EthCC 2: Yalda Mousavinia

all right hi everyone my name is yalda and I'm part of autarky and we are part of the Aragon Network and the talk I'm giving today is seven principles of human work dows so I guess first we can start with what is a Dao and this is just not a Dao like a blockchain but more as an organization of humans it's usually one that operates based on rules which are encoded in smart contracts that you know are on top of a blockchain what is a cooperative a cooperative is an autonomous Association of persons that are united you know voluntarily over a common goal and you know they're they they are part of an organization that's jointly owned and democratically controlled our all dows cooperatives this is actually something that has been recently been discussed on Twitter lately is someone a Hugh Karp was like we should rename dows to digital cooperatives and then there was a response it's more like digital plutocracies so my answer is no all all dows are not cooperatives but what is a human work Dow a human work Dow is a cooperative organization that operates based on rules which are encoded in smart contracts that run on a blockchain so I think it's important to understand that you know a Dow is just like a corporation operates on a digital jurisdiction just like corporations of today there are many flavors of them so you also have many flavors of a Dow so the seven principles the Rochdale principles there are a set of set of ideals that were established for cooperatives in 1844 in England and through this presentation I'm going to show you the similarities between the ideals set forth in 1844 and how they're very similar to what's going on with cooperative dows today okay so the first principle is voluntary and open membership essentially cooperatives or voluntary organisations open to all persons that are able to use their services or contribute to the organization and accept the responsibilities of membership okay and then dows or human work down there they have permissionless membership usually in our open source world you create a pull request and then if you're you can start to collect tokens and these tokens that you're earning kind of like you build up your membership through through that and then um so for cooperatives it's a democratic member control so so it's one person one vote typically for cooperatives at least based on these principles and people in the co-operative it's not always flat you know you can use your voting power to also elect committees representatives that can have you no authority over specific types of decisions like financial planning but the the members still always have that control to you know elect new representatives etc okay so for a dows it's like more like for human work dows it's working member control there's that actually a part of like a recent tweet debate Anja Bly was like you know not all cooperatives are one-person one-vote and I was starting to search this more and I thought that they all were too but actually for agriculture cooperatives there is precedent for the voting to be based more on patronage and for cooperatives patronage is usually like your sweat equity how much time or resources you're putting into the co-operative and that translates to some of the DAO governance models today like you know the systems at colony is building where you're earning tokens for completing tasks and that's also similar to some apps that we'll be building into Eragon as part of the planning suite and so for a dhow a human work now it's self governed by its members they set the policies they decide how votes are weighted it's like the people that are contributing to the actual work of the Dow and and they can also define like if there is hierarchy in their Dow or not okay so for cooperatives a third principle is member economic participation so in cooperatives usually numbers contribute portably like they all contribute the same amount of capital and it's because of that equal contribution of capital that they have one person one vote and that the incentives are aligned and someone doesn't feel like they should have more voting power it's like this is a basic principle of cooperatives and if someone does put in more capital usually it is treated more like a debt or a loan not not because you put in more capital you're going to get more of a financial return because that also like starts to break the game theory of cooperatives but for dows and human work dows this is where you know you can start to evolve things a little bit because the problem with cooperatives is they are more difficult to bootstrap so if you're trying to kind of compete or exist in the tech world with other like more well-funded organizations you have to try to maybe think okay how how can we have this more like cooperative model and the you know 2019 but like maybe tweak a few things so you can you know bootstrap a human work down more more easily so that was just like a recent article actually about crypto networks and cooperatives and there's like that quote from Jesse Walden there but essentially due to this this limitation it's like what you can do with human work douses make them more multi stakeholder organizations where the members the working members can still have control but since you have a lot more freedom and room to experiment with governance models you can start to have people that you know will contribute financially and they can get like you know revenue in return or you can say okay the members are still the working members are still going to have like fifty percent of the voting power like one-person one-vote or based on patronage and then you can say the people that are financing or helping finance they can have like another aspect of voting power so it's not like you're completely controlled by your investors but you can start to come up with these negotiations to invent new models for how a human work Dow can evolve on the co-operative model so then the fourth principle is autonomy and independence this is I mean that's it's very similar to what a principal would be for human worked out as well but essentially cooperatives are autonomous self-help organizations are controlled by their members and if they enter into agreements with other organizations they always do so on terms that ensure democratic control of their members so like as I was saying before there really isn't that much room in cooperatives to upgrade to change your voting power but due to dowse you can you know you can have autonomy to upgrade your governance so as I was giving the example before is you know you can if you're an Aragon Dow you have like your permissions app you can start to define other stakeholders in the network and give them privileges to do you know to execute on specific like bylaws or actions all right I feel like I'm going through this really quick so then the the fifth principle is education training and information it's like yeah this is actually a cooperative principle cooperatives want to provide education and training for their members and they also because like the the