Hives

People work together voluntarily for mutual benefit

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

Written by @kingflurkel and @matthewcarano

Humans are social creatures for evolutionary reasons at least. Because each person has a unique combination of genetics and experience, their skill sets vary. So it is then, that groups of people can leverage the combined abilities of all members to achieve more than any individual can on their own. For this reason it behooves us all to band together, to form communities, to contribute to and benefit from our pooled expertise and resources. This is the incentive framework that promotes social behavior.

Social behavior is peaceful and cooperative in nature, and exists this way because it is much more advantageous to expend our energy in peaceful pursuits than to take up arms against our neighbors. There is less risk to the security of our property and ourselves when we peacefully collaborate instead of using force to achieve our goals.

Peaceful collaboration

In Swarm City there are many ways for users to peacefully work together. One way is by trading goods and services over hashtags. To recap, a hashtag in Swarm City is a marketplace where people go to find each other, transact value, and gain reputation in the context of that market. Hashtags are created by users who wish to develop and maintain context specific markets. These maintainers ensure that their hashtag is an excellent place for commerce to occur, and in return they receive a small, fixed fee for every transaction that happens over their hashtag. For more information on hashtag function, creation, and maintenance, please read Hashtags Revisited.

Another way for users to work together is by forming a hive. In Swarm City hives are groups of people who provide the same general service and share the same general set of values. For example, a group of aligned rideshare drivers may form a hive, and that hive would provide services in one (or more than one) hashtag. Each driver would earn hive reputation (similar to earning hashtag reputation) for every ride they provide as a hive member, and would give a percentage of their earnings to the hive shared resource pool.

Drivers benefit from organizing this way because their hive reputation gives them influence over how the resource pool is spent. For instance, funds may be used to provide insurance for all hive drivers or for marketing campaigns, and the more reputation a driver has, the more say they will have over how the funds are allocated. Also, hives with good rep in a particular hashtag might receive preferential status in that hashtag, thus giving that hive’s drivers preferential status.

Many types of hives

That is just one example. Like minded devs could “hive” together to provide development services for hashtag owners looking to build a unique Storefront. Or couriers could align as a hive to provide delivery services for a buy/sell hashtag. There can be marketing hives and arbiter hives that provide their respective services to hashtag maintainers directly. In fact, a group of people that align themselves to create a market together is a hive that runs a hashtag. Hives can also be a group of people who make a large purchase together, so that all members of the hive would benefit from economies of scale. An example of this is a neighborhood forming a hive to purchase 1000 solar panels to power their neighborhood.

There are many ways to organize in Swarm City. When you think about it, Swarm City is a very flexible platform bound by an incentive structure that promotes good actors, so users have the freedom to act liberally within the confines of polite decorum.

Creating a hive

Any user in Swarm City may create a hive. In their profile, the user will see a list of hives they belong to. If the user has admin rights, an edit button will appear next to the name of the hive. To create a new hive, the user would select the “create new hive” button.

Next the app will explain the process of creating a hive.

The hive creator adds a hive name and description.

The hive creator will also choose a governance model. For example a dictatorship would give all admin rights to the hive creator, as well as sole control of the hive resource pool.

Voting and proposing rights are established here. Perhaps every hive member has an equal vote, or receives influence based on their hive rep.

Just like a hashtag, a hive is a smart contract. The hive creator chooses what percentage of SWT from each hive deal will get saved in the hive wallet. The hive governance model will determine who has influence over those funds.

Hive members with reputation may propose what to spend hive resources on. They may stake their own reputation on the proposal. With enough reputation, a hive member may fund a proposal on their own. They may also spend their reputation on trying to activate multiple proposals, or seek reputation help from their peers to activate their proposals.

This is a recap of the parameters set by the hive creator. If it looks good, continue forward.

Here is the hive summary screen. The hive creator may add a new member by clicking the plus sign on the bottom.

To add a member, the hive creator needs the shortcode of the user they would like to add.

Confirm the member add.

Hives are people who share culture, so joining a hive means aligning with that hive’s culture. Hive creators must be conscious of the types of personalities they want to attract, and know that each hive attribute they choose in the setup will affect the type of culture they achieve. Not only that, a hive’s hashtag reputation is the sum of all its member’s reputation in that hashtag. The only way for a hive to stand out in a hashtag is if its members do.

Using rideshare as an example, from an end user perspective, they can choose to only send out their ride request to a particular hive or hives they trust, or to everybody that provides services on a rideshare hashtag. If they are interested in learning more about a hive, they can choose it in the app, and read what the hive creator has written to describe it. Also, a hive could create a short video describing their culture and why choosing them would be beneficial to the end user.

To learn more about Swarm City, or participate in our community, please join us on Slack and say hello. You may also follow our development process on Github.