Turn Your Hack into a Sustainable Project with Colony – Auryn Macmillan

all right everybody if you're staying which I hope you are we're gonna hear from Aaron McMullen who's a user researcher which I do not see a lot of in this space so thank you thank you and he's gonna talk with you about how to turn your hack into a sustainable project so please give him your rapt attention curiosity and excitement Thank You Aaron thanks for calling me Lane I thought I was on tomorrow so this is like really a really rush to guard jump down there but luckily I made the slides in advance I was actually just now setting up a colony for for someone else for exactly what I'm trying to talk about here so kind of very very timely so what I'm going to do is quickly just run through a primer on ten of what colony is for anyone that's not aware of it anyone that hasn't interacted with it interacted with before and then that's this can be really quick primer and what it's actually hoping to make this more of a kind of a workshop where anyone that's got a hack that they essentially want to have persist beyond the scope of the hackathon here that they want to turn into something viable sustainable long term then I essentially come around and help people get get set up if they want to create a colony or at least just do some do some kind of QA on some of the decisions that need to be made to set up a colony so yeah with that in mind let's let's just kind of jump into a quick overview so the firm is 19th century technology setting up a company if it's slow laborious expensive so registering doing legals issuing shares getting bank accounts all that stuff it's a painful process work coordination HR budgeting payments contracts bookkeeping all that stuff is that is again a painful process and then access to capital is this kind of essentially boys club it's it's it's very much a kind of a networking game and a game of being able to convince a kind of small group of people that that an idea is viable and that's not to say that it's the wrong approach but it's it's it's a difficult difficult thing to crack for a large portion of the population colonies intend to be essentially the firm for the 21st century super simple to set up really really low barrier to entry so I mean the claim we make is as easy as a Facebook group to create I don't think we're quite there yet but it's a simple process there the digital native organizations where essentially the organizational logic is enforced by software instead of rules they they're intended to kind of eat this middle management layer so colonies want to create an environment where you have this kind of bottom-up contribution flow where people who are contributing value are able to identify the value that they're contributing and to to be essentially autonomous self managing and for for the rest of the organization to be able to kind of validate that contribution now and then the that kind of leads into the the incentive model so colonies has this this interesting kind of incentive model you you bootstrap a token to finest value and then reward people for the work that they contribute to the organization the reward is both in the form of tokens in the in the colonies Treasury but then also refutation in the colony which kind of later on leads these colonies to be able to become these kind of reputation mediated entities these kind of meritocratic organizations where the people who are actively contributing to it other ones who end up with kind of decision-making power in the organization so some kind of quick examples of what essentially like how we think that the current version of colony that the DAP is useful so some examples of some colonies that kind of up and running or kind of planning to you up and running soon is a local mesh networking cooperative that pulls the the revenues from a mesh network to then fund network maintenance and upgrades a co-working space where you offset the the cost of your co-working space by contributing work to the space in NFT art gallery that distributes revenues based on your contributions to the art galleries in both the the art that you contribute or the the effort or the the work that you contribute to getting traffic through and actually making sales of art an established web 3 project turning can a passive community members into active contributors or what I'm hoping to see more of here at the hackathon is these hackathon projects that go from being kind of an idea to a sustainable projects and fairly reward that contributors without having had funding upfront and that's the the use case that's most exciting for me right now I have a couple of side projects that I've started one that I'm starting this weekend where this kind of incentive model is is what kind of driving contribution so they're they're grant funded projects or kind of prize money funded projects where we distribute those that that funding whenever it does come in proportional to the amount of work that people have contributed to make make the the product that this this project is trying to develop so I'll dive into a specific example here minute when I share my screen and we start poking through some colonies but the other thing that I just wanted to point out was that colonies kind of developer tools allow you to kind of take all of the pieces that we use to build LDAP and kind of plug that into any other application and so the interesting kind of there's a bunch of potentially interesting outcomes from that basically the ability to insert colonies