Colony: A platform for open organizations
colony.io
colony.io
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.
Hypothetical 1: You and a growing team of incredibly engaged Colony members build out a $10M/yr revenue stream. Edge case leaks 87% of tokens to a dedicated hacker. Sorry?
Hypothetical 2: I like/hate your successful Colony. So I locate and bribe/extort your main influencer/s to push your project into the ground (block work, object to everything, whatever) or in my preferred direction. Code is law. Obey?
There are so many other fun problems with code-as-immutable-law for human institutions, it's concerning that none of these are even remotely addressed in the Colony literature (not to mention that the full, binding, self-regulating dispute mechanism fails horribly in both the above scenarios).
How's that any different from the current state? Execs of current companies are humans with power to run the company into the ground. You can extort/bribe them like that as well. How does it change anything?
> "How does it change anything?"
The action itself may appear the same, but in code-as-law systems the consequences of this action change everything. The system of governance is immutable. If I can coerce your primary influencer to destroy your Colony _there is nothing you can do about it_, because the system is still _working exactly as designed_. Like an AI auto-pilot flying you into a mountain at high speed because it got a correctly formed override instruction to do so.
In the real world we have multiple interpretive, negotiated, social conventions to deal with bad actors, agents and outcomes that violate the spirit or intention of underlying agreements.
The lack of these are EXACTLY the problem in a "code as law" system - and worryingly it shows that most of our intuitive responses to bad agency in these type systems is still "but it's the same in the real world". Except of course for the existential threat posed by immutability of consequence and recourse.
You cannot remove trust from collective human agency, you can only put it somewhere else and pretend like it doesn't matter anymore. Right up until it does.
> Execs of current companies are humans with power to run the company into the ground.
I get what you mean, but in practice you can't wilfully do this without serious consequence. To destroy value is to take it from someone. Fiduciary duty is a legal reality.
Edit: I do think a good "control test" of many of the code-as-law systems is to compare against cases about how it would be different than a ledger managed by a person & the existing legal framework around it, and then a centralized database with security around certain operations.
It is patently not a perfect system, but the failures are notable because they are not common. Most shareholder lawsuits against management are resolved before anyone ends up in headlines.
The level of code safety in smart contracts is abysmally bad today, Ethereum didn't further the state of the art with EVM/Solidity (quite the opposite), and this needs to be fixed before any serious business can rely on a DApp.
Smart contracts are like aerospace engineering, not like iStore apps development; delivering slightly buggy code, written as fast as possible, by easily interchangeable developers, doesn't cut it. It's worse than for aerospace actually: when you design a plane, your opponents are the laws of physics, which merely don't care about you. When designing a smart contract, hackers are specifically after you, and statistically, some of them are smarter than you and your code.
> 2. I locate and bribe/extort your main influencer/s
How is it different from the current practices of bribing executives and misleading shareholders (naively supposing that shareholders need to be mislead in order to pass bad, narrow-sighted judgements)?
> There are so many other fun problems with code-as-immutable-law for human institutions.
Indeed!
> It's concerning that none of these are even remotely addressed in the Colony literature
I take Colony as an experiment. As hinted above, I think you'd be a fool to bet your livelihood on some Solidity code. I don't think we're able to foresee which of those problems matter, nor the compromises which best mitigate them. Like in code optimisation, you need to measure before acting; Colony will meet those issues, will try to address them, and may or may not survive the process. Whether the lessons learned benefit Colony 2.0 or another project raised from its ashes, it's hard to say, but in the great scheme of things, it doesn't matter much.
How do you informally convince code to stop trusting a certain influencer? You'd have to put in code paths managing this first, because code is a physically binding regulation.
> ...bribing executives and misleading shareholders
You raise an interesting point - in a Colony there is presumably no concept of enforceable fiduciary duty to shareholders (because there are none - we're not trading securities, we're trading plastic house chips on a blockchain). There are no legislated considerations for other members/colonists/dappsters/etc. I can vote/act with impunity, regardless of value creation/destruction potential. Welcome to the legal grey zone.
> I take Colony as an experiment.
As do I, and one I hope succeeds. But I'm not sure THEY do, which means early adopters are riding a bet that Colony gets it right the first time.
Security is as security does in a lot of these cases, so if it functions as a security, you're likely to run into encounters with the SEC.
Oh, the drama! It might be compelling to join as a perfect substitute for an HBO subscription, who needs game of thrones. You might see a group forged in a decade of Eve online alliance warfare fighting mob hackers fighting two competing factions of hedge fund managers fighting a 4chan prank.
On the other hand, sufficiently boring organizations (e.g. stewardship of some greying enterprise software open source) with peeexisting informal trust networks should be perfectly safe. But would they need "colony"?
