DADA Collective: Isa Kost, Italy / Mar Espi, Spain, collaboratively created using blockchain technology, a visual conversation.
DADA Collective: Otro Captore, Chile / Beatriz Ramos, USA, collaboratively created using blockchain technology, a visual conversation, a visual conversation.
What would the world look like if John Lennon and Paul McCartney never met? If Larry Page and Sergey Brin never teamed up to transform the Internet? What if William Procter and James Gamble, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, or (my favorite example of fashionable shoes!) Jimmy Choo and Tamara Mellon never joined forces? The world would be very different for sure.
History is full of powerful collaborations on micro and macro scales. Why? The results of such collaborations can be greater than the sum of their parts because bringing together different talents, perspectives, and fields enables us to create something more than we ever could on our own.
Often, the results of collaborations are even better than hoped. Sometimes, collaboration lets us overcome obstacles we never thought we could. Other times, collaboration allows us to find a novel solution, be daring, and address long-standing problems. And best of all, in the process, we can learn from others and make a huge impact.
Blockchain can enable a different and deeper collaboration by tapping into the power of underutilized resources like hobbyists, local communities, the power of impact, connecting the virtual and real worlds, and new open-source development. In other words, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Blockchain technology can help us go far. Much, much farther than we thought was possible.
Blockchain technology enables radical collaboration.
Leveraging the Power of Amateurs and Hobbyists
In 2005, Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, editors at Wired, coined the term “crowdsourcing” to describe how businesses were using the Internet to “outsource work to the crowd.” In The Rise of Crowdsourcing, in June 2006, Howe first published a definition for the term:
Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively) but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.
Since then, we have seen many variations and implementations of crowdsourcing. Because blockchain technology is so good at keeping records in chronological order, it can enable even greater collaborations. For example, it can help bring together amateur hobbyists to lead progress across fields.
Meet GlobalXplorer,1 a nonprofit crowdsourced platform to analyze the incredible wealth of satellite images currently available to archaeologists. It is the brainchild of Sarah Parcak, 2016 TED Prize winner2 and National Geographic Fellow, who has attracted attention for using technology to locate ancient sites.
The goal of GlobalXplorer is to democratize the wonder of archaeological discovery and help us connect to the past. Relying on satellite technology, Dr. Parcak is creating a global network of citizen explorers and revolutionizing the field of archaeology. Anyone with Internet can discover hidden civilizations or locate sites where looting has taken place.
To develop trusted ways to verify an object’s provenance—to protect museums and other purchasers from buying looted objects— GlobalXplorer joined ConsenSys Ventures’ Tachyon program in 2018. Together, they will use Ethereum-based blockchain technology to develop a centralized repository and marketplace for anyone working with ancient artifacts and archaeological sites and track objects from when they are discovered to when they go on display in museums. Ideally, this collaboration will combat looting and the illegal purchase of antiquities. Along the way, it will help museums monetize their collections.3
The Rise of Local Communities and Economies
Collaborations can be hyperlocal for the benefit of a specific community to solve a specific problem. For example, BULVRD4 is a global mapping community in which you can earn cryptocurrency for making road reports and driving. After you install the BULVRD Drive app and start driving, you receive real-time road reports, such as traffic, police, and hazards. It gives you traffic-aware turn-by-turn navigation to ensure you arrive at your destination on time.
When you drive using BULVRD, you earn tokens. You can drop tokens along a route to incentivize driving certain routes and influence the development of future reports. If you develop road reports like traffic and hazards, you earn more tokens. You can then “drop” your tokens on your routes to encourage other drivers to report to be able to find the quickest way. Or a business can drop tokens in front of their stores, or a user can drop tokens on various routes to find the quickest way!
