Decentralised Futures

* Book: Decentralised Futures. How digital technologies will change the shape of organisations to come. Edited by Jonathan Bone & Christopher Haley. NESTA, 2020

URL = https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/Decentralised_Futures_Essays_FA.pdf

Description

"Human civilisation is, in large part, a story about human organisation. From hunter-gatherer bands to nation states, our societies have been fundamentally shaped by the organisational forms we have adopted; whether that be democratic government or dictatorship, army battalion or resistance movement, worker cooperative or multinational corporation. Organisational structures have typically developed as a means of tackling specific problems, such as speeding up decision-making or ensuring resources are distributed fairly among group members; however, it is clear that those we have developed to date are inadequate when managing common-pool resources like our environment. Our future will thus be determined, to a great extent, by how effectively we can design organisational forms which deal with the challenges ahead.

This collection of essays discusses new organisational forms which are emerging, enabled by digital technologies like blockchain. These organisations are allowing people to self-organise and collaborate as part of decentralised networks. Such decentralised networks have several novel features, perhaps the most important of which is that, unlike many organisations, they are designed to function without the need to trust other members of the group – that is, with trust in people replaced by a different kind of trust, in the technology itself. This has the potential to change radically what people think an organisation can be and what it means to work for one."