
Colony: A platform for open organizations - fabianhjr
https://colony.io/
======
flunhat
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).

~~~
orcdork
It's interesting that I'm on exactly the other side - it seemed halfway
interesting until I realized there's some kind of cryptocurrency involved (and
only figured that out while reading this comment).

The org stuff looks interesting - the crypto stuff makes me more suspicious of
it's present and future because of the possibility of a money grab.

~~~
tinkerrr
Instead of such a knee-jerk reaction to crypto, perhaps you can ask if the
crypto token involved makes sense in this use case. If it doesn't, like in 99%
of the cases, you can dismiss it then. Colony, IMHO, is one of the few
projects where it does make sense to have a token.

~~~
iakh
Can you help me understand why a token makes sense in this case? It seems just
as easy to implement this concept as Colony SaaS.

~~~
bmelton
If it's like Assembly, the coins/tokens themselves don't have value _per se_,
they just represent ownership. Basically, in this case, it's acting more of a
ledger to represent equity than as the commodity it's typically used as.

An example:

UserA posts a great idea, and wants help to implement it. UserA is an MBA, has
a business plan, a rough idea of execution, etc., but is not a programmer, or
a graphic designer, or anything like that. UserA realizes she needs help, so
she posts bounties - with features relative to the importance of the success
of the project. "Need a landing page" might be a feature, with tasks broken
out like "design a logo", "build a wireframe in Sketch", "convert Sketch
wireframe to React frontend", etc. Each of those tasks will have a value,
represented by Ether.

UserB, a graphic designer comes up with the perfect logo, which is worth 100
ether. User C, a frontend developer picks up the wireframe task, gets
consensus, and then bangs out the React work, for a total of 250 ether. Other
work gets done and an MVP is launched. The MVP was built, and a total of 5,000
ether were distributed as bounties were claimed and completed. User B has gone
on to do a bunch of other graphic design tasks, and has a total of 600 ether,
while User C left the project after completing the frontend work. The
project's MVP launches, and makes $10,000 in profit. Because UserB has 600
ether, and 5,000 ether have been issued, UserB's share entitles him to ~12% of
the profits, so he is disbursed a payment of $1200. UserC's share entitles him
to $500.

As the project grows, UserB takes on more and more work, and more and more
ether are issued. UserC doesn't ever come back on, but is still entitled to
profits on the work they've done, though their share of ether will keep being
diluted as the project goes on.

Hopefully I've been able to illustrate that the coin in this case is used not
as currency itself, but as a representative stake in ownership.

~~~
mgkabar
Yeah, this seems very similar to how a Colony is envisioned to run, with a few
extra considerations:

Each colony's native tokens act as a representation of equity as described
above (more or less), entitling holders to a 'rewards' disbursement
periodically - but they _also_ may be employed by the colony for mechanisms of
governance in the case of token-weighted voting.

Additionally, whenever someone makes an amount of tokens, they also are
awarded an equal amount of reputation, which cannot be transferred and which
decays over time. This score also confers influence in the colony for voting
and dispute resolution, if the members of the colony wish to make their voting
reputation weighted, or some combination of reputation and token-weighted.

Finally, to claim rewards, a user needs to have _both reputation and tokens_
\- this means that tokens themselves don't immediately entitle one to rewards;
only those who actually contribute meaningful work to the colony (as evidenced
by their reputation score) are entitled to proportional rewards.

------
popcorncowboy
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
> 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?

~~~
popcorncowboy
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.

~~~
digikata
I think it's good to press hard on how newly proposed code-as-law systems
work, but at the same time, how are gaps between code-as-law larger or
different from say an executive that skims money out of a company,
transferring it to other bank accounts. The banking system isn't enforcing any
legal contracts in that transaction, and if the malfeasance is discovered then
some legal recovery action would order or capture assets to be transferred
back. Couldn't a court of law order assets be transferred to a wronged party
in a code-as-law system?

Edit: I do think a good "control test" of many of the code-as-law systems is
to compare against cases about how it would be different than a ledger managed
by a person & the existing legal framework around it, and then a centralized
database with security around certain operations.

------
alain94040
I built something similar 10 years ago (pre-Ethereum obviously). Launched at
TechCrunch on stage. Execution wasn't that great and it died, but the main
problem was that everyone thinks their ideas are awesome, and no one wants to
do the actual work for a handful of tokens. We'll see if history repeats
itself here.

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

------
katelynsills
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.

~~~
octaveguin
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
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."

------
conatus
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/)

~~~
d15b0ff178b085c
This sounds _very_ similar to how Colony is envisioned to work on-chain.

The whitepaper outlines the system of Domains, which seem to be the same as
your 'circles' as you describe them. You can read a TL;DR here, which also has
a link to the full whitepaper: [https://colony.readme.io/v1.0/docs/off-
whitepaper](https://colony.readme.io/v1.0/docs/off-whitepaper)

I think there may well be 'off grid' (or in Colony's case 'off-chain')
challenges to running an organization exclusively with Colony.

> 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.

One thing that comes to mind as a response is Colony's reputation system
mechanics: Reputation decays over time. So, to help disincentivise a
'reputation aristocracy' within an organization, reputations scores will halve
over the course of about 3 months, which means no-one can just rest on their
laurels and hold influence in a colony without regularly contributing to that
colony's goals.

As others have commented, the other main distinction would be that a colony
can put bounties up in native tokens, which confers influence in some types of
voting (other types can be exclusively reputation-weighted), as well as
dividends from the colony's revenue. Each colony can tweak their token's total
supply, issuance rate and initial distribution to achieve the desired
incentive model for what they need/desire.

