Shokunin began as a demonstration of the tools that we already have within the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. A place to create organisations permissionlessly, while still having strong guarantees on the usage or lack of abuse of the resources under organizational control.
This necessarily involves a voluntary abdication of unilateral power by all participants bringing an awareness of our responsibility towards the collective. As well, an awareness of the sustainable amount of effort one can be expected to contribute to a unified enterprise. This effectively avoids the chilling effects on a shared space of people who take up more than their fair share of the space or resources. And to avoid burning themself out or breeding mistrust.
The technical design of SHOKUNIN is designed from the ground up for social scalability. Action only needs one person to affect it, and only one person is required to veto a malicious activity.
With multiple shared pools of resources, and resources of various types, SHOKUNIN may be able to act at a much higher capacity than existing consensus-based DAOs. But there is a heavy requirement of trust between members. In the longer term, we may address this issue by interconnecting groups of organisations using the same tools, whereby these organizations have membership in one another. This will allow for large multi-entity collaborations, while still allowing individuals access to agility in their own “home” space.
SHOKUNIN is simply one example of such an organization. It has demonstrated a lack of unilateral control by any party, and aims to use its collective resources to affect common public good goals. Unfortunately yet fortunately as well, we understand that we don’t have infinite resources and can’t solve all the problems, bringing forth the need to demonstrate our ideas within specific areas of expertise.
The word “shokunin” roughly translates to “craftsperson”, but has cultural connotations related to collective responsibility. In certain communities, the local “shokunin” creates all of the tools and lifestyle implements for a community and is a respected role in their societies.
As members of SHOKUNIN NETWORK, we likewise prefer to support projects in the areas of creating tools and environments for:
We prefer to be reliable and focused sources of support for existing projects and individuals over being unreliable and wide-reaching. There are other places where one can get funding from the end of a shotgun.
We prefer to take responsibility and help projects that we support with technical expertise and advice, if we do not have the financial resources to support them directly.
At our core, we believe in behaving in a long-term sustainable way, the actions towards others and ourselves included. We are creating tools and environments in a way that we believe is responsible.
We build a core community of a manageable size for productive communication, strong trust and ensure that members:
As we approach resource scarcity, SHOKUNIN will lean further into its role of facilitating communication and collaboration between SHOKUNIN and resource providers - be that as:
This is why SHOKUNIN gather.