The Decentralised Cathedral and the NFT Bazaar

In 1999 Eric Raymond wrote a book titled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary” in relation to the the software engineering methods used in the development of the Linux kernel and his own open source project management experiences.

The novel looked closely at the real struggle between top-down and bottom-up design, or more precisely put;

The Cathedral Model

• Source code is made available after each release but during the testing and building process it is kept private between core developers.

The Bazaar Model

• Source code is developed openly in public over the internet for anyone to view.

The core of the message of the novel is all about how you balance and manage open source systems along with effective social coordination and prioritisation. The Cathedral is symbolic of a concerted planned effort to create a particular work of art. Most of the process happens in private in a more deliberate setting. However, the Bazaar is quite chaotic seeming, where independent entities come to a common location to each give voice in competition with each other to what they think the right way to do something is. This battle of ideas happens out in public from the start and creates an openly competitive ecosystem that then forms into an emergent organisational coherence that you wouldn’t expect, highlighting the long tail.

At DIGITALAX and ESPA I have consciously chosen to do both, not just across technical implementation, but rather the implementation and building of our entire ecosystem.

It’s a Decentralised Cathedral and an NFT Bazaar.

Our team is constantly both testing in live production all of the time and refining concepts/ideas that have been carefully architectured to catalyse the intended results.

The industries that our ecosystem is spread across from Digital Fashion to NFTs to Casual Esports are all testing the bleeding edge. Most of our endeavors have never been experimented on before, never been concepted before and never been combined before in such unique ways, both technical and business infrastructure — we are building out hybrid systems for a crossover between realms, between ways of thinking, ways of working, ways of coordinating.

Our Decentralised Cathedral is operative internally as we engage in mechanism design, double diamond etc. to ideate, refine, check and test certain core concepts. Decentralised not meaning lack of control in this context but rather an adherence to a higher level of cross-checking and standards.

Because of the nature of the industries that we have chosen to build in, when these initiatives are released publicly the next phase of the work just begins. This is the NFT Bazaar — an evolving BETA environment where anything goes and the “NFT” of the Bazaar in this case referring to a well defined value container that ensures a higher level of direct exchange so that the optimisation and emergent evolutionary process can happen more effectively.

It is putting a little bit of the Cathedral in the Bazaar and a little bit of the Bazaar in the Cathedral. This allows us to test rapidly, receive immediate feedback, iterate within a well purposed roadmap and continue innovating.

This also means, that like any test environment, tests fail or expose errors. This isn’t something to tear people down over but rather it is an indication of the system working in the way it is supposed to because no one knows the answers before the tests are run. If you think you do then you are not testing the right things.

This cross Cathedral-Bazaar approach will continue to remain relevant for us as we on-ramp new Players and unlock progressive decentralisation and utility of the ecosystem in general.

The recent Matic marketplace sale for our Among Us Sheriff Mod digital fashion NFTs was a great success, with the injected liquidity changing Designers, Developers and Players lives as we speak. However, there are always things that can be improved, unfortunately technical doesn’t get us all of the way and can insert false positives. We are working hard to remain effectively responsive and will have an update in the next article specifically addressing mechanisms for enabling more evenly distributed sales for the future that benefit everyone.

So we welcome you community to the open bazaar!

Hey! I’m Emma-Jane! I’m a 23 year old fashionaut amongst other things

I am the founder of DIGITALAX and a bunch of other stuff in web3. 😆

Follow me on Twitter and check out my website janefuture.com