OrgTech Review #4
DAO Incubator launched, Edgeware whitepaper published, Moloch website live, and more!
Previously on OrgTech Review
Most clicked: DAOstack's Nathalia Scherer on self-organisation at scale, Autark's Yalda Mousavinia on Human-Work DAOs, P2P Models' Aragon-powered DAO Wiki.
Project News
Aragon
Bounties Network
Collaboration 2.0: The Future of Work is on the Blockchain. Blockchains solve many challenges of the current freelance economy, by enabling platform interoperability, cheaper fees, and creating permanent records of contracts, identity, and portfolio data.
DAO Incubator
Introducing DAO Incubator. From team/community members behind Aragon Black, DAOstack, DGov, dOrg, and Tribute, this "Do Tank" will conduct governance experiments, connect teams, and spawn DAOs.
DAOstack
Announcing PolkaDAO. Web3 Foundation is endowing this community DAO with $10,000 DAI, so that DOT holders can make decisions on funding proposals related to Polkadot.
Edgeware (by Commonwealth Labs)
Edgeware's whitepaper has been published. Edgeware aims to facilitate effective on-chain governance, with modules for Signaling, Identity, Democracy, Council, Treasury and, eventually, DAOs.
Gitcoin
Gitcoin Grants: $50k Open Source Fund. Round 2 of their Liberal Radicalism experiment, in which they match donations based on a formula that values many small contributions over a few big ones.
Moloch
Website now live with a proposal interface. $275k has been pledged so far to a fund that will support Ethereum sustainability. More updates here.
oscoin
Radicle alpha launched. From the team behind open source coin, this "peer-to-peer stack for code collaboration" is a Github-alternative that hosts your code on IPFS.
Brain Food
A tweetstorm from Ethereum core dev, Lane Rettig, concludes that "The DAO is Ethereum's first killer app."
Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt's founder, expects to see more startups integrating bounty mechanics into their models.
Beyond OrgTech
A Cooperative Manifesto: There is no more important social change work you can do than cooperative development, because fundamental change is needed to solve capitalism's failures, solving these failures is more important than convincing people the failures exist, and people need concrete (not theoretical) solutions they can rally around. True democracy does not exist if we spend our working lives in autocratic organisations, because this means we are more likely to submit to autocratic leaders elsewhere (e.g. in politics). Therefore, the worker cooperative is perhaps the most important modern experiment in the historical democratisation of society. Thanks to Daniel Kronovet (Colony) for the recommendation.
The First Signs of a Global Human Management Revolution: The challenges faced in the 19th century workplace gave birth to a bureaucratic management revolution. However, bureaucracy comes with its own set of challenges, and a humanistic management revolution is emerging to address them. This can be seen in trends towards networked structures, autonomy, and distributed decision-making, among others.
A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it's bad for you: Merit itself is the result of luck, because it depends largely on one's genetics and upbringing. Believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, discriminatory, and arrogant, ideologically translating inequality into superiority, ultimately leading to less sympathy for the unlucky.
Hierarchy Is Not the Problem... It's the Power Dynamics: "Structureless" organisations will always generate informal structures, which can be less fair than formally-defined structures like hierarchies. We should be focusing on the heart of the problem - creating healthy power dynamics in which everyone feels empowered, influence is transparent, and coercive power is minimised.
The Software That Shapes Workers' Lives: The software used to manage supply chains (e.g. SAP) is a black box that generates worker commands in the name of efficiency. "Small reductions in 'latency,' for instance, can magnify in consequence, reducing a worker’s time for eating her lunch, taking a breath, donning safety equipment, or seeing a loved one." Perhaps this software should include worker welfare measures in its algorithms.
Researchers Find Critical Backdoor in Swiss Online Voting System: Notable crypto researchers, Sarah Jamie Lewis, Olivier Pereira, and Vanessa Teague, discovered a cryptographic trapdoor in the Swiss Post's e-voting system, which would allow admins (Swiss Post) to alter voting outcomes undetectably while "proving" that no tampering took place. Read the paper here and Sarah's tweetstorm on the issue.
Why Naval Ravikant Thinks Remote Work Is The Future: AngelList’s founder believes that, eventually, all companies will employ remote workers, and the companies who do it most effectively will be those built from the ground up to be remote (e.g. crypto).
Events
21 March - bkDAO Workshop - self-funding neighborhoods (Bushwick Generator, New York)
22-24 March - RadicalxChange (Detroit)
25 March - Kleros - Dispute Revolution (Columbia University, New York)