I'm happy to see another product in the "opinionated management" space (another is https://www.loomio.org) but think integrating a cryptocurrency limits the appeal and cheapens the concept. I really can't see who this is designed for.
Interesting to see the comparison. I've been (very) loosely following the progress of Colony, and I've had the sense that they were much closer to Assembly (http://assemblymade.com/), which is now defunct.
I was a participant in Assembly, and am optimistic that an eventual replacement will figure out how to make the money side work enough that they can keep going.
As it stands, I'm not entirely certain who Colony is for. Hopefully, not everybody.
Agreed. And in particular I'm curious as to "what truly differentiates Colony from what Assembly did"? ie. what is Colony doing to address the fate of Assembly?
I'd love to see something like this take off. I also remain unconvinced that the problem with something like Assembly was simply that it wasn't on the blockchain.
It's also a big ask to bet the cumulative and growing value of your collective efforts on your contract code not ever having any kind of edge case that could leak value contrary to the _spirit_ of your endeavour. Or deferring the (still as yet untested) legal issues of DAOs.
To me it seems like a viable and interesting idea to have decentralized internet-based organizations with people doing work in exchange for crypto-tokens.
Sure, it limits the appeal, but a lot of viable and interesting things have limited appeal... Whether this kind of thing could become mainstream within a few years is the question, no?
I think the token allows for more market-based economies. Maybe that's a market economy within a firm, or a market economy within a coworking space amongst members, or in open source projects.
Sure, you could use fiat or a non-blockchain "token", but I believe this open market, with price discovery, adds more value then it detracts.
This is the first Ethereum based project I've seen that seems halfway interesting (and I'm one of those "cryptocurrency doubters").
It doesn't somehow recursively relate to Ethereum, doesn't over-rely on blockchain buzzwords, and can be explained in a sentence or two. While first reading the page, I didn't realize that it was even an Ethereum based project until the very end, which I liked. At any rate, I'm interested enough to read the documentation in depth now.
Don't ruin this by having some bullshit ICO money grab, though. It looks halfway decent (and if you read my comment history, I don't really say that about any cryptocurrency projects, really).
They’ve already written a blog about why they’re not going to do an ICO unless and until they are fully functional. If I remember correctly they were planning an ICO, but their lawyers advised that it would be a bad idea under the current circumstances and they rethought it. Honestly it’s says a lot of good about them in my opinion, most of all that they care more about the health of the project than getting rich quick. Even if long term riches are their goal, at least they’re going about it the sensible way and not playing cowboy.
A protocol token is part of the Colony roadmap, but they won't do a token sale until the product is ready, to minimize the risk that their token will be considered an unlicensed security by the SEC.
Protocol tokens or "app tokens" in general are really exciting, and a lot of the smart VC people are talking about them. The latest episode of the A16Z podcast is all about protocol tokens, for example.
So I wonder if this is the case because Colony actually pivoted into using Ethereum? I remember an earlier version that had the same basic concept but nothing to do with Ethereum.
It's interesting that I'm on exactly the other side - it seemed halfway interesting until I realized there's some kind of cryptocurrency involved (and only figured that out while reading this comment).
The org stuff looks interesting - the crypto stuff makes me more suspicious of it's present and future because of the possibility of a money grab.
Instead of such a knee-jerk reaction to crypto, perhaps you can ask if the crypto token involved makes sense in this use case. If it doesn't, like in 99% of the cases, you can dismiss it then. Colony, IMHO, is one of the few projects where it does make sense to have a token.
Being suspicious or cautious, particularly considering the amount of people expressing the same sentiment in the comments, is not a knee-jerk reaction.
If it's like Assembly, the coins/tokens themselves don't have value _per se_, they just represent ownership. Basically, in this case, it's acting more of a ledger to represent equity than as the commodity it's typically used as.
An example:
UserA posts a great idea, and wants help to implement it. UserA is an MBA, has a business plan, a rough idea of execution, etc., but is not a programmer, or a graphic designer, or anything like that. UserA realizes she needs help, so she posts bounties - with features relative to the importance of the success of the project. "Need a landing page" might be a feature, with tasks broken out like "design a logo", "build a wireframe in Sketch", "convert Sketch wireframe to React frontend", etc. Each of those tasks will have a value, represented by Ether.
UserB, a graphic designer comes up with the perfect logo, which is worth 100 ether. User C, a frontend developer picks up the wireframe task, gets consensus, and then bangs out the React work, for a total of 250 ether. Other work gets done and an MVP is launched. The MVP was built, and a total of 5,000 ether were distributed as bounties were claimed and completed. User B has gone on to do a bunch of other graphic design tasks, and has a total of 600 ether, while User C left the project after completing the frontend work. The project's MVP launches, and makes $10,000 in profit. Because UserB has 600 ether, and 5,000 ether have been issued, UserB's share entitles him to ~12% of the profits, so he is disbursed a payment of $1200. UserC's share entitles him to $500.
