The Problem:

Too often, when we are confronted with a deluge of information, we struggle to make sense of it and to decide if we can trust it. What would happen if people always had access to enough relevant, trusted information to take meaningful action?

When it went online, the internet promised a revolutionary new level of access to information for all people. Now, a few decades into the information age, we recognize new challenges:

• It is hard to verify if information is accurate and true.
• It is hard to verify the source of information.
• It is hard to make sense of unlimited information.
• It is hard to focus our attention by understanding what information is most relevant in a given scenario.

On its own, transparency can be used as a weapon. Transparency might give us access to unlimited information, while making it difficult to discern what is most important. Headlines, status updates, and advertisements light up our screens so quickly that it's hard to find space for deep thought and focused work.

As a result, our attention is scattered, we struggle to make meaning, and we are not sure who to trust. We want to collaborate on solving big problems, but often we struggle to agree on what the problems are in the first place. Globally, there is not yet sufficient trust to collaborate on solving our biggest problems.

It is possible to change this system.

Our Hypothesis:

There is plenty of information in the world. If we make spaces for meaningful collaboration and focused attention, then people will build trust. We can create systems for sharing information across spaces so that trust scales globally, enabling people to take collaborative action.

We know what it's like to share trust with friends and family. We don't need to reference a blockchain to decide whether to trust our closest collaborators. By connecting small networks of people, blockchains make it possible to reduce information overload and scale trust to a global level.

What is an Oracle?

Let's define an Oracle as anything that can provide verifiably true information to a blockchain from the "off-chain" world.

Existing Layer One blockchains have solved many financial accounting problems. At any time, we can review transaction history and blockchain state, and we can use that information to make future decisions. With Cardano, we can use transaction metadata and on-chain datum to store additional data on-chain.

However, just because data is on-chain does not mean it is true.

Take weather, for example. We could put a message on the blockchain that says that it was 75 degrees in San Diego, California on September 1st. And that information would be immutable. Anyone could look at it, and it would be accessible for as long as the blockchain is running.

The question is, how will people know that this information is true in the first place? Where did the data come from? Was there a reliable source? Was there an incentive for anyone to lie?

Trusted oracles set foundations for trust across organizations and networks of people, and can provide scaffolding for putting truth on the blockchain. The oracle itself only has value if it provides true information.

Why Oracles (and AI) Require Additional Scaffolding

In daily scenarios, each of us needs to decide whether we trust information when we are far away from its source. Our distance from a source of information can be measured in several ways:

1. Geographically: How far am I from the place where this data was created?
2. Chain of Relationships/Degrees of Separation: Who do I know that knows someone who knows someone else?
3. Machine-driven abstraction: What algorithm processed this data before creating the summary I am seeing now?

When this happens, we transition from trusting people we know to trusting the systems in which we participate. This applies to both blockchain oracles and to AI. In the case of a blockchain oracle, if a system for getting information on-chain is trustworthy, then the immutable record can be trusted. In the case of an AI systems, if the system for adding training data is trustworthy, then the response of the AI is more likely to be trustworthy.

People can start to collaborate, form relationships, and learn how systems work at small scale. When they are ready, people can participate in broader systems by making connections between groups. The work of connecting groups is already ongoing across the Web3 community, led by collectives like Rebooting the Web of Trust and the World Wide Web Consortium.

The Andamio Network is a "Human Oracle Layer" for adding data about people who are contributors to projects of any kind, and who want a way to share credentials and with anyone. It provides temporary, collaborative scaffolding that allows people to build trust at small scales, before making connections across groups.

Goals

• Andamio is built to help groups of collaborators build trust at small scales.
• Andamio emphasizes education and on-boarding as essential to building networks.
• Andamio helps networks of organizations build enough trust that people can collaborate at large scales.

Concepts

• Don't Trust, Verify: When people are far away from a source of information, they must have clear ways to verify that information is true.
• Human Oracle Layer: By collaborating at any scale, groups of people create data. When appropriate, this data can be shared across expanding networks so that people can build trust efficiently in order to solve global-scale problems.