~~~
conatus
Thanks for this - very interesting.

Also very interesting on the degrading reputation - glad you/they have thought
about these issues a bit.

I'll add though I do think my concern of a quantitive fix to a qualitative
and/or cultural problem still stands but will take a more informed view once
I've looked at the white paper in detail.

Cheers.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
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
Why?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
>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
I think making it open source would be better in the long term, but I'd
personally use it either way if it works.

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

 _> You choose what you work on. It doesn’t matter where you live, or who you
know-only how good you are._

But from the linked whitepaper:

 _> The smallest structural unit in a colony is the ‘task’. A task represents
a unit of work requiring no further subdivision or delegation. A task has
three roles associated with it: A manager [...] A worker [...] An evaluator
[...] The manager (usually the creator of the task) is responsible for
selecting the evaluator and worker_

So it looks like it does indeed still matter who you know. To create a task
requires the token as collateral, so if you're not on good terms with anyone
who possesses tokens, then you're outta luck. I'm not even saying that the
aforementioned is a bad thing, but it seems like exaggeration to claim that
this solves the problem of favoritism, nepotism, and cliquishness in human
organizations.

Crucial question: is this project itself governed as a colony?

~~~
mighty_bander
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.

------
joeyspn
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.

------
danpalmer
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
> 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
> 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.

------
lozenge
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
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
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.

------
octaveguin
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.

------
flotillo
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
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.

------
andy_ppp
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
this sounds a lot like my local government

------
quadcore
> 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
Looks like you earn tokens by doing work, and each token is a vote?

------
haffi112
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
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)

------
afpx
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?

~~~
elena_di
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-...](https://blog.colony.io/token-weighted-voting-
implementation-part-1-72f836b5423b) and have opened more than just code, e.g.
our employee equity plan [https://blog.colony.io/on-creating-a-better-
employee-equity-...](https://blog.colony.io/on-creating-a-better-employee-
equity-plan-d89bcab4a4e2), the legal reasoning behind a token sale etc.

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

~~~
collinvine
We run something called a "collaboration network" that is using our early beta
product. The product isn't feature complete yet, just task management with a
token incentive model. So we're doing early experiments but can't quite pull
of more complex ones—yet.

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

I am thrown a bit, though, by this concept:

 _Rather than centralised ownership and hierarchical management, smart
contracts distribute ownership according to the value each individual
contributes, and influence emerges from the bottom up through systematic peer
review of contributed work._

Systematic peer reviewal...

Further into whitepaper:

 _Reputation losses can arise from a user being found responsible for a badly
executed task, or being involved in the dispute process and the dispute being
resolved against them. In addition, all reputation earned by users is exposed
to a continual decay over time._

Meritocracy is an interesting concept. It's supposed to represent a system of
advancement based on individual ability. It might work in a pre-existing
system: earn points within this domain wherein the outcomes are known and
points are awarded based on their complexities. Tetris leaderboards are
meritocratic.

Will this approach ever work with conceptual knowledge? There is still a
subjective hierarchy of trust and non-binary interpretation; given how much
one would need to have their ego in-check to perform evaluations in a merit-
based way, that's where I see the concept start to shake at the knees.

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

> Rather than centralised ownership and hierarchical management, smart
> contracts distribute ownership according to the value each individual
> contributes, and influence.

So it's like Asana with a reputation system?

~~~
AgentME
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.

------
lowglow
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.

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

~~~
lowglow
Yeah sure. I'll email you.

------
chaz6
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
Perhaps open source projects might use it as their governance model?

------
nate_martin
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.

------
dreit1
How does Colony differentiate itself from Aragon?

~~~
elena_di
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
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
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.

------
dyeje
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?

------
groceryheist
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.

------
marssaxman
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.

------
meriton
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.

------
Egidius
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.

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

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

~~~
fab13n
I thought of ants and bees.

In a pro-decentralisation context, the interpretation you're referring to--
which is the pinnacle of centralisation forced through violence for selfish
goals--is so obviously irrelevant, that it didn't even come to mind.

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

That this wasn't brought up during the naming process paints a pretty clear
picture of the team's demographic makeup.

Edit: Yep.
[https://blog.colony.io/colony-q3-update-9daa57d0918c](https://blog.colony.io/colony-q3-update-9daa57d0918c)

~~~
Chris2048
Perhaps it was brought up, and not deemed relevant?

"come[s] to mind" != "triggered"

Suggesting a team should alter its "demographic" ("diversity" hiring) for the
sake of such a weak association is extreme.

~~~
cvsh
Hm, making the name of a brand you intend to market worldwide something deeply
offensive to a huge swath of the world is a pretty poor decision.

I'm not saying their hiring "should" be altered, but I do think were it more
inclusive, this would have never flown. Maybe that speaks to the value a
diverse team brings to an organization.

~~~
Chris2048
I'm not convinced it is "deeply offensive to a huge swath of the world". Or
that a diverse team would bring more value.

------
joelthelion
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
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.

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

~~~
stefano
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
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)

------
twoquestions
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!

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

~~~
thiagodelgado
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)

------
sixten
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
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?

------
zitterbewegung
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.

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

------
Aeolun
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?

------
NicoJuicy
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
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

------
earlybike
How does it compare to Holocracy?

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

------
adgasf
Where's the source-code?

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

------
AndrewKemendo
You lost me at token.

------
foobarbecue
Historically oblivious choice of name.

~~~
elena_di
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)