As the project grows, UserB takes on more and more work, and more and more ether are issued. UserC doesn't ever come back on, but is still entitled to profits on the work they've done, though their share of ether will keep being diluted as the project goes on.
Hopefully I've been able to illustrate that the coin in this case is used not as currency itself, but as a representative stake in ownership.
Yeah, this seems very similar to how a Colony is envisioned to run, with a few extra considerations:
Each colony's native tokens act as a representation of equity as described above (more or less), entitling holders to a 'rewards' disbursement periodically - but they also may be employed by the colony for mechanisms of governance in the case of token-weighted voting.
Additionally, whenever someone makes an amount of tokens, they also are awarded an equal amount of reputation, which cannot be transferred and which decays over time. This score also confers influence in the colony for voting and dispute resolution, if the members of the colony wish to make their voting reputation weighted, or some combination of reputation and token-weighted.
Finally, to claim rewards, a user needs to have both reputation and tokens - this means that tokens themselves don't immediately entitle one to rewards; only those who actually contribute meaningful work to the colony (as evidenced by their reputation score) are entitled to proportional rewards.
Seconded. I help to manage an open organization (an open source project, non-revenue, so thankfully no need to worry about profit sharing) and it's often damn hard. I was hoping to see a platform with tools specifically tailored for distributed organizations to make collaboration and communication easier. But as soon as I see anything related to cryptocurrencies, it puts me on high alert. I don't pretend that it's fair, but there's too many scam artists at large looking to exploit suckers for a quick buck to be anything other than cautious.
Ethereum lost my trust when they suggested a soft fork to make transactions with a specific account invalid, eg, the DAO fix.
It showed both that
a) code as contract is still too hard when even core contributors can't get them right, and
b) the dev team is willing to shunt the underlying principles under the right conditions (eg, financial ones)
A central team that is willing to de-authorize specific transactions through control of the code base is at conflict with a decentralized network. Sure, the network didn't have to go along with it, but they also probably wouldn't have performed the change on their own, either.
The fact that the cryptocurrency will not be "one member, one vote" but operate as an influence will just create positive feedback loops that amplify dominant voices and weaken less dominant voices. Which is already how the logic of social influence works anyways.
This is really interesting. I've lately become more curious about theories of transaction costs - how traditional firms might have an advantage because they don't have to bargain over every decision and have understood lines of decision-making. I'm wondering if decentralized organizations might have a transaction cost problem.
Your comment reminded me of this quotation (it's from Lord Bryce's "The American Commonwealth", describing urban political machines in the 19th century):
> An army led by a council seldom conquers: It must have a commander-in-chief, who settles disputes, decides in emergencies, inspires fear or attachment. The head of the Ring is such a commander. He dispenses places, rewards the loyal, punishes the mutinous, concocts schemes, negotiates treaties. He generally avoids publicity, preferring the substance to the pomp of power, and is all the more dangerous because he sits, like a spider, hidden in the midst of his web. He is a Boss.
You're probably right that voting on everything is not the best way to go, but this is the first Ethereum project that doesn't seem useless or some kind of money grab.
I can't quite tell from your comment whether you are familiar with this as an existing topic in economics - if you're not, you might find this an interesting intro to the area of study http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/coase.htm
I wasn't until this week, so apparently I'm projecting just the right amount of knowledge :D Thanks for the link! I've been looking for opportunities to learn more.
See above ^ - I work for one so can say with some truth here.
Yes they do have this problem but it confers several advantages: people are more bought into the work they are doing, they are happier, they understand decisions made about them, they work with more passion. Not all communicational efficiency makes people happier or more productive. Though it does take discernment and judgement when to not bother have a meeting and make a decision about something. You want to try and lower the problem you identify.
Great question. This is the biggest opportunity for software, in my opinion. The boundaries between the firm and the market are, in part, governed by transaction costs. (There are more reasons. You mentioned you're interested in reading more, so I'd recommend this: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Nature-Firm-Reader/dp/052114...)
Technology has the opportunity to decrease transaction costs amongst a group of participants. Consequently, this could then lead to lower trust amongst participants—one of blockchain's leading selling points.
It's all theory, so we'll see how this plays out, but it's the one thing I think is most exciting: can technology lower transaction costs and thus blur the lines between firm and market.
It is a lovely idea for a new company but I cannot see a big company changing its ways, especially one with a natural monopoly that has no actual competition. Another issue I see is people just giving recognition to their friends, not those who deserve it.
