The Commons Stack: rewarding altruistic behaviours to bootstrap purposeful ecosystem platforms
This is the first post written on Stories of Platform Design that is part of a new series called “B-Sides”. Launched as an experiment part of the upcoming Whitepaper, B-Sides gathers contributions from members of our community in order to explore ideas emerging within and at the edges of the Boundaryless ecosystem. The concept? Think of B-Sides Stories as a metaphor for the backside of a vinyl record where all the good, unexploited stuff is hidden.
In this post, the author Renzo d’Andrea — an active Whitepaper community contributor since the start — explores the key insights emerging from the case study interview carried out with Commons Stack as part of the Whitepaper research.
Enjoy reading! If you want to know more and provide with with further ideas on how to develop the B Sides project, go here: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/B-Sides-ideas-survey.
As we experience how the values’ disruption keeps roaring at global and local levels, the individual and collective awareness grapple with its turning point. The needle of organisational evolution seems to be moving towards a decentralized and co-operative footprint. The impact of organizations and their architectures — from institutions to corporate, startups — are facing deep questions. To capture these ongoing cultural and organizational transformations, the Platform Design Toolkit team has been working to embed a systemic approach into the platform strategies and organizational development context. Their upcoming Whitepaper is a fascinating sense-making project where collective intelligence boosts a co-creation process. As we share the same purpose towards ecosystemic organisations and platforms design, as a Whitepaper contributor, I analysed the impact of the Commons Stack project as a contribution towards our common cause.
With Jeff Emmett, we explored in a semi-structured interview how Commons Stack embraces the systemic challenge to propel feasible scenarios for the commons economy. From governance to marketplace dynamics and community value creation, we cover topics that link the guiding question in our conversation with the Commons Stack: how to navigate the technological education and cultural transition towards the commons ecosystem?
Three Key Insights
- Commons Stack offers a set of tools that enable a collaborative paradigm towards a more egalitarian and democratic structure, enabling an ecosystem of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) to take shape thanks to open source templates and processes that are continuously refined. The Trusted Seeds is an example of how experts who share a common purpose help to steward a systemic shift towards self-governance.
- Re-orienteering entrepreneurship and extending design to economic systems: economic systems designed based on crypto innovation and token engineering principles will help to align incentives towards a purpose-driven economy that preserves public goods and our commons.
- Radical democratisation: technology enables new capability to design financial instruments, complex systems of interaction and monetary policies that aim to maximise welfare from the point of view of communities and autonomous players in an ecosystem. It empowers decentralised fit-for-purpose solutions rather than placing power in almighty central institutions.
Democratising the design of DAOs by growing commons and nurturing the ecosystem
Networks and communities evolve their needs and desires within platform strategies, while the pace of the technological shift in platform design becomes prominent. An emerging context is one of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) that shed light on the demand for an ecosystemic shift. To bring this forward, modular tools are necessary to embed collective infrastructures and enable collective governance, funding and voting mechanisms. Governance — it can be related to norms, rules, actions — guides how communities regulate their decision-making processes internally and with stakeholders. Tokenized networks based on blockchains can disrupt traditional governance structures and propose a new form of how society organises itself through transparency and coordination by incentivising the network actors.
The Commons Stack’s value proposition has been focussing on creating an open-source library that could enhance the DAOs ecosystem, based on token engineering design, to boost purpose-driven economies. By re-aligning incentives for commons goods, the Commons Stack open-source library offers useful components to test real-world scenarios, facilitating funding stream and transparent decision-making.
As Jeff Emmett walked us through the current landscapes of protocol tools, Commons Stack applies the token engineering principles to facilitate the use of replicable components such as the augmented bonding curve and conviction voting to set up governance mechanisms, or proposal engines. The ecosystem of DAOs can benefit from these components and scale up by serving the needs for commons and its communities.
The Commons Stack tools turn the complexity of the engineering design process into enablers of commons and instil a more egalitarian DNA in the ecosystem.
Each community might have different needs and goals to solve. Governance and funding contexts are real scenarios to test accordingly. As an example, a Community Funding Clubs that might want to benefit from a bonding curve for funding goals, differently from an engineers group that seeks a governance mechanism, this implies a conviction voting mechanism. The latter is a decision-making process where voters are incentivised to value conviction and flexibility (Read more here). Therefore, parameters can be also designed such as a time window within which to vote according to the funds' availability or to decide the length of the proposal. The bonding curve is another tool to experiment and set conditions to design economic systems. A practical example of its deployment occurred in the Community currency initiative. Red Cross teamed up with Grassroot Economics to solve the challenge of hard cash in areas across Kenya and Ethiopia.
The early adopters of the Commons Stack toolkit that shape their ecosystem are mainly in the crypto space. Examples are Moloch and Metacartel. They offer funding programs with a donation system. The bonding curve simulation tool aligns incentives and boost altruistic behaviours.
It also evolves through the Trusted Seeds that is a call to join a growing collective intelligence made up of experts that steward the evolution of Commons Stack itself. As a lighthouse, the Trusted Seeds sheds light in the DAO ecosystem through its transparent spine of human expertise. It creates the breathing governance that supports new commons development and their economies along with token engineering tools implementation. At the core of this cultural build component, the Trusted Seeds acts as a bedrock to face the burning questions of the Commons' existence aligned with public goods.
As the Open library keeps progressing, with an iterative design strategy, we explored with Jeff how value creation is propelled by a discovery process with simulation tools.
