Community DAOs. Engaging with the Colony MVP.

Transcript

eight so I'm here to give you an update on what's been going on with colony so you may know colony as this general project for building douse and dissenters organizations in general and before I'm gonna dive into what we've been doing in colony I want to sort of give the context so talk briefly about what is a Dao because even though everyone's talking about them there's not really one definition that everyone agrees on now you all probably know the Dao sort of this infamous first Dao or something that claimed the name so the Dow was a contract and very early aetherium which attracted a lot of attention a lot of ether so you probably

know this is one hundred and fifty million dollar plus investment fund which then got hacked and caused a hard fork in the network and you know a lot of drama what you may not know is that this was not the original plan so not just the hacking in the heart folk of course but it wasn't supposed to be an investment fund the idea was that this would be run like a firm a company right it was only after it had attracted so much money that this idea took hold that a Dow is some investment fund it's a big pot of money and you interact with this contract by sending proposals voting on them taking some kind of bureaucratic action the end result of which is that

funds move from A to B now you might think that just sounds like a multi-sig with extra steps and in some sense it's true in some sense is not quite fair because of course these rules can be really complicated and you can have voting systems you can you know some people encoding systems of parliaments and courts and appeals processes so the rules can be very complex but the key is that the funds are locked you take actions the end result of those actions is funds move so that's what I mean by with multi-sig with extra steps and so there are other kinds of dao i want to talk about so there might be a lot in this category which are bureaucratic this you know the ones i've just

mentioned another kind of doubt that you all know but maybe never thought of as a Dao would be Bitcoin itself the Bitcoin network is a decentralized organization it has many different types of actors all acting according to the hard-coded incentives it's very powerful marshaling millions of dollars you know setting up developing hardware building data centers and it's pretty much board line on governor believes we've seen but it's also a Dao it's just a very different type of animal so if we talk about a Dao platform it really is more of a general way to align incentives around any kind of goals so you can code the incentives and have some kind of governance rules

and that's a but a doubt platform allows you to do and the Dow itself would be a programmable governor burrell incentive machine so the colony network let me get back to Connie the calling network is conceived to be a relatively flexible platform on which you can encode incentives and build your own dowels of various types but I'm not going to talk about that sort of general component layer today I'm gonna dive into more of what our current app is doing in the more specific example the colony as a company as a firm the prime coordination tool in the economy and I specifically mean the whole firm and not just the boardroom which would be like having a

you know this multi-sig type Dow which proposal for budget for the various departments vote on it stuff like that I mean really they're full operations of this firm or or the community so any large projects you'll have you'll want to divide it into smaller problems when you launch a colony you have a structure called the root domain but pretty soon you will be adding subdomains and sub subdomains now this could be a conceptual breakdown of the problem you're tackling or it could be an org chart of your organization so that's up to you something that's not in our original white paper but is in our current vision is that each one of these could have a different decision-making procedure so down here we might have a little

workgroup you know dev team whatever and there's one guy who's the team lead and that guy can be the dictator have the final say on all things that have here and that stay here they can create work allocate the funds that are there and evaluate things it might be fair like if this were happening up at the top the whole thing would be a dictatorship but you know the fact that we can use it in each team you know some this is how we work as teams you know somebody can take the initiative and it's totally okay and it's only when disputes arise that that the decision-making goes up the tree and so that's one possibility in another domain we might have this permissive reputation weighted funding cube mechanism that we described in the original white paper in

which the reputation system mediates the ability to direct funds and now I've mentioned reputation I should say the reputation system so far is live in the sense that any actions you take in the colony you will earn reputation but the reputation isn't being used yet because this particular module of permissions module isn't active but so it's half there but since this the vision of this is that reputation you earn it for successfully receiving funds and it also allows you to direct funds it's sort of this feedback loop so it means that the colony itself is a resource allocation mechanism a process mediated through

this reputation system that was the original vision and this is a continuous process so unlike boardroom style Dao here but there you'd have to take an action before something happens this one would be continually moving and very dynamic and only you have to take action to stop processes from happening so we see we're envisioning this is a lot less bureaucratic and a lot more dynamic so right that's that's where we might be at so exactly let me talk about further up so maybe higher up here we say yeah let's have a boardroom type thing up there to just decide how to give funds to the various bigger departments and the problem is there's that having these

proposed may coming up with a budget proposal is really hard and reading a budget proposal and determining whether you agree with it is also really hard as a lot of cognitive load and voter apathy is a problem in all dowels going back to the even though 100 million dollars or more was at stake you know the voter participation was tiny because people don't want to put in that much work so we've come up with a system we described a few months ago or last summer I think specifically how to come up with and agree on a budget so we wrote this up into the name budget box and if you search for that budget box calling you'll find also the paper and the blog post the insight was that instead of asking someone to evaluate a project and

trying to determine how many funds they need that's hard what we'd ask instead is which who needs more resources X or Y so by giving people that comparison it's a much easier question for us to answer we're relational thinkers it's much more fun it's much more engaging and the process works like this by repeatedly asking over and over a or B a or C D or F whatever they be really asking these comparative questions which are more engaging and fun to answer we can still generate collectively what the overall colony thinks the budget of a department should be we get a weighted ranking so this allows for for distributed way of both coming up with the budget and

agreeing on the budget that is a lot easier than trying to vote on proposals to a boardroom so that's the budget box that was not in the original white paper but there's been you know it's something we came up with afterwards hey you might our vision is that you could use that in the domain well I need to mine but they each in each domain you can choose its funding or its permission system so it should be very modular so that part is now described in the white paper because right now look at that date that's less than 24 hours ago fresh for you guys we have updated the white paper to describe all of these multi permissions systems and all our new ideas and a special shout out to daniel has done most of the work and updating this great stuff so