The contract between the things that are provable on-chain and the actual real world where people are not so straight-forward to interact with is the point where you realise that only a small percentage of this model is actually a tech problem and is mostly a people problem, at which point tech-led startups are ill suited to being the complete solution.
As I understand it, Aragon is a way for a traditional company to sort of 'blockchainify' itself, by putting board management, funding, accounting, etc. of a traditional organization into a dApp.
Colony is a really fundamental re-imagining of the way an organization works. Instead of being a normal company ported to the blockchain, a Colony is an organization native to the blockchain.
Aragon's focus is mainly on Board-level governance, while Colony is focused on the day-to-day management of tasks with a built-in reputation system to allow contributors to be rewarded in proportion to the value they provide a project while having reputation-weighted influence in the governance of that project.
How are you going to handle the growing inequality problem?
In every type of economy, inequality gap in wealth distribution tend to grow over time. In your system, you'll have the same trend with "reputation" or whatever measure of influence you choose.
For wealth, it’s probably a toughie, but for reputation it’s a bit easier because reputation decays over time. That means it’s impossible for an influence aristocracy to emerge. There will still likely be a power law distribution of influence at play, but it won’t be as extreme as it might otherwise be, and people will have to remain active to retain their influence.
You can have a look through the Solidity language documentation http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/ then setup an environment with truffle (contract deployment and testing framework) and testrpc (lightweight blockchain client) as the client then write some contract code
I know smart contracts are based on being able to prove that you solved some given task. The task can for example be to find a value which hashes to match the one in the contract. However, that task is not so interesting within an organisation.
Can someone give an ELI5 of how I can prove that I did a job which is more complex than the one above? For example, to implement a new feature in a software system, sell a product, design a product which the colony is happy with...
Essentially, I want to understand better what are the limitations of these smart contracts.
For anything that's not mathematically provable on-chain, the contract will need input.
The way you'll prove something that needs social validation is by getting approval. So Colony is all about reputation, propositions, dispute resolution, etc.
This concept seems interesting, and great at first glance, but the more I think about it the more I’m skeptical as to whether it would be a fair system.
It looks like a true meritocracy, but a computer does not fundamentally understand merit, which I assume means that it is left to people to recognise the merit in others. I can imagine this would lead to the same politics as you get when peer feedback influences bonuses (which is relatively common now).
I also worry that it would be too easy to game for certain people. We already have the case that men are more likely to ask for raises, which is a contributing factor to pay inequality. I can see there being other places like that here which would allow for gaming the system.
I’d love to read a blog post on these sorts of concerns from Colony. It’s a fascinating concept and I do hope these aren’t issues with the system in practice.
> I also worry that it would be too easy to game for certain people.
I wouldn't call this gaming the system. It's well-known that in order to be successful it's often not enough just to do good work. You also need to tell others about your work as well as negotiate for yourself. Negotiating isn't cheating but an essential part of human communication that can be learned if you happen to be not particularly good at it.
> We already have the case that men are more likely to ask for raises, which is a contributing factor to pay inequality.
This made me wonder if framing the question of pay inequality along gender lines is making the right distinction. Maybe, it's not necessarily women earning less than men but rather introvert or shy people? There are men who daren't ask about a pay raise either. Those probably earn less than more outgoing men, too.
So, by framing this question solely in terms of gender we might be glossing over a part of the problem because that way one of the main causes for pay inequality remains hidden behind gender labels.
> Maybe, it's not necessarily women earning less than men but rather introvert or shy people?
Yes it's definitely both, but I feel stating it as a gender equality issue makes it much clearer that it is a failure that needs to be fixed.
> It's well-known that in order to be successful it's often not enough just to do good work
Agreed, I think this is a failing of most cultures right now. The good work that one does should speak for itself, and in a true meritocracy good work would be sufficient. Unfortunately that is never the case, it depends on people essentially boasting about what they do, and unfortunately it is all too easy for people who do mediocre work to boast loudly enough and receive praise. This is a current issue, and one I think Colony could encourage.
I had this idea a while back but it’s difficult to get the incentives right. In the real world how does the work get checked it’s been done?
I think about replacing local government with this for example. I can easily see my local bins not being collected and even more worryingly a list of outstanding issues (like an overwhelmed github project) that never seems to go down. I’m glad they are doing this though and I intend to help I think.
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This looks useful, but I couldn’t find any source. It seems like a centralized, closed service but yet it advertises itself as a platform for openness. How is that? For instance, does colony.io use colony.io to develop colony.io? And, if not, why not?
Currently the software is closed-source, but will be opened up when it's ready.
The whitepaper was just released last week, and the Colony dev team is working on getting a good foundation for the contracts that will comprise the Colony network - once those are ready, it'll be opened up.
