personal computers, the internet, which has evolved through three grand stages of web 1 in early 1990s, followed closely by web 2 in late 1990s, and finally web 3, which emerged around 2008.

Web 1

Web 1 was the Internet protocol with the simple mail transfer protocol which made email possible, and hypertext transfer protocol that made it possible for anyone anywhere to build a website. Protocols of web 1 were completely decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant. ?Web 1 came with the Declaration of Independence of the Cyberspace authored by John Perry Burrow, in February 1996.

Web 2

Further development of the internet saw certain centralization of web services with emergence of web applications built on the hypertext transfer protocol, but this time the emerging applications came with permissioned gateways, that could be accessed using username and password. New companies with centralized governance structure proliferated rapidly on this second iteration of the web that saw the emergence of Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many mor. The originally decentralized web became centralized. John Perry Burrow’s ??Declaration of Independence of the Cyberspace lost certain meaning and power. The web had quickly lost its independence less than a few years after the declaration.

Web 3

In 2008, however, Satoshi Nakamoto, released a new protocol for decentralized web, inspired by Randolph Merkel Tree of 1975, Adam Back’s antispam and Adams Cash. ??Nakamoto’s innovation added time stamp to solve the double-spending problem that had plagued the internet protocol. Bitcoin was born, and jumpstarted??a new ultimate economic revolution of high entropy disorder and disequilibrium, underpinned by Shannon’s science of information as George Gilder described.

Virtual Machines

Second generation blockchain projects followed swiftly after the advent of the initial bitcoin blockchain. Notable development in 2015, was the Ethereum protocol as Turing Complete Ethereum virtual machine (EVM)by Vitalik Buterin that enabled anyone anywhere to create any kind of decentralized applications using smart contracts, inspired by the work of Nick Zambo in 1994.?People most notably created cryptocurrency tokens, which they used to raise money to fund projects, through initial coin offerings, starting in 2016, and progressing through 2017, only to fade out slowly.

Internet Native Business

More innovative however is the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)that automates organization governance. Dan boneh of the Center for Blockchain Research in Stanford University, defined a DAO as a smart contract deployed on the blockchain THAT interacts with members of the public who form a community to support a common project. Indeed,, the DAO IS a mechanism for a group of individuals, to pool resources To form an internet native business, that is managed by its members by means of automated governance. The DAO takes IN proposals,. MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY vote for or against THE added proposal. then the winning proposal is funded. The question is how to automate governance correctly. The root of trust for a DAO is the public source code of the smart contract. Anyone can inspect the smart contract to learn what it is created to do, and then choose to become a member of the DAO.

Governance Transformed

The greatest application created, of all creations of web 3, is the automated bicameral governance mechanism the for effective administration of stakeholders of any particular projects. For the first time in the history of mankind, bicameral governance, has given fringe stakeholders a mechanism for expressing their ideas, and even voting for the ideas of their choice. I discussed this topic on the article Impact is Profitable, published here on Wyathi. I also discussed these matters from another perspective on the article Make Impact While Making Money, published on Wyathi, as well. Briefly, Optimism protocol introduces a bicameral governance structure with two co-equal houses, the token house, and the citizen house. The main difference between these two houses is the transferability or sell-ability of governance rights.?The token house has fungible tokens that are out in the world, sold in the market to raise money to fund projects.?Fungible tokens are transferable, and sellable to other people. Someone with much money can hold lots of tokens, because these tokens are available in the market for anyone to purchase. Someone without much money may not be in a position to hold many tokens, and therefore such a person would be at a disadvantage when voting for decisions is based on the number of fungible ????????tokens held as it is the case In a plutocracy.

Fortunately, we have Citizen House.?In the Citizen House citizenship is represented by identity tokens, also known as soul bound nonfungible tokens (NFTs), that are not transferable, not sellable, but they can be earned. The importance is to balance the two houses. With fungible tokens alone, governance is buyer-able on the market at a price, as it happens in traditional corporations, where ownership changes hands when someone or another entity buys majority shares in the stock market. The new owners may not have the same human values as fringe stakeholders of the organization.?Bicameral governance is a system that protects human values, because human values should not be put out there for sale. ?Citizen voting puts the last first as Robert Chamber, put it in his book Rural Development: Putting the Last First published in 1979.

Robert Leshner of Compound Finance a decentralized finance market, explained at the 2022 DAO Summit, that the coordination mechanism of community token is most important. How the design of community token is executed is paramount. The token is the unit of account to determine how much of a profit a member is entitled to in the event there is a distribution of patronage.

