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Colony: A platform for open organizations

colony.io

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Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#101

Post by conatus »

archagon wrote: post #80
conatus wrote: post #53

I work for a digital workers cooperative. 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,…

Question: are you guys legally organized as a cooperative, or is it still a conventional corporate structure?

Legally organised as a cooperative.

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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#102

Post by thiagodelgado »

popcorncowboy wrote: post #85

Here are just two thought experiments I'd love to hear Colony/elena_di explain: 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 ever…

Hypothetical 1: Contract security is taken very, very seriously, and discussed in section 2.2 of the whitepaper. The short answer is that colonies will have a 'recovery mode' whereby whitelisted addresses have the ability to alter some state of the colony contract directly. This should, in principle, prevent the circumstances enabling such an exploit from ever happening. In that sense, the hypothetical is moot.

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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#103

Post by conatus »

d15b0ff178b085c wrote: post #83
conatus wrote: post #53

I work for a digital workers cooperative. 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,…

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 excl…

Thanks for this - very interesting.

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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#104

Post by kibwen »

I like the idea of open organizations (as flawed as they may be, it's hard to be worse than modern corporate fuedalisms), but I'm skeptical. From the OP here:

> 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?

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#106

Post by mighty_bander »

kibwen wrote: post #104

I like the idea of open organizations (as flawed as they may be, it's hard to be worse than modern corporate fuedalisms), but I'm skeptical. From the OP here: > 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 o…

And a little bit below the quoted text, it states that the manager is responsible for determining the bounty for the task - for the worker, the evaluator and him/herself. I can't imagine that working very well.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#107

Post by popcorncowboy »

gedrap wrote: post #92
popcorncowboy wrote: post #85

Here are just two thought experiments I'd love to hear Colony/elena_di explain: 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 ever…

> 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 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?

fab13n made a similar comment on this line. So thanks to both of you for illustrating the point (genuinely):

> "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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#108

Post by DRAOBE »

fab13n wrote: post #94
popcorncowboy wrote: post #85

Here are just two thought experiments I'd love to hear Colony/elena_di explain: 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 ever…

> 1. Edge case leaks 87% of tokens to a dedicated hacker. Sorry? 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 fa…

With actual people you can informally convince either colleagues or the state that an exec is acting in bad faith of outside the policy framework of the company. And this can trigger formally defined actions. A sort of protection against deceit is built in by the fact that regulations are merely social conventions and not physically binding.

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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#109

Post by fab13n »

cvsh wrote: post #81
fab13n wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought of ants and bees. 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.

It will probably come to mind for folks whose families were affected violently by colonization. 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

Touché (and yes, I would also blend into that picture seamlessly).

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#110

Post by stefano »

thiagodelgado wrote: post #102
popcorncowboy wrote: post #85

Here are just two thought experiments I'd love to hear Colony/elena_di explain: 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 ever…

Hypothetical 1: Contract security is taken very, very seriously, and discussed in section 2.2 of the whitepaper. The short answer is that colonies will have a 'recovery mode' whereby whitelisted addresses have the ability to alter some state of the colony contract directly. This should, in principle, prevent the circumstances enabling such an exploit from ever happening. In that sense, the hypothetical is moot. The s…

> well, the answer is simply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's not a great answer to a very realistic case.

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