It has been over two years since Trent envisioned the builders of tokenized ecosystems to start practicing engineering to "get the incentives right." Last year Zargham of BlockScience open sourced through The Commons Stack a major framework to help dealing with programming incentives in complex adaptive networked systems. Shermin published the Token Economy book, giving the community an overarching narrative about how web3 will change how we do business and how we organize online. The promise? A more equitable, sustainable way of resource allocation, embracing the Information Era.
The engineering of a token economy is akin to engineering a ciritical infrastructure like bridges, or interconnected power networks. The goal of the Token Engineering Community is to bring that values-based approach to engineering in the Information Era. We aim to counteract the "move fast and break things," "go big or go home" mindset of the Early Information Era applied to a society in transformation, which brought us: financial engineering, business engineering, social engineering. All of these efforts suffered from applying "a linear mindset in a non-linear world" - and from asking "what could go wrong?" with a naive, handwavy rather than with an inquisitive, responsible mindset. With token economies - complex adaptive dynamics encoded into cyber-physical systems of humans, nature, and machines connected though the internet - we have a new power, with it comes new responsibility. To some it is old wine in new bottles.
A Hitchhiker's Guide to Token Engineering - in this online, open and free (from) edition - will be a collection of stories from the road to aqcuiring these new skills and knowledge about tools, processes and collaborations needed in engineering token networks responsibly. So, at least the road trip stories should be fun to read, have lots of examples.
Of course the book itself has a token model! Learn about it in How to Contribute.
The book has a limited Early Access phase, in which you can direct which chapters first, comment and ask questions from as early as the Annotated Table of Contents. The phase closes sometime in September before the presale of the first edited print version starts. You can join Early Access now here. For discussions and questions drop by the #te-book channel in the community discord.
I'm Sebnem, one hitchhiker from Industrial to the Information Society: A society that has an entirely new, programmable, co-designed value system. One in which value is created and shared, in a crowdsourced and crowdfunded manner, much like this book. I'm a computer scientist who specialized early on in peer-to-peer networks and their applications in decentralized energy systems. In 2017 I changed the applied research career at Siemens as Senior Key Expert for Cyber-physical Systems for Freeelio and founding member of the German Blockchain Association. With Freeelio, an open innovation collective, I have lead the design and implementation of multiple R&D project and ventures: Energy Solidarity Token, The Sun Protocol, and Electraseed Fund. These efforts brought me some recognition, e.g. being among the Top 100 FinTech Influencers for Sustainability and both The Sun Protocol and Electraseed Fund are among the 40 startups in the Sustainable Digital Finance mapping of the German fintech ecosystem in 2020. But most importantly, these efforts helped me understand the paradigm shift and collaborate with amazing people and inspirational organizations. I want to curate and share this knowledge in the h2g2 tradition.
My motivation for this book, some or all you probably share - and can add to through co-creation:
- next time we onboard a new collaborator we will not have to explain everything from scratch, we can gift them the book instead as a welcome & orientation present
- generate funding for common bounties in the following open source projects: Le Grand Jeu and LGJVR, Ecosystem design Toolkit, cadCAD, The Commons Stack, SourceCred, OpenMined, Ocean Procotol and Electraseed Fund that builds using the other OSS projects: a corwdsourced, crowdfunded decentralized energy system across the globe that belongs to users and sponsors of clean energy!
- get to know bright minds who'd love to learn token engineering and apply it through one of those OSS projects, or else share the 💕
Any chapter or subsections, or examples and code snippets can be co-authored. So each chapter eventually will have an "About the Co-authors" section in its README.md. I already reached out to the ususal suspects and feel we have covered the foundations for a good first copy of this Hitchhiker's Guide to Token Engineering. Head over to How to Contribute: we're looking forward to valuable contributions, which will at minimum earn you TE creds!