tile organization and incentives into any other application so you can imagine things like an MMO where that every piece of gold you cannot collect in the game gives you an influence over their project's future roadmap and a share of the project's revenue or a ride-sharing application where the drivers and the people building the application end up becoming the kind of owners of beneficiaries of the organization and a Jenny kind of reputation in the organization and being able to dictate its roadmap or social media application where your impressions earn your revenue share and a voting voting right in the the future roadmap for the organization I said earlier that it was not very Dallas and the the reason for that is just the current version of colony is is a very kind of permissioned architecture she directly permission accounts with with unilateral ability to execute whatever the specific permission you gave them is there's no voting yet there's no dispute resolution process yet but that's all kind of coming in the pipeline so what-what I'm kind of excited about now is the ability to kind of create again these bootstrapping upstart projects and allow them to essentially bootstrap the the reputation supply of all of their contributors so that once the functionality is enabled and once those projects are ready they can basically seamlessly hand it over to the the community of people that have built up a reputation supply contributing to the the zatia yeah and so I guess from there I'm keen to describe play with the app and and so anyone that's got your laptop out then feel free to kind of play along otherwise I'm just going to poke through it and show you some of the features and if anyone has any questions what's the point if he asks don't just yell out and we'll keep it really open bear with me for a second while I figure out screen sharing here and yeah then we'll stop poking I guess now if anyone has any questions in the meantime feel free to jump in yeah so the question was do I think that colony is more suitable for nonprofits that are just trying to kind of dish out work or to or for for-profit organizations that are trying to kind of distribute I guess profits revenues whatever it is I'd say either all I don't think that it's necessarily better for one of the other the the colonies that I've created so far maybe toed the line so they're there grant-funded they don't really have a business model so I guess I couldn't wouldn't really call them kind of for-profit but they do have a reward model that's one of the interesting mechanics that colony has is this reward model where you are able to reward contributors basically periodically period a a rewards distribution that pays out a a chunk of tokens to all of the reputation holders proportional to the amounts of reputation in native tokens that they hold so that kind of profit-sharing revenue sharing dividends like kind of mechanism obviously would lend itself well to kind of a for-profit organization but I mean I'm using it in the context of burn signal which is most definitely not a for-profit organization so it's really just kind of an alternate reward model and kind of how you use it is up to you I guess now so this I mention let's zoom in a little bit I mentioned that I was just creating a calling of helping someone create a colony this is the one that I I just helped created but I'm gonna go ahead and jump over into a different colony to start with I will go into the beta colony so we just launched this one and it's essentially a colony this is trying to incentivize our community members to contribute to developing colony as a kind of ongoing project the resolutions not great here so I guess it's gonna be a little bit difficult to read but in terms of features of the colony application basically we have this this task construct which is the the atomic level unit of work for a for a colony this is our colony pays out its balance it's a little award reputation and I guess on that reputation is awarded every time the colony pays out its native token so each colony selects a native token when it's set up in this case it's BL NY which we can addict named baloney which is this is the beta colony which is a precursor to the meta colony which will be there they're kind of the governing entity for the colony Network and so we're using this as a bit of a testing ground the nearly token for the meta colony is CL and why so BL and why just came as a bit of a play on words from that but there's native token can be any the RC 20 compliant token so you can go and pick dyers in native token if you want or you can spin up a new token when you create the colony and that's a really important choice because it can't be changed once you create that native token but once you kind of decide on that native token you cannot change it later and it has some pretty big implications on how reputation is distributed so in the case of I'll jump over to another colony burn signal this is a project that I started at F New York last year it's it's grant-funded and kind of prize money funded we've got some funding through get coin grants we've got a small molecule ants and we want a little bit of prize money at our in New York and basically what we do is set up milestones so development milestones when we say release our proof of concept app or we really see the MVP version of our Apple we implement some feature set we can have defined milestones and when we hit those we pay out a chunk of the die that this this colony is holding onto through that