11 ms·

Colony: A platform for open organizations

492 points by fabianhjr 9y ago

lozenge 9y ago
I'm happy to see another product in the "opinionated management" space (another is https://www.loomio.org 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.
- bmelton 9y ago
  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/ 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.
  - popcorncowboy 9y ago
    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.
- mbrock 9y ago
  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?
  - spiderfarmer 9y ago
    Mechanical Turk doesn’t seem to have shortage of workers and Amazon does nothing to market it.
- collinvine 9y ago
  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.
flunhat 9y ago
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).
- QAPereo 9y ago
  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.
  - mbrock 9y ago
    https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0 https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0 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.
    - Kiro 9y ago
      What's the difference between a protocol token and the scam tokens you usually get from ICOs?
katelynsills 9y ago
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.
- flunhat 9y ago
  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.
- octaveguin 9y ago
  I've thought a lot about this too recently while working as a contract software dev versus a regular employee. 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.
  - abraae 9y ago
    In Fred Brookes' classic "The Mythical Man-Month", he extols the virtue of having a single architect: "Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds."
- lazyasciiart 9y ago
  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 http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/coase.htm
octaveguin 9y ago
This is all based on smart contracts. A detailed description of how it's supposed to work was linked in a blog post of theirs: https://colony.io/whitepaper.pdf 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.
chaz6 9y ago
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.
- flunhat 9y ago
  Perhaps open source projects might use it as their governance model?
lowglow 9y ago
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.
- ismail 9y ago
  What are those reasons?
  - weego 9y ago
    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.
- popcorncowboy 9y ago
  +1. Would love to hear your insights on this.
- collinvine 9y ago
  Would you be up for chatting? We've been wanting to talk to people from the Assembly team to hear about their experience.
  - lowglow 9y ago
    Yeah sure. I'll email you.
Egidius 9y ago
I'm keeping my eye on Colony's progress for a while now. I cannot wait to get involved. I see a lot of similarities with https://dogezer.com/ https://dogezer.com/ Colony seems better though in terms of design from what I can judge right now.
dreit1 9y ago
How does Colony differentiate itself from Aragon?
- gichiba 9y ago
  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.
- elena_di 9y ago
  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.
  - ComodoHacker 9y ago
    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.
    - thiagodelgado 9y ago
      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.
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      I'm not sure it aims to solve wealth equality gap..
NicoJuicy 9y ago
So, let's say i want do to something on the blockchain that looks like this. Where do i start ( in the context that i can program)
- elena_di 9y ago
  You can have a look through the Solidity language documentation http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/ 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
- kobeya 9y ago
  https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide
- iddqd 9y ago
  This is a good start: http://truffleframework.com http://truffleframework.com
- corford 9y ago
  Check this HN thread from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398550
haffi112 9y ago
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.
- mbrock 9y ago
  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. Check out their tl;dr: https://colony.readme.io/docs/off-whitepaper https://colony.readme.io/docs/off-whitepaper
danpalmer 9y ago
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.
- BjoernKW 9y ago
  > 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.
  - danpalmer 9y ago
    > 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.
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andy_ppp 9y ago
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.
- alexirobbins 9y ago
  this sounds a lot like my local government
diggan 9y ago
So where is the actual signup for this? The homepage does not make it obvious...
- stefano 9y ago
  Welcome to the world of blockchain startups! There is no signup nor product, but please subscribe to our newsletter and download our whitepaper! And don't forget to pay into our ICO!
  - elena_di 9y ago
    Actually we said we won't do an ICO until we have a product live on mainnet https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0 https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0
- fabianhjr 9y ago
  They are in beta, you can send them an email if an org you are part of would like to test their beta/mvp. (Just putting it out there, I am not related to the project)
- collinvine 9y ago
  We have a beta product at the moment. We're doing closed testing as it's not feature complete: task management with a token-based incentive model.
afpx 9y ago
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?
- gichiba 9y ago
  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.
- tinkerrr 9y ago
  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.
  - 0x006A 9y ago
    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.
- elena_di 9y ago
  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-part-1-72f836b5423b 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-plan-d89bcab4a4e2 https://blog.colony.io/on-creating-a-better-employee-equity-..., the legal reasoning behind a token sale etc.
kvz 9y ago
Interested in trying this for Transloadit, currently our only tooling to achieve similar ideas is markdown/GitHub. Is there a demo/pilot somewhere?
- gichiba 9y ago
  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.
- thiagodelgado 9y ago
  We're running a closed beta at the moment but if you have a use-case in mind you can send an e-mail to collin@colony.io :) (Although he probably won't be able to reply before next week)
flotillo 9y ago
Is this just not yet another case of unnecessarily attempting to shoehorn in blockchain technology where it's not really required? This is basically a freelancing platform that has been overcomplicated by the use of a blockchain and 'smart contracts'.
