Towards Robust and Resilient Economies and Communities
Why we need a Token Engineering Commons
It’s been four months since the official kick off of the Token Engineering Commons (TEC). The community is blossoming and as we approach the launch of our token economy, we are aligning around our shared vision and mission — stewarding the cultivation of resources to accelerate the creation of robustly engineered models, modular tools, standards and educational opportunities that advance the field of token engineering in a regenerative way. In short — advancing token engineering.
Why Token Engineering?
Token Engineering is truly a transdisciplinary field, reflected by the amazing humans who are drawn to the Token Engineering Commons. We are engineers, scientists, researchers, educators, ambassadors, philosophers, AR/VR and game designers, digital nomads, activists, artists, edgewalkers and most, have a very hard time fitting in a box — except on screen when we have our community calls:
The Token Engineering community is comprised of several organizations and projects focused on developing the tools to navigate complex systems. Landing in this space, we find ourselves at the nexus of an ecosystem of heterarchical network collaborations working on various elements of the library of components needed to create cyber-physical commons infrastructure.
Some projects in the ecosystem are focused on building safe, open source smart contracts. Others are researching and documenting crypto economic patterns and use cases to uncover best practices. Some are developing token engineering standards and educating the greater community on value flows, coding and conflict resolution.
What we all have in common is that we are looking at whole systems modeling to validate economic designs. This requires exploring decentralized finance from both scientific and ethical perspectives. Doing so will enable communities to deploy resilient tokenized infrastructures to support their goals, causes, or commons.
However, the tech alone won’t save us; nurturing relationships and looking at our collective cultural habits and dynamics will ensure that the potential in these powerful new socio-economic patterns will be regenerative and resilient.
Why the Commons?
The TEC is using novel token engineering tooling to design and implement a regenerative economic system around the advancement of the TE field. We hope to become a schelling point for the growth of this budding ecosystem.
The TEC will enable the TE community to collectively fund this nascent field, while also capturing the value that is provided to create an alignment of incentives between individuals in the TEC and the continual creation of token engineering public goods.
If the TEC is successful, we will steward a common pool of resources to fund proposals like these. Our hope is that Token Engineering practices will be accelerated and adopted by the wider blockchain space, enabling a huge leap forward in its maturity and evolution.
In order for this to happen, we need to shift our dialogue and missions from building pieces and parts, toward using established engineering practices to build the next generation of decentralized economies and infrastructure.
Battle-testing and Bootstrapping while Weaving and Nurturing
In addition to innovating on technical design patterns and bootstrapping an economy around TE, we are focused on humans! Nurturing the people that are a part of the Commons, as well as the relationships and culture, while documenting best practices will enable a more resilient ecosystem; healthy communities create healthy economies, and vice versa.
To do this, the TEC is weaving Ostrom’s principles into the DAO framework, employing subject matter experts to explore boundaries, conflict management and other processes to keep our Commons healthy for the long haul.
These cultural frameworks can offer a trellis for community platforms, cooperatives and what we call “warm DAOs” looking to not only find tech solutions, but implement the complementary cultural practices that provide the deeper connections required for a thriving and engaged community. True to our ethos, all of this work is open-source and documentation will be published and shared with other communities.
Join the Mission
With all of these developments, the TEC is constantly iterating and integrating discoveries and feedback, and seeks to stay in alignment with the mission — supporting Token Engineering projects, research and implementations.
The Token Engineering Commons community, ecosystem friends, and partners are open to sharing and connecting work around this vision. We look forward to continuing to build bridges between networks, DAOs, commons, communities, institutions, academia and others around the world.
We warmly welcome you to join and share:
👋 Pop by our Discord or Telegram channels, introduce yourself and share what you are working on
☎ Say hi on our weekly community calls at 2pm EST / 8pm CET on our general voice channel on Discord — add it to your calendar
💸 Submit a proposal for funding for your TE project
📑 Read more about our working groups and join one
📣 Follow us on Twitter & Medium to stay up to date on the upcoming hatch
This article was written by @JessicaZartler and Griff Green with edits by Livia Deschermayer, Jeff Emmett and Kris Jones.