Resilience

Although Compound was formed way before Optimism could finally give us the name of the mechanism of bicameral governance, it’s had already implemented this type of governance with certain success. Robert Leshner Reported that success is attributable to giving community members ability to vote. Community member participation in governance creates resilience for the organization. Involvement of the community builds resilience. When the organization is managed by the community it cannot go stale, because the community generates diverse new ideas that are implemented on a continuous basis. In a centralized system, when a central organization is holding the key, a single point of failure prevails , such that , one event can knock ?down the ?organization, just as we have witnessed in many global health projects, which experience fixes that fail system archetype, as I described in Emergencing. Repeated fixes that fail eventually destroys the organization, or the stakeholders for ever. In a decentralized system with diversity of thoughts combining from widespread community, somebody is always around, no matter what. The system is not dependent on any single person, or entity. This creates robustness of the organization and ensures that the organization will be there for decades if not centuries. This is resilience for sustainability, precisely what we need to create sustainable one health communities.

Increased Rate of Innovation

Inclusion and involvement of as many community members as possible, will certainly increase the rate of innovation in global health, obeying Shannon’s law of information entropy. A system that is open to the whole world, is the most fitting to produce global health.

Participation in Knowledge Translation

How do we Engage Universities in Africa ? The prevailing tragedy is that knowledge in African Universities remains uncoded, untranslated, and therefore untransmissible. Young people join universities to learn new knowledge and combine learned knowledge hoping to create new innovative products. The process of creating new products from learned knowledge is known as translation, from university to community. Translation is a very expensive process, and only possible when knowledge is encoded. Translation requires substantial financial capital a lot of money to fund research and development of new ideas. Universities in Africa do not have a budget for translation of knowledge.?I discussed this matter in greater detail in Ustawi: The knowledge Conversion Organization, published in 2010, and in Ubricoin White Paper.

Briefly, University knowledge does not leave the University in sub-Saharan Africa. Many universities in Sub-Saharan Africa have not arrived at the information age. Most of the processes involving knowledge generation continue to use pre-information age technologies. In all schools in Sub-Saharan Africa, students are required to present thesis, dissertations, academic reports, manuscripts on paper and bounded as paper books and stored on endless rows and piles on campus buildings. All this knowledge is stored on campus sites and never finds its way out. Very little if any of this material is published on the web (www) and the universities do not benefit from information superhighway that transmits knowledge in the speed of light.?Even though students are supposed to type their projects on computer—no hand written work is accepted—the lecturer will demand that the students print out the final copy on paper and deliver the paper bound project for review, approval and archival.

The digital copy remains with the student, who may not know what to do with the copy. The university has not put in place organized digital repositories for such digital copies. The final paper copy delivered to the university joins piles of similar archived documents in the university. Tens of thousands of papers bound documents of student projects can be found in all departments. The knowledge in those archived documents never see the light of day. Locked up in buildings, that knowledge decays inexorably. The student leaves his or her knowledge on a university shelf, where the rest of the world will never know what the student accomplished. The market is not so kind to the student whose work cannot be found anywhere on the world wide web. It is tough for students graduating from universities in Sub-Saharan Africa to find jobs in the global market place. The student’s knowledge remains on a shelf in a university completely inaccessible to the rest of the world.

Tremendous Potential

In Sub Saharan Africa, broadband internet is not used to get knowledge out of the university. Broadband internet has tremendous potential to revolutionize quality of education and how information travels to and from the universities. Broadband internet provides access to knowledge base, wealth of information, and great potential for learning.

Illustrative

This stagnation and decay of knowledge created in African universities will soon come to an end, thanks to Web 3. Experience at Compound Project is highly illustrative of how to engage universities, and similar learning centers to translate local knowledge. Web 3 opens up major mechanism for engaging university students and faculty members in knowledge production and translation. In Compound project we see student and faculty members in many universities participating in voting on proposals, contributing analysis. Like Stanford University student teams in United States are very active in voting for proposals on compound. This voting mechanism is an incredible knowledge conversion and translation that enables students to participate directly in funding decisions of knowledge generated and proposed to be funded on the platform. As most of university students in Africa have access to the internet, they will participate in knowledge translation into products that will improve health of people living in African continent. Translation of university knowledge will result in increased local manufacturing of biomedical products and health care supplies, that are critical to saving human lives. In this way, Web 3 will save lives. Amazing!

Delegation is Key

most people by nature prefer to delegate details of monitoring or any technical subject to people in their community who are more knowledgeable. This calls for??people who have a lot of interest to learn the proposed project in detail, to serve as representatives of their community. ?Such individuals, or groups of people in the community are elected to serve as delegates to review proposals, end eventually vote for or against the proposals. Delegation allows members to assign tokens of ownership to a computer group, or to a person, who the member knows has good knowledge of the project.

Incentives for?Teachers and Students

This voting can be used as academic compensation tool, creating revenue for people in the academic environment. More money for universities in Africa. Translation of university and community knowledge in Africa will produce global health, because we know that economic development is by far the greatest cause of improvement in health. ?This is how we build sustainable one health communities using the work of Claude Elwood Shannon.