Colony is a platform for organizations that operate via software rather than paperwork and management hierarchy.

At its core, a colony is a set of smart contracts that describe all aspects of a traditional organization, as well as some new capabilities that would only be possible using a decentralized protocol like Ethereum.

It's infrastructure for the future of the firm, built to organize and incentivize teams, projects, and communities.

The Colony Protocol

The Colony White Paper describes a complete protocol for organizations, with crypto-economic processes for:

• Ownership and permissions
• Reputation
• Dispute resolution and decision-making
• Work management and delegation
• Financial management, including rewards and payments

To learn more about the Colony Protocol, dig in to the Colony White Paper or read the white paper TL;DR

The Colony Network

The Colony Network is the infrastructure upon which all colonies run.

The colonyNetwork repository contains the solidity implementation of Colony, which is developed as free software. See our guidelines if you're interested in contributing to the colonyNetwork codebase. Developers interested in contributing to the Colony Network are encouraged to look at the code on GitHub, and to come say hi on Gitter.

The current colonyNetwork release is glider. Glider implements some, but not all, of the Colony Protocol:

• Ownership and permissions (through roles)
• Reputation
• Funding Pots and payments
• Domains and Skills
• Tasks and work ratings

The Colony Network is maintained and improved by the Meta Colony (which is, itself, a colony on the network with special permissions).

Membership in the Metacolony is open to all (and heartily encouraged!), but changes such as network upgrades require a minimum reputation within the Metacolony to proceed.

colonyJS

colonyJS is a JavaScript library designed to make interaction with the Colony Network as straightforward as possible for (d)app developers.

Using colonyJS, all of the functions of a colony can be imported and called as methods within a JavaScript application.

Things like parsing returned parameters from a transaction, connecting to the right network version, and signing transactions with a wallet provider are all handled by this library.

To learn more about how to use colonyJS with your dapp, or to get specific info about the colonyJS API, see the colonyJS docs.

Developer Portal

If you didn't get here from there, have a look at our Developer Portal to get started.

Or, if you're feeling old skool and just want to chat, send an email to build@colony.io to chat with our DevRel team. We're nice people!