Ellcrys: A Comprehensive Path to an Open Collaborative Future

Collaborating Successfully Across Borders

Introduction

Ellcrys is changing the way people collaborate by creating a platform where people can be able to co-create, co-own and co-manage open source software together, openly and transparently. This is done by leveraging blockchain and git, and through this way, Ellcrys is able to build a democratic and decentralized system that allows anyone anywhere in the world to work together on a project.

The Scenario

You have an idea and you discuss this idea with a friend. Your friend thinks it’s an amazing one and won’t stop talking about how this could be the beginning of something new. You meet to discuss the way forward and realize it is a really big idea, and you would be needing some hands in on it. No. Many hands. You don’t have money, and Silicon Valley might just be a step away from your dreams. Your friend, (Um, let’s call her… B). B knows many people. She’s what you’d call a social butterfly, well, on the internet. B knows some developers and designers. She belongs to some coding community and could bring in people who’d be interested to build this idea with you.

The Problem

B arranges a meeting with everybody. The timing is perfect. You don’t know how B did it, but she got six people living in four continents together. Michael is a designer and goes to MIT. MI-fucking T! The two brothers who are dropouts are doing very well in Hong Kong, and Octavia Wulf owns a restaurant in Australia, a side gig her husband manages for the family. Six of you will be talking tonight. Your palms are sweaty. You think B is a genius. How did she manage to pull this off!?

It is time. Everybody is talking. And someone says, ‘I want 20%.’ This is one person asking for a cut. What happens when everybody starts making their own demand? What happens when this idea is built? Wait, who even owns this idea? And then it dawns on you something that might be a problem. And if this project is built, how do you sort out who manages the GitHub account? What about the source code? You have a slight thought that you might just be getting paranoid over nothing but you can’t seem to push these thoughts aside. You fast forward your thoughts to when everybody starts working on the project, and the thought about who the web hosting account is going to be in their name. What about the PayPal account? What happens during the building process? What happens after? Uhnn.

The Solution

The truth is, your concerns are very much valid. Because If you don’t ask the questions now, these questions will definitely arise later in the building.

Ellcrys makes it easy so that anybody who is part of a project — developers, designers, collaborators, investors, members, spectators, are truly part of the project, together. Ellcrys provides access to developer tools for building open, transparent, and multi-owned software owned products and organizations.

This way, you can build organizations remotely together with people you haven’t met, and probably will not meet without being scared of getting cheated.

Collaborating Successfully Across Borders

Recognizing the Role of Trust in Collaborative Relationships

“Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilisation work.” — Vince Lombardi

The advantages of effective collaboration cannot be over-emphasized. Collaboration can stall when people do not feel the need to open up, and this brings about the role of trust in collaboration.

Definitions of Trust

Over time, we have come across many definitions of trust. We have to agree that trust is a central part of human relationships and all successful collaborations are built on trust.

An article by Larry Prusak on HBR reads, ‘If I had to pick the one thing to get right about any collaborative effort, I would choose trust.’ This seems like a no-brainer, but according to Larry, trust is the driving force behind every successful collaboration. It is for the sake of trust, that companies hire an excess of ‘other’ people (organizations) to function as a place of authority over them, by handling management and a couple of other human affairs.

To collaborate, effectively, these companies need badly to pay the price of trust. In solving the problem of trust in collaborative relationships, we go down to the root cause of mistrust in business relationships.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

So, what do humans do? Humans conceive the idea and hire other humans who take charge of the situation to create trust. If I’m going to be doing business with a fellow human, I might as well need to trust them, but I don’t trust them well enough to give them control over the project that I’m going to be working with them on, so we choose somebody, or a group of persons and hand over total control to them)

Let us go back to the situation I painted in the introduction. Would it be easier if everybody just agreed to own 20 per cent of the idea, start building, push bits of code to a web-based hosting platform for version control? Perhaps, employing a lawyer and an accountant to do the recording and negotiating, so that workflow goes smoothly and everybody’s mind is at ease? Well, that could go ohkay, but what happens if some misunderstanding comes up later, and the lawyer or accountant starts taking sides? You see, there’s the thing with centralized organizational authorities.

Centralized bodies are bodies that are put up in an organization to take control of the whole process. The problem with this system is that the ‘decision makers’ hold control of the organization. Another problem is that everything becomes monopolized.

Let us take a breather here and talk about version control systems.

According to Atlassian, “Version control systems are a category of software tools that help a software team manage changes to source code over time. Version control software keeps track of every modification to the code in a special kind of database.”