How can you use something that isn't built to build the same thing unless you're using a time machine? I suppose once Colony is in production, you can create a Colony clone using Colony.
It's called bootstrapping, would indeed be interesting if they used there own platform to build it, or run it in a way right now that allows them to migrate to Colony as early as possible. As long as it does not work for there needs, it's not clear why it would be good enough for anyone else.
We run something called a "collaboration network" that is using our early beta product. The product isn't feature complete yet, just task management with a token incentive model. So we're doing early experiments but can't quite pull of more complex ones—yet.
Colony is beginning Beta II this quarter; if you have a use case and don't mind providing some good feedback and tolerating occasional bugs, send Collin an email to inquire about participating.
Not so - a blockchain or other type of decentralized shared ledger is required for the reputation system to work as it should. Reputation needs to be calculated and verified so that it can exist independently of some sort of gatekeeper or platform (as you are implying).
Tokens on the network also are essential for Colony governance (voting, dispute resolution, dividends/rewards, etc.) - This is why Colony is built on Ethereum.
Why do all these features of a colony need to be part of the same thing?
I see
1. Reputation
2. Governance based on reputation
3. Division of labor
4. Team membership
5. Organizational ownership
6. Dispute resolution
It is not obvious what this particular set of organizational features is necessary or sufficient for. Even worse there are likely many different ways of implementing them and it is not obvious how implementation details will affect resulting organizational dynamics. A better approach would be a modular organizational design with different plug-ins that satisfy different organizational requirements. This would allow organizations to choose their rules and to innovate instead of having to pick up a complex model of organization off of a shelf. A modular design would let you start small, build a minimum set of requirements to power some organizations and then scale up the complexity from there.
It is organised non-hierarchically and via consent (i.e. a modified and lighter form of consensus decision making that emphasises "I won't stop this" over "I 100% in agreement) - there is no voting but decisions still get made. Its called sociocracy[1].
Here is roughly how it works:
1. Someone brings in work, meeting clients etc.
2. They put together a proposal on this work, summoning together a team from people who are around who have the relevant skills from a pool of people in the company and surround networks.
3. This goes up on an internal jobs board called CoPitch[2] where everyone decides how much time they think they will spend on it, how much they want to be paid and so on. They say "I will do this for this much money to this time scale".
4. This passes through a few circles - business development, tech etc - to check it is reasonable.
5. Work goes out to client.
6. If client says yes the resourcing circle coordinates a time box to put those people on that particular job.
7. The work is done. People are paid out of the company what they signed up for. If it doesn't deliver or goes over budget then they have to say why or their pay is basically going to be what they said they would be paid.
Apart from the formal members of the cooperative, we are all free lancers.
I've not read the Colony paper in detail (but will) yet on the surface of it this sounds like some of what we do, but in software. In my experience all of this is moderately hard face to face when you are co-located. I treat this with high degrees of interest but a good dose of skepticism that this is a technical fix for an organisational problem that will, despite the software contracts, still have many of the hard organisational problems associated with this sort of thing.
As far as I can see it tries to tackle this to some extent automatically and quantitively with reputation systems and so on. However, off the bat it strikes me that there are going to be "off grid" problems (outside of the software and protocol) that occur that will require a more "cultural" fix that may be harder. We know from digital sociology that these reputational systems create their own hierarchies and imbalances in the system and I am wondering if Colony can prevent these in any way. As I say, open minded, but skeptical, having been doing something like this IRL for a year, eight months.
It sound similar to what you do with one important distinction. "Freelancers" (I am using this term loosely since it seems like your organization gives you much more flexibility than traditional freelancers would get) earn a salary/income whereas in a Colony, the freelancers earn a tokens that represent future earnings potential in a colony i.e. share of revenue/profits. This way, you not only bring work to the Colony but completing it gives you a stake in your Colony.
Interesting. In a sense we do get a stake in the company, which is a missing piece of the puzzle. The profits are put into a pot and you get a share equal to the days you worked. Then people can use an internal crowd funding platform (CoBudget) to decide where to invest this money, which could include "please give it all to me".
So I guess this is to some degree integrated into our digitally enabled but relatively analog model.
There are three categories of membership and a democratic process to move between each: 1. Members - formal cooperative members with legal responsibility. 2. Outlanders - people more dedicated to the cause who get benefits like first refusal on incoming work and so on. 3. Collaborators - the first stage. You work at Outlandish basically.
No status prevents you from participating in circles to make decisions, apart from the Outlanders circle (which is a meeting between members and Outlanders) and the members circle (an extraordinary circle when there have to be particularly big or legal or sensitive decisions made - most decisions are made between Outlanders and members).
