OrgTech Review #15

Colony mainnet launch, OpenLaw legal wrapper repository, new Autark roadmap, and more!

Previously on OrgTech Review

Most clicked: Aragon, DAOstack, Colony, Moloch [a comparison], Memorandum of Understanding between dOrg, LLC and Open, Esq LCC, Wetonomy embraces the DAT paradigm.

Project News

Aragon

• Autark Flock Proposal for Aragon Network Vote #3. Autark is rebranding That Planning Suite to Open Enterprise, to reflect its evolution into a suite of apps for the general coordination of organisations. They're targeting a soft-launch to mainnet during Q4 2019 and aim to expand the functionality of the existing suite (e.g. add support for bounties that aren't connected to GitHub issues and for reviewers to get a percentage of the bounty), to enable new governance mechanisms (e.g. new voting patterns, dispute resolution, and vetoing), and to work on various initiatives that will support the Aragon ecosystem. Lots more details in the linked proposal.

• The Founding Episode - In Flight by Aragon One Podcast. Aragon co-founders Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo introduce their new podcast and discuss the evolution of crypto since 2017, IEOs, blockchain fundraising, and decentralised infrastructure.

• Aragon Black Blog: A blockchain for Bookchin. A follow up to last week's "A History of Decentralization" post, this essay explores Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism" philosophy in relation to blockchain technology.

Colony

• Glider has launched. Colony's mainnet was soft-launched 2 weeks ago and is now ready to go public. This first release brings reputation, the ability to use any ERC-20 as your colony's native token, task management and payments within single-level domains, role-based permissions, and the ability to distribute rewards according to reputation earned. Check out the contract here and the release notes. The dApp is not live yet, but developers can start interacting and building with the Colony Network (e.g. to integrate Colony with the dxDAO).

ditCraft

• ditCraft released updated ditExplorer with UI improvements. Previously, ditCraft announced dit v0.2 with support for deploying smart contracts on POA Network's xDAI network and an integrated Twitter bot for (Twitter-)KYC. ditExplorer is a graphical interface to dit, a decentralised Git which uses staking with reputation-based "knowledge tokens" (KNW) to coordinate and vote on merge requests.

Edgeware

• Milestone: Lockdrop passes 2,000,000 ETH. With 865,000 ETH locked and 1,135,179 ETH signalled (as of June 20), this is the biggest lockdrop to date (stats here).

Open ESQ

• The operating agreements of dOrg, LLC and Open, ESQ LLC were published on Open Law. Both agreements, as well as their Memorandum of Understanding (reported last week), were written with the legal support of Open ESQ. With their assistance in forming the recently launched PoolTogether LLC-DAO, it looks like Open ESQ are building up the experience to be the lawyers of choice for new DAOs.

OpenLaw

• The Era of Legally Compliant DAOs. OpenLaw has built upon the earlier work of Open ESQ and dOrg, with the launch of the OpenLaw DAO, a free legal repository for people to easily deploy Limited Liability Wrappers for their DAOs. These wrappers will prevent DAOs from being defined by default as general partnerships, which would result in joint and several liability for all members. This dramatically expands the use cases of DAOs, empowering them to take on more traditional contractual relationships and manage physical assets.

Brain Food

• Dynamic Governance: Where Cybernetics Meets Sociology. Dynamic governance, or sociocracy, is a management approach where decisions are made with consent where nobody objects, as opposed to consensus where everybody agrees. Teams ('circles') are interlinked through individuals who belong to two or more circles across all hierarchical levels. As a consequence, dynamic governance can help organisations to move forward with decisions quickly while also make use of knowledge throughout the organisation.

• Introducing Gauntlet. Designing cryptoeconomic systems is a complex endeavour as their decentralised governance often involves lengthy update processes and their decentralised architecture may be subject to lucrative attack vectors. Gauntlet is building a simulation platform to run agent-based modelling which "leverages battle tested techniques from other industries to emulate interactions in crypto networks". By modelling the choices of individuals, the tool could map emergent patterns and ultimately contribute towards more secure and effective incentive designs and governance mechanisms.

• Risk-adjusted token bonding curves. Most token bonding curves follow a fixed pricing function of token supply and demand. Due to external factors and information asymmetries, such bonding curves can be subject to market failures. The ixo Foundation proposes an adaptive impact financing mechanism, with an alpha coefficient as a modifier on the bonding curve. As a result, the adjusted price accounts for risk information. For instance, in the case of impact investing, the price of such a bonding curve would reflect the chance of reaching an impact milestone. Open questions include how the risk factor can be deterministically calculated.

Beyond OrgTech

• A dose of democracy in corporate governance may help save social media. Social media businesses thrive by fine-tuning algorithms to optimise their platforms for user's attention and engagement. Yet, scandals such as Cambridge Analytica raised awareness of the political power that is influenced by these platforms' business decisions. In this political backlash, social media may benefit from involving users directly in the governance of their platform's rules. When legitimising output is not only costly but also politically controversial, a more reasonable approach would be to legitimise inputs by co-creating the rules of a social media platform with the user.

• Blockchain and Public Companies: A Revolution in Share Ownership Transparency, Proxy-Voting and Corporate Governance?. Traditionally, shareholders of publicly listed companies were registered personally, yet today's systems are optimised for transaction throughput which resulted in the creation of new intermediaries. Non-transparent and highly complex ownership structures inhibit corporate governance to reach and engage the large and fluctuating amount of shareholders. While the complexity is currently mitigated by proxy-voting mechanisms, transparency remains low. Along with digital identities and progressive regulation, blockchain could increase such share ownership transparency and provide the basis for a "shareholder democracy".

Events

• 27-28 June - OPEN 2019: Decentralised Collaboration (London)

• 28 June - DAO Crash Test #3, Aragon Edition (Online)

• 28 June - DGOV London Community Meetup (London)

• 1 July - Building an Unstoppable Organization with Aragon (San Francisco)

• 19-21 August - Web3 Summit (Berlin)

• 20 August - DAOfest (Berlin)