The Source Platform
Organizations who have the same noble intentions to create a positive impact in our world are competing with each other for resources and status, instead of collaborating to get further together and make the most meaningful impact possible.
Mission
The mission of The Source is to provide the key resources to empower impact organizations to serve effectively and collaborate coherently. We do this mainly through a semi-open-source technology platform which is flexible and extendible enough to be the last system an org will ever need. Additionally, we provide consulting, physical spaces and are the primary conduit for education, knowledge, best practices and big-data management.
Org Structure
By being both a nonprofit and DAO, we've taken an innovative approach to our org structure in order to marry the best parts of the traditional and new models. The nonprofit is the chief operating entity, while the DAO is a supplementary symbiotic vehicle which allows funding, governance inputs, and individuals to access our ecosystem.
Our clients partner with us at a negotiated gross-revenue percentage, allowing our nonprofit's success to be tied directly to the growth of our partners, and allowing us to be able to work with organizations of all sizes, including those just starting out who would not normally be able to afford services at the level that we provide.
Our DAO allows us our partners and other aligned individuals and orgs to invest, provide suggestions for governance and join our network without officially becoming a partner or staff. Our DAO is essentially treated just like one of our partner orgs, which allows a circular relationship with partner orgs who are also part of the DAO.
Investing
Our DAO utility tokens are the primary investment method which can be used for access to resources in our ecosystem. We keep 50% of the DAO treasury reserved for buybacks after a vesting period along with a max early percentage. The DAO provides the funding, in a grant style, for the nonprofit to achieve acute objectives.
As a nonprofit we reinvest all of our earnings back into our wide ecosystem, which further increases the utility value of the tokens.
Governance
Our DAO's Governance model is based on an evolving algorithm of input of value and momentum as measured by the other members of the DAO, which decouples the governance from the capital to a certain extent.
Our nonprofit is not directly governed by the DAO because the nonprofit's Board of Directors have autonomy but they are obligated to poll all of our partners, including the DAO, for any major decisions.
Symbiosis
We are all about partnering, collaborating and uplifting each other. Which is why we don't try to do everything ourselves and instead partner with orgs who have the experience in the different realms, such as running co-working spaces, communities, retreats, summits and development programs. Our goal is to be conduit for the creation of a diverse and thriving ecosystem.
Even though we are primarily a tech and consulting company, we focus on the physical spaces in order to have a central place for our staff and our various partner's staff to gather, co-live and work alongside each other in key hubs throughout the world.
The synergy created in these holistically orchestrated spaces bonds teams together and brings out new levels of creativity, allowing the work to come through naturally.
Holistic Approach
Our guiding principles are centered around the beliefs that work should feel effortless, that we should have complete trust in our teams and that technology should free us up so we spend more time connected to the natural world.
This is why a big part of our work is consulting on how to structure org practices to create the most conducive environment possible, along with personal development programs which help people shed self-limiting beliefs and fears, in order to step into a sense of serving to the greater whole.
We regularly host team retreats where remote workers come together to create deeper relationships and to work in a sprint style approach to make significant progress, concluding with a celebration and R&R time to recharge.
Our environment has an enormous impact on us, which is why we are so mindful of architecting them to allow greater levels of connection, wellbeing, clarity and capacity.
The Tech
Our highly customizable and extendable software platform, which includes CRM, Project Management, Automation, Documentation, Communication and Collaboration is our flagship product and our entry point to almost all of the orgs we work with.
Our platform is a bit like many of the existing enterprise-level tools out there, like Salesforce, except that we've ingeniously architected it to not only allow it to fit all of the org's flows like a glove but to actually fit each individual's needs like clay that each person can mold to cut through the noise to the signal.
Our architecture focuses on the inter-relatedness of all the data to allow it to be collated succinctly so there is less repeating and more connections between the points which are traditionally stored separately. For example, jotting down meeting notes and having some points become task items, which have further discussions around them and being able to see this whole web of connection, some of which happens automatically by keyword matching.
Our really special twist is in how the data can be shared between our partners and suggestions are automatically provided, allowing them to collaborate without manually communicating and piggy-back of each others work in an alliance style method.
