= "Commons Stack builds "commons-based microeconomies to sustain public goods through incentive alignment, continuous funding and community governance... putting effective new tools in the hands of communities, enabling them to raise and allocate shared funds, make transparent decisions, and monitor their progress in supporting the Commons."

Contextual Quote

"We’re producing a library of robustly designed components that can then be forked and used in any commons initiative or open source project, and anything we learn from those live deployments are an opportunity to collect data and improve our model. We’re turning this into an engineering design process which will revolutionize the entire crypto industry."

- Kris Decoodt [1]

Description

1.

"We are building commons-based microeconomies to sustain public goods through incentive alignment, continuous funding and community governance. Our library of open-source, interoperable web3 components will put effective new tools in the hands of communities, enabling them to raise and allocate shared funds, make transparent decisions, and monitor their progress in supporting the Commons.

We want to create a world where public goods are valued fairly for the benefits they deliver. Our current economic system frequently exploits the environment, and undervalues open-source software, open research, and other altruistic efforts addressing the collective needs of our society. We aim to change this." (https://commonsstack.org/?)

2. Kris Decoodt:

""We can give communities economies and allow them to encode their community values within these economies. In this way, we can scale these community commons into global networks that are protecting our most valuable resources.

This is essentially what the Commons Stack is trying to do. We’re trying to scale trust using the blockchain, and we’re trying to scale the commons with these tools that we’re building. We’re creating an open-source library of components that enable purpose-driven communities that are united around any cause, whether it be cleaning up trash or planting trees or producing open source components for the betterment of humanity, and we’re giving them the ability to raise money, make decisions about how to spend it, and to measure impact.

This tech stack for the commons will include tools for varying methods of governance, funding, proposals, simulation and initialization. These are modular, interoperable components, so any project can take the pieces that are relevant to their community, customise them to their specific needs, and combine them into a token network . This could be considered an SDK for DAOs, so you can take any of these components, interoperably combine them and launch your token network around your community goals. " (https://medium.com/commonsstack/the-commons-stack-scaling-the-commons-to-re-prioritize-people-and-the-planet-e1293123831d)

Status

Towards a Minimum Viable Commons

"We’ve identified four key components for a ‘Minimum Viable Commons’: the Augmented Bonding Curve would provide sustainable funding for communities, the Giveth Dapp provides a proposal and escrow service, we have Conviction Voting which is a continuous decision making governance process, and we will have the Commons Analytics Dashboard (powered by cadCAD) which will allow us to measure the value produced in these communities. We’ll be building with an iterative engineering approach, so we’ll be developing each component one by one and inviting communities to launch them in beta test environments. As they we test out how these components work in live environments, we can improve them in our next codebase iteration. Once each of these components is built we will synthesize them into an ‘Minimum Viable Commons’ and we believe it will be a new standard in token network design." (https://medium.com/commonsstack/the-commons-stack-scaling-the-commons-to-re-prioritize-people-and-the-planet-e1293123831d)

Discussion

Jeff Emmett:

“In my conversations over the past months, I have realized there are semantic difficulties in discussing some of these topics. Some terminology that was useful in capitalist paradigms is no longer welcome in post-capitalist worldviews, which is completely understandable, but can lead to breakdowns in communication. I find the miscommunications most severe when it isn't clear whether we are talking about "cold" currencies or "warm" currencies.

In my opinion, the currencies we know today are "cold", and embody extractive, debt-based value systems. When we talk about Commons initiatives existing within these cold currency systems, as islands on a sea of capitalism, there are huge mismatches in value systems and exploitation of the commons is the norm. However, using a Cyber-Physical Commons framework, we can design "warm" currencies that embody community value systems. We can imbue community currencies with semi-permeable membranes and governance toolkits (along with cultural best practices) that allow us to embed pigouvian taxes to internalize externalities, and limit exploitation by capitalist systems.

The 'tragedy of the commons' as explained by Hardin was a misnomer, as Jean Russell points out. However, the 'free rider problem' still exists, and although we cannot eliminate it completely, we can mitigate it with proper ecosystem design. Free riders cause what I think is the biggest problem in OVNs today: altruist burnout. It is our reliance on the continual goodwill of 'do-gooders' (without appropriate value compensation) that will keep the commons playing second fiddle to corporate and state forms of collaboration. A lack of proper incentive alignment makes OVN participation unpalatable to the general public (who can garner better 'market value' for their skills in traditional economies). Even the super-altruists among us who forego big salaries (or any salary at all) take a personal loss to provide good for the world. This eventually drains their resources (or their will) to help, leading to systematic altruist burnout. Doing good for the world often comes at a huge personal cost, in today's day and age - does it have to be this way?

The view of the Commons Stack is that good people should be rewarded for doing good things. We can decry 'profit incentives' as extractive in our "cold" monetary system, but in a "warm" monetary system it could alternatively be understood as a 'generated value surplus'. By designing these commons ecosystems with positive feedback loops that offer reciprocal rewards to people who provide value to the community, we are aligning the incentives of participants to propagate what is best for that community. To me, this is preferable over expecting people to sacrifice their bank accounts to chase dreams of doing good in the world, only to quit and go back to the 'real world' after realizing how little their efforts are financially valued. After all, even altruists need to eat!

In commons circles, it seems we are jaded by the existing financial system, and for good reason. But I feel like many commons approaches throw out the baby with the bath water. "Cold" currencies have a big issue with exploitation and value extraction, but with appropriate system design we can retain the useful aspect of incentive alignment in "warm" currency systems, and mitigate the extractive tendencies of unchecked capitalism. "Warm" currencies will allow us to step away from talking about 'dollars' and start talking about 'value'. With community attribution networks to appropriately value care work and monitoring systems that respect complexity, we can address the shortcomings of our current system and build something new atop the rubble of neoliberalism. There is a reason markets are the largest decentralized coordinator of human behavior the world has ever seen - the question is, can we harness that power to do good in the world?

There is promising academic research coming out of BlockScience and the University of Vienna, mathematical foundations that open up the potential for token engineering and rigorous complex system design with agent based simulation - I highly recommend a read of these papers, and checking out what the Commons Stack is doing to build on that research with an open source, customizable library of Commons components, a cultural and technical 'stack' to empower the commons.” (email January 2019)

Token Engineering Commons

Kris Decoodt:

"We have an invitation to the community today. We’ve realized that blockchain research and development is a public good as well, it’s also a commons. It’s providing public goods for the entire community to use: it’s non-rivalrous, it’s inclusive, and therefore it falls prey to the free-rider problem as well. We need an ecosystem-funding DAO to push forward token engineering R&D in the blockchain space. Our invitation to the token engineering community is to come together as a DAO once the tech is ready and launch the Token Engineering Commons (TEC). This will be the first commons that we hope will be launched, using the Augmented Bonding Curve. Many of the token engineers today are working separately, getting by on client work, doing token engineering research in their spare time. This work is crucial, and we believe it needs to be done, it will push the ecosystem into the next level of maturity. The Token Engineering Commons will provide a sustainable funding mechanism to unite these researchers around the common cause of maturing this industry. (https://medium.com/commonsstack/the-commons-stack-scaling-the-commons-to-re-prioritize-people-and-the-planet-e1293123831d)

Commons Stack

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