The intention of the organisation is for everyone who wants to to be a member.
This is a really intriguing organizational structure. I'd love to ask you some more questions about how it works if you have any free time... please hit me up at (griffin {at} colony.io)
Let us know if anything comes of this! I'm very interested in seeing more tech companies organized as cooperatives, and it seems that Colony's tech could be very complementary in that regard.
That's really great! I've been rooting for the cooperative model to take off a bit more. Seems like a more humane and societally friendlier way of running things, especially if it helps ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth and power among the working ranks.
This sounds very similar to how Colony is envisioned to work on-chain.
The whitepaper outlines the system of Domains, which seem to be the same as your 'circles' as you describe them. You can read a TL;DR here, which also has a link to the full whitepaper: https://colony.readme.io/v1.0/docs/off-whitepaper
I think there may well be 'off grid' (or in Colony's case 'off-chain') challenges to running an organization exclusively with Colony.
> We know from digital sociology that these reputational systems create their own hierarchies and imbalances in the system and I am wondering if Colony can prevent these in any way.
One thing that comes to mind as a response is Colony's reputation system mechanics: Reputation decays over time. So, to help disincentivise a 'reputation aristocracy' within an organization, reputations scores will halve over the course of about 3 months, which means no-one can just rest on their laurels and hold influence in a colony without regularly contributing to that colony's goals.
As others have commented, the other main distinction would be that a colony can put bounties up in native tokens, which confers influence in some types of voting (other types can be exclusively reputation-weighted), as well as dividends from the colony's revenue. Each colony can tweak their token's total supply, issuance rate and initial distribution to achieve the desired incentive model for what they need/desire.
Also very interesting on the degrading reputation - glad you/they have thought about these issues a bit.
I'll add though I do think my concern of a quantitive fix to a qualitative and/or cultural problem still stands but will take a more informed view once I've looked at the white paper in detail.
Possibly interesting, but no way to sign up? Not even a way to try and get an invite, beyond signing up for the mailing list and hoping that's the way they send them out?
Agree,It's a big turn off for me personally to be honest. And I imagine institues in countries which were once colonized wouldn't be excited about using such a product/project due to fair historical reasons.
Organizations still consist of people. An organization that forces it's employees to work with a tool that has a very historically charged name, one which perhaps even degrades the people working, is gonna have much more trouble than the one which threw out the tool because of the name, at least that's my opinion. Imagine a british company asking it's division, in what was a former colony, to work with a tool called colony. You could be a fully technical person who has no regard for how certain words were used historically and just understand them by definition and without the historical context, but then you shouldn't be in a position making managerial decisions which affect your international workforce.
Did you see my other post? Now you've upped the ante; even working with this tool "degrades" people.. A pretty big stretch imo, especially since "colony" is otherwise a pretty common word - you are only focusing on negative semantics.
> Imagine a british company..
I can, and still see no problem.
> but then you shouldn't be in a position
Why? By what standard does anyone weight "historical context"? It's your supposition that there would be any affect at all to international workers.
In a pro-decentralisation context, the interpretation you're referring to--which is the pinnacle of centralisation forced through violence for selfish goals--is so obviously irrelevant, that it didn't even come to mind.
Hm, making the name of a brand you intend to market worldwide something deeply offensive to a huge swath of the world is a pretty poor decision.
I'm not saying their hiring "should" be altered, but I do think were it more inclusive, this would have never flown. Maybe that speaks to the value a diverse team brings to an organization.
How do you handle accountability and ownership in such an organization?
Everything seems to be centered about individuals taking up work on a voluntary basis. However, in many organizations, some work just has to get done. How do you handle this?
We have a beta user who ran into this problem. He posted tasks, no one took them. He upped the price by 2x, and one task was taken. He upped the price again to 3x, and all tasks were taken.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadI was a participant in Assembly, and am optimistic that an eventual replacement will figure out how to make the money side work enough that they can keep going.
As it stands, I'm not entirely certain who Colony is for. Hopefully, not everybody.
I'd love to see something like this take off. I also remain unconvinced that the problem with something like Assembly was simply that it wasn't on the blockchain.
It's also a big ask to bet the cumulative and growing value of your collective efforts on your contract code not ever having any kind of edge case that could leak value contrary to the _spirit_ of your endeavour. Or deferring the (still as yet untested) legal issues of DAOs.
Sure, it limits the appeal, but a lot of viable and interesting things have limited appeal... Whether this kind of thing could become mainstream within a few years is the question, no?
Sure, you could use fiat or a non-blockchain "token", but I believe this open market, with price discovery, adds more value then it detracts.
