David Dao
David Dao is Chief Scientist at GainForest.Earth and Econ & Gov Lead at Protocol Labs
A pioneer in data valuation for machine learning, David holds a PhD in AI Systems from ETH Zurich. His work, which sits at the frontier of AI and decentralized systems, has been globally recognized by the World Economic Forum, XPRIZE, and Ethereum.
Sessions
Open source powers a $100T+ digital economy; more than 99% of companies rely on OSS, 70%+ of production code comes from it, yet the maintainers carrying that infrastructure are barely funded and burning out, with 60% having quit or considered quitting, while only a tiny fraction of companies give back. FOSS and OSS licenses were 40+ years old and were designed for another era. Prosperous Software Movement is trying to fix the value-capture failure in open source.
GainForest funds people who steward forests, directly. We do this with three pieces that fit together: data sovereignty so the communities collecting forest data own it, local AI so models that read that data can run on the steward's own device, and open nature finance so the money that depends on the data actually reaches the steward. This session shares three short stories from the field, then turns into a small-group conversation about where this kind of stack would matter in your own community.
A hands-on follow-up to the Hypercerts on AT Protocol talk. We'll design funding, decision-making, or evaluation mechanisms together — adapted to the room, ranging from conceptual sketches to technical deep dives.
Simocracy is a small experiment that lets you write a short brief for an AI agent and put it in a conversation alongside other agents and humans. This session is a discussion about what that does to a room. We will run a short live demo with sims debating a topic the room picks, then break out for small-group conversations about who writes these agents, whose perspectives they carry, and when you want them around. No background needed.
Simocracy is a small experiment that lets you write a short brief for an AI agent and put it in a conversation alongside other agents and humans. This session is a discussion about what that does to a room. We will run a short live demo with sims debating a topic the room picks, then break out for small-group conversations about who writes these agents, whose perspectives they carry, and when you want them around. No background needed.