Antidote to Holacracy: Blockchain Smart Assets

New Strategies needed to Meet Group Needs in Holacracies
The failings-to-date of holacracy have to do with career growth, compensation, and capacity (in the sense of codification and deployment group knowledge). This is exciting news for learnings in prototyping decentralized flat governance models in groups. After the fact, it is quite obvious that career growth and compensation would need to be redefined in a holacratic model since they are still in the mode of the old structure. The needs behind these areas need to be elicited and addressed via other means. For example, the needs behind career growth could be learning, variety, and contribution, where previously career progression was a strategy for meeting these needs. Now, the needs are still there, but different strategies for meeting them in decentralized models need to be innovated, such as switching responsibilities with some frequency and the ability to learn about and contribute in new ways. Similarly with compensation; the underlying needs could be financial security, status, and being acknowledged, and now in holacractic models, these would need to be met differently. This would also be trued for the codification and deployment of new capacities emerging from the group operations.

Group Needs registered as Blockchain Smart Assets
One great benefit of blockchains is their potential agility in coordinating soft processes like ongoing group orchestration in a flat collaborative model. Blockchains can be a heightened level of holacratic operation that attends to the fundamental needs underlying group operations. Once elicited, registering group needs as blockchain-based smart assets can be a way of keeping the needs of the group alive on an ongoing basis. Participants could anonymously vote community token as to what group needs are being met/unmet and these addressed in the community meeting. Each group need, (like autonomy, collaboration, agreeing to the same rules, privacy, and creativity), could be registered as its own smart asset, with an address, thus community token could be anonymously voted to this address to indicate groups needs met/unmet.

Group needs as blockchain-based smart assets is an outgrowth of the Convergent Facilitation model for effective group operation. Convergent facilitation is a model for collaborative decision-making, a way to correct the paradigm of ‘no one makes a decision’ or ‘someone makes a decision for everyone else.’ The reason that convergent facilitation can an effective means of collaborative decision-making is both 1) quick and efficient use of everyone’s time in making initial decisions and 2) the quality of buy-in that keeps decisions sustainably alive in facilitating the group’s operations after the decision is made. This is because each person is encouraged and empowered to take stewardship and ownership of ‘our needs as a group.’ Instead of a begrudging compromise (‘it wasn’t really my decision’), this leads to a willingness to stretch to meet our group needs in empowerment because ‘it was my decision.’ Convergent facilitation helps us as a group to get into the highest mode of why we are here, to create something together that matters to all of us. It is a process based on principles that allows groups to make decisions together in cooperative manner, not win-lose, majority wins, or unwilling consensus.

One part of convergent facilitation is transparent decision-making. Probably not everyone wants to participate in every decision, but everyone might want to know what is going on. Thus, all decisions that need to be made can be listed, and community members can indicate their interest in leading, participating, and not hearing about different decisions (Figure 1). In this way, transparency, and trust in community decision-making are created. Everyone knows what is happening.

Figure 1. Convergent Facilitation Decision-making Matrix.

Blockchain Government

Blockchain technology is starting to arrive to the extent that applications are being defined for different sectors, most prominently markets/finance/banking, government/legal, IOT, and health. In all of these venues, the thinking is that centralized models may be something of the past, and could be supplemented or improved by secure decentralized frameworks that could be more efficient, quicker, and less expensive. For example, in finance and banking interbank transfers currently take three days to clear, but this could be immediate.

The reason that secure decentralized ‘smartnetwork’ operations are possible is the maturity of the Internet. The Internet is now large enough and liquid enough in terms of global reach, billions of participants, and in-place infrastructure such that a whole new tier of applications is enabled like those using blockchain technology. Blockchain technology creates secure decentralized transaction networks. The technology combines the peer-to-peer file-sharing of BitTorrent with public key cryptography to form a network where independent parties (rather than a centralized authority) can confirm that transactions are unique and valid, and record them into a ledger. This means that transaction networks can be more decentralized, secure, and resilient, and also accommodate a much greater scale of activity since parties do not need to know and trust each other, just the system.

