Colony

Transcript

[Music] cool hello everybody I'm presenting colony colony is a platform for decentralized autonomous organizations the goal of it is to make it really easy for people to start organizing ations together online all over the world um so the problem that we're solving is that lots of people would like to be involved in projects but the trouble is that opportunity is pretty centralized in just a few places but actually Talent is really really distributed so it's quite difficult for a lot of people to get involved with

things other than open source projects um and secondly it's also very difficult to manage a distributed Workforce um we're seeing more and more people becoming freelance uh it's reckoned I think by Forbes that by 2020 as much as 50% of the US Workforce will be uh freelance whilst at the same time more companies than ever are growing so I feel that there'll either be a huge growth in project management as a role or software is going to need to mediate those relationships and that's essentially what colony does so our solution is a platform that enables people to contribute to projects that they find exciting and yeah essentially

what if you could contribute to your your your time to projects and earn ownership of those projects just like you would if you're an angel investor investing money so Colony makes it possible to have efficient decentralized organizations by removing the need for hierarchical management and we think that what this is going to mean is that it will be able to exist as a sort of aggregation platform that enables people to do all sorts of kinds of projects online so so the way that works is that rather than it being managers who set tasks and assess work and divide labor the system helps people do that by

aggregating the collective intelligence of of lots of people who know about very specific skills as though they were sort of a single super intelligent manager um so this comes in uh a few stages to begin with users contribute by uh cont suggesting ideas that they think should happen within their organization uh making decisions about other people's suggestions doing pieces of work and providing feedback um and what the the system is doing while people are doing that is essentially assessing what they are what they are up to so for every interaction that you make the system scores you against other people it Compares you with the uh the um reputation ations of

everybody else who's interacting with that system and contribut contributions are weighted according to the value that they've added and necta which is a sort of token which indicates ownership sort of like Equity um is distributed proportionate to the value that everybody's contributed so we see it as being um uh a layer that enables collaboration and as such we don't want to do everything so it will be will be able to integrate it with all the kind of softwares that you know and love so far we've already done GitHub and I'll get into that when I do a demo um and there'll also be an API so you can use it for whatever you wish there'll be two different models

they can kind of like GitHub uh the community version is free open source uh anybody can contribute to it well anybody can contribute that's been invited to join the colony and it's open competition uh there'll also be a paid version which is more for traditional organizations that want to become more self-organizing um and become more efficient accordingly uh right I'll do the demo there here we go so uh this looks a bit odd but cool um is that going to help that's a bit better okay so I'll

just guide you through the the uh through the interface so at the very top you've got the the dude's Avatar so if we click on that it's going to open his profile pretty standard really but the important thing here is that you can add tags add your skills and interest so that's really the most important thing that you do when you first start the platform you add whatever things you might be skilled at in as granular detail as possible because that is how you get stuff gets rooted to you within your Colony so so this guy some kind of designer um so the colors that go around the person's face indicate the kind of

things that they do on the platform and in what proportions so it's making suggestions about things that think should happen making decisions giving people feedback doing comments and so on and actually doing pieces of work and then you've got this level which is their it's indicative in a single figure of their overall competence so that level increases over time based on the amount of stuff that they've done and how good they are at doing it so to begin with it's purely quantitative it's just about how much stuff they've done but then over time it becomes actually about how skilled they are so if we go back to this profile next to their skills we've got all these numbers and these uh these are their skill profile for that specific

thing um so as you get to higher levels it's about like I are you in the top 10th 10th percentile for a skill are you in the top fifth percentile for 10 skills and the higher the level becomes the more difficult it becomes to get there obviously so beneath the profile we've got um we've got the tokens so there's two tokens within Colony you've got pollen which is essentially like a fuel it's used or or a currency is used to pay for everything you do so if you make a suggestion it cost you some pollen if you make a decision it costs pollen tagging things cost pollen commenting pretty much everything you do cost you pollen and the reason why you want to use that pollen is if you've done something good like you've made a

suggestion that was accepted then not only you're going to get your pollen back so you can do something else with it but also um you're going to earn some nectar and nectar is like ownership of the colony sort of like Equity although yeah um so every 10 minutes some nectar uh 50 nectar is created by the system of that 70% goes into this Colony Central reserve and that's used to pay people for doing sophisticated pieces of work that require human judgment to interpret the value of so think things like coding design legal drafting all those kinds of things the remaining 30% is distributed amongst everybody using the system in proportion to the value that they've

contributed by doing things like making suggestions making decisions tagging things uh giving people feedback and so on and that all happens completely automatically and algorithmically based based on the effort that they've put in over the proceeding 72 hours um so yeah this is this is the colony Central Reserve uh and that's sort of under everybody's control as I mentioned and then this is this is this dude's actual colonies that he's in uh so you can be in lots of colonies you can contribute to lots of different projects at the same time um and this indicates the amount of nectar he's got in each one and the little red flash is like he's got something to do

