Happy Vision of a hApps Future
Today I want to share with you some of my vision for hApps on Holochain. Imagine me rubbing my hands together even as I type. For me, envisioning hApps has that vibe of a conspiratorial plot being planned. “Mwah ha ha…. Let’s take over the world together.” Come in, come in, let’s envision these possibilities.
Product Owner for hApps
After the Holo ICO, I shifted from ICO Project Lead to Product Owner for hApps and Co-Director of the Commons Engine. I will share more about the Commons Engine soon. As Product Owner for hApps, I am delighted to work with a stellar team on building hApps we can use internally, and some interesting hApps we think our community can benefit from.
If you have seen our latest videos from hApps Showcases, you know we are working on things like Personas and Profiles and Abundance of Presence. I have already posted about the way we want to handle identity and how that aligns with the leading visionaries in the identity and personal data space. I used to work for IdentityWoman, including doing operations for Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, so this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who knows my backstory. I am overjoyed that the team is aligned and eagerly building what I believe in.
Internally, the Abundance of Presence hApp is in high demand. We are a distributed team trying to work across the globe together, and this is a tool geared toward helping us feel connected and aware of each other so we can easily communicate and coordinate. Basically it is a chat for groups to schedule meetings, but it has some interesting user interface features that we think helps the global team connect, like information in profiles that help us sense into each others’ well being in more intimate ways than we’re used to using in Google Calendars and Trello boards. Yeah! Still, the question is, where is this going? What is the longer vision here?
The Decentralized Web
Back in August, Holo sponsored, and I attended, Internet Archive’s “Decentralized Web Summit” event. I was also asked to facilitate a set of conversations around one of the thirteen core topics. I selected “Beyond Advertising” as my core topic, because the way funding works in a system seems to keep determining the shape of the system…despite best intentions otherwise. I collected insight from those attending “Builders Day” and presented and facilitated a discussion at the main event as well. Sir Tim Berners Lee contributed his thoughts. Mitchell Baker of Mozilla contributed hers. While it was an honor to hear from these luminaries of the field, their voices were consistent with everyone else’s views: the advertising model of the web is a problem, feels wrong, and we need better options. The incentives of the model drive platforms to service the advertisers and data clients, rather than actually servicing “user” interest. Users are treated like products, not like contributors and beneficiaries. We feel it. Reciprocity here feels broken. We want to move away from tracking and surveillance that make us feel like we live in a petri dish (or, locked in by the walls that form the edges of that dish).
Thrivability
For all of us in the Holoverse, we look to and gain inspiration from nature and living systems. What has evolution learned from trial and error of millenia?
What strategies do living systems use, and how can the lens of biomimicry help us see possibilities in the challenges we face?
For a decade I have been championing the notion of thrivability. For me, living systems don’t aim to just sustain, they strive to thrive. So of course I was listening to all of this thinking, “what can we hack in here that actually leads to a more thrivable world?” I heard everyone bemoaning what isn’t working. I wondered “what is working that we aren’t noticing,” so we can do more of that until what isn’t wanted dissipates from lack of attention. What I saw, when I looked through this lens, was that we have started creating an “Exuberance Economy” where there can be more than enough for everyone.
We might complain about these platforms and what they do to earn money, but really what is happening is that we have subsidized our use of technology. Roughly, we used to have to pay cost of production plus profit margin divided by number of units sold which equals cost of unit. Now, the cost of software production doesn’t correspond to the number of users (units sold). It costs roughly the same to build something for 10 people as it does to build it for 1000.
We can get into the economics here, but the takeaway is that we have learned how to create exuberance in the economy. In the last 15 years or so, we developed ways for revenue generation to be disentangled from “units sold” so that who is paying is not necessarily equal to who is consuming. In some cases this goes sideways, like in some advertising. In other ways this creates additional gifting economies.
In the gaming world, we see games that are profitable where each person is not charged in playing the game. They only charge for some players who are buying special customization or additional features. (We also note that the gaming world figured out that special customizations that enables advantages in the game shows up as an unfair advantage. Cosmetic differences seem okay. Tactical advantages for a price tag are not.)
Let’s celebrate that we’ve found ways to subsidize participation for a greater number of people who could not afford or would not pay to participate. Now, let’s find ways to make that healthier and with sufficient sense of reciprocity in the system for people to feel it is a “fair game” to play. Let’s play it on holochain!
An “Exuberance Economy” on Holochain
Conspiratorial winks. What “games” can we create on Holochain that enable more of the exuberance economy?
In this next era, there can be a distribution of the architecture to enable distribution and sharing in a commons (the sharing economy) without a feudal overlord (centralized control organization).
We can have massively cooperative businesses that are firmly rooted in an ethic of abundance.
Practically, what does that mean? Well, one of the models for exuberance is Freemium software. Some small set of “users” pay for premium services while some larger set of “users” are subsidized, gaining free services. In a sense this model has done away with advertising because the community of participants IS the funnel toward premium payments (if designed well).
Let’s break that down even further for Freemium. We need a method for payment. And we need a way to filter some functionality for only paying participants (and keep in mind how gamers hate unfair advantage in paid models). We may want some feedback loops so we have a sense of how many people are using the application, how much they use it, and so on, so we can determine the features that should be free and those that merit payment.
I want to build hApplets that can be combined together in service of the Exuberance Economy model that hApp developers desire. Going for Freemium model? Put together hApplet one, four, and seven. Adjust settings for specific instance. Go! As easy as google adwords but way healthier for the ecosystem.
Generative Questions
To that end, I am exploring the tensions brought up by questions such as:
- Who can pay and who benefits? Who needs it? How do we balance those?
- Acts of generosity expand option space. What are the options that open up? What do healthy boundaries look like, and where should they be?
- We have collapsed the difference between that which is finite by nature (rival resources like a tree or an apple) and that which is infinite by nature (non-rivals, like an idea or recipe) in our marketplaces. Are there ways to avoid twisting non-rival goods into scarcity-based forms to drive compensation for them?
- How does the system enable feedback without getting too bogged down by responses and administration thereof?
Living systems find ways to repurpose materials, where an output from one is an input to another. Coming from a Metacurrency background, I took in the feedback from the Dweb Summit to consider the multiple inputs and outputs we are playing with and how to structure and support the necessary flows for our hApps. Consider, as you design hApps and other startups, the dimensions of resources such as:
- Time
- Infrastructure (hosting)
- Talent and knowledge
- Social connections and relationships
- Assets (particularly rival goods)
- Money
- Passion and purpose (motivations to activate these other resources)
- Data
Of the above, what does one have and need to be successful and fit within an ecosystem of others? What hApplets can help us convert these from what we have into what we need at a given phase? Tools like tokenization can transform time into money with possible mutual upside.
By having conversations with many in the community, I am looking to build hApps that assist the Holochain community in thriving in an exuberant economy.
Solving for reciprocity gaps
In summary, yes, the hApps team is building some basic tools for productivity on our team. And in the future, we are creating tools for an exuberant economy that are as easy to use as Google Adwords. Let’s make them healing for people and communities, benefiting from the real richness of reciprocal relationships.
