Coordination problems are at the core of our inability to address humanity’s greatest challenges. Currently, our efforts to construct effective responses towards the threats of climate change, mass migration, technological disruption or pandemics prove insufficient.
Corporations whose operations affect our daily lives have neither transparent, participatory governance, nor incentive alignment with humanity and the ecosystems that support us. Nation states trigger tribal identities and isolationism, leave populations feeling disaffected, and suffer capture by monied interests and autocratic leaders. Nonprofits and NGOs struggle toward effective operation, and are quite often fraught with fraud. The open source ethos remains a tactic employed by few industries, while open source projects lack the tools to coordinate and fund contributions from a workforce sufficient to their ambitions.
How can we improve our coordination abilities while working to solve systemic problems? How can we embrace the new trends in organizational governance and redefine the corporation? To these questions, we at Autark aim to explore a possibility. Not a solution, and certainly not The Solution (as we strive to avoid the techno-utopian fallacy that "we have new technology and new technology solves everything"), but a possibility.
Rapid growth of blockchain technology opened up new possibilities for creating sets of interconnected organizations, linked through distributed systems via decentralized ecosystems. Cryptonetworks, a form of digital cooperatives, are redefining the way we collaborate in the modern economy, enabling stakeholders to more transparently voice their opinions, vote and strengthen participation - thus, creating an urgent need for a new generation of coordination tools and applications. This need is also evident now when local communities and activists worldwide mobilize forming movements, taking action together - in a collaborative and decentralized manner.
Autark exists at the intersection of all those various trends in organizational dynamics coming together: a transition towards decentralized governance, the advancement of digital cooperative economy movements, as well as more coordinated grassroots actions in the face of bureaucratic organizational failures. We believe we have the humble beginnings of a new way to organize and are taking steps towards an evolution of Open Source. We want to serve organizations that operate with the transparency and participatory spirit of open source projects, with the efficacy and scale of a transnational enterprise. We want to create collaborative futures.