The value and tools of ecosystem platform strategies in web3: OpenQ story

Picture by Dimitar Karanikolov — Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi | Siracusa

Intro

The heart of this article pulses from the challenges on how to blend organizational models and impact in society. In the last five years, my experience in start-ups along with a series of facilitation and strategic projects in web3, has led me to focus on how to kick-start and improve the impact of ecosystemic business models.

This work is inspired by experimental workshop tools and feedback loops, created to achieve tangible results. The ecosystem intent toolkit that I embedded from the remarkable work of David Kish and Danielle Stanko, creators of the toolkit, is an example.

I believe that validation of ecosystem assumptions are the key feature of Web3 as well as the bridge between web2 and web3. Ecosystems and platforms shape our society. But the challenge for organization is to understand the dynamics between platforms and their communities.

What is the intention? Addressing a common understanding

The tangible effect I want to pursue is to awaken organization designers and platform shapers to learn more about ecosystem strategy tools. The intent of Web3 ecosystems is about creating resilient communities. Yet, this needs practice and shared language to avoid current unsustainable business practices.

My latest experience is with the OpenQ team, where my role is to support ecosystem business development and apply ecosystem platform strategies. The purpose is to share how, at OpenQ, we applied the strategic tools to create actions for collective impact.

OpenQ is a peer-to-peer freelance marketplace tailored for software development. With an integrated payroll system the goal is to provide convenience for freelancers, boosting their reputation. Organizations can quickly outsource projects saving transaction and management costs. We are currently developing multiple strategies to implement products and services as well as creating a community to boost the marketplace.

The lack of common understanding and sense-making between the software devs, technologists and communities is the problem I want to address. My experience with OpenQ as a strategic researcher shows the importance of clarity of communicating a value proposition for the given business ecosystem. With iterations and feedback loop, my actions are to instil ecosystem platform strategy tools in web3 teams. These trigger dialogues of alignment, practice systemic collaboration and leverage a community-centric ecosystem strategy. This could implement the technology means for global socio-economic issues.

Platforms & ecosystems: how do they impact our society?

Platforms aren’t so much technology, but scalable collaborative agreements, business models and governance structure. As a result, this means that communities are driven by multiple purposes, with common history or having a shared ownership interest. They are themselves members of the ecosystem. An ecosystem is a combination of platforms and communities. Hence, a marketplace is enabled by platforms that trigger communities to exchange values.

Our decision making process and life experiences have been increasingly surrounded and affected by marketplaces on digital platforms. Their governance design and complexity relies on the participation and empathy of the community members, the users of a platform. Enhancing the evolutionary role of communities is the main window through which the value of the ecosystem can thrive with a redistribution of resources.

The interaction of economy, technology and the growing phenomenon of self-organizing puts pressure on traditional organizational models that require sense-making, patience and understanding. In their work, the Boundaryless team have identified the main reasons for platform failure: poor ecosystem understanding, wrong product model, liquidity and go-to market issues, using wrong metrics.

I have researched the organizational pressure to change by looking at trends for the organizations life span. Corporations and web2 platforms lifespan shrinks because the current model is flawed, with the following main three internal and cultural challenges:

• A competition-based model in silos does not support organic internal innovation
• Not able to keep up with complexity with their rigid current approach
• A centralized model that is not able to benefit from all the potential of networks effect

However, there are examples where corporations are shifting their business model and their modus operandi towards a cooperative ecosystem, often in Retail. Shopify empowers entrepreneurs looking to develop their own brand, so the value of the ecosystem is created, instead of captured. You can read extensively about this specific example here.

What we’ve learnt from platforms with an extractive business model, is that they enable connections, but focus merely on economical outcome and efficiency. Communities, on the other hand, might struggle for coordination and governance structures, but they generate social capital, diversity and are prone to emergent needs: care, repair and heal social fabric for long-term impact.

Ecosystem strategy aims to investigate and enable the coexistence and enhancement of platforms and communities. This alignment is the challenge I want to contribute to. I have started my quest in this previous article.

Web 2 to Web3 Ecosystem: what is the transition about?

The transition from Web2 to Web3 comes to life by first outlining the main differences. This opens routes where and how they might coexist and begin to focus on specific areas, applying tools to enable ecosystem innovation.

Based on the above table, one of the crucial narratives that should be transformed into actions is about the shift towards a community centric approach, with participatory governance.

Web2 platforms overly focus on tech evolution, where the pressure from the shareholders triggers an incentive mechanism based on competition. In the market, as they outdo each other, this creates systemic inequality.

A community governed platform works differently. Here, the incentive mechanism is collaboration. And it is exactly this space for shaping decisions that creates retention in the community. The competition is fairer, with less concentration of value. Then the platform needs to be valuable to stay. How you govern makes the difference. If there is a fair internal competition in the platform, this creates incentive for high quality. A good example is Braintrust, another decentralized talent freelance marketplace. This is a good example where a platform and a community work together to create its own economy, facilitated by the web3 technology. As they state: ‘The blockchain technology is to transparently distribute control of its network to the community members who contribute to building it. By distributing control globally based on user contributions (like referring talent, vetting talent, and referring clients), Braintrust’s blockchain-powered model aligns the incentives of the network itself with the people building it, rather than relying on a centralized platform that would otherwise extract disproportionate value in the form of high fees from its knowledge workers.’

