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Colony: A platform for open organizations

colony.io

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Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#141

Post by repo001 »

mgkabar wrote: post #119
stefano wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> well, the answer is simply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's not a great answer to a very realistic case.

I think the many sentences that come before the shrug emoji illustrate that the case is not very realistic. You're taking the final, sarcastic closing comment out of context.

You're absolutely wrong. It's this attitude toward security that is a main factor toward most of the Ethereum hacks to date.

- 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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#142

Post by collinvine »

fortythirteen wrote: post #99
elena_di wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we haven't implemented the white paper yet. But we are coding that now and the repo will be opened once we're ready. Meanwhile we did publish the source for the token-weighted voting implementation, see https://blog.colony.io/token-weighted-voting-implementation-... and have opened more than just code, e.g. our employee equity plan https://blog.colony.io/on-creating-a-better-employee-equity-... , the legal re…

Do you have an open roadmap? Why not eat your own dog food here and "colonize" development, even if manually?

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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#143

Post by collinvine »

joelthelion wrote: post #74

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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#145

Post by alain94040 »

I built something similar 10 years ago (pre-Ethereum obviously). Launched at TechCrunch on stage. Execution wasn't that great and it died, but the main problem was that everyone thinks their ideas are awesome, and no one wants to do the actual work for a handful of tokens. We'll see if history repeats itself here.

That being said, best wishes. I'd love for something like this to eventually take-off.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#146

Post by collinvine »

lowglow wrote: post #19

I worked with the Assembly team that basically did this, without the complications of smart contracts/etc involved. This is a hard problem for a number of reasons.

Would you be up for chatting? We've been wanting to talk to people from the Assembly team to hear about their experience.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#147

Post by macandcheese »

Genuinely curious, how would this affect the way we work differently than, say, a SaaS product that powers decision making at an organization with voting / assignment of tasks. What is the inherent advantage to using Ethereum to power this? I'm not _trying_ to be cynical, I just struggle to see how this is anything more than shoehorning a new technology into an existing product / space. Not saying it's not cool or that it should be dismissed because of that, it seems like a great proof of concept and it seems executed well, but I fail to see any real benefit to this to an "organization" (Perhaps my assumption of an organization being a business is my problem here) over a SaaS product that does the same thing.

> 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?

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#148

Post by goodroot »

Very cool. I support your initiative and wish you well.

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.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#149

Post by lowglow »

collinvine wrote: post #146
lowglow wrote: post #19

I worked with the Assembly team that basically did this, without the complications of smart contracts/etc involved. This is a hard problem for a number of reasons.

Would you be up for chatting? We've been wanting to talk to people from the Assembly team to hear about their experience.

Yeah sure. I'll email you.

Re: Colony: A platform for open organizations

#150

Post by katelynsills »

collinvine wrote: post #139
katelynsills wrote: post #9

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.

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 particip…

Thanks for the book recommendation! Just bought it. Agreed that smart contracts and technology in general could be used to reduce transaction costs.
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