Government is a sector where blockchain applications could have a significant benefit and finally allow services that are personalized instead of one-size-fits all. Public services could be as individually-specific as a Starbucks coffee order. Blockchains could be a liberty-enhancing equality technology allowing individuals to be more empowered, participative, and involved. Governance might be the next venue where individuals can take more authority and responsibility for themselves. The Internet made this possible with financial instruments, an intermediary like a stock broker is no longer needed for selecting and buying-selling financial instruments like stocks, bonds, CDs, and mortgage products. Likewise in information and entertainment, the Internet has fractured traditional centralized industries and created a new sensibility where individuals select their own content. Health services is another example where patient-driven EMRs (electronic medical records), web-based test data, personalized genomics, and quantified-self wearables have led to a new sensibility of individuals self-advocating for health as biocitizens. The key point is that the nexus of authority has shifted to the individual per decentralized Internet models. Blockchain-based government services could trigger a similar shift in sensibility and a rethinking of authority

Decentralization concepts are already underway in government (Rescaling the State) with a focus on the important role of mayors as non-partisan administrators (If Mayors Ruled the World), and the rise of metropolitanism (21st Century is the Metropolitan Century and Metropolitan Revolution). These ideas could be deployed in more detail per several key properties of blockchain technology in government services, for example its being secure, decentralized, scalable, universal, granular, auditable, trackable, and transparent. Applications could roll out in two phases:

Basic Blockchain Government Applications

• Transnational organizations – Correspondingly transnational governance structures for world-scale organizations like WikiLeaks, ICANN, and Wikipedia could be accountably and transparently coordinated by blockchains 
• Document registrations – Blockchains could serve as the whole of a society’s public records repository
• Voting – More secure and universal public electronic voting systems, and more transparent, usable, aggregatable data regarding representative issue voting records; faster results tabulation
• Issue and proposition development – Blockchain-coordinated proposal development, validation, and community dialogue and participation, and short-term delegative democracy instead of elected representatives (Liquid Feedback) 
• Campaign – More immediate, transparent, universal, and interoperable finance disclosure and tracking
• Digital signatures and identity – Blockchain-based digital identity validation, signatures, proof-of-truth functions, escrows, passport services, and inclusive pseudonymous identity services for documented and undocumented individuals alike
• Notary services - using blockchain technology's secure auditable record-logging functionality together with digital timestamping and pointers to electronic documents stored off-chain

Advanced Blockchain Government Applications

• Personalized opt-in governance services – Individuals could enroll in competitive personalized governance services (locality-provided or vendor-provided), paying for preferred services, such as composting, or education. Other personalized government services could include: reputation-based ID systems, voting, dispute resolution, national income distribution, public documents registration and repository (Bitnation, facilitator of the world’s first blockchain marriage October 5, 2014)   
• Blockchain public finance services - Self-directed community bonds (Neighbor.ly), whose creditworthiness could be facilitated and evaluated with blockchain-based mechanisms such as Ricardian contracts, such as those contemplated by Greece to provide assurance regarding tax receipts
• Real-time documented legal services - On-demand tele-attorney consultation, rights advocacy, law enforcement interaction, and private policing (Sidekik)
• Futarchy prediction markets - Two-step voting process on outcomes and strategies for their attainment rather than individuals as representatives 
• Token issuance and management - Civic tokens (convertible to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or fiat currency, or accepted directly) could be issued for guaranteed basic income initiatives, health services, EBT/foodstamp programs, or other community spending initiatives to improve efficiency and reduce fraud

EmergingTechs Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology, and Geoengineering in the Governance Eye

The second annual Governance of Emerging Technologies conference held in Phoenix AZ May 27-29, 2014 discussed a variety of governance (regulation), legal, and ethical aspects of three areas of emerging technology: nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and geoengineering (climate management).

The prevailing attitude in nanotechnology is much like that in artificial intelligence, “no new news” and some degree of weariness after having experienced a few hype-bust cycles, coupled with the invisibility frontier. The invisibility frontier is when an exciting emerging technology becomes so pervasive and widely-deployed that it becomes invisible. There are numerous nanotechnology implementations in a range of fields including materials, computing, structures, nanoparticles, and new methods, similar to the way artificial intelligence deployments are also widely in use but ‘invisible’ in fraud detection, ATM machine operation, data management algorithms, and traffic coordination.

Perhaps the biggest moment of clarity was that different groups of people with different value systems, cultures, and ideals are coming together with more frequency than historically to solve problems. The locus of international interaction is no longer primarily geopolitics, but shifting to be much more one of collaboration between smaller groups in specific contexts who are inventing models for sharing knowledge that simultaneously reconfigure and extend it to different perspectives and value systems.