Colony, a platform for community collaboration powered by Ethereum, announced today the launch of its public beta. The platform lets teams, projects, and communities do work, make decisions, and manage money, together.
The Colony Network is a suite of smart contracts, running on Ethereum. It provides a general-purpose framework for the essential functions organizations require, such as ownership, structure, authority, and financial management.
The first beta version comes implemented with:
- Token Issuance: Simple token issuance and management.
- BYO Token: Already got a token? Add utility to it by making it your colony’s native token.
- Domains: Think of these like teams or departments—use them to organize tasks.
- Simple Tasks: Define work, deadlines, and skills; discuss the work, assign a worker, then pay them in your colony’s token, ETH, DAI, or any other ERC20. Simple Tasks use a single transaction payment mechanism to minimize Ethereum transactions. Less trustful compensation mechanisms are coming soon.
- Funding Pots: Each domain has its own funding pot which you can supply with a budget for work needed in that domain.
- Permissions: Give teammates (or even smart contracts) permission to create and fund tasks in individual domains from that domain’s funding pot.
- Reputation: Doing great work earns Reputation points in the skills you used and domains to which you contributed. Reputation is present and correct at the Colony Network level, but has not been surfaced in the app yet, but is coming soon.
- Suggestions: Crowdsource suggestions for proposed tasks.
- Receive Revenue: Your colony can receive, ETH, DAI, and any other ERC20 compatible token. Once received, it can be funneled into your colony’s working capital, or distributed.
- Rewards: Distribute funds to your colony’s members proportional to their contribution. Like Reputation, the functionality exists in the Colony Network, but is not yet surfaced in the app, but it is also coming soon.
“The Colony beta is very definitely MVP software. We’re sure you’ll find it useful, but most of the features are also pretty stripped back to begin with, and you may encounter UX niggles. It’s also worth noting that using Colony is most definitely risky. This is highly experimental beta software and we urge you to exercise caution in its use. While we have built the Colony Network with utmost care and diligence, we provide absolutely no guarantees whatsoever as to its security or fitness for purpose of any kind. Do not commit more funds to a colony that you can afford to lose.”
– The Colony Team
