Whether it’s thinking about the roadmap for an open-sourced project or how a cooperative of constituents and their custodians come together, governance has been a pinnacle aspect of our thinking in setting the foundation for EVERY and the greater ecosystem. We researched many models that could potentially bring us closer to providing a system of self-governance, and in doing so, we solidified our intent to establish specific pillars to create the right incentive structures that are aligned with the underlying philosophy of the blockchain community. What that translates to is the proclamation that the interactions between Brands and Shoppers are pinnacle to EVERY governance and creating the space for them to contribute insights and proposals in guiding that governance is paramount.

We’ve engineered exciting initial rules of engagement for Brands and Shoppers, and have aligned them around the fundamental framework of equitable value exchanges. In a democracy where every Brand and every Shopper has a standalone vote, Co-op Members will be able to come together and collaborate. As custodians, our job is to make it easy, informative, and fun while incentivizing members to participate in determining how the EVERY Protocol, the EVERY Token, and their associated funds and value, respectively, will move forward.

The way that we’ve put this together is a very holistic, intricate, and thoughtful piece of EVERY as a whole. The manner in which EVERY governance will interact with software, people, and processes, will demonstrate a level of authenticity between members, technology and the way their interactions are organized. A fully centralized or a non-distributed governance structure doesn’t match with a distributed piece of software. We could build a typical corporation, throw an archaic model on top of a distributed ecosystem, but not only is that illogical, it goes against the fundamental tenets of the ecosystem we’ve set out to build.

Putting in place strong governance from the outset is so important to EVERY because we’re building something ambitious and we want break the status quo. Our governance system will need to be built to empower and enforce our ability to help Brands, Shoppers, and third party marketplace developers to express their wants, needs, and current pain-points so that others in the ecosystem can respond and adapt. Bringing together these different viewpoints and perspectives to create a more harmonious ecosystem while leveraging the blockchain will require a newfound approach. Our governance system will also need to enable an ever-changing ecosystem and protocol in order to help unlock the mechanisms that enable the ecosystem to organically refine, optimize, and grow more efficient for everybody involved.

Originally published at medium.com on February 12, 2018.