- gichiba 9y ago
  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.
groceryheist 9y ago
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.
earlybike 9y ago
How does it compare to Holocracy?
- conatus 9y ago
  As far as I can tell Holocracy is basically a form of organisational design that doesn't depend on the blockchain for organisation.
adgasf 9y ago
Where's the source-code?
- elena_di 9y ago
  The white paper just got published so we're relatively early in the process of implementing that.
conatus 9y ago
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, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy [2] https://www.co-pitch.com/ https://www.co-pitch.com/
- tinkerrr 9y ago
  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.
Aeolun 9y ago
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?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
asymmetric 9y ago
Interesting project, but I find it unfortunate that they chose such a historically loaded term.
- nullp0tr 9y ago
  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.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    An organisation that throws out a tool because of its own insecure projections on its name has more problems..
    - nullp0tr 9y ago
      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.
      - Chris2048 9y ago
        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.
joelthelion 9y ago
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?
- collinvine 9y ago
  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.
tomericco 9y ago
Is it a DAO? If not, what are the differences from all other projects that are implementing DAO?
foobarbecue 9y ago
Historically oblivious choice of name.
- elena_di 9y ago
  The name actually comes from the idea of colonies as occurring in nature https://blog.colony.io/the-future-of-work-cf99211e7ac4 https://blog.colony.io/the-future-of-work-cf99211e7ac4
quadcore 9y ago
> you're empowered to do the work you care about, not just what you're told to do. > 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?
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Looks like you earn tokens by doing work, and each token is a vote?
meriton 9y ago
Honestly, I feel many of the features that are claimed as 'new' don't seem so new. Giving credit to previous work really seems to be a big issue in the ICO and BTC community, for any reason (?). 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.
popcorncowboy 9y ago
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 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).
- gedrap 9y ago
  > 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?
  - DRAOBE 9y ago
    Well, there is actual law against it? https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/nyregion/ex-citigroup-construction-executive-admits-taking-500000-in-bribes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/nyregion/ex-citigroup-con...
  - popcorncowboy 9y ago
    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.
twoquestions 9y ago
Color me skeptical, but hopeful. 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!
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
You lost me at token.
dyeje 9y ago
I read the whitepaper TLDR, but I'm still not clear on the value of the Colony Tokens. Is the idea that they are like shares in the Colony?
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
A closed* platform for open organizations. Are there plans to make this open source? There's only one correct answer to that question, and it should be made clear from the outset.
- owens99 9y ago
  Why?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    >A closed platform for open communities 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.
    - owens99 9y ago
      I think making it open source would be better in the long term, but I'd personally use it either way if it works.
  - DonbunEf7 9y ago
    Because it's 2017 and we shouldn't suffer non-Free Software any longer.
joeyspn 9y ago
This is probably one of the first Ethereum projects along with Augur. 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.
kibwen 9y ago
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?
- mighty_bander 9y ago
  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.
swlkr 9y ago
This is a really beautiful landing page. This project looks great!
alain94040 9y ago
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.
macandcheese 9y ago
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?
- AgentME 9y ago
  Using Ethereum means that everyone can agree on the state of the system without needing to place trust in any central authorities. You don't have to trust whoever is running the service to not accidentally or maliciously change the data or force a change in the software. You don't have to worry about the service going down (business says they're pivoting / gets bought out) and arguments about multiple different members setting up new accounts at different services claiming theirs is the true one that everyone should use (putting that member effectively in charge). The Ethereum blockchain provides a durable recording of the organization state. 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.
goodroot 9y ago
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.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
So, are we destined to reinvent something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store but with cryptocurrencies? This concept sounds horrifying.
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nate_martin 9y ago
This looks really cool, but I'm a little bit confused about why this needs to be decentralized. You could theoretically just implement this network as a saas instead of on top of a blockchain. You could even still do all the financials with ether but just maintain the state on servers somewhere. 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.
marssaxman 9y ago
I love the concept, and the principles driving it feel both good and familiar, so I hope humans do eventually learn how to build organizations like these. 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.
sixten 9y ago
For someone to connect to a Colony through a standard web browser, it seems they'd need a plug-in like MetaMask (https://metamask.io/ https://metamask.io/) and I wonder how this might limit who uses Colony?
- sixten 9y ago
  Watching this video of MetaMask being installed, a person needs to create a secure password and a phasephrase: How to use Ethlance - Installing MetaMask Chrome Extension [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUZ_XT0a9_U 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?

