The Colony Public Beta Is Live

Try it now !

This is our getting started guide .

Here are some answers to questions we’re sure will come up.

And, while you're at it, come and join the conversation on Discord . You'll find talented, like-minded people and make beautiful colonies together!

So, what does Colony do?

Colony is a platform for community collaboration. It lets teams, projects, and communities do work, make decisions, and manage money, together.

Use it to organize and incentivize the work your team, project, or community needs to do.

Concretely, this first version of the beta comes equipped with:

• Token Issuance: Stoopid simple token issuance and management. It even starts off locked, so your token can't be traded until you're ready.
• BYO Token: Already got a token? How lovely! You can add utility to it in a blink by making it your colony's native token.
• Domains: Think of these like teams or departments—use them to organize tasks.
• Simple Tasks : Define work, deadlines and skills; discuss the work, assign a worker, then pay them in your colony’s token, ETH, DAI, or any other ERC20. Simple Tasks use a single transaction payment mechanism to minimize Ethereum transactions. Less trustful compensation mechanisms coming soon.
• Funding Pots : Each domain has its own funding pot which you can supply with a budget for work needed in that domain.
• Permissions : Give teammates (or even smart contracts) permission to create and fund tasks in individual domains from that domain’s funding pot.
• Reputation (sort of) : Doing great work earns you Reputation in the skills you used and domains to which you contributed. Reputation is present and correct at the Colony Network level, but has not been surfaced in the app yet. Don’t worry, it’s coming!
• Suggestions : Crowdsource suggestions for proposed tasks. Users with the Administration permission can easily turn grassroots intelligence into paying tasks!
• Receive Revenue: Your colony can receive, ETH, DAI, and any other ERC20 compatible token. Once received, it can be funnelled into your colony's working capital, or distributed as...
• Rewards (sort of) : Distribute funds (perhaps from your colony's revenue?) to your colony's members proportional to their contribution. Like Reputation, the functionality exists in the Colony Network, but is not yet surfaced in the app. However, Colony community super badass Tommy Cox is nearly done with a standalone app to do this. Let’s just take a moment to reflect on what a hero that man is.

A few provisos, a couple of quid pro quos.

The Colony beta is very definitely MVP software. We’re sure you’ll find it useful, but most of the features are also pretty stripped back to begin with, and you may encounter UX niggles. However, now thatbuilding is so swift, we’re burning through our substantial product roadmap, about which we’ll share more details in another post next week.

It's also worth noting that using Colony is most definitely risky. This is highly experimental beta software and we urge you to exercise caution in its use. While we have built the Colony Network with utmost care and diligence, we provide absolutely no guarantees whatsoever as to its security or fitness for purpose of any kind. Do not commit more funds to a colony that you can afford to lose. If you do lose funds, we accept no responsibility, and there is nothing we can do to aid in their recovery. Here be dragons.

Whatever your experience, we want to hear about it. What do you like, what don't you like? What do you need for it to be really useful to you?

To request features, please gohere.

Please report bugs that need squishinghere.

Now go,get stuck in; the future of work is waiting.

Colony is a platform for community collaboration—do work, make decisions, and manage money, together .

Join the conversation on Disco rd , follow us on Twitter , sign up for (occasional and awesome )email updates, or if you’re feeling old-skool, drop us anemail.