purpose as far as like how a cooperative goes is you want to you want to train people so people can hold many different hats in the organization you know you don't cooperatives typically don't want these like central points of failure where one person or like a few people are holding on to a specific aspect of knowledge for how to for how to do that specific tasks so that's why you know training and education and making people like more multi-skilled is an important aspect of cooperatives and I think you can also see this in the open source community of which dows live of you know open knowledge and training by practice whether it's you know you put up tasks and github people do the work there you provide review to them like people are learning through more of us like apprenticeship program and it's actually much more open than cooperatives because cooperatives there they're not as like they're the like they're not all existing in this open source world where you're contributing to the tasks and earn earning but this is where human work Dow there is more room for people to you know it's like just grow the network beyond traditional structures because it's more open and then the sixth principle of the co-operative movement was a cooperation among cooperatives essentially it says you know cooperatives serve their members most effectively and they strengthen the co-operative movement by working together through like local national and international structures and we can start to see that in the DAO world as well especially if you all subscribe if all dows are part of the ethereum blockchain for example or if we just focus on one blockchain due to subscribing to that blockchain you are you're making your organization more flexible for cooperation with other organizations in the network because you're part of this new digital jurisdiction you're using code that subscribes to these same rules so by nature human work dows are built to built to cooperate with other dows and then I guess it's also like if you choose your Dowell platform like you go with Aragon or dau stack you're also more likely to cooperate with dows in that network as well it's like the way that those systems are built is they encourage the collaboration between the other dows so I think it will definitely be interesting to see the bridges between the different dowels like if there will be ones that that start to form or not but I think that that this is an also like a very interesting principle is how how similar this is to you know the principles of the past as well and then and then another the seventh principle essentially of a cooperative movement was cooperatives work for the sustainable development of their communities through policies approved by their members so it's concerned for a community I think we can say that it's probably a lot of people in the etherium community feel the same way and but it's like how do y like we still have to like kind of take it to the next level because whenever you're building it Dow it's like okay well why don't we just build like a traditional cooperative and in the real world using like the existing legal structures it's like if you do that you don't have as much freedom as building it as a Dow because you start to become constrained with the laws of of the the state or country in which you incorporate but if you kind of exists as a Dow you do have more freedom so not only are you concerned for your community the people you're working with but you are actually contributing to technologies that allow you to cooperate in a manner that is kind of more in tune with how we might you know it's like it's like cooperate without limitations of that jurisdiction invent new new models for for cooperation okay so basically that was the rundown between the the seven principles of cooperatives and how how we can redefine those for the seven principles of human work dows and I think it's it's I think what's fascinating about dows today is a lot of people are building them and they're inventing these these models that are very similar to cooperative models and they actually didn't know about cooperatives before I'm part of space cooperative in actual California a cooperative corporation like we incorporated two and a half years ago I also have a Swiss Association that we're about to establish called the space T Central Association and a Wyoming LLC and I'm part of a dhow so it's like over the past three years it's like I feel like I've I've learned so much about different entities and you learn about the restrictions of them and I think it's fascinating about what's about to happen with dows because like having traditional corporations is it's not so fun it's like really confusing like for example for our LLC it's like there are two foreign members and it's like oh if you're a foreign number you have to hold back 35% for taxes even though you're not like working in the United States there's like all this stuff that we have to I mean it doesn't really make sense it's like you don't even live in the United and we have to withhold taxes so I think that what's what's gonna be fascinating with this world if human were cows is really truly building these digital jurisdictions and figuring out how we can like evolve out of them so we don't have to kind of like be restricted with the traditional corporate models so that's basically the end of my presentation was pretty short but if people have questions well you know [Applause] do you see any like new with Dow's that aren't really present in cooperatives that we're doing something new that is maybe additive to those first seven principles I think that there are there definitely yes it's I think a lot of it is more about like how the governance will be quite different so you might have to introduce different types of principles for example you can have human work dows that are still permissioned like they're not permissionless even for cooperatives it's there are different types of cooperatives like there are worker owned cooperative or where the people that are working as part of the co-operative they're also like benefiting from the work and the labor and like equally sharing the revenue or there are consumer cooperatives where it's more like you know you go to REI or the grocery store and you purchase something and as you're a member of that co-operative you got like some some dividends as part of it so I think that like the the principles they are quite different for different types of cooperatives so you also have different principles for different types of dows like for example voluntary and open membership that's usually probably something more in tune with like a consumer cooperative but for worker owned cooperative you probably you still want to go through an application process sometimes to admit the worker so I think that will also happen with like human work dows as well it's not always gonna be completely permissionless and then I think the other interesting thing will be how like dispute resolution fits into these more like permissionless networks because that's also