This simply means that version control systems allow users to save a copy of their work to a database by ‘pushing,’ make modifications to their work by reverting to previous copies of the work through the history of past code commits. Version control systems are designed to enable trust between people for remote collaboration by which anybody from anywhere can contribute to building projects together.

There are different types of version control systems

1. GitHub
2. Bitbucket
3. GitLab
4. Beanstalk
5. PerForce, etc etc.

But, there is a problem, don’t you think?

The problem is that these web-based version control systems are controlled by a central body. For the sake of this article, I will focus on GitHub. For example, GitHub is controlled by Microsoft and if anything happens, Microsoft can decide that a repository is not worth the trouble to be on GitHub. (eg GitHub censoring posts. Also deleted content posted by The Shadow Brokers)

A year ago, GitHub revealed in a blog post that it survived the largest known DDoS attack in history. A DDoS attack is a cyber attack whose intent is to bring down websites by barraging them with loads of traffic in such a way that their servers can no longer handle it. This attack is a ploy by cyber bullies whose intent is to force targets offline and cause a denial of service for users of the targeted resource. Imagine what would happen to projects that have been hosted on this type of version control system. If the central body is at risk, the projects would also be at risk. According to Wikipedia, GitHub recorded over 100 million repositories as at May 2019, making it the largest host of source code.

On May 27th, 2019, GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab was hacked with the hacker demanding a ransom of 0.1 BTC (bitcoin). The intruder left this message to everybody whose repository [they] cleared:

“To recover your lost code and avoid leaking it: Send us 0.1 Bitcoin (BTC) [around $570] to our Bitcoin address 1ES14c7qLb5CYhLMUekctxLgc1FV2Ti9DA and contact us by Email at admin@gitsbackup.com with your Git login and a Proof of Payment. If you are unsure if we have your data, contact us and we will send you a proof. Your code is downloaded and backed up on our servers. If we don’t receive your payment in the next 10 Days, we will make your code public or use them otherwise.”

Now, this is the problem. Our world is becoming more connected as millions of users keep building projects together, as the gap between communication keeps closing, these centralized platforms we rely on to provide us with the services and tools that we need to stay connected keep [doing whatever they want], mostly without our permission. We tell ourselves that we don’t really care what they do with our data, but the truth is that we do. These centralized authorities take our money, our time, and also our data. They add or modify a feature without our notice but send this notice afterwards in a software update. We want to be part of the building, of the process, and this is what Ellcrys brings to Open Source Collaboration — A new way to collaborate together, and effectively. By providing the tools that make everybody a part of governance and the decision-making process, Ellcrys intends to fully create communities that are open, and transparent so that anyone, anywhere can truly take part in the creation of software products and services without relying on a third party.

Opportunities with Ellcrys

1. Decentralized Git Hosting: Ellcrys provides a decentralized git hosting system that allows collaborators to save and share codes without the fear of their code being censored or destroyed.
2. Decentralized Ownership: On Ellcrys, these collaborators are able to own source codes/ projects together. Source codes shouldn’t have to be in the name of the person who created and added it to the hosting platform.
3. Decentralized Governance: On Ellcrys, there is no such thing as account owners managing the governance structure. Collaborators create governance structures that guide them based on the Ellcrys protocol.
4. Hybrid Proof of Stake/ Proof of Work Consensus Model: The Ellcrys consensus mechanism makes it possible that everybody is a participant in the Network.
5. Autonomous Functions: Collaborators are able to build blockchain applications that offer whatever services they can think of, in the language that they are conversant and comfortable with, and do not need to learn any other language before they can build on the Ellcrys blockchain.
6. Ellcrys Native Coin: Ellcrys native coin is known as Ell (ȅ), a utility token that allows transaction within the Ellcrys blockchain. Ell is mined through a coin generation protocol known as ‘PeopleMint.’ PeopleMint is a protocol that allows anyone, anywhere to create new coins by scanning fiat currencies to promote accessible and fair distribution in the Ellcrys network.

The End

1. We believe that anybody should be able to be a part of open organizations — Have access to/ and involving open-source projects.
2. We believe that open organizations should be truly open in the truest sense of what openness stands for.
3. We believe that software users should have more power and visibility into how the software is built.
4. We believe that collaborators should have the freedom to contribute to communities of their choice without fear.
5. We believe that distance should not be a barrier to owning the software and being a part of open organizations.

*** Ellcrys Pre IEO will start in July 1st, 2019. Read more here. Do you want to know more about Ellcrys? Get Started here, or see what we’ve been up to? Check out Ellcrys Q1 Updates***