On the back-end, BULVRD leverages the Ethereum blockchain with smart contracts to manage rewards and create new datasets. Using nonfungible tokens or NFTs (digital collectibles), you can stake your digital collectible on the map to show to the world or use it as a new marketing avenue when selling it. You can also earn custom BULVRD digital collectibles for your contributions in the ecosystem. Finally, it also leverages geospatial augmented reality experiences to give community members a new way to interact with the world around them, including automation via machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Unleashing Creative Collaboration and Co-creation across the World
That same blockchain technology may facilitate unprecedented collaboration across borders. For example, Beatriz Helena Ramos,5 founder of Dada, a social network where people speak to each other through digital drawings creating collaborative art, explains,
We are creating a whole economy using blockchain. I’m an artist. But I don’t come from the art world. I come from the entertainment industry. I worked many years in animation, and my first job was at MTV as a painter. I worked for Disney. Then I opened my own animation studio with a contract to work for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I directed over a hundred commercials for some of the biggest brands in the world such as Coca Cola. But here’s the thing, I don’t own any of the intellectual rights to the work I’ve done for 20 years.
According to Ramos,
The global animation market is worth $300 billion. To put that figure in perspective, the global art market is only $60 billion. Animation is one of those industries where you can easily see who is creating value. The artists are animators, illustrators, writers, musicians, voice-over actors, and designers. It’s not that artists don’t create value; the problem is that we don’t capture any of it.
This is where blockchain comes in. Ramos explains,
We have built a tool for millions of people around the world to make and access digital art. Using blockchain, we can now guarantee that artists have full control of their work and that the value they create stays within the community.”
Nonfungible tokens allow for digital artworks to be probably unique, therefore allowing it to capture value. It also provides intellectual property protection and proof of ownership.
Dada allows you to create visual conversations. It’s all created on the platform with our tools. Someone makes a drawing, you reply to it, then others reply to it, and magic happens. Ramos observes, “The beautiful part is that all of this has been created by different people at different times in different countries who have never met each other. It’s a completely spontaneous process and is a new way of making art.”
Soul In The Machine: Visual conversation collaboratively created using blockchain technology made by 19 artists from 12 countries and live-streamed at the Ethereal Summit in New York, June 2019. https://soulinthemachine.dada.nyc/.“
We have thousands of these visual conversations. Dada currently holds the largest collection of tokenized digital art. We have a hundred thousand drawings ready to be traded as NFTs.” These NFTs can be layered into one single image that someone can own. Ramos continues,
Pase Mágico: Visual conversation collaboratively created using blockchain technology by Otro Captore, Beatriz Helena Ramos, Boris Toledo Doorm and Talita Sotomayor.
We can now build the tools for anyone to use these drawings and add value on top of them, they’ll be able to animate them, and add text or music to these visual conversations. If there is a commercial value to what’s created, every contributor will receive their fair share.
Ramos explains,
I can easily see how a visual conversation may become a book, and where the artists and the collectors share the profits of the sales. I can also see how animators could come in spontaneously and give life to characters. We could make it into a property that could generate thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenues. All the value staying within the community.
In this new model, artists can make art for the sole enjoyment of it without any pressure to produce. Collective ownership and shared profits will allow artists to live full and rewarding lives while at the same time contributing their value to the community.
A new economic paradigm for a self-governed community is that it owns the value it creates and directly controls the means of production, distribution, and profit-sharing of its collective work. In this system, artists will receive a guaranteed basic income for their contribution, allowing them to do what they love and make art freely.
Proliferating the Impact and Acts of Kindness
If blockchain can harness artistic thinking from all over the world to change how we create, and even what creative processes look like, how can we use blockchain for impact?
Meet Plastic Bank.6 Its goal is simple: to stop pollution of the ocean with plastic by making it more valuable. To do this, it transforms plastic waste into currency by empowering the most impoverished people in the world to convert the pollution in their communities into wealth.
Shaun Frankson,7 co-founder and CTO of Plastic Bank observes,
We started looking at how to stop ocean plastic. How do we not treat our ocean as garbage disposal? If you walk into a kitchen sink that is overflowing with water, what would you do first? The answer is obvious: you’d turn it off. We started to look at how we do that.
