Ownership and Governance Models
- Ashu Sikri (Unlicensed)
Dec 3 - This is a really high level post that will get built out in coming weeks that seeks to answer the question of what are some mechanisms by which farmers actually “own” the data network and what does mean, practically.
This page can be read in conjunction with the Cooperatives and DAOs post here.
Two critical things that any organization needs to address is: (i) who benefits from the economic value generated and (ii) how are decisions made; more simply, economics and governance.
Some practical questions include:
How does the organization generate economic value and how is that value shared between owners? Even within cooperatives there are different schools of thought on this; Amul prioritizes paying its farmer members more for their milk whereas other groups maximize profits and allocate dividends or patronage back to members
What decisions are handled by management vs. a board of directors (and who makes up that board) vs. shareholders directly?
Are voting shares allocated on the basis of capital contribution only or some other contribution? Are votings rights one member - one vote or linked to # of shared held
What are the sources of capital and what is the link between capital contribution and governance rights? This looks pretty quite for VC funded startups vs. cooperatives
Below are some examples of interesting models that could inform our approach; these will be organized is a more coherent framework in the coming days.
Joindata is a data cooperative for dairy farmers in the Netherlands. The Supervisory board, which manages the organization, reports to the General Assembly where all the members are able to vote. There are two sounding boards (tech experts and farmers) which advise the company.
BigGreenDao is building a distributed philanthropy whose goal is to make grant-making more inclusive by giving NGOs that receive grants from the philanthropy a role in selecting who to fund going forward. GreenDAO is legally a 501c3 and uses two types of tokens to allocate decision making: an Exec token for committee members to decide how to run the organization and a GovToken given to community members (the Exec committee and also grantees that are selected by GreenDAO) which is used to decide which orgs to fund and how much.
Regen Network enables farmers (land stewards) to list projects that provide ecosystem services and get paid for these. MRV for different product types is codified as a smart contract to build transparency/automation. Tokens allow participation in network governance and the allocation is detailed below; the 5mn tokens held by the Regen Foundation are meant to help under-represented groups participate in governance.
The Drivers Cooperative is a driver owned alternative to Uber or Lyft. Drivers elect the leadership group and earn patronage points which entitle them to dividends.
Briantrust is a talent marketplace that is owned and controlled by its users; talent (freelancers who do work sourced through the platform), clients (enterprises that are hiring freelancers) and agents (who refer and vet talent and clients) earn tokens (BTRUST) for building the network. Tokens allow participation in product roadmap, staking for bids (demonstrates commitment to clients), special offers, etc.
Uniswap is a protocol that powers decentralized crypto trading (eg, users who want to trade one Ethereum based token for another can connect with liquidity providers and do so in an automated fashion through smart contracts without a central clearinghouse). In just a couple years, the protocol has processed $20bn in transaction value, traded by 250k users through ~50k liquidity providers. The protocol is developed by a company, Uniswap Labs, and the governance token, UNI, is for the protocol with a vision that the company eventually hands over governance of the protocol to the community. UNI tokens are allocated in the following way:
60% to community; 25% of this or 15% of the total pool allocated to historical users
21.226% to the Uniswap team
18.044% to investors
0.69% to advisors
Midata is a data cooperative for health data where users can give consent to share their data for medical research. Its a Switzerland based nonprofit that “operates a data platform, acts as a trustee for data collection and guarantees the sovereignty of citizens over the use of their data.”