The situation you really are getting at is one in which the Common Colony is mature enough that the 'recovery mode' features have been disabled and the contract is in full community control (a reasonable assumption if the Common Colony is pulling down $10M a year as you suggested). In this case, it also seems reasonable that some of that $10M a year will be spent by the Common Colony on bug bounties and internal security, paid to experts who have the highest reputation scores. If somehow there was still some brilliant exploit by a hacker who was both skilled enough to outsmart many, many world-class developers all working together, malicious enough to forgo the generous bounty awarded for disclosing the exploit to the Common Colony security domain, and downright detestable enough to willingly crash an enormously successful DAO... well, the answer is simply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hypothetical 2: This is where the reputation system gets interesting. If you really wanted to try to gum up a colony's inner workings by 'objecting to everything' or somehow interfering with the normal day-to-day workflows, you yourself would need some reputation score to do that. With each objection, you would be required to stake your own tokens and reputation on the outcome of the dispute. If the other members of the colony don't approve of what you're doing (I don't see why they would if you're trying to push the colony into the ground), they will vote against you and you will lose tokens and reputation. So with each unsuccessful attempt to interfere with the colony you hate, your own ability to influence that colony will diminish substantially.
Section 9 in the whitepaper describes these mechanisms in detail.
That's not a great answer to a very realistic case.
The many sentences that come before the shrug do nothing to address the very realistic scenario of a breach. The "sarcastic closing comment" was in fact the final truth of it.
You're assuming quite a lot of this hypothetical hacker - the response above clearly addresses the hypothetical by stating "here are the relevant reasons why this hypothetical is impossible or at least unlikely, and here are the relevant sections in the whitepaper for more verbose information".
>The many sentences that come before the shrug do nothing to address the very realistic scenario of a breach.
If you're assuming blackhat success for any conceivable project/company/database regardless of security measures taken to prevent it, what would an appropriate response even look like? What kind of answer would satisfy you?
In the real world, with an actual registered company/cooperative, you can call the police or sue people in court as a last resort. This is not possible in a distributed world, so a new kind of recourse needs to be invented, if that's even possible.
I think we have to forego the stereotype of lone wolf havker (or at least not treat as the only hacker stereotype) when considering having a large population put their valuables into a single pot.
Yes, by saying "the hypothetical is moot". Moot. And why? Because "in principle" "this should ... prevent the circumstances enabling such an exploit from ever happening.". Moreover, that we should simply trust that the intrinsic balance of economics means successful projects cannot exhibit a state in which a breach would be profitable, and anyway that the combination of someone smart enough, mean enough and motivated enough to breach is inconceivable.
Which could all be acceptable. Except if they're wrong even once, you lose everything.
> What kind of answer would satisfy you?
I see this response a lot on HN, and it's an obviously cheap shot.
If the asymmetry of outcomes in the two types of breaches is not obvious to you, then lets talk it out.
If an attacker breaches your real world company servers, they can cause a lot of damage. No question. They can steal IP, records, etc etc etc. The examples are legion. You're right.
But if they breach your Colony dAPP? They own you. Not metaphorically. They take de facto ownership of whatever value you've created.
No matter how incredibly well you can hack eg. Apple, you can't ever take over total ownership and control. Even if you hacked the Exchanges and somehow reset all the records, even if you compromised key board members, etc etc in the real world we have recourse, we have liability, we have laws and courts and means to make claims and pursue remedies.
But on the Blockchain? All your Colony are belong to someone-else the moment you edge-case a smart contract. Permanently. (Unless you can convince Vitalik et al to re-fork, case in moot point.) The equivalent would be if Apple ran a server that if you could figure out how to breach you could take ownership of Apple and total control of its operations.
So, "what kind of answer would satisfy"? One in which the design did not fundamentally and existentially depend on no-one ever figuring out a combination to a lock that gave them total and immutable control of a store of ever increasing value.
> It really seems like the most appropriate response to this is indeed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Except, if you've ever been decently burned by a clause in a contract, you'll know that the actual felt response is not even close to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I do the same thing when I assume that there will be bugs in my production software, regardless of any security/testing and measures taken to prevent it. Why is this suddenly less likely when we're talking about a DAO?
The answer that satisfies would of course be you still have the power to revert things if necessary, which you've already provided, but I'd never for the life of me imagine disabling it.
- brilliant exploit by a hacker who was both skilled enough to outsmart many, many world-class developers all working together.
- malicious enough to forgo the generous bounty awarded for disclosing the exploit to the Common Colony security domain.
- detestable enough to willingly crash an enormously successful DAO
If you think one or all of these attack vectors are not something to be concerned about (or worse, be sarcastically dismissive about) you have no business writing smart contracts or anything security related.
The three points above are all valid and absolutely important, and should be consistently and properly considered by anyone developing smart contracts or anything security related. There's no disagreement about that.
popcorncowboy, however, wanted to make an argument that assumed a security breach in order to make a broader point about "code-is-law" and DAOs in general, but was waiting for a response to unveil his second statement (which you can read now). The sarcasm was a response to the rhetorical and argumentative style of popcorncowby, not an illustration of the Colony dev attitudes toward the security of the smart contracts that will comprise the Colony network.