He observes,
The problem of ocean plastic starts with developing countries with no waste management system. In fact, it is a common practice for people in developing countries to push the garbage into the streets, which then ends up in the waterways. When you throw something away, it must go somewhere. All too often, it’s the ocean.
Asia is one of the biggest contributors to ocean plastic. Many countries around the continent have almost no waste management systems and abundant poverty. Frankson says,
They are also sitting on acres of diamonds and they don’t realize it. Did you know that the pound-for-pound value of plastic when sorted is more than that of steel? How do you pair this opportunity with this abundance of plastic to start capturing the value of plastic?
Frankson continues,
What’s the threshold cost for plastic to not end up in the ocean? A dollar? No it’s really a matter of pennies. And this is where we started to look at how we can change the perception of plastic to harness this opportunity.
It turns out that around the world there are many people called waste pickers and scavengers who collect plastic.
Plastic Banks is transforming this industry to dignify recycling while creating a global revolution around social plastic. Frankson explains,
Our business premise is to make plastic too valuable to end up in the ocean. We realized that 300 g of plastic has a market value of about $0.10. If the same 300 g of plastic is changed into the shape of a phone case, you suddenly have a $20 to $30 item. If you think about it, just the change in the shape of plastic turns waste into value.
How do you reveal value in plastic? About 80 percent of plastic comes from developing countries, mostly in Southeast Asia. Ironically, these impoverished nations treat plastic as garbage. They fail to see that if plastic is collected, sorted, and recycled, the pound of plastic is valuable. It’s an amazing opportunity. Plastic Bank was born to dignify recycling and empower communities to take plastic resources that are lying around and use it to create value.
Frankson says, “We came to realize that when you treat people as a supply chain, it is a very cold world. The world begins to change when you build a supply chain that puts people first.” He continued, “We wanted to give pride and dignity to recycling where we can stabilize the price.”
Plastic Bank brings value to plastic. People pick up the plastic and bring it to a plastic bank. Each location operates as an independent local cooperative. The plastic is sorted by type, color, and weight. Then a value is attached to that weight. In certified locations, a special digital bonus payment is earned on top of the market rate of plastic. This ensures collectors can provide for their families and send their children to school. According to Frankson, all plastic from this program is turned into social plastic. It is used by large companies to package their product instead of new plastic.
Frankson explains,
We realized that the entire model of recycling needs to be ethical, sustainable, stable, and dignified. Where it would never go below a certain floor because of market conditions. And that’s really where our social plastic came from. How can we stabilize the price and continuously increase the value of plastic for both collectors and communities?
Plastic Bank is built on Hyperledger Fabric in the IBM cloud. Frankson says,
I’m an advocate for blockchain for business and using smart contracts for just about every condition of what can and can’t happen with the system. I support having blockchain be the trusted data and smart contracts being trusted with decision-making. You can get instant, real-time, unlimited scale of any exchange of assets. This is especially critical for us as we are an exchange-based system.
He explains,
When someone goes to a plastic bank to exchange plastic for value of some kind, we track everything using smart contracts. Whether it’s an exchange of cash for plastic, an exchange for goods and services within these markets, or an exchange for our digital reward tokens. Blockchain and smart contracts allow these exchanges to happen.
Frankson explains, “Data recording is done by smart contracts, and identification is done in blockchain code. We store data in blockchain code and the decision-making capabilities for just about anything to do with it.”
He continues,
Our business model is always evolving. We continue to tweak the business model and work in different cultures, different climates, with different income levels, and in different geographies. We are increasingly able to go straight to the household and businesses, which is very exciting. We think it is an opportunity for impact.
