A new vision for “primitive accumulation”
According to Marx, “the whole purpose of primitive accumulation is to privatize the means of production, so that the exploiting owners can make money from the surplus labour of those who, lacking other means, must work for them.” With freeftopia, our intent is to use the same means but to the opposite end: enabling a primitive accumulation of virtual wealth in order to extend the existing, private ownership of the company to any person that contributes to its activity.
Since we’re endeavoring to transform an existing organization into a commons, one of our priorities is to start accounting for the value created by new members, as soon as they take part in the community.
As a traditional company, there’s no practical way to do that. The usual form of incorporation enables individuals to engage either as shareholders, employees or service providers. Each of these modes of engagement comes with significant transaction costs, preventing casual contributors from joining in, unless they do it for intrinsic motivations only; i.e. not expecting anything in return from the organization.
Our goal is to design and test a simple system with the aim of allocating units of value to freeftopia members, as a reward and an acknowledgement of any contribution that is made.
We’ve been thinking and talking for some time about how to reward network members as an alternative system to the just-mentioned usual modes of engagement. Admittedly, the path toward this goal is somewhat unclear at this stage; Should it be some sort of internal market, with people bidding on projects? Should we assess the value of each other’s contributions? Should we take into account the time spent on a task, the perceived utility of its outcome, or a combination of both? It’s still hard to tell.
Until our experiments drive us to some acceptable ways to define systems and create rewards, we feel we are badly in need of some short-term, limited solution in order to get things kicked off.
So let’s go lean, build something simple and test it.
In the past few months, a number of people have engaged with freeftopia. It’s true that the lack of clear structure, shared plans and measurable incentives makes it difficult for people to contribute on a regular basis. Still we enjoy the involvement of everyone, and we appreciate every interaction that takes place online, or sometimes around a coffee. At this early stage in the life of freeftopia there is a tremendous value in having someone spending an hour on a call, reviewing a story before it’s published or arranging a meeting.
Keep in mind we’re not yet talking about complex value assessments. We’re not yet ready to figure out ways to measure the efforts needed to design and implement a product feature, or run a marketing campaign. As a first step, we want to acknowledge the interest and the effort of people who are willing to go beyond an initial conversation and start acting as members of the community. And we are fortunate that we keep attracting people who have this willingness.
Recently I came across Mangrove, an extraordinary community of freelancers and entrepreneurs. Members of Mangrove’s core team have pledged to invest at least one day a week on average, toward common projects.
While intrinsic motivations are their main driver, there is always a need for transparency with respect to the amount of work that each member contributes. Mangrove has chosen to let each member declare how much they’ve worked over each two-week period and to share this information openly within the group. They use a simple spreadsheet to that end:
As Mangrove co-founders Adrien and Matthieu recently told me, the intent here is to capture the pulse of individual work engagement within the community in order to adjust members’ behavior in a stigmergic manner: instead of being based on central coordination, activity is incentivized by the group’s acknowledgement of everyone’s efforts. When a member can’t put in the expected effort for an extended period of time, a conversation may start about the causes of the situation and how to fix it.
Since Mangrove doesn’t generate revenue nor distribute financial rewards, there’s no material consequence to this process. It’s all about transparency in the purpose of a balanced, cohesive collective work.
This is exactly the stage freeftopia is in right now: we’re starting to track and acknowledge the basic interactions that make our network grow, even without a formal model for evaluating the cost, the price or the utility of our contributions.
Hence we’re proposing a similar system, with a simpler scoring structure, coupled with the issuance of our first tokens:
- everyone will be invited to declare her involvement in the project over the past week ;
- we suggest 3 possible “grades” as a way to guide participants so that the measure of involvement has consistency:
1. social activity (100 tokens): any sort of social activity in the group, like attending the weekly call, or being part of conversations on our Slack, or inviting someone new to the project;
2. a minimal amount of work on a specific task (250 tokens): reviewing a text, answering questions from an ftopia prospect, setting up a meeting, etc. — anything beyond a social interaction, which doesn’t require more than a few hours of work;
3. a more significant amount of work, either several small tasks or a bigger one like translating a story (500 tokens). Note: it is understood that the total amount of work shouldn’t exceed one day — when more work is performed, a project-based assessment should kick in, (but that’s for later); - members will be notified each Saturday that it’s time for scoring one’s own activity, and will have up to the next Wednesday to do so ;
- members will be able to view their tokens via a personal dashboard, which will eventually serve as the starting point for interacting with the community (sharing rewards and making decisions).
Why do we do this?
The first, most obvious goal is to provide a tangible feedback mechanism for informal or light-touch contributions. Using an crypto-token as unit of account is the first step towards our eventual goal of designing and executing a consensus protocol that manages the distribution of financial rewards to members of the community.
Just as important, we intend to use token allocation as way to trigger positive interactions within the community, rather than encourage a mercenary mindset. Once the distribution of tokens is initiated, our next move will be to deliver tools for sharing them within the community, either publicly or secretly… but more on this later :)
We are about to write down the requirements, then design and implement a simple app that will enable each member to declare one’s weekly contribution and access a first version of a dashboard.
Leaving the old primitive accumulation model
New technologies and methodologies are making it possible to track value creation and distribute incentives and ownership within organizations in many exciting and innovative ways. These will eventually make it possible for millions to break away from the old model of “primitive accumulation” that Marx lamented.
Interested in contributing your time and talents to freeftopia and helping us experiment with the creation of a new type of organization? Please email us at free@ftopia.com. Or just help us by spreading the word and sharing this post. Thank you!
Warmest thanks to Bill Rice for the great editing work. Thank you to Adrien Montcoudiol and Matthieu Leventis for sharing your experience at Mangrove. Thanks to Karine and Christophe for their inputs and support, and to Alexandre, Dorian and Raphaël for their willingness to implement the app! :)
