The road to Community Ownership

When we first set out in search of the Talisman we envisioned that it would be a “community-owned” wallet, and thus we proudly stamped that onto our twitter bio, but what exactly does that mean? Well, it isn’t idealistic hyperbole or empty marketing speak but it’s not simple either. 2021 was the dawn of the age of Aquarius baby, and great change is upon us, so buckle in and let’s discuss!

The combination of tokens, smart-contracts, and organisational dapps (Please hmu if you can think of a better name for this) is already enabling new kinds of cross-border organisations.

Organisational Dapps — Productivity and organisation tool that can be configured based on blockchain state. An example of this would be a token-permissioned discord server, or application with web3 sign-in like Skiff.

I don’t see the innovation slowing down either, assuming we have the freedom to operate these organisations without being pwned by regulators for non-compliance with employment and securities laws. Decentralised organisations enable a fundamental shift of power and influence in the world, so some conflict with the law and state is certain, but the possibilities are limitless if we can transcend rules made by our forefathers to rein in our now outdated institutions.

Through the use of these new technologies, Talisman aims to cultivate community-ownership. What we mean by that is:

1. Users are rewarded for the value they provide and can become co-owners in the products they use.— This is possible because tokens offer us a programmable and low-cost way of administering ownership and incentives compared to paper equity.
2. Products can harness the intelligence of the crowd. — Thanks to on-chain identities we can understand how much skin-in-the-game somebody has, how they’ve previously contributed to a project. We can approximate their sincerity and give proportional consideration to their views in the community.
3. Users are increasingly able to influence the scope of the product, and even participate in the product development. — Who is employed by the organisation, and who is not becomes more of a gradient than simply black and white. Speculation and currency are the main drivers of most crypto engagement, but this can be harnessed to build a community that are always open for consultation and ready to bat for you.
4. Organisations can increase transparency and meritocracy through public on-chain identities and reputation. — This might sound orthogonal to community ownership but meritocracy and fairness is important in any team. Especially if our organisations fragment and contribution becomes increasingly permissionless.

How will we enable the above in Talisman? It’s not obvious and thus this should all be taken with a grain of salt. We are already building quite a complex software product, something typically considered to have a low probability of succeeding, so the path to community ownership is incredibly treacherous. We will walk this path cautiously, make incremental changes and manage the risk of ruin. In spite of the difficulty, we believe that this is the way.

Here are a 3 steps we’re taking toward community ownership in Q1 2022:

1 — Commending our Mightiest Contributors

Cast from rare minerals mined in the Paraverse, 2250 Commendations have recently been minted by the Talisman Guardians. These commendations will be bestowed upon those who perform acts of service for the Talisman community.

These items are RMRK 1.0 NFTs on Kusama (just like our Spirit Keys) and will serve as a valuable on-chain record of community contribution, and a de facto identity system. This is specifically helpful when using our Discord server as an organisational dapp to manage the community, as they enable us to create specific social spaces for easy consultation with our best contributors. They’re also a kind of IOU to ensure that the nuanced value of prior contributions is not misrepresented if we reward contributors with something more tangible in the future.

Commendations have varying levels of value and supply, which are explicitly related. For example, a Gold Commendation is worth five Silver Commendations, but has a smaller supply. The Heirloom, Artifact, and Azurite Commendations are reserved for special and outstanding acts of service, leadership, or influence.

The first commendations are already being awarded to our Sentinels: Phase 1 contributors for their efforts. The recipients and purpose of all commendations will be recorded in a public registry on airtable, available here, and in our discord. If you have previously contributed to the Talisman community during Sentinels: Phase 1 reach out to Anaelle or Obyt on Discord.

2 — Building a Remarkable Community

Since December we’ve been working behind the scenes with the Collab.Land team to integrate their bot with RMRK 1 NFTs on Kusama. We love RMRK, and Singular, because they make it dead easy for artists to mint and sell NFTs without needing any technical knowhow. Thanks to CollabLand and Talisman, any RMRK NFT can now also serve as a digital access pass to permissioned discord and telegram spaces.

A benefit of this is that artists can run exclusive events and communities, foster relationships with their biggest fans, and communities like Talisman can build increasingly specific social spaces for special interest groups. The potential of applications that are configured based on blockchain state is enormous, and this is only one of the first examples. Soon we’ll release a detailed guide for users to set this up, we’ll show you how to make use of the CollabLand bot and build your tokenised community in more detail.

3 —Shaping Up our Product Team

After the release of the Talisman Beta, we’ll be experimenting with a new product development and prioritisation process in our core team AKA the Talisman Guardians. The process is called Shape Up and it was pioneered by the team at Basecamp, the amazing product development company who created productivity software by the same name and invented Ruby on Rails. Basecamp were a remote-first company years before it was cool or necessary and in 2017 banked $25 million in revenue with only a 50 person team.

The Shape Up process shifts the responsibility for product design, scoping and implementation to small integrated teams of designers and programmers. This allows leaders to focus less on managing and more on shaping the work. In Shape Up everyone contributes to the vision and substantiates their ideas with data, which is then submitted to the organisation, which votes on which pitches to dedicate development resources.

We see this as a decentralised prioritisation and development process which could grow to involve greater community consultation, and eventually include integrated teams within the community who could even be part of the development process.

If you want to learn more about Shape Up you can read the free online PDF published on the basecamp website.

There and back again

There’s no shortcut to community ownership, it isn’t something that can be figured out overnight. Shifting towards a decentralised organisation will require us to design new processes and wrestle with a multitude of new incentives problems along the way. But it is possible, and the best kinds of mistakes to make are original ones. We have the power to create a community which is productive and aligned by both values and incentives, one that is meritocratic, open and global. Whether you’re an optimist or a skeptic, you‘re welcome in the Talisman community Discord, and to come along for the ride.

Stay tuned for more important updates, key date announcements, and exciting opportunities by following us on Twitter. Be the first to learn about new opportunities with Talisman, and help shape the future of the Paraverse.