Recently Plastic Bank partnered with SC Johnson where they sponsored development in Indonesia. Frankson explained,
There we have an active full digital ecosystem. So, someone could receive secure digital savings through our program. They can spend those digital savings at the local markets. If I’m a collector, I have a digital identity, I have a digital wallet, and I can find where to bring my plastic and where to get the digital rewards. If I’m a store owner, I can run a point-of-sale system and an inventory system and again having a digital wallet where if someone wants to buy my goods. All of this is enabled by blockchain.
Blockchain plays a big part in how Plastic Bank can do this. Frankson explains,
For us, blockchain is the trust stamp. It’s how we can provide a trusted transparent supply chain. It’s how we can provide financial inclusion. It’s how we can establish a private identity for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Blockchain is delivering on our promise of doing good. Blockchain is a powerful tool and is amazing.
Connecting Real World and Third Place
Most people live between two social environments: home (“first place”) and the workplace (“second place”). Yet for many of us that’s not all. We have a “third place,” social surroundings separate from the home and workplace. These places could be churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, or parks—or anywhere else we spend time outside of home or work.
Have you ever noticed that you seem to be spending more and more time online? My children live in their video game worlds. They have full lives and identities there. In fact, for many of us, social apps and video games have effectively become the third place where we go to socialize, debate, and have fun.
Ray Oldenburg argues in his influential book The Great Good Place that third places are essential to civil society, democracy, and civic engagement. They establish feelings of a sense of place that we don’t get elsewhere. They also help establish a feeling of belonging. Could blockchain technology help us create third places online—virtual churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, or parks—that can hold our rupturing society together? Why not? As a form of technology, it is just another form of collaboration that prioritizes belonging and community.
Other scholars have summed up Oldenburg’s view of the third place in eight characteristics. Among those are that they tend to be a neutral ground with no obligation to join. They also tend to be a leveling space where your economic or social status does not matter, and anyone can participate equally and freely. The main activity revolves around happy and playful conversation. Accessibility and accommodation, the presence of “regulars,” and keeping a low profile and playful mood are some of the norms. A third place is a home away from home where you feel warmth, possession, and belonging.
Decentraland is an example of a third place.8 It is an open-source initiative to build a virtual world that runs on open standards and uses Ethereum blockchain technology to track ownership. It is made up of 90,000 pulses of lumber, or 10-m squares. There, you can trade, develop, and monetize the virtual land by building on top of it. MANA is Decentraland’s currency and can be used to purchase land and make in-game purchases. If you own land in Decentraland, you can build and monetize your games, artistic experiences, or social applications. At Decentraland, you can create, experience, and monetize immersive 3D, interactive global content and applications.
The land in Decentraland has been distributed in many ways. For example, you can pay thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency to participate and build whatever you can dream of on your virtual land. Maybe, you can even turn a profit one day! While there is debate around whether this investment will have an upside, Decentraland is a risky investment. Some have paid more than $28 million for blocks, which is the largest ever sale of virtual land.
Although it is hard to predict the future success of Decentraland, you can be sure that it will correlate with whether there are good games that entice participants. Themed neighborhoods, festival land, Vegas City, games, universities, and other establishments are currently being built. And best of all, once you have built something, no one can knock down your creation. And unlike other virtual worlds in which companies operate centrally, control all land, and store all the content on their servers, Decentraland’s developers plan to eventually withdraw from operating the platform.
This is where the blockchain technology is critical. The plot owners will run Decentraland. Presumably, this reduces the risk of a central company’s arbitrary, capricious decisions (e.g., sudden rule change) or going out of business.
To some extent, Decentraland promises to deliver a virtual version of a libertarian utopian society. No one can remove your user content at Decentraland, not even a government. Of course, users can favor some content and filter out others. There are also community-based filters. After all, presumably, plot owners are motivated to make money. Perhaps they will make prudent content decisions for their communities.
Open-Source: Innovation on Steroids
Though the sharing of technical information predates the advent of the Internet and the personal computer, it is undeniable that the open software movement has been critical to the proliferation of the Internet and its applications. The main principle of open-source software development is peer-production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available and accessible to the public. Many large formal institutions have supported the development of the open-source movement.