492 points by fabianhjr 9y ago

I'm happy to see another product in the "opinionated management" space (another is https://www.loomio.org 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.

bmelton 9y ago
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/ 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.
- popcorncowboy 9y ago
  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.
mbrock 9y ago
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?
- spiderfarmer 9y ago
  Mechanical Turk doesn’t seem to have shortage of workers and Amazon does nothing to market it.
collinvine 9y ago
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.

flunhat 9y ago

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).

QAPereo 9y ago
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.
- mbrock 9y ago
  https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0 https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0 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.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    What's the difference between a protocol token and the scam tokens you usually get from ICOs?

katelynsills 9y ago

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.

flunhat 9y ago
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.
octaveguin 9y ago
I've thought a lot about this too recently while working as a contract software dev versus a regular employee. 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.
- abraae 9y ago
  In Fred Brookes' classic "The Mythical Man-Month", he extols the virtue of having a single architect: "Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds."
lazyasciiart 9y ago
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 http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/coase.htm

octaveguin 9y ago

This is all based on smart contracts. A detailed description of how it's supposed to work was linked in a blog post of theirs: https://colony.io/whitepaper.pdf 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.

chaz6 9y ago

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.

flunhat 9y ago
Perhaps open source projects might use it as their governance model?

lowglow 9y ago

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.

ismail 9y ago
What are those reasons?
- weego 9y ago
  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.
popcorncowboy 9y ago
+1. Would love to hear your insights on this.
collinvine 9y ago
Would you be up for chatting? We've been wanting to talk to people from the Assembly team to hear about their experience.
- lowglow 9y ago
  Yeah sure. I'll email you.

Egidius 9y ago

I'm keeping my eye on Colony's progress for a while now. I cannot wait to get involved. I see a lot of similarities with https://dogezer.com/ https://dogezer.com/ Colony seems better though in terms of design from what I can judge right now.

dreit1 9y ago

How does Colony differentiate itself from Aragon?

gichiba 9y ago
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.
elena_di 9y ago
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.
- ComodoHacker 9y ago
  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.
  - thiagodelgado 9y ago
    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.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    I'm not sure it aims to solve wealth equality gap..

NicoJuicy 9y ago

So, let's say i want do to something on the blockchain that looks like this. Where do i start ( in the context that i can program)

elena_di 9y ago
You can have a look through the Solidity language documentation http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/ 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
kobeya 9y ago
https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide
iddqd 9y ago
This is a good start: http://truffleframework.com http://truffleframework.com
corford 9y ago
Check this HN thread from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398550

haffi112 9y ago

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.

mbrock 9y ago
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. Check out their tl;dr: https://colony.readme.io/docs/off-whitepaper https://colony.readme.io/docs/off-whitepaper

danpalmer 9y ago

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.

BjoernKW 9y ago
> 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.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  > 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.

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andy_ppp 9y ago

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.

alexirobbins 9y ago
this sounds a lot like my local government

diggan 9y ago

So where is the actual signup for this? The homepage does not make it obvious...

stefano 9y ago
Welcome to the world of blockchain startups! There is no signup nor product, but please subscribe to our newsletter and download our whitepaper! And don't forget to pay into our ICO!
- elena_di 9y ago
  Actually we said we won't do an ICO until we have a product live on mainnet https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0 https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0
fabianhjr 9y ago
They are in beta, you can send them an email if an org you are part of would like to test their beta/mvp. (Just putting it out there, I am not related to the project)
collinvine 9y ago
We have a beta product at the moment. We're doing closed testing as it's not feature complete: task management with a token-based incentive model.

afpx 9y ago

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?

gichiba 9y ago
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.
tinkerrr 9y ago
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.
- 0x006A 9y ago
  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.
elena_di 9y ago
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-part-1-72f836b5423b 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-plan-d89bcab4a4e2 https://blog.colony.io/on-creating-a-better-employee-equity-..., the legal reasoning behind a token sale etc.

kvz 9y ago

Interested in trying this for Transloadit, currently our only tooling to achieve similar ideas is markdown/GitHub. Is there a demo/pilot somewhere?

gichiba 9y ago
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.
thiagodelgado 9y ago
We're running a closed beta at the moment but if you have a use-case in mind you can send an e-mail to collin@colony.io :) (Although he probably won't be able to reply before next week)

flotillo 9y ago

Is this just not yet another case of unnecessarily attempting to shoehorn in blockchain technology where it's not really required? This is basically a freelancing platform that has been overcomplicated by the use of a blockchain and 'smart contracts'.

gichiba 9y ago
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.

groceryheist 9y ago

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.

earlybike 9y ago

How does it compare to Holocracy?

conatus 9y ago
As far as I can tell Holocracy is basically a form of organisational design that doesn't depend on the blockchain for organisation.

adgasf 9y ago

Where's the source-code?

elena_di 9y ago
The white paper just got published so we're relatively early in the process of implementing that.

conatus 9y ago

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, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy [2] https://www.co-pitch.com/ https://www.co-pitch.com/

tinkerrr 9y ago
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.

