Building understanding of Holochain & Holo’s progress

Leadership & Org Update 09

We know many of you are wondering about the state of the project. We see this in a lot of ways — questions like “When HoloPorts?” or “What does Art’s article mean?” and “When is Holo Closed Alpha or Open Alpha?”

As David shared on Telegram a few weeks back, we notice that as at the same time the internal team becomes increasingly excited about the progress being made, there are concerns across the community about our progress. So we are looking at how to bridge this gap in understanding and perspective.

We want to look at this in a few ways:

How we operate with agile processes, and hold a long-term perspective How we approach coordination How we communicate and how we make commitments How we build our business and How we encourage and enable personal agency within our community

First, we are oriented to operate in a rapid and agile way, simultaneously holding a long-term perspective. We have a huge mission for Holochain, Holo, and HoloFuel. Huge missions take time, though the world of crypto is seemingly all about the now.

Some look to the world of blockchain because they don’t like the ‘short-termism’ of being driven by quarterly profits and shareholder expectations. But there are a few examples of long-term thinking there as well. Bezos demonstrated this with Amazon in the 90s — to the distress of many of his investors.

Holochain is committed to a long view, but for a different purpose than simple profit extraction. We are out to create the maximum possible impact towards lasting patterns that reinforce distribution over centralisation, and we have accepted short-term pain because we believe it will make the project more successful.

An example of this is the Rust/Go trade-off that Art talked about in his recent post. In this case, we took a long-term perspective that hurt our ability to hit short-term timelines and added a certain complexity — but it is the better choice for the future of Holochain. We are grateful to our community for sharing that perspective.

The second is our approach to coordination. We believe in the future of distributed applications and we know that this requires new ways of working and coordinating with people. So we are wary of patterns with too much centralisation even within our own organisation. The world today has a particular lens, and tends to look for a single leader in an organisation; and when they don’t see something they are used to they expect us to put it in place.

This is not how we work — nor intend to work. For example, we currently have a four-person executive team, not just a CEO, and we each take on different responsibilities based on our strengths and experiences. Thus you hear from our visionaries, architects, and operating executives. It allows us to see from a much broader perspective and handle enormous complexity — and we believe this sets us up to deliver the future we imagine.

We recognise that this can make it hard for people to know what to listen for; because the signals that may be used to interpret other organisations don’t work as well in our case.

Communication

This leads us to the third point — our approach to communication and commitments. In 2018, we communicated dates far too aggressively. We were communicating with the voice of the visionary architect rather than the builder. We were slow to adjust and clarify our timelines. In 2019, we have the following communication patterns in place:

Delivery dates are only communicated through the Holo Leadership Medium Post and reinforced on AMAs with our community. We will communicate our best informed timelines whilst being transparent about any risks or unknowns. Progress is communicated through our regular comms — Holochain Dev Pulse or Holo Emerging Clouds.

SpaceX was delayed years from its original commitments, and now it powers much of the space industry. Elon Musk almost always stands at the forefront of ideas and puts a stake in the ground about when something will come to pass. Teams of builders stand with him, doing the hard work of making it so — and often they have been late — but they are still shaping the world. We are creating the next Internet. Art Brock, like Elon Musk, will continue to put a stake in the ground for rapid progress towards a huge goal. He will continue to envision, predict, and inspire us all in order to bring this project into fruition — maybe just not as quickly as he wishes.

We know that you want more certainty and clarity. As a company we are sharing the progress we are making often and in a granularity sourced from the people who are doing the work. Building something this big takes time.

We are not cloning Ethereum or building a dApp. We’ve built a protocol for distributed applications — and with Holo, we are building an infrastructure for a new Internet. This requires the unlimited networking of P2P hosts and a dynamic supply micro-transaction currency. This is new, and we are confronting challenges that nobody has faced before and working to solve them in ways that make it easy for an ecosystem to grow and succeed. We are not experiencing delays because we are doing the wrong things or due to a lack of cohesion or skills. These challenges and this progress is what it looks like when it’s working.