# Three Bureaucracies of Sharing: Owners, Managers and Protectors

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [315]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2014-06-30 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Governance model for shared resources such as camp commons.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Free housing and 21st Century Leadership (2010): Blog essay on the model of personal effectiveness he adopted after inventing the Hexayurt in 2002, with...
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Burning Man shelter building (25%); Open government & anti-corruption (17%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: resource control (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 3 undated); vaccines (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); Spanish (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Kit (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); refugee shelter (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Red Cross (1 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Burning Man (1 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.41 (1.00 is the top), number 157 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md): same career work: Free housing and 21st Century Leadership
  - [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md): same career work: Free housing and 21st Century Leadership
- On the same works, just before: [700] [Vinay Gupta - Basic Income | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/700.md); [316] [Vinay Gupta - Maker Faire UK - Newcastle 2014 (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/316.md); [172] [vinay gupta | be you. (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/172.md)
- On the same works, just after: [314] [EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/314.md); [384] [test (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/384.md); [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Three Bureaucracies of Sharing: Owners, Managers and Protectors, video, 2014-06-30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [315], https://guptaoption.com/texts/315.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=0s) oh yes wrong right the reason I have a rule that I tried never to talk unless i'm recording at because it still to be repeated myself in public and so it forces constant progress and it means the people who've never met me and never interacted would be years after I give at all can come and find the threads and pull on them and the whole conversations have started that way getting years off the main event right just forward fussing with machines let me tell you why this is a refugee shelter design called a hexayurt could you and so the point of this shelter is very it is very very simple and very cheap to build typically you make out something like plywood and in plywood this is a whole sheet of plywood just like it comes off the truck this is a half sheet of plywood and if it's not big enough rather than having one sheet like this once you like this one tree like this give you a nice high roof if you need more space for a family you could put two or three of them together and you know it allows you to get us came up the size of your building you pass that along now why would is not a great material yeah it's an okay material but it's not great in here so if you want something that's much more lasting what's stronger than plywood you could work in this stuff the system on purpose and that material is called honeycomb polypropylene so it's about twice the price of plywood and its equity extremely strong the main advantage of honeycomb polypropylene is that it lost a really long time it doesn't get movie and you could pressure wash it so if you have a bunch of these shelters built from honeycomb proper polypropylene one group goes home they take the shelter's down and by pulling out with bolts you flat pocket on tracks and then you can ship the shelter somewhere else to be put back up again and you can clean them because you use a pressure water with bleach until they're

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=150s) exactly the condition they were in they started and this design is creep I invented it in 2002 ah I've been attempting to give it away ever since last year we built about thousand views of burning man and I will show you that as soon as this it's uh please give me one of the vga air Troy BG there another one okay so what does this have to do with bureaucracy I'm sure you're dying velocity right the answer is that sharing things is actually really difficult even when it's just a design for a sheltie oh man there's a real challenge of hair right so one of the ways that I could have shared that design of work I could have started out by making a company and making a patent so i would put exclusive control and then it could have shared it with people for money and this is the conventional approach of sharing things the ordinary business is used it's where we get our vaccines it's where we get our materials tour we got our computers it's the core mechanism that we have jacob piece of property you should check the visa prodigy you attempt to get people to pay you for it and this is the kind of standard mechanism of capitalism and it works really well for some things but everything that it was easy to do that way has already been done and this is a really really as crisis point the problems that we're having our that all the things that capitalism is unable to deliver are unavailable affordable health care and new technology that doesn't pay until it's we developed for many years proper care for poor people all these things are not accessible through that mysm so you need to build a new mechanism to try and deliver those services the first attempt to that was the welfare state and maybe this works quite well in some countries knocks well in other countries when you take it to the limit and attempt to provide everything on that basis turns out the papers us right

