Contributionism is an economic model built around contribution.
Contributionism focuses on the organisation and how they are owned, governed and incentivised.
Contributionism represents an alternative to capitalism.
Critiques of capitalism
Capitalism is one of the most widely adopted models for structuring organisations across the world.
Capitalism is often associated with a number of economic structures and ideas such as free markets, business, private property, profit motives and wealth accumulation amongst others.
Capitalism is not required for any of these structures or ideas. They could exist and be broadly adopted in other economies that adopt different approaches for structuring the organisation.
Capitalism is focussed on the organisation. Capitalism adopts a share based ownership structure that influences how organisations are owned, governed and incentivised.
A number of critiques can be made about how capitalism structures organisations:
- Flawed justifications for unfair contribution treatment - Earlier contributions are excessively rewarded at the expense of future contributions. Commonly used reasons to justify this excessive reward are not fairly justified.
- Contributions are not respected - Contributions do not need to be respected under capitalism. The common purpose of a capitalist organisation is to maximise shareholder value. Capitalism often leads to a disconnect between contributions and ownership, governance and incentives.
- Flawed share governance and incentive rights - Perpetual governance and incentive rights are a flawed approach that is commonly adopted with shares of ownership. This structure commonly leads to excessive compensation for earlier contributions at the expense of future contributions.
- Fair compensation often requires ongoing gestures of goodwill - Maximising shareholder value can lead to environments where labour is exploited. Workers are often constantly reliant on the goodwill gestures of owners to not exploit their contributions.
- Risk of stagnant ownership and leadership that isn’t collectively accepted - Capitalism can result in stagnant ownership and leadership. Leadership might not be collectively accepted by the contributors involved in the organisation.
- Risk of motive, priority and incentive misalignment - The motives, priorities and incentives of capitalist owners and leadership can become increasingly misaligned with workers.
- Excessive competition - Capitalism incentivises excessive amounts of competition due to the perpetual need for workers to create their own organisations if they want to be fairly rewarded for their contributions.
- Equal opportunity and meritocratic fallacies - Capitalism does not commonly result in meritocratic organisations. Capitalism does not create economies that have equal opportunity.
Capitalism is often rightly criticised for serving the interests of the few and for increasing the amount of inequality across society.
When you review how ownership, governance and incentives are handled under capitalism, you can more easily see how a capitalist structure can lead to these undesirable outcomes.
Capitalism was never properly designed to fairly reward and respect all of the contributions that people make towards an organisation.
Instead, capitalism creates a structure that incentivises the exploitation of future contributions and creates an environment where this exploitation can more easily occur.
Contributionism, an alternative approach
Contributionism looks to resolve the issues that are commonly found in capitalist organisations.
A number of contributions are important to an organisation. These contributions include labour, capital, consumption or donations.
The economic model for contributionism includes 7 key principles that organisations should follow to improve how they are owned, governed and incentivised.
The 7 principles of contributionism include:
- Respect contribution - All contributions should be respected.
- Contributor & public ownership - Organisations should be contributor owned or publicly owned.
- Contributor governed - All organisations are contributor governed.
- Temporary governance rights - Temporary governance rights should be given to all contributions that match the contribution ownership type.
- Temporary incentives rights - Contributions should receive temporary incentive rights so that contributors can benefit from the full value of their contributions.
- Transparent priorities - Priorities should be transparent so that people can contribute towards organisations that they are aligned with.
- Collectively accepted leadership - Leadership should be collectively accepted.
There is a massive opportunity to create organisations with better aligned incentives that fairly respect and reward all contributions that get made towards an organisation.
To properly respect contribution in any organisation, we’ll need to collectively keep getting better at understanding and rewarding contribution.
Contributionism is only interested in broadly defining the most important principles that organisations should follow.
Beyond these initial principles, it is up to the contributors involved in an organisation to decide how they want to operate.
Each organisation could be operated in a large variety of ways. The purpose of contributionism is to suggest the structures for ownership, governance and incentives that should lead to positive outcomes for all the contributors involved in the organisation.
Contributors should feel confident that if they maximise their contribution efforts to generate value and impact that their contributions will be respected and fairly rewarded.
Contributions are the foundation of any economy. Contributionism helps to ensure that contributions are the beating heart of every organisation.
Why is this relevant for Polkadot
Contributionism could represent one of the go to models for thinking about how organisations and DAO’s structure themselves in Web3.
Contributionism is solely focussed on how organisations handle ownership, governance and incentives.
The ideas suggested in contributionism should become increasingly relevant for the growing number of organisations that are being started across the Web3 industry.
This economic model was started by outlining some of the fundamental principles that can be recommended to organisations to consider and adopt.
We’re looking to gather feedback to refine and improve upon the current foundations with further analysis and resources.
After that we’ll explore approaches that could be adopted under this model and look at what tools and systems could be developed and used to experiment with this model across Web3 ecosystems and potentially elsewhere.
Next steps for contributionism
Contributionism is being shared widely to everyone that might be interested in giving their thoughts and feedback about the model.
If you know of any existing efforts that might be related and relevant to this initiative then please do share them in the comments.
Right now our focus is just to raise awareness about these ideas and listen to any feedback that people might have!
You can find our Twitter and Telegram on the contributionism website if you wanted to reach out and discuss anything directly.