reward mechanism that that I mentioned earlier so all of the tasks that people are doing in the application are all actually just being paid out with this burn signal token and the really interesting thing there is that it doesn't require us to know exactly how much funding that we have up front it doesn't require us to allocate any specific amount of died of US dollars or be thrown like that upfront for work we can reward everyone with this negative token and all of our contributors know that when we hit a milestone they'll be able to claim a a relative portion of whatever we do have but don't necessarily know exactly how much we have and so it's the the whole purpose of this talk is to talk about how how to kind of bootstrap a project from a from a hackathon into something that's sustainable and this is the kind of model that I that I've been following with this project and then I think we can replicate with a bunch of other projects is essentially a reward model where all of the contributors understand that they're going to be rewarded fairly compared to one another but you don't you don't have to have a specific amount of funding allocated in advance so you don't have to understand exactly how much funny is going to come in in advance so yeah I think again this this is a model that I'd like to see replicated here at the hackathon with any any projects that we want to want to kind of persist beyond the scope of the hackathon and again just to kind of poke around features a little bit more the we have a suggestion here which is basically I'll jump back over to the beta colony cuz it actually has some suggestions in it one and this is kind of our bottom-up contribution funnel here so anyone can come in and suggest a task and then as a as an admin in the colony if I see a suggestion that is in a domain where I have permissions I can accept it and that automatically generates a link tasks over here that can then be allocated funding and assigned to someone and payout tokens and reputation the community tab here just lists all of the members of the colony so this one is is has a bunch of people in it basically because everyone that joins colony gets automatically subscribed to this one so they are kind of inflates the the number of people in this one but we have actually had a pretty decent amount of active contributors and I guess the last thing that I wanted to touch on here in terms of is not my profile sorry is just the permission structure so again I talked about colonies not being very Daoist yet essentially you explicitly permission users within some context in the colony so we have this domain hierarchy which is I guess you can think of like a categories in the forum or folders in a file system that allow you to contextualise there the tasks and payments that you're creating and then contextualize the reputation that you earn from completing those tasks in in future what that will allow us to do is have these really localized dispute resolution processes so say dispute pops up in the front end engineering domain then it's front-end engineers who gets away in on that a dispute resolution process but it also has a really clear escalation path up through this kind of domain hierarchy so if it can't be resolved within front end then it may get escalated to engineering if you can't be resolved there then it may get escalated to the kind of top-level domain in the colony but in lieu of that for the time being we have this domain-specific permissioning system where you can basically give different people different sets of permissions throughout that domain hierarchy so the way that we've used it in this colony is basically for all of the people that are contributing code in the dev domain we give them the administration permission which lets them autonomously jump in and create tasks and allocate funds and then it requires me the the nevolin dictator of this colony to come in and actually finalise tasks and pay out the tokens and reputation associated with it yeah I think that's a pretty good overview of kind of what colony can do right now so I guess my ask from you guys is just if anyone's running a project and would like to see it exist beyond the scope of the hackathon then come and have a chat to me we can figure out if if colony makes sense otherwise if anyone has any questions about colony or about kind of helping your your project to persist beyond the hackathon using a colony or not I'd love to talk more and yeah came to hear what people are working on time for questions here - so yeah yeah questions they're not then far away cool sorry to monopolize the questions you mentioned the meta colony yeah can you give like a quick overview of what the meta colony is yeah so every time a task is completed in a colony the colony network takes fee on that task let me scroll down here so you can't really see me to the resolution the colony know it takes a fee it's it's currently set at 2.7 percent of whatever token you're you're transacting in that those tokens get forwarded on to the meta colony and the meta colonies then tasked with incentivizing ongoing development of the colony network so it's it's the the vehicle that will end up governing and incentivizing the proliferation of the colony Network moving forward eventually and I think a goal for colony as a company is to kind of roll a lot of its operations into the meta colony right now our kind of dogfooding experiment is with the beta colony which is the the Bologna precursor to the meta colony [Music] you [Music]