The Future of Working Together Pt. 1
The future of work is communal. An individual’s interactions with a business is already rapidly changing from a transaction to an ongoing relationship. Relationships that look more like sports teams and fans and less like employers and employees: Beyonce’s Bey-hive, Greenbay’s Cheeseheads, Diet Coke Drinkers, brands and their bands of brandeds.
Leveraging communities, businesses have unlocked a new generation of innovative products and services. Twenty years ago, the idea of getting into a stranger’s car and having them drive you to the airport was unheard-of and frightening. But now, because of ride share communities this happens many, many times a day. Furthermore, strangers frequently deliver meals to people’s homes, and even step inside to help assemble furniture or paint a nursery. You might even spend the night in a stranger’s home on your next vacation instead of a hotel. This relationship between consumers, providers, and platforms is a revolution of trust. Trust as a product of community.
While many successful businesses rely on communities to drive revenue, compensation for creation of value in these communities is often wildly unbalanced: Yelp doesn’t pay its reviewers, Reddit doesn’t pay redditors, and the enterprises monetizing open source software rarely pay maintainers. Google and Facebook provide the ultimate community head fake — they posture as companies connecting people to information and each other, but then make their money from advertising — exploiting the communities on their platforms.
Why don’t people in communities get paid for the value they create?
While many might be quick to point to corporate greed, close inspection reveals that perhaps it’s an infrastructure issue — it’s both expensive and difficult for businesses to administer micro-rewards for micro-services. Even the lowest cost transaction providers typically charge both a percent and flat-rate charge for each transaction, and you still need to handle the complexity of managing who gets what and for what service.
However, making micro-reward infrastructure-as-a-service available to businesses would be tremendously valuable: it offers the promise of deepening ties to communities by further aligning incentives for them to succeed. A community can be measured in how tight-knit it is, and this infrastructure tightens the weave of these communities.
The tight-knit communities will win. They’ll compensate for the creation of value, and in turn see more community members working harder to drive success. If someone has to make a choice between who to work for, they’ll choose the organization that’s able to most directly compensate them for the value they create.
Historically, creating micro-rewards for micro-services was difficult and cost prohibitive, however with new financial technologies and regulations (Stripe, Plaid, Cryptocurrency/NFTs, Reg A+/CF, etc.), moving money is rapidly becoming faster and more efficient. So, at Fringe we’re taking advantage of these new technologies to build the infrastructure for what we call Community-Driven Revenue.