Our database agnostic design allows us to use any of the popular blockchains and distributed ledgers as the main backend with intermediate databases as caches to ensure that data can be quickly accessed, even if one of the networks goes down or experiences significant lag time.
On top of all that, we provide the easiest dashboards with vast drilling-down capacity, stunning data visualizations, comparisons and projections allowing a whole new way to interact and understand the data that makes up the life blood of each organization.
DAOs
Our tech platform can be used for all sorts of organization, but DAOs would especially benefit from the communication and collaboration tools, since the barrier to more people joining DAOs is the level of noise on Discord servers.
Really busy people desire extremely effective communications where there are action items and follow through from those communications, which is difficult enough in traditional orgs.
Our platform not only helps facilitate meaningful communication, it addresses the governance piece by allowing algorithms which track clout, and how much effort someone is contributing and how effective is their follow-through on tasks they have taken on based on the other contributors feedback. The premise is that the more committed someone is to the mission of their org, especially over-time, the more governance weight they should receive.
Big-Data
There is a fine art to managing and working vast amounts of data that is being collected, especially from environmental sensors and samples. Our aim is to be one of the trusted central repositories and create data definitions to allow the interchange of all sorts of data that is being collected by various systems around the world.
By being able to aggregate and analyze the data from so many sources in a coherent way we can identify trends and gain a much better understanding.
Dendritic Knowledge Base
Our minds operate in a dendritic fashion, which is why people struggle so much with filing systems where you have to choose which one bucket or sub-directory something should fit into.
Instead of using the typical linear approach we utilize chunks of chunks which are all automatically tagged and weighted, creating a visual map of how information relates to each other.
Users can still create taxonomies and folder structures like they are used to doing, but now they can have the same file exist in multiple places and contain chunks from other files, creating a web of connections.
We utilize a crowdsourced system of approving comments, questions and suggestions to the docs in order to keep them living and truly in the commons.
The Social Network Effect & Directory
Our social network feature allows us to host a directory of almost everyone in our vast shared database, which is open to all of our partner orgs and approved individuals in the DAO in order for facilitate more connections and utilization of services.
Imagine creating task items in your project management app and having people who can full those request being automatically suggested and seeing their past projects with our partner orgs.
Our partner org's can utilize the siloed social network functionality in order to provide a dedicated space for just their clients to communicate and collaborate, similar to Mighty Networks, but with the twist of optionally sharing posts or key insights with the larger whole and allowing automatic suggestions from the larger network.
Our aim is to respect privacy while encouraging a higher level of sharing and collaboration to break orgs out of their silos.
Our partner orgs can easily craft their own interfaces for the network so they can control what and how the data is displayed.
A Network of Networks
Local networks are the key to bringing communities in real life together, which is why we are all about empowering these local networks by providing them the tools to facilitate the local connections and track energy exchanges with their own tokens and DAOs.
Virtual-Assistants and Support
Our shared pool of highly-trained virtual assistants supplement the technology by allowing key staff at our partners to easily delegate tasks via the PM functionality to free up their time to focus on the core of their work.
Research performed by the VAs is entered into our shared knowledge-base for others to review and add on to, creating our own verified and expanded version of Wikipedia.
The VAs are also trained in providing basic support for our tech platform, since much of the support time is spent on just hand-holding someone through the processes until they feel confident enough to do it themselves.
Semi-Open-Source
We take a hybrid approach when it comes to open-source licensing by having a base which is completely open-source but allowing only our partner orgs access to the rest of the source-code, since the supplemental parts are specially funded and are the secret sauce for success.
Levels of Partnership
We offer several levels of partnership depending on how many of our services a partner would like to utilize. Our tech platform is the base and is bundled with our consulting services to ensure that an org has the best practices in place.
The next two levels are based on utilizing the retreats and physical spaces. Our ideal and top tier level of partnership is where the org is using all of our services to the fullest extent, including the management of their physical locations, HR and other parts of their operations so that they are able to fully focus on how to best serve their mission.
Next-Steps
We are meeting with the aligned organizations to kickstart the DAO, secure the seed funding for the nonprofit and start bringing in the amazing human beings that are being magnetized to this vortex.