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=300s) so these are pictures tax yurts of people have built around the world and they're just pages pages pages pages of the things people are building them over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of units maybe a thousand a year all kinds of different entities can I get it into refugee comes yet no terribly difficult because the NGO bureaucracies are very slow so that they don't really like that it's too permanent it's too cheap it's too easy to people to build themselves an NGO involves to get very uncomfortable how uncomfortable we built one in painting and a took a hundred and two different agencies reported a hundred and sixty different individuals it was sitting right in the middle of port-au-prince with an aid worker living in it and not a single agency would come and visit I've had people from Geneva refuse to stand inside of one a demonstration they came they looked at it would not set foot inside them disintermediation ones so um the shearing problem is something that we've got very little language for the final right when we say that we want to share something usually we're sharing a flat we're sharing a car we're sharing a tent right I have something I've lend it to somebody we don't really have a precise language for us and the case I'm going to make is that sharing implies bureaucracy and if you correctly apply the need for if you correctly understand the need for the bureaucracy and the function of the bureaucracy you could design efficient bureaucracies to support sharing the any sharing model that doesn't explicitly specify the bureaucracy and its functions will fail because you'll get an informal power structure which will be completely ineffective in a crisis somebody finally breaks the thing we're trying to share if ineffective improvised bureaucracy breaks down and now everybody hates each other right away was your job to ensure it was your job to fix it I never said I would do that and the whole thing breaks so does this kinda make sense as a starting point for an analysis right we we don't have enough money we don't have enough stuff sharing is efficient way of doing it sharing is hard and sharing is hard because it employs bureaucracy is a really bad at designing that's the thesis so with that as a starting point

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=450s) how many people in this room are bureaucrats is that really all the bureaucrats we have the room three people I think we've got more people without with undp right if you are from UNDP your bureaucrat we'd raise your hat right ok any other bureaucrats is that really a trip York see Nadia you look very very disinclined to raise your mom you're a trap right yeah you see right so we have two distinct natales bureaucracy right this is a radical step but we have to destabilize bureaucracy so people are going or ashamed of being the mechanisms by which we share right no bureaucrats equals the informal power structure informal power structure equals sharing breaks down when it gets difficult if you want robust sharing must have robust bureaucracy even if its technical bureaucracy even if it's done with computers yes still need the bureaucratic functional film yeah let me talk one more solid and then you can go relax so you probably can't read this but this is a large complicated part for designing huge refugee Elvis or helping to manage failing States it's on a website called a resilient max I've right in the middle right here we have resource control which is all the different kinds of sharing all the way up to things like limited liability countries when you're sharing arrangement breakdown in society your society breaks down I was told the Georgia lost Maine's electrical power for several years in the political upheaval in the 90s is that right so in that kind of instance probably the physical stuff was still standing it's unlikely the power stations were physically destroyed what was lost was the ability to share the generated resource with people bureaucracy breaks down and I'm not an expert right I'm

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=600s) just guessing from the history that the bureaucracy broke down the systems were turned off and the whole thing just stopped providing services that's an example of the kind of impact that break down the bureaucracy can have so you know I'm really seriously when designing this stuff not just for us as individuals but for you know us as societies the world is fallen in crisis so all three bureaucracies that I think are necessary for sharing our bureaucracy owns something a bureaucracy that manages something and a bureaucracy that protects something so if we take a typical instance of a shared asset like a road theoretically the road is owned by the society as a whole it's managed by some ranch like the Department of Transportation and it's protected by the police services and the government all the rest of the kind of hierarchy at the same pretty typical form of institutional chair informal sharing and my neighbor borrows my vacuum cleaner it's owned by me it's managed by then and it's protected by police because if they steal it if you call them they become I hear that's really not such a great idea here but it works fairly well in Britain and once you start trying to define these reactors for the various kinds of sharing that you're participating what you'll find is sometimes they're easy to name and sometimes they're hard to make so you get an example where you're sharing something it's not really clear who owns for example a piece of code did you copy from the internet but you can't find the original author because it's just sitting in some violence on package you're now sharing this thing and it may not be properly licensed you're not sure who the owner is you know it's unclear and in those situations usually the sharing doesn't work very well because when you file a bug who's going to accept the bug report the thing has become decoupled from its bureaucracy it's just kind of make sense ok it doesn't like you could hot movies not hearing you ok if you stop surrounded everywhere I use them okay microphone I thought you sir that turn gonna work phone better no better sure I yell is that better yeah horse but he's hot okay one sorry goes

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=750s) okay so and what I will suggest well we'll try to sort that out is if we do a little exercise is everybody clear about protect manage on good question yes you swear have you gone through V I'm sure you have but I just want to be exposed to be easily so are you sure we definitely need bureaucracies keep track of that I don't we have alternative technologies in a broad sense as we can use to enable sharing I am I think that those technologies are functionally equivalent to be reverse it so well no one defies adversity is technology well so we are not the fascists are you thinking taking pieces all right excuse me real okay better yeah great sorry about that guys if that happens last knew immediately and all sorted so Alberto was asking you know aren't being basically talking about you know are there other ways of doing share and other than bureaucracy my answer is anything that does the job of tracking and recording anything that does the job resolving complaints all these things are our bureaucracy what bed cones bureaucracy is that programmers that run the Bitcoin system and you know there's always going to be humans and creating the mechanisms of providing the systems that what defines beaurocracy said stands along the process of the programmers have big fight just when you're 10 sorry no English said this religion that was what we find that we find that bureaucracies that distance along the process yeah so imagine your sense Google Doc programmers your system on the garden of service example romantic a Bitcoin I think it's not very correct they did it once but yep doesn't yeah so in the example something like that coin the bureaucracy is the background foundation which pays the

