Association

Association

Mission, Vision, and Values

The Telcoin Association Constitution articulates a Mission, Vision, and set of Values to serve as a guidepost for the community to order its behavior towards a common cause, vision for the future, and set of ethical standards.

The Telcoin Association Constitution articulates a Mission, Vision, and Values for the Telcoin Association to serve as a guidepost for the all participants in the ecosystem working towards a common cause, vision for the future, and set of ethical standards.

Association Mission, Vision and Values can be updated by Association Governance by the Miner Assembly (using the TGIP process) or by the Platform or Treasury Councils (using the TELIP process).

Telcoin Association Mission

The Telcoin Association’s mission is to connect GSMA Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and a global user base through a shared blockchain infrastructure - the Telcoin Platform - and to sustainably maintain and develop that platform and its decentralized governance, including facilitating legal structure for stakeholders.

Telcoin Association Vision

The Telcoin Association’s vision is to create a globally adopted, self-sustaining ecosystem that aligns GSMA MNOs and mobile phone users across the world around a common, blockchain infrastructure, empowering them with self-custodial products and services and their inclusive, decentralized governance.

Telcoin Association Values

  • The Telcoin Association’s values in general aspire to follow Ostrom’s 8 Design Principles for sustainable management of common pool resources including:
    • Clearly Defined Boundaries: Participants who have rights to harvest TEL units from the Telcoin Platform must be clearly defined; the boundaries of the Telcoin Platform must be clearly defined.
    • Proportional Equivalence Between Costs and Benefits: Harvesting rules restricting time, place, technology or other benefit are related to local conditions; the benefits obtained by users from the Telcoin Platform, as determined by harvesting rules, are proportional to the amount of inputs required in the form of labor, material, or money, as determined by provisioning rules.
    • Collective-choice Arrangements: All Miner groups affected by operational rules can participate in modifying operational rules.
    • Monitoring: Monitors are present and actively audit the conditions of the Platform and Miner behavior. Monitors are accountable to or are the Miners.
    • Graduated Sanctions: Miners who violate the operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other Miners, by Council Members, or both.
    • Conflict-resolution Mechanisms: Miners and Council Members have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among Miners or between Miners and Council Members.
    • Minimal Recognition of Rights to Organize: The rights of Miners to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.
    • Nested Enterprises: Harvesting, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
  • Sustained Yield: The Telcoin Platform, including each network, TEL inventory and issuance, and all other renewable resources belonging to the community, shall be utilized, developed, and maintained on the sustained yield principle, subject to preferences among beneficial uses.
  • Self-governance: Miners, the population that is subject to the rules of governance, shall possess full authority over and within the governance system. Individual Miners, within Miner Groups, as a part of the Miner Assembly, on and over Miner Councils, should be able to work together to resolve common problems and realize shared aspirations. Miners, who are the major appropriators of TEL issuance, should have sole authority in making and adapting rules within collective-choice arenas regarding the inclusion or exclusion of participants, appropriation(harvesting) strategies, obligations of participants, monitoring and sanctioning, and conflict resolution.
  • User-ownership: Miners have the right to access the system, to harvest from flows of benefits it produces including but not limited to TEL issuance and fees, to participate in crafting and enforcing their own rules, and to determine who is allowed to participate in the aforementioned processes.
  • Credible Neutrality: All Miner Groups shall maintain property rights of access, withdrawal, and share collective choice rights of management and exclusion, and their interests may not be revoked from any Group without their consent in constitutional-choice processes.
  • Incentives Compatibility: Harvesting and governance rules should enable stakeholders to realize their own interests and preferred outcomes while producing services that benefit the whole platform.
  • Informed Consent: Each Miner Group has rights to representation on every Council and may replace their Council Members at any time, in other words, every interest group has a voice in every matter that may affect their functionally based interests. Each Miner Group, as a part of the Miner Assembly, must consent to any changes to the governance system.
  • Separation of Powers: Miner Councils are stationed across levels and areas of the platform, and each is empowered with authority over a specific jurisdictional domain of the system.
  • Local Autonomy: Each Miner Group, based on their location on the Platform, shall (a) have the right to elect enough members to their own local, network Councils and (b) Council decision-making rules shall require that at least one representative from each local Miner Group must consent to any changes made to the rules governing the day-to-day activities in their domain.
  • Balanced Representation: Global councils that govern system-wide policies including the rules for allocating the TEL treasury and special purpose councils shall consist of a balanced representation from each Miner Group based on their functionally differentiated roles, locations, and interests in platform production processes.
  • Functional Representation: Representation rights to select members on all Councils shall be granted to each Miner Group based on their functionally differentiated roles, locations, and interests in platform production processes.
  • Inclusive Decision-making Rules: All decisions regarding improvements to the Platform, regulating the flow of TEL units, and other rules across levels of the governance system shall require at least a super-majority approval (of 75% or more) by the organization with authority. All Miner Council decisions should include votes by representatives from every Miner Group.
  • Equal Voting Power: Each Miner Group shall have equal voting rights in constitutional-choice processes. Each Council Members shall have equal voting power on Miner Councils in collective-choice processes.
  • Privacy: Privacy means consenting to choose what you share, and with whom. Voluntarily disclosing the personal information related to an individual without their consent is expressly prohibited and may result in sanctions by the Compliance Council.
  • Conceptual Unanimity: In order to build shared understanding and clarity of communication in our community, the Association should strive to achieve a high degree of agreement or consensus regarding the meaning and definition of important concepts or ideas.
  • Relative Unanimity: Inclusivity, cooperation, and compromise are valued in the community. The aim is to achieve a broad consensus or agreement on important issues or topics, while recognizing and respecting the diversity of perspectives and opinions that may be present.
  • Reject Panaceas: There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to governance or Telcoin. Instead of assuming that designing effective governance systems is a relatively simple analytical task that can be undertaken by a team of objective analysts sitting in a nation's capital or an international headquarters, it is important that we begin to understand the policy design process in democratic societies as involving an effort to experiment with many component parts.
  • Rules Changes are Experiments: Policy changes resulting from democratic processes over and within the Association governance system need to be viewed as experiments based on informed expectations about the potential outcomes and the distribution of these outcomes for participants over time and space. Given the complexity of rule systems combined with the complexity of the Telcoin Platform that is being regulated, all such efforts to devise effective governance systems face a nontrivial probability of error.
  • Embrace Complexity: Complex systems require complex governance arrangements and blockchains are inherently complex. Telcoin governance should embrace and harness complexity to its advantage.
  • Freedom: The Association should always promote freedom of participants in its decision-making and structuring the ecosystem such that it fosters freedom of thought, speech and action, with a goal of promoting the efficient flow of ideas and fostering creativity and growth.
  • Long Term Thinking: The Association should not myopically focus on near-term benefits, but should also attempt to consider long-term implications on the ecosystem and others that may not have a current voice in decisions being made.
  • Subtraction: The Association should maintain awareness of the natural tendency of power to corrupt and create structures to maintain healthy checks and balances reasonably designed to foster diverse community involvement in operation and decision-making to dilute power accumulating in any particular area.
  • Stewardship of Values: The Association should maintain a wide scope in the values it maintains and be good stewards of the entire ecosystem, such as a commitment to decentralization and open and fair equal access.