Though open source creates huge value, some classify it as an inforgood or knowledge which involves significant investment to create, but the cost of reproducing is, or is near, zero. Thereby lies the challenge of incentivizing the production of high-quality open-source code.
Keving Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin, observes in one of the interviews,
Almost all applications in the world rely on open-source software. The vast majority are built on the shoulders of giants, people who’ve done open source in the past. All these brands that you’re familiar with and you interact with every day already use open-source software. This is the foundation that modern software infrastructure is built upon. Almost $400 billion of economic value is created by open-source software. While the blockchain system is truly massive, the wider open-source ecosystem is even bigger.9
Remember NFT ERC-721 tokens from Chapter 3? They are much more than CryptoKitties (as cute as they are). They can be useful. NFTs are almost like badges, trophies, or kudos. They can represent actions or accomplishments like gold stars your elementary school gave you every time you turned in your homework on time, or loyalty points from your favorite store, hotel, or airline.
It turns out that a digital trophy case is very useful for fostering collaboration. What if you could earn tokens or badges for completing requests to make open-source contributions? What if you eventually could convert your collection of badges into a degree or some sort of accreditation to signal expertise? What if you could convert your collection of badges into a reward?
In other words, NFTs can be used to encourage certain socially desirable actions in various networks and communities. In this case, they can be used to encourage contribution to open source.
According to Ian Lapham,10 a blockchain engineer, “We need to change your perspective on how you view NFTs. When we look at NFTs at face value, we think of CryptoKitties, A game.” Lapham explains that secondary use cases make NFTs valuable. He continues, “It’s important to start thinking of NFTs in other ways. NFTs are almost like badges or trophies or just general representations of actions or accomplishments you’ve made within a network such as voting on governance.”
Lapham explains,
There are really no incentives to vote on any proposals. If you’re awarded an NFT representing that you voted on this item, then maybe some third-party developer can see that you voted on it and will want to incentivize you to do other things. Then your vote becomes an actual asset. It is now a digital good.
According to Lapham, viewing NFTs in a new light can unleash creativity in new products and services. Lapham says, “It becomes more powerful when we start thinking about the interactions and the bundles of actions that we can take with collections of NFTs. You can start to get creative with it and think of some interesting use cases.”
Lapham explains how NFTs can lead to a renaissance in open source. According to him,
The idea is that if you contribute to open source, you get a form of digital goods, say a badge. They have value and you can exchange it for whatever. It could be tickets, other goods, or money. The money could be in whatever form you like—Ether, Bitcoin, a stable coin, fiat, or something else.
Open source contribution cycle - enhanced through open protocols.
According to Lapham, when you contribute to open source, you are effectively collecting various rewards. This collection may be viewed as a form of payment. In other words, if you contribute to an open-source project, you get some benefits in return. This way I can signal my ability as a developer and improve your reputation, social capital, and employment opportunities. Lapham explains, “Once you start using blockchain to explicitly attach awards through your activity, then it becomes more interesting. This allows you to trade.”
A sample profile that showcasing users’ contributions and rewards.
Once we put these rewards on blockchain, we formalize these kudos and increase their value and uses. It increases the value of social capital or reputation. In the process, they can incentivize certain behaviors. Lapham observes,
If you can track the person who is contributing to my code, voting on your proposals, and writing actively within the thread online, then you know the person is a really good user. You may want to reward them to encourage further engagement. This may further increase incentives for people to contribute to open-source projects.
Enter the world of Gitcoin,11 a community for developers to collaborate and monetize their skills while working on open-source projects through bounties. Gitcoin is on a mission to make open-source contribution sustainable by allowing developers to choose projects that fit their portfolio, preferences, and time, as well as to incentivize open-source software development in blockchain. As Gitcoin’s website explains, “The weight of maintaining open-source falls on the shoulders of 0.01 percent of developers. This is not sustainable. This is not right.”