It doesn't somehow recursively relate to Ethereum, doesn't over-rely on blockchain buzzwords, and can be explained in a sentence or two. While first reading the page, I didn't realize that it was even an Ethereum based project until the very end, which I liked. At any rate, I'm interested enough to read the documentation in depth now.
Don't ruin this by having some bullshit ICO money grab, though. It looks halfway decent (and if you read my comment history, I don't really say that about any cryptocurrency projects, really).
A protocol token is part of the Colony roadmap, but they won't do a token sale until the product is ready, to minimize the risk that their token will be considered an unlicensed security by the SEC.
Protocol tokens or "app tokens" in general are really exciting, and a lot of the smart VC people are talking about them. The latest episode of the A16Z podcast is all about protocol tokens, for example.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150402004048/http://colony.io:...
The org stuff looks interesting - the crypto stuff makes me more suspicious of it's present and future because of the possibility of a money grab.
Oh boy another platform that can be gamed by a minority for their overwhelming benefit
An example:
UserA posts a great idea, and wants help to implement it. UserA is an MBA, has a business plan, a rough idea of execution, etc., but is not a programmer, or a graphic designer, or anything like that. UserA realizes she needs help, so she posts bounties - with features relative to the importance of the success of the project. "Need a landing page" might be a feature, with tasks broken out like "design a logo", "build a wireframe in Sketch", "convert Sketch wireframe to React frontend", etc. Each of those tasks will have a value, represented by Ether.
UserB, a graphic designer comes up with the perfect logo, which is worth 100 ether. User C, a frontend developer picks up the wireframe task, gets consensus, and then bangs out the React work, for a total of 250 ether. Other work gets done and an MVP is launched. The MVP was built, and a total of 5,000 ether were distributed as bounties were claimed and completed. User B has gone on to do a bunch of other graphic design tasks, and has a total of 600 ether, while User C left the project after completing the frontend work. The project's MVP launches, and makes $10,000 in profit. Because UserB has 600 ether, and 5,000 ether have been issued, UserB's share entitles him to ~12% of the profits, so he is disbursed a payment of $1200. UserC's share entitles him to $500.
As the project grows, UserB takes on more and more work, and more and more ether are issued. UserC doesn't ever come back on, but is still entitled to profits on the work they've done, though their share of ether will keep being diluted as the project goes on.
Hopefully I've been able to illustrate that the coin in this case is used not as currency itself, but as a representative stake in ownership.
Each colony's native tokens act as a representation of equity as described above (more or less), entitling holders to a 'rewards' disbursement periodically - but they also may be employed by the colony for mechanisms of governance in the case of token-weighted voting.
Additionally, whenever someone makes an amount of tokens, they also are awarded an equal amount of reputation, which cannot be transferred and which decays over time. This score also confers influence in the colony for voting and dispute resolution, if the members of the colony wish to make their voting reputation weighted, or some combination of reputation and token-weighted.
Finally, to claim rewards, a user needs to have both reputation and tokens - this means that tokens themselves don't immediately entitle one to rewards; only those who actually contribute meaningful work to the colony (as evidenced by their reputation score) are entitled to proportional rewards.
> One organization should not be beholden to, or have to trust another, in order to confidently conduct their business.
>
> That’s why the Colony protocol is built as open source smart contracts on the Ethereum network.
In one breath, "We shouldn't have to trust any other organization" and then immediately after it's "built on the Ethereum network".
I wish this was not a requirement.
It showed both that a) code as contract is still too hard when even core contributors can't get them right, and b) the dev team is willing to shunt the underlying principles under the right conditions (eg, financial ones)
A central team that is willing to de-authorize specific transactions through control of the code base is at conflict with a decentralized network. Sure, the network didn't have to go along with it, but they also probably wouldn't have performed the change on their own, either.
> An army led by a council seldom conquers: It must have a commander-in-chief, who settles disputes, decides in emergencies, inspires fear or attachment. The head of the Ring is such a commander. He dispenses places, rewards the loyal, punishes the mutinous, concocts schemes, negotiates treaties. He generally avoids publicity, preferring the substance to the pomp of power, and is all the more dangerous because he sits, like a spider, hidden in the midst of his web. He is a Boss.
You're probably right that voting on everything is not the best way to go, but this is the first Ethereum project that doesn't seem useless or some kind of money grab.
There's quite a bit of overhead in specifications planning and negotiation.
There is, as well, a lot of overhead in committees and "no hierarchy" ways of working.
A great amount of efficiency is gained when someone - almost anyone - is The Boss.
"Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds."
Yes they do have this problem but it confers several advantages: people are more bought into the work they are doing, they are happier, they understand decisions made about them, they work with more passion. Not all communicational efficiency makes people happier or more productive. Though it does take discernment and judgement when to not bother have a meeting and make a decision about something. You want to try and lower the problem you identify.
