Open Sourcing The Organization

Well, it’s high time we do something of this sort

If we trace the history of internet back to 1991, we, the general public got introduced to Internet, thanks to Open Source only. Many people say if Tim Berners Lee had chosen to patent the internet, he could have made billions off it. Apart from internet, there are a ton of great open source software which are used by masses, for example, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, PHP scripting language, Python programming language and several others.

But, somewhere in the previous we saw the Open Source Model fading away in importance. Companies like Microsoft, Oracle with their unlimited access to resources were building proprietary tools to serve their users and the cohort pursuing Open Source Software developed was pushed into the backseat. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that one of the main reasons for this was lack of monetary incentives for developers.

But, then in 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto came and launched Bitcoin with this post on P2P Foundation website and the whole dynamics of the industry changed. With the success of Bitcoin, developers realised that they could also create something of value to the world and monetise it by creating a token to supplement their innovation by forming a community. See this talk by Naval Ravikant :)

As Chris Dixon talks about this in his famous blog post, “Why Decentralisation Matters”,

“Early internet protocols were technical specifications created by working groups or non-profit organizations that relied on the alignment of interests in the internet community to gain adoption. This method worked well during the very early stages of the internet but since the early 1990s very few new protocols have gained widespread adoption. Cryptonetworks fix these problems by providing economics incentives to developers, maintainers, and other network participants in the form of tokens. They are also much more technically robust. For example, they are able to keep state and do arbitrary transformations on that state, something past protocols could never do.”

But, how do we enable creation of more such networks? Whenever they tell the tale of Bitcoin, they talk about the CyberPunks email list where the idea for a P2P currency first originated. But, like Satoshi, not all developers have access to such high profile email lists.

So, how do we really connect to people who share our mission of building something?

Over the years, we have seen a new working style emerge especially among Blockchain projects. Usually, a person or a group starts working on a project and along the way, they find like minded through the platforms like GitHub, Twitter, Reddit etc. to work on the platform. And, in the end, each individual is rewarded in Network tokens for their work.

For example, this is the way Decred, a governance focused Blockchain works. Anyone who is interested in working with the team can join them as a Contractor by showing the intent to contribute. We really appreciate the work Noah and his team are doing with this work model at Decred. Read more about it here.

This model has evolved greatly over the past few years with projects implementing various methods such as Smart Airdrops to incentivise users to come and work for the network. This type of model incentivises developers to come and work for the network and continue to add value to it.

One of the examples of this was recently seen in the way HandShake project distributed its tokens to the open source developers. 70% ownership of the HandShake project has been granted to open source developers a faucet.

As mentioned on the foundation website,

The free and open source community is the principal coin owner of the project upon launch. These coins are distributed without any expectation of work. As free and open source software is the principle of giving away code without any direct financial return in exchange, similarly Handshake is about giving away financial value without any expectation of code in exchange. If the community is interested and Handshake becomes viable in the future, it is possible (but without any obligation whatsoever, contractual or implied) for individuals to have incentive to integrate the functionality into their own software.

At Prism Labs, we believe that this Gifting Economy model implemented by The HandShake Project is something that will be adopted by many projects in the future. However, it remains to be seen how upcoming projects will approach this token distribution model to incentivise development of the network.

With these Contractor and Gifting Economy models, teams behind Blockchain projects have an opportunity to bring together top talent by properly incentivizing them to work in the right manner without any need of formalities like employee contracts. Similarly, contributors will also have the opportunity to contribute to more than one project at once maximising their impact in the Blockchain ecosystem.

Whatever the future holds for cryptocurrencies and Blockchain, but it’s surely the beginning of a new age work model for the distributed systems of the future.