so if we go over into the top right hand corner we've got teams so teams is kind of an important concept and it's a bit of a misnomer because it's not actually the people that you work with it's just like your your friends the people that you trust and you want to bring into the colony um so when you join the colony you can invite up to six people that you trust and believe are going to add some value to the project um so everybody can do that so A colony can grow to be arbitrarily large but importantly your purview within the colony is limited to the two teams that you're part of the team that you were invited to and the team that you subsequently invited the reason for that is what the system is on the whole trying to do is to aggregate the

collective intelligence of many people as I mentioned and in order to do that you need to meet a few criteria which are principally decentralization so people are drawing on their own local knowledge um diversity so theyve come from a a variety of different experiences and Independence so they're not unduly biased or influenced by any particular persuasive people and so all of the functionality is kind of based around those principles um so what being in teams means is that you can you can sort of directly chat with these guys uh but you can't chat with people who aren't in team so you might have thousands of people but you've got basically another 12 people that you can speak to that

doesn't mean that's where the communication stops you can you communicate indirectly Stig merically with everybody else and then down here you've got your most recent activity so the stuff that you've got to do um so in the the middle is kind of where the magic happens uh this white box up at the top when you've got a suggestion that you think should happen click in here add your suggestion add some tags that uh uh pertain to the skills necessary to uh to have an opinion about this and then you just hit submit and that will get sent out to anybody who's got any one of those skills so here's a suggestion here's what it looks like um and you'll notice that you're being forced to make a judgment

based on the informational Merit of the suggestion alone you can't see who's made the suggestion so you can't be influenced by by that knowledge um you've got all the tags that people had applied you can up Vote or down vote them by clicking or double clicking um you can add some more tags if you don't feel that those sufficiently encapsulate the skills necessary to have an opinion about it perhaps bring some more diverse opinion in and then you simply make a decision so let's say we agree with this which we really should um you can then see what other people think you can see the comments that they've made you still can't see who's made them but you can up down and vote them do all that good rity stuff um and then you'd hit next and to get your next card and so what's going

on here is is obviously voting uh but it's not trying to get to consensus and it's not even trying to get to sort of perfect democracy actually is just trying to make an efficient and collectively intelligent decision in a timely fashion so what it's doing is sampling the statistical significance of the voting and once it gets to a point where it realizes if it were to continue polling people the outcome isn't going to change it calls the decision it either kills it off or it moves it on to the next stage so what you'd get in practice after this would probably be another suggestion or it could be anything but this is a potted demo so I've got a a step-by-step process of a single suggestion so I'm going to hit next and it's going give us the next stage which is to to specify exactly

what needs to be done to deliver that suggestion so we've got the suggestion that was made we've got the tags that were created and the comments that people had made and then you build the you build the specification out of three components epics tasks and commands so an epic as you probably know from agile is like a container for tasks um you use it to help structure things uh a task is a unit of work suitable for one person and then a command within colony is something that can be executed programmatically by the system and what that means for now is that it's integrated with GitHub and so if somebody creates a poll request rather than that going to a cordev or a a

manager rather that gets given to all of it's gets shown to all of the people who've got an opinion about that who've got those skills and they vote to decide whether it's going to get merged in or not so there's no manager at all um you build task much like a Google doc it's a realtime updating collaboratively editable document it tracks the additions deletions and Replacements that people have made to the text you vote on whether or not you think those uh replace those changes should be made uh apply a deadline which gets averaged from what a lots of people think and then you just vote on whether you think the state at which you're leaving the brief is uh is not quite ready yet or or it's good to go so let's say we think this is good to go it's

going to move us onto the next stage which is to decide actually who within your colony is going to do the task so the system comes up with a short list of potential candidates who could do the task by comparing their reputation profile with tag Cloud that was agreed collaboratively so you might say you look at each one of these guys profiles or perhaps you already know them you say okay well John Doe he's he's awesome be great if we could get him to do the task this is known as a weighted preference vote incidentally uh you say James is also so very good uh jedo is completely useless I don't know how he interfered his way in here um these guys are both kind of middling so um and then what the system does is average what a lots of

people think and offer it to the person who's collectively preferred essentially the one who's most expensive um if they accept the task then great if not then it gets offered to the person who's next in order of collective preference uh once they accept the the nectar the ownership the equity whatever you want to call it goes into uh an Esco contract um they submit the work for approval H if it's accepted then awesome it gets the the Nector gets sent to their private wallet if not then they iterate upon it with feedback from The Colony until the colony is satisfied and that's pretty much how it works it's it's like a big system of feedback loops um so if I just go back to the presentation where is

it you see yes so where are we now we're in we're in private Alpha um we are we've got a few people using it always looking for more so if you've got an idea you've got a project and a team to engage please get in touch we're currently a team of two who've built all this over the last year uh always looking for awesome people to join the team so if you're interested hit me up uh we're currently fundraising the may or may not be a crowd sale in the not too distant future um here the contact details join our like please uh more the Maria and thank you very much