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=900s) programmers who create the system who make decisions like whether you fork back on the bureaucracy is still there it's just informal and it's very hard to control right the programmer make the decisions that do the owning type thing and you could argue the pic point has no owner overall but it still has managers in the form of the Bitcoin foundation of effect on programmers and it still has protectors in the form of the security consultants so the King change the nature of their other big time and yeah absolutely Bitcoin programmers can do things like take some bitcoins and refuse to accept them anymore it's calling for kit it's good i don't even know yeah it's a very very humble process so this notion that we have owners managers as actors right and I'd like us to think about the places where we play those roles does anybody own something that they share with people right physical property intellectual property and sharing a house participation an open source project okay so almost everybody owns something that they so think about how it feels to own something in share I own this this is mine I'm giving it to you you you you can everybody kind of identify with that feeling of owning something choosing to share so we've all played this role being the owner ahsoka what about managing sharing processes right you've signed the lease for a how secure than sublight the friends you've borrowed vacuum cleaner for somebody and then manage that you will have been hired by an organization which is theoretically working on behalf of the people at the charity who participated in the managing over sharing process but half of the room think carefully anytime you've done a contract for an NGO you're managing a sharing process and lots of things in education you're managing sharing process right so lots of us participate in managing chair what about protecting care so something goes wrong and you wind up having clean up the max you know you've got your director to charity you have managed projects where something

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=1050s) has gone wrong you've had to catch them so maybe a quarter of a cicada protectable is Arthur here now so Arthur is a CFO bad writers and he's basically the man who carries the financial baked steak and says no we come for an Arthur is the absolute embodiment of the protector all sharing circle Irish co-write a certain gorilla-like quality and this is a very very important function edge writers function without any be formally in the protective role for about 45 43 years to now fears and as a result everybody how to play to protect your role because we have is really formalize that in to have a new chief financial about once you formalize the role everybody else you're locked isn't it are converted so we've all played these three functions but most of the time when we're in the sharing arrangement we don't formally define the functions or who's it which rope so we in informal we design these structures or we take a template we take a template for something like a standard charity structure or stop the project structure without necessarily understanding that it's firstly a sharing arrangement and secondly what the rules are you know Board of Directors owners will employability corporation lawyers you don't sort of thing right we're sharing the property that is this company right these are the owners these are the monitors these are the protectors we never make the rules explicit in our hands we just kind of take the corporate forms without really understanding the logic that causes them to exist this kind of make sense so what I want to ask people to do is really really think about how it feels to be in each one of those three rolls right we've done the owner role we've done the manager role we've done the protector road when we come together to design projects that are going to involve some kind of share an element which most of them do when you get right down to that how to think about explicitly defining the three rules and their relationships to each other in your project are we doing for time

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=1200s) instructions okay so when you come to designing projects thick very explicitly about from the owner role manager role protector role and explicitly define them so quite often you'll find that this protector rule is the state it's the police its legal system it's the lawyers dollar as the court and in that kind of instance you know Oscar self do we really need to go to the state or can be sort this out the sunset ordinary rules right you know do we do we walk the thing or do just trust it only this deal it's an example really made conscious about the protective function the owner function most of us don't really like to think about ownership and sharon projects but if you don't have explicit owners you wind up with informal rumors so you wind up in a position where somebody feels like they open something because it worked on that and then the funding dries up and selling anything evaporates but that was our space right that was a reward from that was our while you feel the sense of ownership but you don't actually own it and that's a real shock than the harbor's anybody had that happen you have the informal sense will do something then it vanishes because the owner rules that were the fastest manager role nobody likes to think of themselves as being with the manager but actually the manager is simply the responsible party when something goes wrong so you know over the next couple days we're going to be spending a long time designing stuff a lot of that stuff will include informal share it and I want to think really clearly about those three roles does everybody have a straight right most of us have experienced and we could potentially know that we've time now but we could potentially at some point over the weekend over the next couple days rather do an exercise where we take roles forming what three partial groups and play those three roles I've and that might be a useful thing to do is you design the projects you know kind of thick throughout you pretend to the owner you tend to be the matter who you pretend to be protector now let's ask what happens when the bills stop being paid good so the heck's your project was very kind of it was designed in for I didn't do we understand this stuff when I designed it but I decided that I didn't work for an NGO and because I would get a conflict

