Andamio is not a monolithic system like some of the “Web 2.0” social networks you might be accustomed to. In order to use it, an Organization must create a new, independent “Instance” of the Andamio Platform.
Andamio is built upon a set of “parameterized” smart contracts. These Plutus smart contracts are used to manage treasury funds, track commitments from contributors, and to govern decision-making systems. Plutus contracts can be built with re-usable rules that remain constant with different parameters. The Andamio contracts define what an Organizational Administrator, Decision Maker or Contributor can do, but crucially, not who they must be. Unique Role-Based Access Tokens are minted uniquely for each role in every instance of the Andamio Platform.
Each instance runs independently on the Cardano blockchain, with unique access tokens, rules, and contract addresses. It is easy to make Andamio Instances interoperable, but by default they are independent. Organizations can opt into network participation when they are ready and at their own pace - for example, when collaboration across organizations is necessary for solving bigger problems.
People participating in an Andamio Instance use on-chain, Role-Based Access Tokens to participate in the system. In Andamio, there are 4 role-based tokens: 1. Organization Admin 2. Decision Maker 3. Contributor 4. Learner
The Andamio Admin can add or remove tokens from the Andamio Treasury, and approves the list of valid Projects so that Contributors can make commitments.
An Andamio Decision-Maker can approve that a “Commitment” is complete. In the Learning Management System, a Commitment can represent student completion of a Module, Project, or Student Learning Target. For organizations, a Commitment can also represent a project or task with token rewards. As we saw in the previous section (Andamio PBL Framework), there is often overlap between “learning” and “contribution”. Decision-Makers might be teachers and course instructors, or they might be project managers and development leaders. In great organizations, leaders often play a teaching role. The flexibility of the Andamio Decision-Maker role allows flexible, emergent leadership to develop across an organization.
An Andamio Contributor can make Commitments to Projects listed in an Andamio Instance. Projects can be for learning, as in a Project-Based Learning Course, or Projects can represent vital contributions to an organization. Commitments are tracked via the Contributor token, and over time can be used to build a track-record that be shared across organizations.
There is overlap between Contributor and Learner tokens, and they work the same way. Often they are one and the same. When they want to, Organizations can create several different levels of contribution tokens. For example, they can allow anyone to mint an “Onboarding” token as they start to learn about the organization and its work, while setting some rules for how a Learner might earn a full-fledged Contributor token with access to more opportunities. In the rest of this paper, we will not distinguish between learners and contributors; we’ll simply use the word “Contributors” to represent both.
Admin and Decision Maker roles can have multi-sig functionality. While it is possible to require just one signature to approve a Treasury Action or to unlock a Contributor’s commitment, it is also possible to require multiple signatures to make these decisions. The Andamio Governance Contracts are used to customize and configure decision-making rules for an organization.
On the other hand, Contributor tokens are unique to each Contributor, and there is always a one-to-one mapping of a single wallet address to a Contributor Token.
Each Andamio Role Token is an indentifier for participants in the platform. It can be connected to systems for Self-Sovereign Identity (SSID) and Decentralized Identity. Take a look at the Development Roadmap to see how we are connecting Andamio to new and existing identity systems.