Relat.ing: BGI + Psychotechnology

How Our Project Will Contribute To The Growth Of The Decentralized AI Platform

We're building a bridge between human wisdom & BGI - an evolutionary cultural sandbox where meaningful relational exploration shapes the future of collective intelligence. 

Relat.ing nurtures natural patterns of connection while gathering curated data for BGI creation, creating a mutual feedback loop that fosters both immediate human flourishing and the development of true BGI. 

This living laboratory of Human+AI co-creation guides technology toward deeper understanding of relationship.

Our Team

Chris Ewald - CTO and cofounder of Interbe.ing. Relational practice wizard.

Daniel Lindenberger - Director of Thaumazo and a core group alumni to Group Works (A group dynamics Pattern Language)

Christine Francis - Mystic earth creature turned experience designer.

Ben Smith - Civilization Research Institute curriculum developer & post-conventional community organizer.

Ufuk Çetincan & Elif Kavalci - Brand design, illustration, UI/UX and art direction Co-founders of Thinker&Tailor.

The core problem we are aiming to solve

Our most intimate online gatherings are trapped in corporate software designed for business needs, not human connection. Transformative wisdom for human relating exists in post-conventional communities, but it remains inaccessible to most people—creating a growing crisis of digital disconnection and shallow online interaction.

Even more concerning: as AI systems learn from our current digital behavior, they're being trained on impoverished models of human connection. Without access to deeper patterns of relating, AGI risks developing blindspots about healthy human connection.

Relat.ing offers a different path: imagine our most meaningful moments shaping the future of intelligence.

Our specific solution to this problem

Relat.ing is a video platform that simultaneously solves the immediate need for better online gathering spaces designed for human connection & wiser relating, while building essential infrastructure for ethically gathered data that fuels socially intelligent AI.

Starting with the livekit.io video platform infrastructure, we will add novel elements that foster connection and point users towards better relational skills. Softer video layouts that are well-suited for relationality will be added. Surfacing group pattern dynamics from the Group Works deck will be incorporated. AI agents with easy interoperability with the SingularityNET ecosystem will be enabled.

A backend toolkit will allow end users to perform semantic & vector searching of their transcript history and allow access to user customizable and pre-defined AI prompts for transcript analysis. These and other features allow more people to use advanced AI workflows to gain valuable insights from past conversations.

Export of video, audio, and relationally annotated transcript data to SingularityNET models will be streamlined and easy. This unlocks a curated relational dataset that can be leveraged to create future BGI.

There are countless ways this foundation can be built upon to foster the co-evolution of Human+AI systems. Better human relating feeds into better data for the creation of BGI. Better BGI feeds into AI agents that help humans relate better. Let’s start the flywheel on this upward benefit spiral.

Project details

The origin story of Relat.ing & Team-Project fit

The idea for relat.ing came out of Chris’ experience with Interbe.ing. Interbe.ing is a global community of meditators that do participatory relational practices together online. In that context, the go-to tool, zoom, was found to introduce undesirable impediments in the fostering of interpersonal connection. The enterprise vibes significantly detract from genuine human connection.

Looking around and seeing all other intimate online gatherings usually using zoom, the question was asked: Why are we using enterprise tools for our most intimate online video gathering spaces? We can do better than this. 

The truth is, online video platforms are inherently designed to prioritize enterprise customers over intimate gatherings. The reason is simple: these companies raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding, and the investors behind them demand returns. As a result, video platforms inevitably cater to enterprise needs, often at the expense of fostering genuine, intimate human connections.

A bootstrapped company that raises small amounts of funding from aligned and community driven sources like deepfunding.ai, is able to maintain individuals as the core customers. Today, anyone with a device wishes to connect in online video spaces. Online coaches, virtual conferences, relational practice and spiritual communities, 1-1 meetings, are just a few examples of spaces that wish to connect more intimately. 

In the liminal metaverse called Vibecafe, Chris met Ben Smith. Ben is an integral member of many post-conventional communities who are particularly appropriate as early adopters and test users of this tool. Some of these communities include Limicon, Monastic Academy, Emergent Commons, VillageCo, The Fractal Community, Civilization Research Institute and other metamodern communities. Relat.ing is planned to be built in relationship with these communities to meet their needs in ways that current video platforms do not.

Christine met Ben Smith at Limicon 2024 at the moonshot workshop that Ben hosted. Christine has been deeply involved in many transformative culture projects as she has personally walked the path of healing, transformation, and wisdom gathering for many years.

