The IOTA Workshop is a craft-production factorty run by a decentralized autonomous organization, for primarily humans to use. While reading futher, please think of this as a thought experiment rather than a business proposal. Inside the workshop, are the tools and instruments that people need to produce goods or commodities. Users of the workshop pay an amount dependent on the wear and tear of the tools they use, along with upkeep costs. For security, users also need to put down a form of refundable collateral. The goal of the IOTA Workshop is to offer specialized industrial tools at higly commpetative and reasonable prices. It is the equivalent of a rental tool business but is distinctive because it operates autonomously at lower costs and is fully transparent. This workshop would be self-sustaining, cheap to use, and highly accessible.
Normally, a business or a capitalist would come in possession of some tools and raw material and then buy the labor-power in the form of employees to operate the instruments to produce goods or commodities. The problem being, the business or capitalist must exploit the worker in order to receive surplus-value (profits) for themselves. By exchanging the capitalist for a DAO operated on IOTA, we can still produce goods or commodities without the exploitation of the worker.
These workshops are not to combat mass-production, but instead to grow the market of craft-production and local small businesses. Ultimatly, this is to get more money in the hands of the working class entrepreneurs through craft-production businesses. The IOTA Workshop enables working class people to test and start a craft-production business by reducing the cost of their initial investment and the overall cost to produce goods or commodities. Currently, there is a price barrier blocking the ability to use specialized tools like metal lathes, welders, or 3D-printers.
The accessibility of places like this would amplify the growth of small craft-production businesses normally dominated by firms inside of large hierarchical corporate empires and giving more power and options to working class people to control their labor. Fundamentally, big corporations overlook niches because they are not profitable enough. The IOTA Workshop is designed to enable local people to asses local problems, with the hope that they can help their community and themselves when they previously could not because of the economic barrier to entry. We will further discuss the plausibility and minimum requirements to create these workshops.
The fundamentals of this workshop include:
- A property or rental space to place tools, instruments and infrastructure.
- Tools and instruments to convert raw materials into goods or commodities.
- Security to minimize discretion and dissuade bad actors
- Collateral to maximize accountability for communal rule enforcement
In order to have a workshop, there needs to be property to place physical objects. To own property there needs to be an owner such as a non-profit organization (NGO), or a person. Currently a DAO on its own, cannot rent retail space. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of an individual that requires the jumpstart of an organization or NGO to allow the DAO to rent land or the human simply rents the space.
In the workshop there needs to be the tools or instruments for people to convert raw materials to products. If these tools are either bought or leased, the workshop will need money to pay for them. The DAO orchestrating the workshop needs to raise funds through donations just like a business. Ideally, raising initial funds only needs to happen once. Once the workshop is operational, it will create a low amount of profit to be used as the investment costs of creating other workshops. Due to the requirement of initial costs, the first workshop might ideally use low-cost tools and instruments to reduce the quantity of required donations. These objects could simply be bike repair tools, phone repair tools, basic woodworking tools, 3d-printing tools or paper printing tools; any sort of useful tools or instruments will work.
When an individual needs to use the workshop, they pay two fees:
- Non-refundable payment for wear and tear on instruments plus a small fee to be donated to the DAO to further develop the workshops.
- A refundable collateral fee in case of excessive damage is done to the workshop.
There seems to be about three things involved in the cost of using the workshop:
- Normal wear and tear of the tools and instruments
- Maintenance costs of the facility, upkeep of tools, and rent.
- Surplus fee given to the DAO to improve and proliferate workshops
By using the tools and instruments in the shop they depreciate and become less valuable. That value needs to be paid back to the workshop through its users. A workshop can have sensors on the various tools to collect data on which tools were used, how long and their intensity to calculate a more precise measurement on the depreciation of each tool. Potentially, if sensors are incapable of measuring wear and tear, then there needs to be someone employed who's job is to measure the wear and depreciation of tools use. Alternativley, if the tool is simple and does not risk excessive damage from use, depreciation can be calculated from equations commonly used in business when calculated the value of business assets.
Beyond paying for electricity and rent for all workshops, if there was a woodworking space, if would need a janitorial staff to periodically clean the general space of debris. Alternative and more specific staff may be required for the upkeep of the instruments in the workshop, like a specialist to repair a metal lathe. The regular fees of these faculty, hired as private contractors, need to be included in the cost of entry and/or usage of the workshop. Anticipating these costs need to be considered when establishing what tools and instruments are in the workshop. For a workshop to be successful, the tools inside need to be in demand. Our supply of these tools are based on their prices, and the influencial cost of maintanace is essential in knowing if the workshop can offer competative prices.
