Charity Games Meet Cryptocurrencies
I established Coffee Shops Network (CSN) not as a private for profit business, but as a philosophy blog wherein we could simulate some circuits.
The idea of “church bingo” is well-established and opens a door onto a potentially much wider vista of “winnings for charities”. Gamblers become heroes, as their gains go to charities of their choice, leaving badges in their profiles.
CSN started as a philosophy blog because General System Theory (GST), on which it draws, uses science fiction as a whiteboard.
Lets sketch possible futures, and even fund some of them, thereby bootstrapping the Coffee Shops Network itself. The blog would be a space for simulations, right down to defining company roles, such as CEO, CRO (Chief Risk Officer) and so on.
Where do cryptocurrencies come in? Some of you may be impatient to get down to business.
Say you won a game which entitles you to donate X amount of bitcoin to charities A, B and C in any combination. You’re in a position to earmark, meaning your winnings may be tagged and directed very specifically, to particular recipients.
Your will is coded into the money itself.
The quilt or patchwork of heroic feats you leave behind might in turn attract funders. The funds are for charity and only the charities may withdraw and redeem them.
Readers may be pausing at this point, scratching their virtual chins. Isn’t such a system likely to be scammed? What’s to keep employee E of charity X from walking into coffee shop Z, buying scone Y which comes with J credits towards game Q? By winning Q, E commits J credits to X, where E works. Isn’t that a problem? Why should it be? People play church bingo precisely to charge up the fundraising thermometer of the very church they’re in the basement of, a church they attend.
What’s on tap through this brand of futurism is organizational circuitry, currency powered, components one might drag and drop in design mode, and test in simulation mode well before deploying (which is not to suggest we can always remove surprises).
Simulations do not necessarily determine the outcome on the “battlefield” (the school of hard knocks) but they definitely help. This is why we “exercise” a tool before we send it to the “front lines”.
Imagine puzzle pieces, perhaps organized spatially (in volume), perhaps on a canvas, wherein the flow-through of currency is shown as “bubbles” (circles), perhaps with radii representing amounts. Such animations may already be familiar as we show electrons as bubbles where electronic circuitry is concerned.
Here we’re assembling organizations, akin to what movie-makers put together to make movies (production companies).
A big circle subdivides into many smaller ones, which appear to flow through pipes, some getting siphoned off here and there to power the machine itself.
We’re maybe seeing core budget for the organization itself, and donors tend to be suspicious of this part, seeing others’ greed maybe getting between a charity’s objectives (desired ends) and staff compensation (a means to that end). What if the staff is just feathering its own nest at the expense of those we intend to serve? This is a perennial question.
A corrupt nonprofit eats up donations while making little difference in the field, which is where auditing comes in, and serious bookkeeping. Even non-corrupt operations may prove disappointing in terms of results, or may produce unintended side-effects of a negative flavor.
Live and learn. If the experiment is well designed, we’ll benefit from our mistakes. “Back to the drawing board” we say — but at least we’ve had some valuable feedback.
I’m suggesting virtual machines might simulate and ultimately display in real time, the actual workings of a non-profit or for-profit organization. People see a cartoon, an animation, of the organism in action, spending energy, deploying assets, getting results. Bookkeeping with cartoons helps a more diverse audience appreciate what’s going on, while developing more financial literacy.
I’m suggesting organizational innovation in the non-profit sector might lead the way, per the Project Renaissance model.
The non-profit sector is a lot like open source software: funders trust it to the extent they have total information awareness, complete insight, at least in principle, into how it all works.
True: just staring at a clock mechanism, even when it’s working, may not prove that informative to someone unskilled in studying such mechanisms. A new kind of literacy is perhaps required. Animations about the inner workings of nuclear energy plants take time and training to understand.
We all somewhat intuitively understand organizational design based on the functioning of our own bodies. Muscles move masses (things with weight), getting work done, and those muscles themselves must be fed and allowed to self repair and grow stronger. We don’t get something from nothing. Conservation of energy rules generally apply.
Large semi-secretive for-profit corporations and banks have all kinds of confidentiality concerns, if only to keep some strategic market advantage. We learn from card games about keeping some cards hidden. We don’t have to show how sausage is made to the public.
A layer of auditors may issue a clean bill of health while preserving confidentiality. They can tell us where we’re in danger of falling out of compliance with best practices. Various ISO standards are set up for this purpose.
Non-profits may also be highly secretive, but a subset attract donor investors on the basis of their being transparent. How they work is no secret. The magic, or special sauce, may be in the people they attract and the theater they stage. Not everyone has a Shakespeare on staff. Transparency and track record are two principal assets of non-profits seeking donors.
So when is a player in a coffee shop supposed to do all this research into what scenarios are most credit worthy?
Lets admit first off this is a nice problem to have: how to encourage would-be philanthropists to do their homework, and develop their tastes in how best to help people thrive.
Perhaps your thing is medical research. Perhaps it’s disaster relief. Perhaps it’s environmental cleanup and habitat preservation. Your personality is reflected in how you donate. Call it “identity politics” if you like, more formalized than ever, and based on putting your money where your mouth is.
In Critical Path, a book by Bucky, we come to see monetary units in terms of bovines (cows and bulls). He was looking at the Phoenician sea-based economy as paradigm and noting how head of cattle were logistically difficult to transport by ship. Easier is to create tokens, backed by a promise they may be redeemed.
The cows might already be out there in the fields, but now more of them are yours because of some transaction that happened in another place and time.
We might summarize this sketch as “currency backed by cows” instead of gold. Livestock of all kinds. Horses too have their price. Animal labor is valuable, and yes, the animals must be fed and cared for.
During the industrial revolution, humans learned how to harness new power sources on a vaster scale. What these sources have in common is an ability to do work, like horses do and did. We measure this ability in energy units, such as joules and ergs. Current = Currency.
What backs our currency quanta in our simulations? Current. Energy stores.
Ultimately, the planetary ecosystem is itself a non-profit, a recipient of energy donations from the Sun. Human intelligence has the job of switch boarding these energies towards various scenarios, projects.
Question: if the goal is to get people thinking like philanthropists, doing homework, funding projects, then why the gamified layer? Why not develop networks of informed funders and channel funds directly through them? That’s what a foundation is. Those who staff it are looking for worthy projects with the promise of sufficient staff and logistics know-how to accomplish the stated goals. We fund bridge and tunnel building the same way. Governments do the switch boarding in many cases, channeling funds to engineering firms.
Answer: games create challenging microcosms wherein we have the ability to build skills and/or to educate players about skills needed (flight simulators, truck simulators…), a benefit in itself. The games are an end in themselves to some degree. In playing them, we become more attuned to what’s really possible in the field. A good physics engine keeps it all seeming more real — not that fantasy games serve no purpose.
Games bring people together, as players and as spectators. They cultivate talents orthogonal to those being funded perhaps, but that’s a positive, a feature not a bug.
If I can help fund eye surgeons in the field, by starring in other forms of theater, so much the better. There’s only so much funding on tap to begin with.
Rewarding certain skills with greater weight, when it comes to committing those funds, gives people new ways to be a hero. Think how rock stars make a difference, by staging fund-raising concerts.
Tapping into that impulse to be a hero is what charitable game playing is all about. The Coffee Shops Network augments the work of foundations without necessarily replacing them.