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=1350s) with for funding with the charities I was trying to persuade to use it so if I'm if I had hexayurt charity and its funding to build let's hear it then places like the Red Cross we find it very hard to work with me because we both be changing the same Thunder dollars so i decided that the hexayurt was not good to have a number so public domain no copyright no pot no incorporation no charitable state has nothing at all we were just going to give it away and we intentionally did things like destroying the ability to train market by making sure that it was used as a generic term so we destroyed the over function we also destroyed the manager function because the heavier project doesn't do we have anything to manage because it doesn't actually own any property and this is a very weird approach but what it meant was that anybody that came to the project wound up as an owner and wound up as a manager for their own form of patios so for burnin lon you've got something on the order 500 teams or 300 teams build a taxi artists and the own manage attack their own system so we kind of flattened all of us are those who are giving it away yeah I to share with you i would like to share with you one example that I think illustrate very good your classes it's not from the envelope and from the co-operative world you know all these in space and a suitable isn't a statistical fact that many in Spanish a quote and precise Morales recuperated enterprises and everybody a glorified step you know but at the end of the day oh yeah all right a little bit levinson so well in the bracket Iranian industries there is an incredible that is this kind of all industries break down and they returned into comparatives and is there is an incredible amount of them an incredible person part of initiative and leadership and informal structures of control a kind of cooperative Stalinism and yeah

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=1500s) you know I'm not very militant cooperative person and I'm I'm really horrified with these movements and I try to answer myself why it doesn't work why workers when they turn into a comparative their album why they don't get power yeah and because it's completely different process of a new cooperative when you're planning it Yanina yes and I think that your your thesis fits perfectly cool yeah fine choice well it's good to meet you sir and okay so we should break time schedule anything else we should think about or do this any more questions for rabba yes with a with a community stewardship I think this is this is super interesting question to be asking ok what's the owner role who has the manager role who has a protective role what are the defaults like okay stain is the default what is an alternative and which one is better for what absolutely now my question to you is how do we leave that into our thinking these three days so you said we should ask each other that but so the society that we live it is very very built around the protective role right the boundary of a nation state is where an army fault to define a territory all your half of either the people or the king of some previous time and everything you do operates inside of these letters to protect a role but a bunch of thoughts stop when we get right down to the individual detail it usually comes down to somebody that we knew for forming the first line of protection sometimes the first and second life so think of community engagement monitors right on a website where some kind of horrible flame war breaks out it's eating up the social capital because people are starting to hate each other and you have to come in you're forming the protection barrier I say right I'm going to close this thread we're not going to talk about this 4-week take it to email so you know you have a party

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ75JqiCZ2w&t=1650s) right and if there's trouble of the party you need to have a bunch of big guys that kind of sort it out pouring of a bouncer works for you as barriers that come between um the state functions so in a lot of ways when we're talking about protector role inside of sharing arrangements you want to think about the priest eight layers of protection how do we start our own affairs of the state never has to become involved in something goes wrong and for example making sure the things that are insured so that if they're stolen vivel enterprise doesn't collapse in good laugh about it sounds really dumb but what we found in the UK is that sharing of personal property becomes much easier for formal insurance yeah because it just eases up to protect your burden and other examples right the distinguishing between emotional feelings of ownership a practical legal ownership hugely important right and i think that there's a lot of room for explicitly defining things as having their owners other than the community that uses them but if you're going to do that it means your common property right as soon as you want legal title or a deed your wound up in the ownership structure and then there are all kinds of strange corporations I've limited liability partnerships that can give you all kinds of legal control over stuff using things like a member bokonim arrangements there's lots of reading for control structures same thing with management right if we're not explicit by who's managing process it's going to go jets from his personality or the person who cares most often those before lousy monitors right and there's a whole story about distinguishing good leadership and good management but in my experience if it's two axes good manager or one access good wiener or the other very few people go through leaders with Manish fiction yeah and often it's quite hard for a group to say right you are kind of dull that you're although sometimes never disorganized you know we're going to make the effort to listen to you tell us what to do resurrecting clear there's no rhetoric about partnership necessary between reader function function and the most efficient organizations unthink have strong cooperation between leadership and management usually over paint

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End of [315] Three Bureaucracies of Sharing: Owners, Managers and Protectors. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [314](https://guptaoption.com/texts/314.md) EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed... (2014); the most closely related, [251](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md) ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.