Aeolun 9y ago

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?

deleted 9y ago
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asymmetric 9y ago

Interesting project, but I find it unfortunate that they chose such a historically loaded term.

nullp0tr 9y ago
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.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  An organisation that throws out a tool because of its own insecure projections on its name has more problems..
  - nullp0tr 9y ago
    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.
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      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.

joelthelion 9y ago

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?

collinvine 9y ago
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.

tomericco 9y ago

Is it a DAO? If not, what are the differences from all other projects that are implementing DAO?

foobarbecue 9y ago

Historically oblivious choice of name.

elena_di 9y ago
The name actually comes from the idea of colonies as occurring in nature https://blog.colony.io/the-future-of-work-cf99211e7ac4 https://blog.colony.io/the-future-of-work-cf99211e7ac4

quadcore 9y ago

> you're empowered to do the work you care about, not just what you're told to do. > 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?

StavrosK 9y ago
Looks like you earn tokens by doing work, and each token is a vote?

meriton 9y ago

Honestly, I feel many of the features that are claimed as 'new' don't seem so new. Giving credit to previous work really seems to be a big issue in the ICO and BTC community, for any reason (?). 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.

popcorncowboy 9y ago

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 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).

gedrap 9y ago
> 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?
- DRAOBE 9y ago
  Well, there is actual law against it? https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/nyregion/ex-citigroup-construction-executive-admits-taking-500000-in-bribes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/nyregion/ex-citigroup-con...
- popcorncowboy 9y ago
  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.

twoquestions 9y ago

Color me skeptical, but hopeful. 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!

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

You lost me at token.

dyeje 9y ago

I read the whitepaper TLDR, but I'm still not clear on the value of the Colony Tokens. Is the idea that they are like shares in the Colony?

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

A closed* platform for open organizations. Are there plans to make this open source? There's only one correct answer to that question, and it should be made clear from the outset.

owens99 9y ago
Why?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  >A closed platform for open communities 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.
  - owens99 9y ago
    I think making it open source would be better in the long term, but I'd personally use it either way if it works.
- DonbunEf7 9y ago
  Because it's 2017 and we shouldn't suffer non-Free Software any longer.

joeyspn 9y ago

This is probably one of the first Ethereum projects along with Augur. 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.

kibwen 9y ago

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?

mighty_bander 9y ago
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.

swlkr 9y ago

This is a really beautiful landing page. This project looks great!

alain94040 9y ago

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.

macandcheese 9y ago

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?

AgentME 9y ago
Using Ethereum means that everyone can agree on the state of the system without needing to place trust in any central authorities. You don't have to trust whoever is running the service to not accidentally or maliciously change the data or force a change in the software. You don't have to worry about the service going down (business says they're pivoting / gets bought out) and arguments about multiple different members setting up new accounts at different services claiming theirs is the true one that everyone should use (putting that member effectively in charge). The Ethereum blockchain provides a durable recording of the organization state. 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.

goodroot 9y ago

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.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

So, are we destined to reinvent something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store but with cryptocurrencies? This concept sounds horrifying.

deleted 9y ago

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nate_martin 9y ago

This looks really cool, but I'm a little bit confused about why this needs to be decentralized. You could theoretically just implement this network as a saas instead of on top of a blockchain. You could even still do all the financials with ether but just maintain the state on servers somewhere. 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.

marssaxman 9y ago

I love the concept, and the principles driving it feel both good and familiar, so I hope humans do eventually learn how to build organizations like these. 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.

sixten 9y ago

For someone to connect to a Colony through a standard web browser, it seems they'd need a plug-in like MetaMask (https://metamask.io/ https://metamask.io/) and I wonder how this might limit who uses Colony?

sixten 9y ago
Watching this video of MetaMask being installed, a person needs to create a secure password and a phasephrase: How to use Ethlance - Installing MetaMask Chrome Extension [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUZ_XT0a9_U 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?