something that hasn't really existed before for cooperatives where you would want to resolve your disputes outside of your organization but if it is a permissionless Network you do want probably like more of a third party to resolve those disputes so it's like that can also be some sort of principle or governance model yeah to execute the vision as you kind of see it what's is there missing pieces left in the ecosystem or like what or if there is any what would those be yes basically I think that let me just have it on that slide so the the work that we are doing as part of ought arc where we're developing a planning suite which has a lot of different tools so a lot of it has to do with the the task management system of a dhow for a human worked out that is the major component that you need is like people completing the work people you know gaining like non-transferable type tokens I know that there's like a lot of debate that you can't have fully non-transferable tokens but still you need something like that for a human worked out because for cooperatives you can't transfer your membership that is something like in the co-operative principles all the bylaws of any cooperative is you can't transfer your membership so if we want a human worked out that resembles that you can't really have people transferring reputation and their earning so I think that you know figuring out how that can work will be very important so that's that's the the main thing and then and then the other thing it's like another application that will will be building as a rewards application like how do you if you have like surplus how do you distribute that to your workers so for cooperatives it's also like I said it's not based on the amount of capital you put in but essentially the amount of time or sweat equity you put in so if you're just if you're allocating like work tokens based on a task management system that's like earning patronage and a cooperative and then usually the profits are distributed at the end of the year after you take care of all the costs so those are the basic like tools that we need to operate as like a human work Dow is just like tracking work being able to see how much each person's like sweat equity is and then distributing profit based on or distributing revenue based on what a surplus you have a great talk my question is we are now as the project making first steps to fair data society Dow and in the process in the last few months there was also we've been dealing with the idea of core cooperatives and how to do it and so and the decision for now in the beginning is actually that we don't bother with incorporation and this is a little bit of a provocative question now that I have it's a I wonder if does the way we envision them do they need to be incorporated moreover a lot of dolls have this promise of making big social change wouldn't incorporation actually present an attack vector for the existing power structures what's your view on that wouldn't a corporation a cooperative being incorporated wouldn't that create an attack vector of the existing power structures those who don't want to see the change attack vector from in a sense in a sense I mean okay it's not it's not a doll it's a different case but when we look at WikiLeaks for example in 2010 WikiLeaks was I mean they had quite a lot of problems because PayPal Visa all those guys the existing power structures cut them off and they found refuge in the cryptocurrencies and they also thanked the ROI so in a sense you know I what I'm asking is if we create a doll and we give it a legal form in form of the cooperative and that dollar starts making big social changes does the incorporation as a choral cooperative present a burner ability well I wasn't necessarily saying that my co Dao should have like a cooperative as their like an actual cooperative corporation as their legal entity I think that the main reason that people form corporations still today in this Dao world is for like you know liability protection like if if the network if you're participating in this network and you contribute to something that might make someone else lose money if you're part of like a corporation they and you get and you're being sued you know you that your personal assets aren't at risk I would say that's the major benefit right like today for why anyone would want to still have a corporation and this Dao world is to protect personal assets so I think what what needs to change for us to get away from actually having these legal entities is for dows to somewhat be recognized and to be able to provide that you know liability protection to members unless it's a completely pseudonymous Dao or you know no one knows who everyone is but it's just like a question of like how if you're doing if you are trying to like contribute to like yeah something like positive social change it's like okay are people gonna trust these this network of anonymous agents I think it's it's definitely gonna be interesting to see what happens and in the evolution of douse but as long as dows are doing friendly things I think it's you know it's probably okay to coexist with legal entities but I definitely think you know I'm biased to say like I like the Aragon model where you know it they are starting to fund multiple entities it's like you have an association now you have Aragon one and I have autarkic and then you have like other contractors I think that that is the model that's going to make the most sense for the next few years where you have like this association that's like their main responsibility is just like sending funds they're not really doing the work of the network and then these other entities and contractors are doing the work and then you start to kind of like Dow fi aspects of the projects where you don't really need the entities and you can fund networks of volunteers so I think it'll be like kind of like evolutionary like that where you start to you know coexist with legal entities and then you work with people that are individual contributors that aren't part of any other entities and then you just kind of like see how things evolve yes so so I'm also part of space T Central and the goal is for space T central to be an Aragon Dao but right now I'm more full-time as part of autarky and we are building applications for Aragon so one one aspect of that the strategy behind that is we recognize as part of like building space T central that the tools that we need they're you know quite generic to dowse in general it's like they will sell it will solve space T Central's needs but it will solve other organizations needs so we have to essentially build out the roadmap of the the planning suite as part of ought arc and then space T Central which will start to come to life more with the governance model of us like more human work Dow so so yeah space T central is a human work now the the governance is going to be based on people that are participating in the network and completing tasks so it is inspired by the cooperative model but it has a few different tweaks yeah thank you [Applause]