Case study · Open data
Yoda
An open data apps protocol with aligned incentives.
- Product
- Yoda
- Service
- Design and development
- Sector
- Open data
- Built by
- Wow Labz
At a glance
Three incentives, aligned
The people who understand a domain set its data standard, rather than whoever built the first tool.
Converting existing datasets to a standard is unglamorous work that nobody funds. Here it is paid.
Revenue from applications flows proportionately back across the value chain that made the data usable.
Nobody sits in the middle extracting rent, which is the failure mode this design exists to avoid.
The brief
Open data fails at the boring step
The open data movement produced an enormous quantity of published datasets and remarkably few applications. The gap is not availability. It is that every dataset arrives in its own shape, and making a hundred of them interoperable is tedious, skilled, unfunded work.
Nobody's incentives point at it. The publisher's job ends at publication, the app developer wants to build the app, and the data scientist who could do the conversion has no reason to spend a month on plumbing that benefits everyone equally.
Open data is not short of data. It is short of anyone paid to make it usable.
The build
A protocol, because a platform would break it
Yoda is a protocol rather than a data marketplace, and that distinction is the whole design. A marketplace has an owner, and an owner eventually has to take a larger share, which is exactly the dynamic that would break the alignment the system depends on.
Proportional revenue sharing across the value chain is the mechanism. Everyone who contributed to a dataset being usable — the expert who defined the standard, the scientist who ported the data — keeps a claim on what gets built with it, rather than being paid once and written out.
How the incentives work
Three roles, one loop
Domain experts set the standard
The standards are defined by people who actually understand the field, which is what stops a format encoding one early tool's assumptions.
Data scientists get paid to port
Crypto incentivises converting existing datasets to those standards, funding the specific work the open data movement has never funded.
Apps share revenue back
Revenue from applications built on the data is shared proportionately across the value chain, so the people who made the data usable keep earning from it.
Stack
What it was built with
Questions
Yoda, answered
What is Yoda?
An open data apps protocol where the standards themselves are defined by domain experts, crypto incentivises data scientists to port existing datasets to those standards, and app revenue is shared proportionately across the value chain.
What problem does it solve?
Open data has plenty of datasets and few applications, because making datasets interoperable is skilled, tedious and unfunded work that nobody's incentives point at.
Why do domain experts define the standards?
So a format reflects how a field actually works rather than the assumptions of whoever happened to build the first tool for it.
Why a protocol rather than a marketplace?
Because a marketplace has an owner, and an owner eventually takes a larger share. That dynamic would break the alignment the whole design depends on.
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