Mission, Vision & Values
These statements were stabilized by the community during 2021 as part of TEC’s cultural governance. They are reproduced here as a historical record of how TEC described its own purpose.
The statements did not arrive fully formed. The community revisited them at three separate checkpoints, each a structured opportunity to review the wording and propose revisions, before the versions below were settled. That iterative process, allowed for refining the Commons’ self-description together rather than fixing it once, and was itself part of TEC’s cultural governance.
Vision
A safer world with digital socio-economic public infrastructures that are diversely designed and aligned with collective needs.
(Iterations the community considered included: “A safer world enriched by interconnected tokenized infrastructures designed to fit local needs while maintaining alignment with the collective interests of humanity.“)
Values
The TEC operated from a prosocial, human-centered perspective. It held itself to high standards of safety, resilience, and integrity, and encouraged members to be radically open source, non-hierarchical, creative, transparent in their intentions, and accountable for their actions. It described itself as value-driven, not profit-driven, striving to support token engineering projects that appreciate the value of public goods and ethical, inclusive economic systems.
Mission (short)
The TE Commons mission is to gather and steward the efficient distribution of funds to projects in the emerging field of token engineering to encourage the robust and ethical design of tokenized infrastructures. The TE Commons will curate and connect projects to the resources they need, while also evolving and maintaining our own healthy culture and regenerative infrastructure where capital supports contributions, contributions create value, value empowers token engineers, and people who appreciate token engineers being empowered contribute capital of all sorts.
Mission (long)
The longer statement expanded on the kinds of initiatives TEC aimed to support, and included anything advancing its vision, and especially work that was:
- accelerating robust, diverse, battle-tested token-engineering design standards;
- adding to the open-source library of TE education, documentation, toolkits, playbooks, and resources;
- creating TE educational opportunities;
- synthesizing research to ensure the safe operability and interoperability of tokenized infrastructures;
- building regenerative open-source solutions for public goods that align people, profit, and the planet;
- connecting communities to resources and each other; and
- evolving and maintaining TEC’s own healthy culture and regenerative infrastructure.
The curation of which initiatives to fund was to be guided, first and foremost, by what would best enable the responsible application of ethically engineered value systems toward a free, open, and equitable society.
Near-term mission (launch era)
In its formative period, TEC framed a narrower near-term goal: to get the Commons launched and operating with a resilient culture. Once launched, the TEC (its smart contracts and the culture built around them) would align incentives toward advancing the token engineering discipline. Key requirements included launch by a Trusted Seed of token-engineering, governance, and commons-management practitioners; an Augmented Bonding Curve feeding a community pool disbursed via Conviction Funding; and an upgradeable design that could improve on its initial form.
Related: Overview · Tokens of the TEC · Governance