If you've followed my work before, you know I've been a fan of DACs (Decentralized Autonomous Communities) for quite some time. In April of 2018, I joined eosDAC before EOS Mainnet launch to help support their efforts to enable anyone to create their own DAC. I've also been working with the FIO Protocol since October of 2018, and became the Managing Director in December of 2019.
Lately I've been wondering what might be possible using FIO Requests to join these two passions in an interesting way. Most DACs come with structure usually including tokenized voting for custodians who make decisions about the constitution for the DAC, the smart contract functions of the DAC, and which worker proposals should be funded. A DAC is mostly a group of people with a shared goal, no single point of failure, and consistently reproducible and transparent computation of consensus agreements. The structure itself provides a bridge between the current centralized companies and corporations to something new, made possible by blockchain technology.
But what if we go even further with our thinking? What would it look like to think not only outside the box, but with no box at all?
What if the only structure was the use of a shared protocol like FIO?
Let's say we have a group of people excited about a particular topic of interest, such as HIVE (feel free to inject your own favorite community here such as Voice, EOS, FIO, ect). Let's say there's work to be done to make Hive more successful. What if a multisig wallet was set up (much like the Hive DAO) or even individual benefactors wanted to put out bounties for work to get done while others want to do work to create value for the ecosystem. It could be facilitated by simply sharing links to proposals on various social media sites and responding to those links with FIO Requests and FIO Sends.
Example:
John Doe (john@doe) publishes a post on multiple social media channels about a proposal to add FIO Support to the Hive Keychain wallet and uses a hashtag agreed upon by the community such as #hivegigs.
Jane Doe (jane@doe) sees the post, and sends a FIO Request to john@doe for 20% of the total budget amount for the project and in the memo for the request, includes links to additional information such as a resume, proof past work signed with the FIO private key, etc. This acts as evidence that Jane is qualified to do the work and she has reputation based on previous efforts to build trust.
John receives multiple requests, evaluates them, and selects Jane to do the work. He updates the listings to publicly state jane@doe has been selected. Her reputation (and John's reputation to pay) are now on the line publicly. He approves the request, sending the initial funds.
When Jane completes the work or an agreed to milestone, she sends a FIO Request to john@doe with evidence the work is done. John reviews it and, if needed, sends a FIO Request back to Jane for an insignificant amount with comments in the memo about the work. If needed, either Jane or John can send each other additional FIO Requests to either expand the scope of the work or facilitate a discount if the work wasn't completed as originally planned.
When both parties are satisfied, John approves the payment request and Jane gets paid. Depending on the work involved, it could be sent to an anonymous email account, submitted as a pull request to an open source repo (as in the case of the Hive Keychain), or some other mutually agreed to process.
In this example, the two people were able to coordinate efforts to benefit a community without ever meeting each other or even communicating beyond just the requests for payments and the links out to the evidence of reputation and work done. Maybe this is a simplistic example and clearly it wouldn't work for every kind of effort, but do you find it interesting enough to explore the possibilities?
As kind of a silly example, I was thinking earlier today about how a FIO Request might be used to sell something like... well... a Voice invite. :)
Kind of a fun idea, right?
I'd love to know what you think about fully distributed DACs using only payment requests between individuals within a community with shared goals.
If you're not familiar with FIO or FIO Requests, check out the demo videos at http://fioprotocol.io/ and get yourself your own free FIO Address using the Edge Wallet. You can try out requests in the FIO store as well.
I hope someday to do a large FIO Address giveaway to Voice users. :)
As a test, I also published this on Voice as well.