Last year we published a comprehensive overview of Informal’s work and funding over the first 3 years of its life as a Cosmos public goods R&D organization primarily funded by the ICF. 2023 marked a major transition year for Informal and we’d like to give you an update!
Informal was born with a dual mandate to focus on formal methods and expanding Cosmos to Rust. Over time it has expanded its scope to better support Cosmos development and the growth of the interchain. In this post, we highlight the different areas of Informal's work, add context for each, and outline our plans for 2023. We also present the funding we've received from the ICF for our work over the years.
The origin of Informal Systems lies in a vision for a new kind of company. A better kind of company. A company owned by its employees. A company focused resolutely on improving the promises made to us by our software systems and our organizations. A company less likely to move fast and break things; a company that might move slow and fix things. This is the story of Informal's origins, as it spun out from the ICF on a mission to expand Cosmos and transform computing.
Last year we published Informal Organizations, describing our initial corporate structure and a summary of our background research on worker cooperatives, ESOP-owned S-Corps, and more sustainable financing and incubation for organizations. In this post, we provide an overview of our emerging internal organizational structure at Informal, and the theory behind it. Our goal with Informal is to create a new kind of organization, a democratic structure that aims to rebalance the power dynamics between capital and labour towards something more sustainable and non-extractive, something that nurtures long-term employment and real wealth creation through R&D, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
Informal Systems is excited to announce a partnership with Cephalopod Equipment Corp, a Toronto-based company operating infrastructure for decentralized intelligence.
Informal Systems envisions an open-source ecosystem of cooperatively owned and governed distributed organizations running on reliable distributed systems. Our view on the technical and ethical dimensions of software configuration is part of this vision. This post frames the problem of software configuration in terms of user accessibility and empowerment and records our current thinking regarding best practices for configuration file formats.
Our mission at Informal Systems is not just about distributed systems, it's also about the organizations that grow along with them. Our vision is an open-source ecosystem of cooperatively owned and governed distributed organizations running on reliable distributed systems. To achieve this vision, we begin with ourselves, adopting a democratic structure that aims to rebalance the power dynamics between capital and labour towards something more sustainable and non-extractive; something that nurtures long term employment and real wealth creation through R&D, entrepreneurship, and innovation; something more like a Zebra than a Unicorn.
The Research and Development team from the Interchain Foundation (ICF) has officially spun out into a new Canadian company, Informal Systems (Informal), to continue its R&D work on the Cosmos Network software and protocols in an independent operating structure that allows for more flexible experimentation. See the corresponding announcement from the ICF.