Why Telos is not like Tau
Telos is a new project which launched in December 2018 that promises to offer governance features. Telos hypes up a feature they call "Participatory blockchain governance". This is a buzzword which basically represents the same kind of governance we see on Steem or EOS. Elections, work proposals, and politics, make up the governance process of Telos.
Tau is different because there can be arrival at a decision through a process of collaborative decision making. The Tau process of collaborative decision making does not require voting. The politics of Tau is based on opinion mining, opinion maps, sentiment, and the direction of development is automatic rather than manual like with Telos or EOS.
On Tau discussions can scale
Tau puts emphasis on scaling discussion and a side effect of doing so is that decision making can also scale. This ability to scale discussions can help with collaborative decision making among the crowd. Who decides for example in EOS or even on Steem what can become a work proposal? What is the level of voter participation and what are the limits of voting? On Tau anyone can propose something and anyone can offer their opinions to the discussion.
Telos commodifies traditional voter based governance services. Tau does something entirely new, novel, innovative, and will be the first to do it. Finally Tau has unique technological properties from TML, to define itself, to be decidable, to reduce potential limits to it's growth.
Telos will not scale, Tau will
Unlike Telos, Tau is designed to scale the development process. As discussions scale based on the opinions of the community members this scaling will enable the construction of formal specifications. These formal discussions which bring about the formal specification will streamline the development process. In addition, the knowledge behind the process will be shareable and even sellable using Agoras. So the novel solutions will be partly commoditizable in a way which will not exist for any other technology available in the crypto space. Program synthesis even will make possible the automation of the programming itself so really once you have the knowledge on Tau you have everything which can come from that and Agoras of course is planning to deliver the knowledge market.
Conclusion
Tau and Telos are not alike. They both approach the same problem but they do so from different dimensions. The Tau approach is like the 3d to the 2d approach by Telos. Telos in my opinion is not novel technology and while it does offer governance it does not offer anything Tezos does not do better in my current opinion. It is also debateable whether or not EOS is successful at governance and it seems Telos is heavily based on EOS.
If anyone thinks I am wrong about this and has close ties to Telos community then please correct my understanding.
References
https://medium.com/goodblock-io/telos-sets-the-new-standard-in-blockchain-governance-e45671360955