Building and nurturing a decentralized organization like ConsenSys isn’t easy. As a collective organism aiming to stay decentralized and self-directed, ConsenSys Mesh members are constantly working towards achieving a balanced blend of collaboration, communication, and facilitation.

As a 900+ person formation spread across six continents, organizing and incentivizing collaboration between us all can be a tricky task, and we are always looking to ideate, create, and test solutions within the company that can help us tap into one another’s ideas and projects and truly cross-pollinate.

On Decentralization

In his post about “How to Build a Decentralized Organization,” ConsenSys Design Chief Jose Caballer shows us that a decentralized world has been on people’s minds for a long time. In his 1982 New York Times Best Seller, “Megatrends”, futurist John Naisbitt’s made a case for the world moving from “centralization to decentralization.” His book sold 14 million copies. Open source software like Linux and peer-to-peer platforms like Napster and BitTorrent have been good examples of decentralization in software. Now, blockchain companies are pushing decentralization front and center in how industries, organizations, and teams work.

On Incentivization

In order to develop a decentralized world, however, we must use engagement as fuel. Organizations, communities, teams, gatherings — they are all made up of people who need to be engaged, stimulated, incentivized.

Because ConsenSys is a remote-first, decentralized mesh of people and projects, we created a simple internal marketplace that incentivized far-flung individuals and teams to get different tasks completed. The tool we used? The ever flexible and powerful bounty.

Bounties Network community member, Sean O’Connor

The tasks could be anything from a developer tutorial to writing a Medium article to planting a tree. The incentive? An internal token, created specifically for this project, with no monetary value attached to it.

The process was very simple:

Someone posts a bounty on the Bounties Network for a task they’d like to complete and stakes a certain amount of tokens for that bounty to get completed. Someone else finds this task on the network and completes it. The person who completes the task gets paid the bounty.

The main aim was to help pioneer a unique incentives ecosystem designed to bring ConsenSys one step closer toward a genuine meshocracy. Getting tasks completed by others within the organization was key in reshaping how we further projects, boost community engagement, and even achieve positive social impact.

Meshocracy is a take on holacracy, a method of decentralized management and organizational governance in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy.

A Tree Grows in Washington

We saw many different tasks get posted throughout the project: getting surveys fulfilled, writing up definitions for blockchain for non-technical audiences, donating books, feedback on dApps being built, hosting online info-sessions about different projects for students, logo designs, sharing writing lessons during weekly writing calls, and many more.

One of the most unexpected and impactful bounties was this:

Plant a Tree

Description: Plant a tree anywhere.

Plant a tree anywhere. Definition of Done: Tree is planted, watered, and in a nice area that will help it survive.

Tree is planted, watered, and in a nice area that will help it survive. Requirements: A correct submission will have a picture with the person planting a tree.

And now check out the submission!

The bounty was created by Luis Soarez, a Full Stack / Blockchain Developer at Token Foundry, who lives and works in Brazil. The bounty was fulfilled by Constantin Kostenko, a Solutions Architect, who lives and works in Washington, D.C.

“ I attended a hackathon last year, called Hack4Climate, focused on tackling climate change. The first thing the organizer asked the audience was who had ever planted a tree. Guess how many hands went up? Less than 10. So many people complain about climate change yet do nothing about it. I am now always looking to challenge and incentivize people to help the environment through the simple act of planting a tree. Individual action matters! — Luis Soarez

Bounties as a method of reward date back to at least the Qin dynasty in 200 BC, and have proven their merit as a tool to motivate and incentivize people. By using bounties to reengineer how individual and collective incentivization work, a decentralized world becomes that much more tangible. They’re a simple, yet very effective, framework that could fuel global involvement and collaboration.

Change the Incentives, Change the World

“What we are talking about here has more to do with reforming underlying patterns of behavior, and especially the incentives, monetary, social, and otherwise, that drive how we interact.” –Vitalik Buterin

As Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote last year, “Change the Incentives, Change the World.” Global accessibility, lower barriers to entry, and censorship-resistance are all promises of the blockchain and of the applications and platforms we are building. Perhaps the critical ingredient to turbocharge a decentralized planet is an incentive mechanism and network — global, borderless, censorship-resistant — that can motivate people to create and sponsor important projects and also surface and activate talented people who are ready to fulfill. Bounties Network is shaping up as the infrastructure for that worldwide forum and freelance economy. We look forward to working with communities far and wide to realize this project at scale.

Sign up to get notified of new projects we’re creating, join the Bounties Slack community to become part of our hive and start your own world changing initiatives. My thanks to everyone who took part in this project!

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community withConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.