Through the metamodernism community, Chris met Daniel Lindenberger, who was a core team member of Group Works: The Group Pattern Language Project. In this project, the Group Works team identified and made explicit core patterns that exist in real-time group dynamics. These patterns use appreciative inquiry to surface core design principles which make group interactions connective, meaningful, and effective. When one has learned to perceive these patterns in real-time, a radical upleveling of group coherence and flow is unlocked.

By building the Group Works Deck directly into an online video platform we both center the primacy of functional group dynamics and human relating, and provide a clear, concrete tool for capacity building in this regard. Because this tool is methodology independent and emphasizes patterns that are easy for anyone to recognize, it becomes easy for groups to embody the patterns described.

Open source supported by a sustainable business

Given the vastly expansive potential and variety of skills and expertise in these areas, we feel it is important for the relat.ing platform to be open source. Experts skilled in various practices are able to contribute their expertise to the commons. A discovery area is envisioned where end-users can find and explore new useful, fun, or developmental practices.

In addition to releasing relat.ing as open source software for all to freely use, an intention of this grant is to bootstrap a sustainable business that will be able to support the operational costs and ongoing development of the software beyond the scope of this grant. We have identified “online coaching” as the most clear and straightforward initial target market ($3.2B 2022 Market size, 14% CAGR).

Making advanced AI workflows available to end users

Relat.ing will feature a backend toolkit that will allow end users to perform semantic & vector searching of their transcript history. Users will be able to Bring-their-own (BYO) API keys of various ai providers to be able to analyze their past conversations. Powerful and insightful pre-defined AI prompts will be offered. Users can create their own AI prompt templates with variables available for transcripts and other meeting context. These and other features allow more people to use advanced AI workflows to gain valuable insights from past conversations.

Providing value to BGI

Export of video, audio, and relationally annotated transcript data to SingularityNET models will be streamlined and easy. This unlocks a curated relational dataset that can be leveraged to create future BGI, creating a mutual feedback loop that fosters both immediate human flourishing and the development of true BGI. 

Inviting users into a co-creative process with AI, including them as an integral ingredient in the data gathering, sets a standard for ethical AI integration into often exclusively human centric relationality exercises, opening the door for AI augmented human co-evolution.

Ethics is the core

This project champions wise human relat.ing at its very core, and seeks to be a grounded launch point for the development of future BGI systems. By focusing on relational skills and using post-conventional relational patterns, this project aims for BGI systems to foster only the wisest and most skilled aspects of human relating and social intelligence. Informed by a Buddhist view of ethics, we hold that spontaneous and playful action rooted in heart-centered connection is truly the highest form of embodied ethics. Insofar as our platform promotes spontaneous and heart-centered play between people, it is also encouraging this example of ethical behavior.

The potential of the Cultural Practice Evolution Sandbox

The Group Works Deck is just the start, and a grounded beginning of what can be built into an online video platform that focuses on fostering wiser interpersonal relating. Additional interactions that we can build into this video platform include the following:

• Active Listening Challenges

• Perspective Taking Games

• Conflict Navigation

• Embodied Decision Making

• Trust Building Exercises

• Emotional Intelligence Training

• Coherence Building

• Attunement Adventures

• Collective Intelligence Challenges

• Developmental Relational Practices

• Community Weaving

• Somatic Intelligence Practices

• Authenticity Practices

Each practice could have:

- Progressive difficulty levels

- Clear success metrics

- Gamified reward systems

- Team challenges

- Achievement tracking

- Community recognition elements

The above lists point to the potential of what can be unlocked within a dedicated environment we are calling the “Cultural Practice Evolution Sandbox”. It is an evolving space that supports people to deepen their connections with each other by using one of the many practices included with relat.ing. Future AI guidance is envisioned that may point people to the best-fit practices for their specific needs.

The Cultural Practice Evolution Sandbox will be enabled with underlying technology. By leveraging livekit.io, we are able to bring AI agents into a video call context, where they can instruct and/or facilitate any of the above interactions.

Existing resources

Livekit.io for video infrastructure: https://livekit.io

Group Works deck for our core relationality upgrade: https://groupworksdeck.org

Open Source Licensing

Livekit.io - Apache License 2.0 

Group Works deck: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Additional videos

Dan Siegel on the importance of relational practices: https://youtu.be/uo8Yo4UE6g0

Was there any event, initiative or publication that motivated you to register/submit this proposal?

Describe the particulars.

Ben Smith was referred to this grant by Holly Denman, in the Metamodern Spirituality facebook group.