that's out now and um so what's the status what do we have we have the calling network live on main net that's great we have the reputation system life as I mentioned before we're calculating reputation were updating them but the reputation weighted funding system is not yet live so you can't actually use your reputation yet but you have it thirdly we have developer resources website which if you want to develop with colony is really this very nice resource so it looks like this has all the components and documentation for it and and lastly we have an example dap that is live and i'll show you a bunch of screenshots of

that in a moment so the MVP the minimal Viable Product the app we have running right now when you go to our website colony dot IO right up at the top says go to app that's where you click if you want to start your own colony I also want to point out the community link just to the left that's our discord which has been very active in this past month and that's where if two for onboarding you'd come there talk to us and that's where a lot of the discussion happens if you're following our blog you would see that we have announced on the 5th of February just a few weeks ago the beta colony this is a colony that is actively developing the colony network and the

colony app so if you don't want to start your own colony you can join the bake I call Annie and see what's what's there to do it would look like this so this is what the app looks like when you're in the beta colony you can see our domains there there's a root domain there's BDSM the business development sales and marketing of course and then we've got product and there's a bunch of tasks that you could pick up and start doing work ranging from 15,000 beta colony tokens BL and y $200 200 I ended i hundred i for various developmental tasks if we look in this business development subdomain you can see there's tasks for you know writing recording yourself in explaining what you want to do if colony or even just

sending a tweet so that's as easy the minimum engagement you need to do to start earning some bail and why today another tab in this app is these osa this is the ones that yeah the the tab the tasks are really easy to do so i'd encourage you to join in and now you can actually complete some work or in some reputation in beta the other tab tab we have is the suggestions this has been really nice so anyone in the colony can come up with a suggestion of things we should improve about the app and this has been really valuable to us just to see what's coming back from the community and which ones are upvoted and what people are think you know what are the pain points that we didn't really necessarily prioritize right and there's a lot of them in some of many up words

some don't and the amazing thing is so already February 25 so that's within 20 days less than three weeks of launching this tab we have had someone come up with suggestions and these suggestions have been up voted we accepted that the suggestion had turned them into a task funded the task we received somebody working on it received the pr merge it into the app and all within the first three weeks so this is absolutely amazing so that was a great achievement was great to see and just the level of engagement of the community has been fun it's been it's been two years of developing finally seeing feedback and this dynamic feedback has been really encouraging so more examples of what's

going on in the colony network right now there's swash app dot IO which I only really got to know about yesterday what they do it's a really cool app a browser add-on that tracks all the data that you want to share with it and me being the person who tries to stop sharing all data whenever I can and block all the trackers I didn't really realize that this was a good idea what they do they are a data union so the idea is you collectively track all the data that otherwise Google or Facebook might track but now you can sell it on a decentralized marketplace and earn crypto for the same data instead of Facebook selling it you can sell it yourself so it's a very interesting project and you can see here they're also heavily into trying out our colony there's tasks

for testing the browser add-on so this is what it would look like there's a browser on here and there's tasks for UI testing on the firefox and android and so on it's nice to see them using it so shout out to them great stuff and these are the overall stats we've had over two colonies created in just the past month so yeah we launched in early February so one month two hundred plus colonies 500 accounts 479 tasks and 271 suggestions and this is going up every day so that's great and on that note I want to say please join us come play with the app join us in our discord and yeah and hopefully you can use colony for your

communities as well so thank you and I'll take a question if there's one the the budget box mechanism that you talked about can you comment on the similarity your differences between something like quadratic voting and other kind of governance well so the first important difference to quadratic voting that I'd point out on where we I shouldn't have there we go so the way

we've designed budget box is that this weighting of what people prefer is done by their reputation the reputation they have earned and that is a civil resistance mechanism where it doesn't matter how many accounts you have it only matters how much reputation you've earned quadratic voting has a lot of nice features but one of its biggest drawbacks in this space is that it counts individual account use users so you'd have to have some kind of a strong identity mechanism to prevent people creating multiple accounts and then voting with multiple accounts because that distorts the game and here it does not so that's a practical difference other than that it's the the ranking we get and the budget allocation is a

little bit different than quadratic and there's various dampening factors we can tweak to see you know but the it tries to achieve a similar goal but with different mechanisms in different trade-offs somebody was asking for permission to build a bridge between colony and Aragon and I can see somewhat of a complementarity between the city yeah absolutely how could you elaborate I'm happy if you watch your opinion in it and how you see that complementarity so Aragon and colony could work very well together and

I could imagine having a colony set up where I have some domain higher up which is a Aragon Dao which gives or even have this you could have an Aragon organization which funds various colonies to work on its project it so there's there's no reason you can't have you can't have both in the same organization so yeah definitely I feel like we come at problems from a bit of a different angle so there's some use cases where Aragon might be more might be the right choice and other things easier on colony so one of the things we really worked on is getting making it easy and permissive and like get the day-to-day activity done where you don't want to have

proposals and voting at every stage so yeah there's no reason why you couldn't have outsourced the decision-making on this higher domain to an Aragon down and you know want to make it modular in that way that there's hooks for different permission system at each level and one of them could be call out to Aragon sure all right well thanks thanks for coming hos [Applause] do you want to say it by me

yeah okay you can send it to because we're having problems with the system so we prefer just it's ass