Communities, at the moment mostly from the crypto space, are experimenting with how templates of the bonding curve, conviction voting might fit together for a collective purpose. One upcoming tool to test complex design systems is the Commons Simulator game. An open-source community project supported by artists and community developers, in which players will be able to test economic scenarios with cadCAD simulator whilst storytelling and gamification elements will shape the flow of the learnings.
Rewarding altruistic behaviours
The Commons Stack value creation is rooted in rewarding altruistic behaviours. One example is Giveth, one of the most active communities in their ecosystem. It is a platform on Ethereum for efficient charitable donation and decentralised governance for nonprofits, a ‘’Decentralized Altruistic Community’’ — as Jasmsheed Shorish describes it. This evokes the current — hopefully — convergence of organizations, at all levels, translating their profit and resources towards systemic actions, like environmental sustainability. Equally to re-align the incentives means to direct resources towards public goods. There are challenges with navigating this vision at the edge of healthy market mechanisms, such as how to balance out free-market capabilities and the financialization of commons-based tools. Nevertheless, the real need is a safe experimental space where communities improve their tangible learning to drive forward a healthier society. In one of the latest research updates published by the Boundaryless team for the Whitepaper, Simone Cicero showcased how organisational platforms will increasingly embed a healthier collective impact starting from local communities. As the engineering discipline matures, a harmonic framework becomes available with the Commons Stack library.
We also covered how communities are also evolving through technology to combine trust, resilience and collaboration. One of the main implications is interoperability, Jeff confirmed this as one of the findings of the Commons Stack research, in the context of how communities locally and globally try to co-create sustainable value. Although the technology lives still in its infancy, token economies can trigger different systemic behaviours through incentives, for example, with reputation, access to savings and spending.
With tokens, the interoperability challenge is addressed by modelling and simulation with an engineering rigour design in the Commons Stack toolkit. This will remove the shadows and give horizons in systems to minimise the failure by design.
A new entrepreneurial leap: wealth creation beyond states and corporations
In the conversation, Simone offered a fascinating angle of how the organizational models might need to re-learn how to connect local landscapes and generate a shorter resilient supply chain. This implies, especially for corporates, to deal with different forms of risk aversion and new constituents to design, for example, new regional interoperable systems. Commons Stack in this sense wants to address the Civic sector as the first compass to connect communities. The minimum viable commons in this scenario would be a household. Jeff’s biomimetic analogy brings us to view small communities coordinating and interoperating between them. These cells and their life could expand at the regional level, national and global levels. By providing the open library toolkit to set up governance or resource flows in the Civic ecosystem, the collaboration to create distributed wealth will happen independently from corporations and institutions. The interoperability features could facilitate monetary policy and financial asset design with a token engineering framework.
The magnitude of cultural change and entrepreneurial leap needed is subjected to the progressing maturity of the evolving technological framework. The traditional capitalist organisations are unavoidably going to retool themselves to navigate innovation towards altruism rather than individual profit. As an organic extension, entrepreneurship will demand multiple entrepreneurs focusing on public goods challenges, collaborating to support a systemic change. The current business models, where the product & market-fit type of innovation-led tool might not be able to sustain this scope of ways of working.
The design of a postindustrial organisation needs an interoperable system that could untangle the complexity of, for example, food distribution system or retail chain. The crypto-economics innovations trigger a novel spectrum of entrepreneurialism, and Commons Stack toolkit serves the purpose to test the design of large systems to re-align incentives for public goods.
Developing tools to bootstrap purposeful ecosystem platforms
As Jeff explained, the Platform Design Toolkit has helped Commons Stack to familiarise with ecosystem design, to map the Commons Stack activities with users, incentives, interactions and behaviours.The systemic view supported the application of cadCad modeling. In a more rigorous engineering framework, the governance flow can be tested with different parameters to reduce entry barriers.
Purposeful platforms engineered by tokens economies must consider vertical issues to open new economies. For example, stability of value and usability imply connecting economies to translate values from tokens to fiat. One bottleneck to solve would be the token trading through the inefficiency of centralized exchanges. We need to keep co-creating and opening learning flux to bootstrap purposeful ecosystem platforms. The Platform Design Toolkit, along with its Whitepaper community collective intelligence, aims at raising awareness of actionable ecosystemic thinking.
The Commons Stack and this action research show an outcome in which we are all involved: the direction to spur human potential to redesign collaboration for purposeful economies.
We see the need to explore unseen paths, as Commons Stacks facilitates the potential of democratizing the design of financial instruments and monetary policies. The DAOs ecosystem is the upcoming web of the new economies with innovative layers of entrepreneurship (technical education, collaboration based on collective intelligence) and interoperability challenges.
In a nutshell, DAOs platforms offer an automated and distributed trust represented by a code-based, unbiased and distributed entity that manages proposals through governance and payment systems. The potential is to humanise DAOs, and make more accessible the need to face the tricky maze of human interactions and solve cultural and structural challenges within the DAOs’ human design.
We’re really grateful for the rich insights and frontiers of social innovation offered by Jeff Emmett and Commons Stack! If you want to explore this further, you can actively experience the Commons Stack collaborative opportunities on Telegram and their website.
Read more about my work on my website and connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.
What’s next?
On 23 July, the Platform Design Toolkit team is gearing up for another exciting online event to share and engage innovators and organizations in the quest towards the Future of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking.
The event will display the research findings we have been collective working on as Whitepaper community contributors since March 2020, when the first community sense-making call was organised.
Sign up to reserve your spot: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/event-july23
In one of the breakout room sessions, with David Kish and Danielle Stanko, I will be facilitating and engaging with DAOs and its impact in organizational models. For more information, sign up to the event and check the event page for updates on the programme!
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