The Hivemaker's code: Introduction

This article is part of The Hivemaker’s Code series:

• Article 1: Introduction
• Article 2: How do Ecosystems Grow
• Article 3: Cooperating on Blockchain
• Article 4: The Satoshi’s Dream
• Article 5: Anonymity in the Cryptosphere
• Article 6: Democracy and Decentralization
• Article 7: Is Net Neutrality Important for Blockchains?
• Article 8: Why Interoperability is the Bedrock of Digital Freedom
• Article 9: The Way Forward

What is This Document About?

Authors: Oliver Lukitsch, Michal Matlon, Gregor Žavcer, Thomas Fundneider, Markus Peschl, Lena Müller-Naendrup

The document you’re about to read will help you create a living digital ecosystem. It’s divided into two parts.

In the first part, you’ll find the toolkit. This highly practical, nine-step thinking process will guide you through designing your ecosystem’s strategy piece by piece.

You’ll start by defining your vision and purpose, then build foundations, understand ecosystem players, map your future ecosystem, and think about its economy, governance, and technologies. At the end, you’ll define specific affordances for making first interactions with the ecosystem easy and select tactics to spin up the network effect.

In the second part, you’ll find multiple articles that will help you understand the topics essential for ecosystem builders. You’ll learn about ecosystems, human cooperation, trust, neutrality, and open society. Rather than being an exhaustive curriculum, the articles are a loosely connected journey that opens you up to a broader context and gives you theoretical foundations for building your project.

This document is a result of collaboration between:

• Swarm - decentralized storage and communication system for a sovereign digital society
• theLivingCore - knowledge and innovation architects rooted in cognitive science

We believe that in today’s state of the decentralized, blockchain, and crypto world, it’s crucial to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. We now see an environment ripe with fierce competition, where players are motivated by extrinsic motivation - the vision of getting rich.

In this regard, Swarm wants to be different. We want to approach the challenge of building a thriving ecosystem by starting from virtues and purpose. We want to think consciously about how our technology can impact and advance society.

This is important, especially when building fully-encrypted systems like Swarm. When you can’t control what your system is used for, your options for maximizing its positive impact are limited. You have to start by creating the right set of values and working to align the ecosystem’s participants around them. You must enable its positive uses and engage people to develop an intrinsic motivation to do good.

By releasing this document, we want to start a movement. One that will attract those of you who want to build decentralized ecosystems consciously and gradually change how the scene looks. So that purposeful technology will soon help people regain sovereignty over their data, identities, and lives.