Responding here to @illia’s recent tweet.
I think Ronald Coase was really a visionary. He explained in The Nature of the Firm (1937) why the economy features a number of business firms instead of a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another.
In a nutshell, Ronald Coase says that there are three types of costs in the economy.
- Costs of search: finding the right information
- Costs of coordination: getting all the people to work together efficiently
- Costs of contracting: negociating the costs for labor and materials
And the above costs are the ‘nature’, the ‘essence’ of the firm, the reason why the firm is initially created.
As technology keeps the pace of Moore’s law, the costs identified by Ronald Coase are significantly decreasing. The most obvious being the costs of search, mostly thanks to the Internet.
Individuals and communities have now more ‘power’, in a Coase’s sense, because they can compete (on those costs) with the ‘firms’.
Therefore, I believe that the definition of a Product/Market fit for Community as a product should be:
“A product that helps communities to reduce the costs of search, coordination and contracting, and that to a degree to allow them to compete with existing ‘firms’ on their domains.”
The next gen of DAOs?