Kevin Owocki, the head of the Gitcoin project, said in one of his interviews,
The Internet has changed the way we live because it has allowed computers to send information over a network without an intermediary. Blockchain I think does the exact same thing for money or for value; it allows you to send it over a network without an intermediary. If you think about what the Internet did to turn our media into entertainment, I just think that if you project that forward it’s possible that what Napster did to record companies, blockchain could do to financial services companies. It could change the way we think about work and invest in financial services. That’s the broad thinking about blockchain’s potential. My specific niche within that is thinking jobs might look like in that ecosystem.12
Gitcoin leverages its global, on-demand workforce to help you find expert freelance developers to design, test, code, and build your project teams today. It also allows you to crowdfund for your open-source start-up or project to increase your budget and bring in more developers. As a coder, you get paid in crypto for freelance jobs, building features and solving bug bounties. You can work with top open-source projects and get paid fast.
Owocki explained,
One of the things that we’re trying to design is giving people optionality for work that they’re going to do while allowing them to test drive relationships before they decide to go full time and before they decide to get hitched. By doing a bounty with the counterparty, you’re really able to try before you buy. And I think that’s an important component of the ecosystem that we’re building.13
Conclusion
The introduction of the Internet has changed the world in many ways, but perhaps its greatest impact has been in fostering collaboration across boundaries previously thought insurmountable. We can now connect not just potential collaborators on another continent but also connect with amateurs or hobbyists who are sitting on creative, unusual solutions. Blockchain promises to take this radical networking to the next level. By enhancing the power of open source, it will change the way we think about exchange, cooperation, and connection
DADA Collective: Cromomaniaco, Chile / Lissette San Martin, Chile, collaboratively created using blockchain technology, a visual conversation..
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1More information about GlobalXplorer is available at https://www.globalxplorer.org/.
2K.T. May. 2019. “Calling All GlobalXplorers: Get Ready to Go to India.” https://blog.ted.com/calling-all-globalxplorers-get-ready-to-go-to-india/. See also K. Killgrove. 2017. “Space Archaeologist Funds Citizen Science Platform with $1M TED Prize.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2017/01/30/space-archaeologist-funds-citizen-science-platform-with-1m-ted-prize/#33e600a73bed.
3S. Rebman. 2018. “Birmingham Organization Tapped for Global Blockchain Accelerator Program.” https://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/news/2018/09/18/birmingham-organization-tapped-for-global.html. GlobalXplorer. 2018. “GlobalXplorer’s Blockchain for Antiquities Joins Tachyon Accelerator, Consensys Ventures’ New Flagship Initiative.” https://medium.com/@globalxplorer/globalxplorer-s-blockchain-for-antiquities-joins-tachyon-accelerator-consensys-ventures-new-fab4ee118fa0; D. Pena. 2018. “GlobalXplorer Selected For Blockchain Accelerator Program.” https://cryptoblockwire.com/globalxplorer-gets-a-valuable-chance/.
4More information about BULVRD is available at https://bulvrdapp.com/.
5B.H. Ramos. Discussions with the author. 2019.
6More information about Plastic Bank is available at https://www.plasticbank.com/.
7S. Frankson. Discussions with the author. 2019.
8More information about Decentraland is available at https://decentraland.org/.
9https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKujxIfRmfI.
10I. Lapham. Discussions with the author. 2019.
11More information about Gitcoin is available at https://gitcoin.co/. See also C. Silver. 2017. “Gitcoin Launches Today, Pushing Open-Source Forward with Cryptocurrency Bounties.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/curtissilver/2017/09/25/gitcoin-launches-today-pushing-open-source-forward-with-cryptocurrency-bounties/#5ec816c89853.
12“Episode 36: Gitcoin Founder on the Future of Open-source Development [Podcast].” 2018. https://www.disruptordaily.com/episode-36-gitcoin-founder-on-the-future-of-open-source-development-podcast/.
13Ibid.