Ecosystem Value Flow: A Learning Experience at Token Engineering Academy
In October 2020, in a three week journey, I experienced the Token Engineering Academy with an on-line course, a dynamic window to raise awareness about ecosystem design and value flows. A learning by doing — & playing — approach invites project teams on experiencing why and how ‘ecosystem value flow’ is an eye-opener. It is a very good practice with the design process tools, from ideation to set up the validation phase. With the mindsets around system thinking, it prompts to spot gaps in problem-solving. With the peer-to-peer exchange, it enables cross-pollination. And joining a project is the door to the practical aspect of the course. Designed and delivered by Angela and Sebnem, Token Academy offers a forward looking landscape of collective intelligence, in the online learning life we all are tuning into. It is an organic consequence of COVID-19, in this tough 2020.
All the participants are eager to make an impact to reverse the paradigm of the business as usual and inspire each other. So if you are wondering where to experience the new economy, how the entrepreneurial fabric evolves through collaborative ideation, you need to follow the Token Academy and its community.
On the presentation day, 8 projects showcased so I could listen and quickly skim through their brief to join in and support. I joined DENiZEN, to facilitate the creation of a platform for pedestrians, made by pedestrians. With Iain Barclay, the project owner, since the very beginning, we had steadily created layers of coordination, cooperation and collaboration.
The co-creation process was advised by the course canvases and the insightful interactive lessons during the week. Ecosystem purpose and stakeholder mapping canvases opened to us the arteries of our initial map. We designed at a good pace with Iain as I could trigger questions to unearth gaps as opportunities to complete the canvas and move forward. My research tendency and skillset to design, facilitate and curate the discovery context matched with the project needs. Along with Santiago, full stack developer based in South America, we learnt how to combine technical, business and systemic lenses to bring the project to the next level.
Design for serendipity
The DENiZEN purpose we came up with is to create transparent and serendipitous walking directions by the community to foster local economies. At a deeper level, DENiZEN project — still in pre-launch phase — is structured to address safety, well-being, comfort and motivation of pedestrian travellers. The technology platform is to identify the most walkable routes to given destinations. The platform will use geospatial and other data, and employ machine learning algorithms to build a geospatial semantic model of areas and neighbourhoods. This makes me think of my own experience with google maps as — when I used city mappers — I ended up walking more and not where I wanted or looked interesting to me. If you feel me… please press here.
From day 1, the premise of the token model generation helped to position the conceptual model. A good pace of examples and assignments marks a good balance in the token academy playground and the holistic understanding of ecosystems, their impact and the crucial dive into the value flows. In each session we could grasp some elements as the transparency with other projects inspired our conversations and action to design on Miro. By reframing the purpose, crafting the stakeholders stories, good questions and positive struggles arise to guide the collaborative process at the onset. These are enablers to challenge your own assumptions with an iterative process.
Throughout the sessions, we looked at MakerDao as a case study. For example, to master concepts, to visualize different actors — e.g. Vault owner, Dai user, Keeper — and the value flows, MakerDao provided a good context. More importantly, to experiment different views to steer the mindset towards the importance of ecosystem’s purpose. And by embracing the Massive Transformation Purpose tool, we could set the tone with an iterative mindset.
These steps geared us up to address stakeholder mapping and stories and the motivation matrix. It is pivotal to deeply understand your stakeholders, they are the source of inspiration to iterate possible solutions. As we worked through the discovery phase, Iain had already been in touch with stakeholders such as the local city council. This was exciting to then figure out which ones are the key stakeholders. Their goals, behaviours and purpose are the precious tension with the ecosystem to feed. To value this work, it is a must to go out and talk with the stakeholders.
As we internally began to throw hypothesis with Iain, the learning session emphasised the business model generation logic as the starting point to expand into engineering practice and challenge any models. All projects encounter an exponential change, and so system thinking comes to support this complexity. The primary focus is to realize the value exchange within the ecosystem. In doing so your model can be accountable, transparent and understandable by all stakeholders. A motivation matrix is a step to frame the members’ interactions, what is sustainable about them. Stakeholders’ stories are a good exercise to keep track of drivers of motivations. This stepping stone will come useful in figuring out policies and their impact in the next steps.
The work flow with Iain happened remotely and the most valuable moments were during the ‘Office Hours’. These were very useful. It’ s the token academy open forum to share questions and receive feedback on the spot. A very good..value flow!
Governance
The Games & Governance session explained the interplay of modeling and simulation, design and play. We talked about the bonding curves dynamics as an important tool and example to simulate incentives that align community goals. Read more in one of my recent action research articles about the link with Commons stack and ecosystem platform thinking.
We learnt about Le Grand Jeu. A tool that we also experimented with live,during the session, with one of the projects running in the cohort. It simulates how and if your model and value flow could work in the participants’ ecosystem. The meaning will come out as result of the community exchange and listening.
The Governance session raised awareness to feed into our system design approaches. We had interactive discussions to unbundle concepts and perceptions about our information society, the mass manipulation machine we deal with and therefore, why and how incentives can move the needle. And for example: how can we design incentives for an ecosystem considering the leverage points and the iceberg model?
The model and the previous questions are a terrain to explore and practice system thinking. For the sake of the learning experience, it was crucial to pinpoint the importance of a common language. In the last session, we discussed visual language in System thinking. This torn down language barriers, it helped to articulate and orchestrate ecosystem development in an adapted stock and flow diagram model, introduced in the course.
Next step: How can we benefit from modelling and simulation?
The learning wave and the engagement did not stop after the course. As the complexity of the system we have designed with Iain, we have kept challenging our assumptions and have looked more into specific value flows. Our aligned agility pivots on defining experiments to understand better failures. For example we are interested in figuring out how to simulate our stock and value flow with CadCad. This tool is an open source framework to simulate design decisions, it brings the iteration process one step closer to test with deeper lens the viability of the model.
Final thoughts
The Token Academy cohort provided a composition of open source opportunities. One concrete example is the common language we could establish as a vital guide to the collaborative process.Then coordination and cooperation are the arteries of addressing tough questions such as, what is the value? How can we measure gain for end users? How can we capture the value? How can we distribute the value towards users?
If you wonder or feel curious, maybe skeptical about the new economy of token engineering, joining the community is a good start to face the reality. The course might be the stepping stone to your innovative avenues. Yes, it is challenging as the echo says ‘tokenize a system, make it more complex, more adaptive, more dynamic’.
This interdisciplinary experience paves the way to apply and share further in my work and network the impact of system thinking. The change we must embrace at all levels is collective, made by the individual willingness to co-create!
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