The workshop ideally needs a small profit to be able to add new tools to the workshop and proliferate other workshops in other areas. By adding a small percentage on the depreciation fees, the workshop could earn money to not only replace broken items, but to buy new tools and expand by creating new workshops with potentially different tools.
The non-refundable fee of using the workshop is the combination of the depreciation of the tools, cost and maintenance of the facility, cost of the faculty and potentially a small profit cost.
Robert Klitgaard, in his book, Controlling Corruption, mentions that corruption is the difference between the willingness to act on one's power and their accountability. In the context of our workshop, our purpose is to give power, in the form of tools, to individuals. Obviously, we need to stop people from damaging the workshop itself. To do this, we need to increase their accountability and reduce their discretion. In this context I am using the discretion as, "The freedom to act or judge on one's own." Their discretion needs to be limited to using the power given to them beyond the original intentions set by the workshop's rules and code of conduct. We also need to increase their accountability of their actions to stop adverseries from acting maliciously.
The purpose of collateral is to increase the accountability of the users in the workshop while they use the tools to their own discretion. There are a plethora of ways to reduce the collateral by either decreasing the available discretion or by increasing the accountability. An example of decreasing discretion, it limiting access to the tools, either by physicical barriers, or by not providing overly dangerous tools in the workshop. An example of increasing accountability is through identity verification of users, certification on skills to operate tools or contracts using the law to enforce complacency.
The upper limit of the collateral would be the total cost of all the capital the workshop owns. It is obvious that this would lead to an unsucessful workshop. By having an upper limit, we have a feasible solution on how the workshop could operate in way that users would treat the workshop as their own space and tools. The goal is to reduce collateral costs as much as possible because it plays a larger role in the barriers to enter a new market than the non-refundable costs. The non-refundable costs are minimized because we use automation as much as possible, and profit is not our primary goal, accessability is.
This upper limit will reduce as the workshop is used. As the tools and instruments depreciate in value, the total capital is worth less over time. When new tools are purchased to replace broken ones, the total capital increases and the upper limit of the collateral increases in the same proportion.
A big way to reduce the collateral fee, is to have identity verification. By knowing who the user is, they can be reprimanded for vandalism if they were to decide to break everything in the workshop. By knowing that users will not destroy all the tools in the workshop, in fear of repercussions served by a local community, we can reduce the collateral fee substantially.
The collateral fee can now be calculated based on the maximum excessive damage from misuse of the tools and the cost of a cleaning or maintanance. Each workshop should have some rules or code of conduct about maintaining a clean workspace, legal operations of what cannot be produced or harassment of other users. Any misuse of the workshop space is breaching the given rules and should be subject to some sort of repercussion. For example, if a user does not clean up after oneself or leaves behind debris, then a cleaning crew will be required and the costs should come out of this person's collateral. Video surveillance can be used as evidence, and oracles or some third party acting as unbiased arbiter can be used to determine if a user has misused the communal space. There are plenty of ways of optimizing the magnitude of misused space and the abuse of tools and determining responsibility through data.
In the end, the lower the collateral fee the more accessible the workshop is to users. The collateral fee should be minimized, but at no extent should the workshop allow a user more discretion than they are accountable for.
The amount of discretion that any individual has in the workshop needs to be minimized in order to dissuade corruption. Obviously, the users of the workshop have some level of discretion when using the tools or instruments in order to create their products. The quantity of discretion given needs to be matched with accountability through sensors, collateral and legal prosecution.
For example, having doors that only open based on ledger access, allows the ledger to control the entry. By including identity verification and a contract that only permits access of verified users, then anyone who brings in unverified users is breaching the contract and can be prosecuted or risk losing their collateral.
Along with each tool being kept behind a locked compartment, each user can wear an RFID band that can unlock any particular compartment. This is a simple way to determine who is using which tool and when. To determine the intensity of usage or misuse. Video can be a fundamental factor along with hiring people as verifies to enter the workshop to quantitatively track the wear and tear of tools and instruments.
This autonomous workshop is similar to a privately owned workshop. It protentially has employees (private contractors), and might collect profits. This workshop is distinct in that it is completely transparent about how it operates and where the profits are going. Any profits received go back into investing into better infrastructure and more workshop opportunities. This should mean that because no one is pocketing the profits for themselves. These workshops should be the cheapest way to offer the given tools to the public.
These types of workshops can be as fundamental to communities and as libraries. They can bring people together as they cooperate and work together in the shops, along with giving them access to a variety of tools that they could never previously use. This type of access could create a plethora of new services and community specific jobs that big businesses either ignore because of the niche markets or have taken away from us because of the high cost of entry into the market.
Markes, Jesse. “Distributed Ledger Technology and Corruption The Killer App.” The Columbia Science & Technology Law Review, vol. XX, Fall 2018, pp. 42-92.
