How smart contracts might reduce risk and enhance trust on OSS projects

Last Friday, we spoke about all wanting to develop trusted OSS supplier / customer relationships but rarely finding them and a contrarian factor for why trust is so hard to achieve in OSS – complexity.

Trust is the glue that allows OSS projects to happen. Not only that, it becomes a catch-22 with complexity. If OSS partners don’t trust each other, requirements, contracts, etc get more complex as a self-protection barrier. But with every increase in complexity, there becomes an increasing challenge to deliver and hence, risk of further reduction in trust.

On a smaller scale, you’ve seen it on all projects – if the project starts to falter, increased monitoring attention is placed on the project, which puts increased administrative load on the project team and reduces the time they have to deliver the intended outcomes. Sometimes the increased admin / report gains the attention of sponsors and access to additional resources, but usually it just detracts from the available delivery capability.

Vish Nandlall also associates trust and complexity in organisational models in his LinkedIn post below:

This is one of the reasons I’m excited about what smart contracts can do for the organisations and OSS projects of the future. Just as “Likes” and “Supplier Rankings” have facilitated online trust models, smart contracts success rankings have the ability to do the same for OSS suppliers, large and small. For example, rather than needing to engage “Big Vendor A” to build your entire, monolithic OSS stack, if an operator develops simpler, more modular work breakdowns (eg microservices), then they can engage “Freelancer B” and “Small Vendor C” to make valuable contributions on smaller risk increments. Being lower in complexity and risk means B and C have a greater chance of engendering trust, but their historical contract success ranking forces them to develop trust as a key metric.

If this article was helpful, subscribe to the Passionate About OSS Blog to get each new post sent directly to your inbox. 100% free of charge and free of spam.

Our Solutions

Share:

Most Recent Articles

No telco wants to buy an OSS/BSS

When you’re a senior exec in a telco and you’ve been made responsible for allocating resources, it’s unlikely that you ever think, “gee, we really

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.