LONDON (Bywire News) - You’ve heard of software as a service – welcome to the world of trust as a service. That’s the vision of Bywire as it starts out its latest incarnation as DAO. Bywire’s Michael O'Sullivan has been chatting to Patrick of NovaCrypto to explain more.
“We are not just a news company, we are a news sector,” he says. “That sector is DTAS (Distributed trust as a service).”
Trust of course is pretty hard to come by, whether it’s in the press or in politics, and whenever something is in short supply it can become a commodity. That’s a demand that Bywire has tried to meet ever since it started up. It does this by being transparent about the way news is made and with its AI to highlight instances of misinformation.
However, this is one commodity that Michael believes should not be sold for profit.
“Three years ago when we created the ‘AI truthometre’, as we call it, we thought this would be the biggest product in the world we were returning truth trust and accountability to online content. However, what we found out was nobody is going to pay to have an AI tell their customers they are lying to them,” he said. “We have to be non-profit. The process of distributing news should not be for profit. If you add profit to the mix you create an incentive to be corrupt.”
Bywire’s recently announced DAO is one way to do this. A decentralised autonomous organisation is controlled not in a rigid hierarchical way, as with most conventional organisations, but by its members.
Moving to a DAO enables Bywire to create a model in which news is more democratic and accountable. Decisions no longer come from the top but from community consensus.
The structure consists of three councils – one for members, publishers and executives. Any member of the DAO can propose a referendum. Proposals are submitted to the member council which votes on which to pass on to the executive council. The executive votes on these with any they approve being recommended to the corporate entity. It’s a decision-making hierarchy, which provides democratic accountability as well as liability protection.
This, Michael believes, is the perfect structure for Bywire. It becomes a self-governing network of independent news publishers. It’s an unusual situation for a news organisation but creates a uniquely transparent, democratic and accountable structure.
“The reason Bywire has succeeded over the past couple of years is because of its community and I really want to make this community part of the projects we are doing,” he adds, “and I think the news will be much better for it and I hope this could be a model for how the news and democracy can be fused together and that could be very exciting for us.”
You can learn more about the BywireDAO at bywiredao.com
(Writing by Tom Cropper, editing by Klaudia Fior)