The Blockchain-powered future of knowledge teamwork
How does the ideal workplace look like? Admit it, you have an idea. Since we all like dreaming, let’s play a little game. You are a knowledge worker in the year 2028. Close your eyes. What do you see?
Do you still sit in a firm’s office at a desk across your boss whom, be honest, you don’t really like?
Or do you see yourself in your favorite place in your city of choice? And do you work on a task your boss assigned?
Or are you part of an open network working in a team of like-minded people on a data-driven project that you specifically chose?
We envision a decentralized, flexible future of teamwork.
Before we get into the weeds of how we are going to do this let’s first understand what are the most important technological innovations that drive the disruption of work and employment.
and robotics (source of image Google)
Artificial intelligence and automation
McKinsey estimates that “half the activities people are paid to do globally could theoretically be automated using currently demonstrated technologies.”
Moreover, “in about 60 percent of occupations, at least one-third of the constituent activities could be automated, implying substantial workplace transformations and changes for all workers”.
These trends are already starting to fundamentally disrupt the world of work and employment.
We believe that, as a consequence, human work will be forced up the value chain, rewarding a combination of creativity, contextual knowledge and data-driven analysis. Machines and algorithms increasingly will perform lower-value tasks.
The age of open data
The universe of digital data is doubling every two years and much of it is becoming ever more widely available.
IDC, a market research firm, estimates the commercial data analytics market at $200 billion in 2017 and predicts double-digit growth in the coming years. In addition, financial institutions generate more than $50 billion a year with data science applications in asset management.
Moreover, the field of data-driven academic research has grown strongly in recent decades, both in absolute and relative terms. Measured by the % share of all academic publications, data-driven research has doubled between 1990 and 2015 while the proportion of theory-focused publications flatlined at around 4%.
The decentralization of information networks, driven by the Cambrian explosion of Blockchain technology
Such Blockchain-powered information networks are based on the mathematics of cryptography and economic incentives.
However, Blockchains create not just another technology but a new kind of accountability between people that closely resembles trust but is scalable across large, open networks.
“Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center.
Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.”
Vitalik Buterin (2016)
Everyone is talking about blockchain but how can this new technology actually disrupt traditional corporations?
- By enabling decentralized employees to transact without middlemen and instead interact directly with each other in a faster and more efficient way
- By giving every worker a stake in the success of the network
- By optimizing the trade-off between work motivation and project coordination that constrains traditional, centralized firms
Why we are building Covee Network
The past 10 years the hospitality and taxi driving businesses have gone through major disruption. You can now stay at a stranger’s flat and be driven by a stranger in his car at a tap of a button. Why hasn’t a similar disruption affected knowledge work like consulting, finance and academia yet?
Most knowledge work is still happening within old-school corporations. People feel that the effort they put in their daily tasks and projects isn’t rewarded fairly.
At the same time, they feel that their skills aren’t aligned with the projects and the team members that are assigned to them, making them less motivated to contribute and deliver the expected results.
We are committed to giving smart people access to the project they want to work on and apply their skills and creativity to solve problems through teamwork. Moreover, participants will be fairly rewarded and assessed for their contribution and collaboration with the other team members.
In the next 10 years we believe that the largest source of value creation for humans will be data-driven knowledge work, organized via a decentralized, Blockchain-based digital economy.
A more flexible, more distributed and decentralized way of work will emerge which will be associated with less full-time employment at just one firm. We envision a world where people will work at multiple jobs and projects at the same time.
People will be able to collaborate with strangers from different parts of the world on complex data-driven problems from various industries (genomics, algorithmic trading, engineering etc.)
In order for people to trust this blockchain-based sharing economy, the right combination of technology, mechanism design and incentives are required. And that is the reason we are building Covee Network.
How networks challenge traditional firms
Why do firms still exist? Well, economists argue that firms achieve coordination among its employees at lower costs than a market can do among its independent buyers and sellers.
However, the drawbacks of firms as coordinators of economic activity are obvious. Given the limited scale of firms, the best fit of person-to-task is often not within the boundaries of one firm.
“The best people to solve a given problem are unlikely to work for the firm facing the problem” as Yochai Benkler from Harvard argues.
Moreover, firms, like other forms of economic organization, face a tradeoff between motivation (an employee’s effort) and coordination (orchestrating tasks and projects efficiently). In firms employees capture only a small share of the value they create.
Networks can drastically improve the trade-off between workers’ motivation and coordination.
Cheap communication technology means that a large number of people can have access to information on a global scale. Today’s networks with near-zero cost of information sharing hence often represent a superior form of economic organization compared to firms.
In addition to improving the motivation/coordination trade-off, networks also make it possible to achieve a much better person-to-task fit well beyond the boundaries of one firm.
At Covee Network workers will be able to pick data-driven projects they like most, form a team based on a Blockchain-powered trust mechanism and interact with their team via smart contracts. Each individual’s contribution will be rewarded fairly.
Therefore, motivation, coordination and collaboration are all achieved.
“What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”
Bitcoin White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto (2009)
“What is needed is a decentralized network for knowledge work based on token incentives, smart contracts and a unique mechanism design instead of trust, allowing any willing parties to solve complex problems collaboratively without the need for a trusted third party such as a corporation, legal agreements or a Web 2.0 platform.”
Covee Network (2018)
Conclusion
We believe the future of economic organization lies not in firms and centralized networks, but in Blockchain-based, decentralized information networks.
Smart contracts can solve the coordination problems, especially in large-scale networks, as well as traditional firms but without the need for middlemen, intermediaries or other third parties, hence reducing the cost of coordination.
At the same time, decentralized tokenized networks also give users a financial stake in the network’s success via ownership of cryptographic tokens, which increases participants’ motivation.
Hence, decentralized networks powered by Blockchains fundamentally break the traditional coordination/motivation trade-off. This is the future of knowledge work.
No more projects that don’t get you excited to work on, no more bosses that you don’t really enjoy working for, no more firms that don’t value your work.
Become part of the Covee Network, join the data-driven knowledge work and collaboration revolution!
Visit our website: covee.network
Join our telegram community: https://t.me/coveenetwork
In our next post we will provide a detailed description of our solution including the mechanism design, token incentive and smart contracts. Stay tuned!
