Working for the man? Working for yourself? The third work alternative.
It has become common knowledge that artificial intelligence, demographics, automation, globalization, and other forces are changing the landscape of “work.” There are over 162 million “gig economy” workers in the US and EU alone and will grow to over 40% of the working population in the next few years. However, despite having access to a global workforce; companies continue to struggle to find the best talent.
Meanwhile, knowledge workers choose to either work for a corporation, or work for themselves.
Employers hiring these “gig economy knowledge workers” are challenged by:
- Finding qualified talent
- distributed project coordination
- quality control issues
- accountability and transparency
- a widening skill gap
Knowledge workers face a unique set of challenges:
- “Feast or famine” income cycles. Deliverables and communication are siloed and often disconnected from projects and stakeholders.
- Management of quality, reliability and resource management becomes additional cost and distraction.
- Self-employed’ gig work does not come with pensions, sick pay, holiday entitlement or parental leave. You have to be an ‘employee’ to get these basic rights.
- Gig workers get paid per project, not by the hour (at least in part). This means many people are earning less than their “billable rate”, with no financial security.
- Upside? What upside? — it’s non-existent. It’s chancing one gig to the next. Many workers live increasingly ‘on-demand’ — at the beck and call of the client, or on online app — just to make ends meet.
Traditional firms/agencies/collectives manage employees and struggle to scale operations through boom and bust cycles. At best, specialty service agencies and employers have a 50% utilization of their staff, whereas many employees do not have work to do in slow times. With this bench cost expense, they are seeking ways to reduce labor costs and find new business. Operations are not immune from the economic “feast and famine” cycle. Resource utilization, value assessment, lead generation, and planning are some of the major pain points. The Statement of work as it stands today, is a process that is subjective and fails to properly qualify projects, leading to scope creep, lower margins, and loss of revenues.
We’re introducing a third work alternative, based on a new economic model we call “boosted capitalism.”
Blackbox is a decentralized talent ecosystem enabling entrepreneurial-minded contributors to focus on what they do best, so they can monetize core skills from anywhere in the world. Our vision is to transition to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). As a DAO, Blackbox will use blockchain and smart contracts to establish and manage relationships between different entities to form a network of next-generation organizations.
The workforce isn’t restricted to just one geographical area — in fact, the entire planet becomes our available talent pool! Repetitive and tedious tasks are eliminated through workflow automation. Our vision is to transition to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) structure. DAOs use blockchain and smart contracts to establish and manage relationships between different entities to form organizations. To understand how this might work we need to think about what an organization is. From a structural perspective, an organization is a set of agreements between different actors and entities (e.g., people, other organizations, machine). With the right systems, standards, and training in place, a decentralized workforce allows companies to grow exponentially. Bringing on new people doesn’t require more office space or increased overhead.
Typically a business development or sales team reaches out to clients within a regional marketplace. By leveraging Blackbox OS they can expand their geographic reach without additional cost, and have access to an augmented staff of experts they can trust with their precious client relationships. This enables them to scale when unexpected work comes in — without the long term cash burn of hiring additional employees. Quality is one of the major weak points of centralized talent platforms such as Upwork and others. Workers are rarely aligned with incentives and the client suffers the consequences if they choose a freelancer unwisely.
Additionally, they can put their underutilized talent resources to work in the network with adjacent service providers that overlap specialties, reducing their overall bench cost.
A DAO will not be entirely machine managed. Although machines and autonomous entities play a key role, humans will still manage many of their interactions and be responsible for many tasks. However, growing AI automation, even in highly-skilled occupations (e.g., programming, finance, data analysis), would increasingly be given over to machines.
We are adopting a co-op consortium blockchain approach where consensus/trust is controlled by pre-selected nodes driven by Proof of Value, reputation, and stake. The advantage of this consortium approach over a fully private blockchain is that we can still be partly decentralized as we grow towards our eventual goal of becoming a DAO.
The culture of core committed contributors requires more than just bits. We understand that human connections underlie transactions and that this evolutionary advantage will assist us to bootstrap the ecosystem in order to place the guard rails, and define the methodology ahead of broader adoption.
We’re building the blueprint to re-imagine what an organization is at its core. We’re moving us all forward towards a better way to work and add value. An ecosystem and protocol to propose, contribute and measure that value.
Influence is earned through a reputation system by consensus review (voting) and consistently demonstrating execution skills (PoV).
The Deliverable Values Points (DVP), or the estimated value of a “Deliverable,” is determined during the proposal stage, and discussed by experts until they reach consensus/buy in.
Once a proposal is accepted, participants can “bid” on owning deliverables (based on skills/reputation/availability). Upon owning a deliverable, the actual payout is the value of the owned deliverable, multiplied with the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) and the Quality Factor determined through a Proof of Value (PoV).
Vote delegation, or “liquid democracy” eligibility is based upon reputation (what have you done?), skill (what do you know?), and stake (why should you care?).
Votes delegation is controlled by the participants and provides the following:
1. a level of efficiency and informed allocation of limited knowledge resources
2. A reputation system based on agreed upon values and transparency ensures all parties are above board and without corrupt intentions.
Read White Paper for additional details
As an entrepreneurial-minded network, we aren’t for everyone. We compete for hard-to-find talent such as data scientists, machine learning engineers, solution architects, founders, and most of all — we compete against the status quo.
To learn more visit Blackboxfoundation.org