EDIT: phrasing
That being said, best wishes. I'd love for something like this to eventually take-off.
> 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.
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.
This is a contradiction. What kind of open community would put their eggs in a proprietary basket? Surely not one with an understanding of the finite lifecycle of proprietary services.
> You choose what you work on. It doesn’t matter where you live, or who you know-only how good you are.
But from the linked whitepaper:
> The smallest structural unit in a colony is the ‘task’. A task represents a unit of work requiring no further subdivision or delegation. A task has three roles associated with it: A manager [...] A worker [...] An evaluator [...] The manager (usually the creator of the task) is responsible for selecting the evaluator and worker
So it looks like it does indeed still matter who you know. To create a task requires the token as collateral, so if you're not on good terms with anyone who possesses tokens, then you're outta luck. I'm not even saying that the aforementioned is a bad thing, but it seems like exaggeration to claim that this solves the problem of favoritism, nepotism, and cliquishness in human organizations.
Crucial question: is this project itself governed as a colony?
Back in 2014, I remember talking with the founder about this project in the original Ethereum Forums when it was only an idea. I was also interested in self-organisation and decentralised management in a blockchain (Holacracy, etc). Glad to see he's come so far and still believes in his idea.
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 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.
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 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 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.
> Influence is earned by consistently demonstrating just how damn good you are.
> Tokens let you stake your ownership on your good judgement when proposing tasks
> The more reputation you earn, the more influence you have on decisions relevant to your expertise.
How does that all work precisely?
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:
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.
I am thrown a bit, though, by this concept:
Rather than centralised ownership and hierarchical management, smart contracts distribute ownership according to the value each individual contributes, and influence emerges from the bottom up through systematic peer review of contributed work.
Systematic peer reviewal...
Further into whitepaper:
Reputation losses can arise from a user being found responsible for a badly executed task, or being involved in the dispute process and the dispute being resolved against them. In addition, all reputation earned by users is exposed to a continual decay over time.
Meritocracy is an interesting concept. It's supposed to represent a system of advancement based on individual ability. It might work in a pre-existing system: earn points within this domain wherein the outcomes are known and points are awarded based on their complexities. Tetris leaderboards are meritocratic.
Will this approach ever work with conceptual knowledge? There is still a subjective hierarchy of trust and non-binary interpretation; given how much one would need to have their ego in-check to perform evaluations in a merit-based way, that's where I see the concept start to shake at the knees.
> Rather than centralised ownership and hierarchical management, smart contracts distribute ownership according to the value each individual contributes, and influence.
So it's like Asana with a reputation system?
I'm not familiar with Colony at all, but if the above are possible concerns -- that you need durable consensus between individuals without enshrining any of them as fully trusted -- and especially if you want to manage money/value too -- then using Ethereum is a good fit.
I agree that blockchains seem to be a buzzword that are shoehorned more than necessary, but depending on Colony's goals then they may be the actual target market for Ethereum.
This is a hard problem for a number of reasons.
The big fear I have is immutability of blockchain data in the case that something goes horribly wrong. If there's a problem with the ethereum core protocol, solidity compiler, wallet software, colony contracts you could lose everything. Vitalik already said that there probably wouldn't be anymore hard forks.
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.
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.
This particular attempt feels impossibly utopian. I don't believe that we can simply jump into the destination we'd like to achieve all at once; we need to work up to it, building all the social technologies of organization, communication, and knowledge transfer which have to exist in order to support a complex group effort.
I'm glad they're working on it, though. I hope that something valuable will be learned in the process, and that it'll help incrementally move us toward a world where we can manage our society more humanely, organizing ourselves collectively and voluntarily by default.
However, Google wasn't the first search engine either. That being said, it might be among the platforms that does at least good in design. When looking at some UI etc I still got the feeling that it's overengineered, i.e. has too many functions. Maybe think about more MVP, gain community and slowly add features on top.
Also, there's so e research on the future of work and recently flash organizations (Stanford, MIT..). The idea you propose looks very similar to Dynamo/Foundry (2015,2016) and what B12 (2016) does, except for the protocol.
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.
> 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?
(Just putting it out there, I am not related to the project)
Counteracting the tyrannical nature of modern company governance is a very good thing. If this takes off, I wonder how these non-centralized forms of governance might be able to be applied to traditional political governance! Any way you slice it it definitely beats out Chinese style dictatorship, and I'd be willing to bet it'd be a good improvement on even US republic-style governance!
(Although he probably won't be able to reply before next week)
How to use Ethlance - Installing MetaMask Chrome Extension
[video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUZ_XT0a9_U
And then would people need to have some tokens to interact on a Colony, and they'd buy the token on an exchange? That requires another account on something like Coinbase, and a wallet?
Once someone has it all set up, a wallet and a secure way to store their private keys to access their tokens, it could be pretty easy to interact with a Colony, but I imagine for there to be network effects on colony.io this might require some catalyst? Maybe an external event, some financial crisis to move a large enough number of people around the world to using crypto?
Where do i start ( in the context that i can program)