By leveraging ownership and governance with community principles through a BRST token, the governance at Braintrust is a system and process that allows anyone from the community to propose an idea that can improve the platform, for example: changing payment providers for payment processing.

Brainstrust is a signal for a possible transition where our economy and society will be healthier if the power is distributed.

A community governed platform works differently. Here, the incentive mechanism is collaboration. And it is exactly this space for shaping decisions that creates retention in the community. The competition is fairer, with less concentration of value. Then the platform needs to be valuable to stay. How you govern makes the difference. If there is a fair internal competition in the platform, this creates incentive for high quality.

Web3 Ecosystem strategy: how does it enable a community centric model?

Web3 aims at promoting community self-determination and agency. The web3 networks of large communities of users engage in scalable interactions across a certain “functional domain” to reward participation, not just capital. This implies to design a fairer governance model, for example see the Mirror air drop tokens.

Web3 offers governance structures to tackle the coordination challenges of communities. DAOs are an evolving stream of alternatives for transparency through smart contracts and, distributing capital via grants programmes. I shared my experience with Aragon here, along with a DAO Incubator project. The big learning for me has been that DAOs have fundamental struggles. A few key challenges are, such as:

• the onboarding process needs clear gates of engagement
• how to set and evolve purpose and strategy to orchestrate efforts
• reduce misaligned financial incentives between members

However, the value framework of self organizing in DAOs can be found in the open source movement. The DAOs wave is not too new besides the token governance. Previously open source has always been organized like a DAO, only with a strong social-layer rather than computational-layer for governance.

This parallel is to pinpoint how combining weaknesses and strengths from different paradigms is to improve a collective awareness.

By understanding the need for developing a community centric ecosystem, web3 tools could come to help and support. In this model below I associated web3 solutions that could enhance community centric models to succeed. For example, I considered OpenQ as an infrastructure platform that aims to enable web3 to grow more efficacy and transparency.

Exploring characteristics of community-centric ecosystems and web3 innovative tools

The model above originates from this source.

How OpenQ applied ecosystem platform strategy tools to shape her story

During my work at OpenQ we discussed how to reach a product-market fit as much as a community-centric model. One of the first strategic research directions has been to look at the Braintrust model to frame our product’s scope. We have asked ourselves a bunch of questions about product development and strategy. We applied a series of ecosystem and platform design tools in the last 2022 quarter.

Below I will point out 4 tools that we used and the benefits we got from this.

1 — Community Identification Canvas

One of the highlights of the process was the community identification canvas to figure out which communities on the supply, demand and stakeholders side were relevant. By mapping the areas of the ecosystem, we got a better understanding which communities were aligned with our ideas. The result was that we decided to put our initial focus on devs’ communities and freelance platforms, amongst other entities in the ecosystem.

2- Community Interaction Canvas

The result from the previous canvas led us to figure out how to interact and validate our platform idea. Below we considered how we engage the communities with the openQ platform. Each layer has a potential to recruit them and attract them by creating interactions.

3 — Flow Canvas

Another important gear in our team innovation processes took place with the Flow canvas. This helped us to identify the balance of resilience and efficiency needed for systemic health. We discussed possible design choices that could affect value flows throughout an ecosystem and the longevity of the system. For example: participation, decision and voting rights.

4 — Arena Canvas

With the learning flow, our iterations and feedback loop with the market, we faced strategic questions about our platform approach. We wanted to provide the right enabling context and tools for the ecosystem with personalized solutions to specific needs and opportunities. We used the Arena canvas from the pdt toolkit — see below — to get a better understanding of our focus and identify the clusters of jobs-to-be-done that could unlock problematic experiences for users.

The ongoing learning and design journey navigated us through dusty and tricky moments where ambiguity and uncertainty were fully present. With patience and continuous iterations, we managed to sharpen our focus on the product model strategy with the hackathon launchpad.

For example, from the canvas above, we wanted to learn the desired outcomes from stakeholders in the hackathon spaces . Each participant takes part with different goals. Sponsors want only one thing: good projects that use their technology. Thousands of projects are created that are never touched again and turn to dust on Github, results are hardly ever discussed.

We found pain points for developers and sponsors and we are determined to solve these issues. A better hackathon experience can have a big impact at societal and entrepreneurial level. To do so we plan to reiterate our tools to better understand our direction and ecosystemic impact. We presented this work at Full Node in Berlin in November, last year. You can follow the evolution of OpenQ here.

Final thoughts and call to actions

My work with OpenQ highlights the bumpy road where strategy and actions can ride in the same direction. The above exercises and approach aligns with my current intention to test adoption of Web3 organization models with practical tools. My drive is to keep fine tuning ecosystem strategy tools for web3. Because I believe they have the potential to:

• scale up the digital local communities’ impact to mitigate global challenges
• bring rapid innovation and make communities them resilient to these challenges
• raise awareness of the market longevity and stability

To put Web3 principles in practice, I keep nurturing collaboration and structure experimentation. So this is also a call to become part of this process.

If you have similar thoughts and tools and want to compare notes, let’s chat.

If you’re an organization that wants to experiment with these tools to better face the complexity of global issues, let’s chat.

If you’re a community or DAO, that is open to practice and learn, with empathy, collaboration and design tools, let me know.