Technology has the opportunity to decrease transaction costs amongst a group of participants. Consequently, this could then lead to lower trust amongst participants—one of blockchain's leading selling points.
It's all theory, so we'll see how this plays out, but it's the one thing I think is most exciting: can technology lower transaction costs and thus blur the lines between firm and market.
A detailed description of how it's supposed to work was linked in a blog post of theirs:
https://colony.io/whitepaper.pdf
I'm interested in what kind of holes can be poked in particularly the distribution of tasks and "reputation mining".
Fascinating stuff. I hope one of these projects transforms the way we work. The payoff could be immense.
This is a hard problem for a number of reasons.
I see a lot of similarities with https://dogezer.com/
Colony seems better though in terms of design from what I can judge right now.
Colony is a really fundamental re-imagining of the way an organization works. Instead of being a normal company ported to the blockchain, a Colony is an organization native to the blockchain.
In every type of economy, inequality gap in wealth distribution tend to grow over time. In your system, you'll have the same trend with "reputation" or whatever measure of influence you choose.
Where do i start ( in the context that i can program)
Can someone give an ELI5 of how I can prove that I did a job which is more complex than the one above? For example, to implement a new feature in a software system, sell a product, design a product which the colony is happy with...
Essentially, I want to understand better what are the limitations of these smart contracts.
The way you'll prove something that needs social validation is by getting approval. So Colony is all about reputation, propositions, dispute resolution, etc.
Check out their tl;dr:
https://colony.readme.io/docs/off-whitepaper
It looks like a true meritocracy, but a computer does not fundamentally understand merit, which I assume means that it is left to people to recognise the merit in others. I can imagine this would lead to the same politics as you get when peer feedback influences bonuses (which is relatively common now).
I also worry that it would be too easy to game for certain people. We already have the case that men are more likely to ask for raises, which is a contributing factor to pay inequality. I can see there being other places like that here which would allow for gaming the system.
I’d love to read a blog post on these sorts of concerns from Colony. It’s a fascinating concept and I do hope these aren’t issues with the system in practice.
I wouldn't call this gaming the system. It's well-known that in order to be successful it's often not enough just to do good work. You also need to tell others about your work as well as negotiate for yourself. Negotiating isn't cheating but an essential part of human communication that can be learned if you happen to be not particularly good at it.
> We already have the case that men are more likely to ask for raises, which is a contributing factor to pay inequality.
This made me wonder if framing the question of pay inequality along gender lines is making the right distinction. Maybe, it's not necessarily women earning less than men but rather introvert or shy people? There are men who daren't ask about a pay raise either. Those probably earn less than more outgoing men, too.
So, by framing this question solely in terms of gender we might be glossing over a part of the problem because that way one of the main causes for pay inequality remains hidden behind gender labels.
Yes it's definitely both, but I feel stating it as a gender equality issue makes it much clearer that it is a failure that needs to be fixed.
> It's well-known that in order to be successful it's often not enough just to do good work
Agreed, I think this is a failing of most cultures right now. The good work that one does should speak for itself, and in a true meritocracy good work would be sufficient. Unfortunately that is never the case, it depends on people essentially boasting about what they do, and unfortunately it is all too easy for people who do mediocre work to boast loudly enough and receive praise. This is a current issue, and one I think Colony could encourage.
I think about replacing local government with this for example. I can easily see my local bins not being collected and even more worryingly a list of outstanding issues (like an overwhelmed github project) that never seems to go down. I’m glad they are doing this though and I intend to help I think.
(Just putting it out there, I am not related to the project)
The whitepaper was just released last week, and the Colony dev team is working on getting a good foundation for the contracts that will comprise the Colony network - once those are ready, it'll be opened up.
(Although he probably won't be able to reply before next week)
This is basically a freelancing platform that has been overcomplicated by the use of a blockchain and 'smart contracts'.
Tokens on the network also are essential for Colony governance (voting, dispute resolution, dividends/rewards, etc.) - This is why Colony is built on Ethereum.
I see 1. Reputation 2. Governance based on reputation 3. Division of labor 4. Team membership 5. Organizational ownership 6. Dispute resolution
It is not obvious what this particular set of organizational features is necessary or sufficient for. Even worse there are likely many different ways of implementing them and it is not obvious how implementation details will affect resulting organizational dynamics. A better approach would be a modular organizational design with different plug-ins that satisfy different organizational requirements. This would allow organizations to choose their rules and to innovate instead of having to pick up a complex model of organization off of a shelf. A modular design would let you start small, build a minimum set of requirements to power some organizations and then scale up the complexity from there.
