Colony is a platform for community collaboration | Hacker News Reader

Colony is a platform for community collaboration

blog.colony.io

64 pointsjoeyespo28 comments

People need to learn how to get to the point, I swear.

> So, what does Colony do?

> Colony is a platform for community collaboration. It lets teams, projects, and communities do work, make decisions, and manage money, together.

I read that, and I'm like, what, it's like a CRM/project management for communities? Keep reading, and it's some kind of a crypto thing, as far as I can tell.

From my understanding, it's project management with free market economics. Colonies and tasks are funded and whoever completes the task gets the reward. So, like a colony, it's a self-organising entity that works towards a goal that is most rewarding for everyone.

> So, like a colony, it's a self-organising entity that works towards a goal that is most rewarding for everyone.

That's a novel definition of a colony, unless I'm misinformed. Better not include it in the PR at least, could backfire.

I'm trying to define it economically. A colony is something that's independent from any other authority, thus creating it's own ecosystem. There's no one in charge, but everyone works on the most rewarding tasks, thus maximizing rewards for the whole ecosystem.

That is not how colonies work, no. The American colonies had to fight a war to be independent. Colonies are subservient jurisdictions.

It's using the term as in definitions #2-3 (particularly 3b) here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/colony, not #1. They mean colony as in "a colony of ants", not the political structure.

You mean a colony of ants that has a queen, workers and soldiers?

The money thing makes me think is it for businesses? but I'm also kind of stumped.

Come now - they offer a tl;dr on their home page:

"A colony is a new kind of internet-native digital company where rules are enforced by software instead of hierarchy".

Right?

I've been experimenting with Colony and other similar software in the past months in the hope to let the community decide on some aspects of our project.

In my opinion we are still a few years away from something usable but the concept of DAOs is really exciting.

The main issue is the high cost of ETH gas, which means just to vote on a single issue may cost a few dollars in smart contract gas fees.

So we're now looking for aspects of the decision making process which are worth the cost. We haven't found any so far.

Either way, it's great to be able to be part of something so potentially disrupting so early in the journey.

>The main issue is the high cost of ETH gas, which means just to vote on a single issue may cost a few dollars in smart contract gas fees

I don't understand the logic of this, why does this need to be a decentralised platform using real currency for transactions?

If you want to simulate a sort of internal market you can implement something like "colony-dollars" and if anything at the end convert it into some actual currency.

The gas is not for transactions. It pays the Ethereum network to execute the smart contracts.

The idea is to have a decision making app where no one controls the app itself.

They're missing the "what is colony for?" section of their site.

Sign of the times: the launch announcement seems to mostly downplay the fact that this is a blockchain/crypto thing.

I guess the shine really has worn off now. A year ago this would have been putting the blockchain element front and center.

Or maybe I'm being overly cynical here, and Colony (which looks like it was founded in June 2017) assumes that everyone who sees their announcement already knows that they're in the crypto space.

Yeah, I think you're right that you're being overly cynical. Blockchain projects now understand that, to be taken seriously, they need to have a compelling product vision. They still get internal press in the blockchain community, but the standards have (rightly) risen.

Pretty alpha in my quick tour of it. I can't even find a way to browse other colonies. Also during a few minutes experimenting with it I had to sign in multiple times with my metamask wallet. A refresh seems to cause it to forget me.

I browsed the website and I still don't know what colony is. I understand it has something to do with crypto currency. is it a wallet? Is it a miner? Is it a game?

This is a good example of how not to make a website.

This is cool! Is there any way not to use crypto, and to use an actual fiat representation (as part of the BYO Token functionality)? Seems to very useful for community/coop resource planning, especially if I can plug in something like Stripe's Connect marketplace-enabling offering for moving traditional monies around.

If the fiat transfers could be cryptographically validated, then I assume yes, as Colony is customizable.

In any case you can use fiat backed or fiat pegged crypto tokens, like USDC and Tether or DAI, respectively. All the fiat-linked tokens I'm aware of are issued on Ethereum, given they use the ERC20 token interface, so would be compatible with Colony.

Thank you!

Oh boy I’m so excited to be a colonizer.

Seems to only be a bad word among the Woke. I'd love to be a colonizer of uncharted lands like Mars.

Product pitch reminded me of Loomio, which is a platform for community collaboration that I've been using a lot lately. If the headline brought you here, but then you got confused by all the block chain stuff, maybe check it out.

Interesting. What are you using Loomio for?

i bought a house with a group of friends, and we're using loomio to manage the household -- organizing maintenance, meetings, and various decisions. it's especially nice for asynchronous decision-making, which should be the only acceptable kind of decision-making.

i learned about loomio from jason benn's excellent blog, here: https://jasonbenn.com/tag/community

Are there other solutions that aim to disrupt middle management?

Colony seems to be trying to do too many things at the same time. It could be useful to traditional companies without any decentralization.

Crypto the new Pyramid Schemes.

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