It is organised non-hierarchically and via consent (i.e. a modified and lighter form of consensus decision making that emphasises "I won't stop this" over "I 100% in agreement) - there is no voting but decisions still get made. Its called sociocracy[1].
Here is roughly how it works: 1. Someone brings in work, meeting clients etc. 2. They put together a proposal on this work, summoning together a team from people who are around who have the relevant skills from a pool of people in the company and surround networks. 3. This goes up on an internal jobs board called CoPitch[2] where everyone decides how much time they think they will spend on it, how much they want to be paid and so on. They say "I will do this for this much money to this time scale". 4. This passes through a few circles - business development, tech etc - to check it is reasonable. 5. Work goes out to client. 6. If client says yes the resourcing circle coordinates a time box to put those people on that particular job. 7. The work is done. People are paid out of the company what they signed up for. If it doesn't deliver or goes over budget then they have to say why or their pay is basically going to be what they said they would be paid.
Apart from the formal members of the cooperative, we are all free lancers.
I've not read the Colony paper in detail (but will) yet on the surface of it this sounds like some of what we do, but in software. In my experience all of this is moderately hard face to face when you are co-located. I treat this with high degrees of interest but a good dose of skepticism that this is a technical fix for an organisational problem that will, despite the software contracts, still have many of the hard organisational problems associated with this sort of thing.
As far as I can see it tries to tackle this to some extent automatically and quantitively with reputation systems and so on. However, off the bat it strikes me that there are going to be "off grid" problems (outside of the software and protocol) that occur that will require a more "cultural" fix that may be harder. We know from digital sociology that these reputational systems create their own hierarchies and imbalances in the system and I am wondering if Colony can prevent these in any way. As I say, open minded, but skeptical, having been doing something like this IRL for a year, eight months.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy [2] https://www.co-pitch.com/
So I guess this is to some degree integrated into our digitally enabled but relatively analog model.
There are three categories of membership and a democratic process to move between each: 1. Members - formal cooperative members with legal responsibility. 2. Outlanders - people more dedicated to the cause who get benefits like first refusal on incoming work and so on. 3. Collaborators - the first stage. You work at Outlandish basically.
No status prevents you from participating in circles to make decisions, apart from the Outlanders circle (which is a meeting between members and Outlanders) and the members circle (an extraordinary circle when there have to be particularly big or legal or sensitive decisions made - most decisions are made between Outlanders and members).
The intention of the organisation is for everyone who wants to to be a member.
The whitepaper outlines the system of Domains, which seem to be the same as your 'circles' as you describe them. You can read a TL;DR here, which also has a link to the full whitepaper: https://colony.readme.io/v1.0/docs/off-whitepaper
I think there may well be 'off grid' (or in Colony's case 'off-chain') challenges to running an organization exclusively with Colony.
> We know from digital sociology that these reputational systems create their own hierarchies and imbalances in the system and I am wondering if Colony can prevent these in any way.
One thing that comes to mind as a response is Colony's reputation system mechanics: Reputation decays over time. So, to help disincentivise a 'reputation aristocracy' within an organization, reputations scores will halve over the course of about 3 months, which means no-one can just rest on their laurels and hold influence in a colony without regularly contributing to that colony's goals.
As others have commented, the other main distinction would be that a colony can put bounties up in native tokens, which confers influence in some types of voting (other types can be exclusively reputation-weighted), as well as dividends from the colony's revenue. Each colony can tweak their token's total supply, issuance rate and initial distribution to achieve the desired incentive model for what they need/desire.
Also very interesting on the degrading reputation - glad you/they have thought about these issues a bit.
I'll add though I do think my concern of a quantitive fix to a qualitative and/or cultural problem still stands but will take a more informed view once I've looked at the white paper in detail.
Cheers.
> Imagine a british company..
I can, and still see no problem.
> but then you shouldn't be in a position
Why? By what standard does anyone weight "historical context"? It's your supposition that there would be any affect at all to international workers.
In a pro-decentralisation context, the interpretation you're referring to--which is the pinnacle of centralisation forced through violence for selfish goals--is so obviously irrelevant, that it didn't even come to mind.
That this wasn't brought up during the naming process paints a pretty clear picture of the team's demographic makeup.
Edit: Yep. https://blog.colony.io/colony-q3-update-9daa57d0918c
"come[s] to mind" != "triggered"
Suggesting a team should alter its "demographic" ("diversity" hiring) for the sake of such a weak association is extreme.
I'm not saying their hiring "should" be altered, but I do think were it more inclusive, this would have never flown. Maybe that speaks to the value a diverse team brings to an organization.
Everything seems to be centered about individuals taking up work on a voluntary basis. However, in many organizations, some work just has to get done. How do you handle this?