Economic Management System. Work and payment organization model - Ambassadors Ecosystem

[wilyam]

Forms of cooperation

Guild is an organization engaged in one or related activities, with a corpus of accumulated know-how, techniques, knowledge and experience available to everyone who joins the guild and which is the treasure of the guild and the means of its success. It is also a fee-based organization when it comes to salaries, with an internal and mutually agreed upon distribution of the rewards received among its members according to internal rules. It is a much more homegrown structure than a department in an enterprise, but much more versatile and powerful than an ad-hoc team (Ad-hoc), but also less coordinated than Ad-hoc. The guild fights for common victory as a unit, as the achievements of the guild are equal to the well-being of each member. The guild has an Sr. who is the guild’s representative to higher ups (or sponsors), but it’s worth noting that his rank (usually) does not entitle him to be a higher paid employee for that reason alone, only on merit.

Ad-hoc team - a short-term association of a small number of specialists from different fields to achieve a clearly defined goal within a certain timeframe. Distribution of payment is usually done by mutual agreement of all participants. In case of shirking from work or conflicts, an employee is removed from the team without any consequences (this is where a little extra care needs to be taken.). At the same time, such a team is usually recruited based on comprehensive data about candidates. The key advantage of ad-hoc teams is their ability to bring together diverse expertise and resources to tackle specific challenges efficiently. However, managing such teams effectively may require strong communication, collaboration, and project management skills, as well as the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Free specialist ecosystem - has no pre-defined micro-organizations other than a single field - the entire project, e.g. Subspace. It has a database about each element open to all the many participants of the main entity, allowing them to join spontaneous Ad-hoc or other teams or to work individually.

Terms

ambassador - participant, specialist, member of the Subspace ambassador ecosystem
praise - achievement points, scorers, points, etc.

I aim so to make a favorable psychological and free market ecology. Maximum decentralized, but at the same time fair management and incentives.

1. WHAT KIND OF STRUCTURE IS SUITABLE FOR AN AMBASSADORS’ COMMUNITY?

1.1. The Subspace ambassador community is an example of a guild by definition.
I’m going to assume counter questions right away…
– What about guildmaster? What about lead ambassadors? We wanted to make several different guilds, in which the most senior, most experienced professionals will be able to correct the work of all the others and be representatives in the highest governing bodies.
– The answer is this. A decentralized reward system is quite capable of ensuring the functioning of an ecosystem of ambassadors. The question is only in the technical realization. And here is a model for organizing such interaction of ambassadors “on the job” within Subspace. As everywhere else, decentralization - inside centralization - which inside decentralization - which… etc.
1.2. I propose to omit all these minor and far from balanced divisions into guilds or other entities, but to give special properties to the specialists themselves. I propose to consider three entity categories:

• Whole Subspace ambassadors ecosystem - as an arena of free specialists;
• Individual specialist;
• Ad-hoc team (a very important form of cooperation).

[wilyam]

2. INFORMATION BOARD OF AMBASSADORS - ECOSYSTEM SPECIALISTS

2.1. An information board should be made about all individual workers.
There will be a board with the profile cards of all ambassadors. On this page it should be possible to sort personal cards of free workers by different criteria, such as achievements scores, skills, projects he/she participated in, length of service, experience (projects he created outside Subspace), as well as there should be a field “what I’m currently working on”, from where the information will go to another page (about this later).
2.2. The specialist (ambassador) should fill in these cards himself. We can call them profiles. But there will also be fields which are not available for editing, but which display links to other cards - to ambassadors with whom he participated in a joint project and evaluations of his work.
His/Her skills can be made in general very visually, for example, colorful design elements. For example, web designer will be written on a blue background, meme specialists - on a green bar, management skills - on a golden bar, coder - on a black background for example, etc. Just examples.
2.3. And with the help of the button "show me all … " e.g. coders, or “show me all translators” you always will be able find a specialists to delegate work for a reward or a companion for a mini-project or suitable ambassadors who are online and who can cover the demand whatever it may be.
2.4. With the help of an electronic board with maps of the entire ambassador community, we will see who we are missing and who we need to recruit.

3. PAYMENT

3.1. I propose to set up payment for Subspace ambassador ecosystem members in such a way: for each work or their periodic contribution they will receive grades from checking ambassadors. The grades will be on two aspects. From these grades will be added up two resulting grades of their performance for equal period of time + for mini-projects. And the total number of awards that will be presented to the paying entity (let’s call it Sponsor, as the previous speaker has already started) is a simple sum of these scores. Although of course it would be good to create a position of a checker who could look at all these indicators and draw conclusions from them

3.2. Payment should be given to the entire “Subspace ambassadors ecosystem” community at once. But should be distributed according to a simple system of collaborative job assessment.
3.3. payment is achievement points.
3.4. There is even an idea to make them an internal currency, so that they can be exchanged when hiring a specialist. A bit of an audacious idea, but it has a lot of advantages. Suppose I have a mini-project and I need an experienced coder to implement it, at least so that my mini-project does not remain mythically cool, which is impossible to implement in code. And in a team you can get an idea of what features are available on our Specialists Ecosystem and adjust the structure of the mini-project to these features. And therefore release a useful product faster. But any other specialist who could be useful to me is busy doing his own thing! And he/she is not sure that he/she wants to wait for some vague result and get then some percentage of it. Instead, I can just hire him and pay him immediately after he fulfills my order! Pay with internal currency (spoiler: this currency is achievement points).

4. INTRODUCTION OF A CHECKER POSITION

4.1. Could be from among ambassadors. Obliged to monitor the implementation of instructions.

[wilyam]

5. ASSESSMENT

5.1. Assessment should be done by all members of the entire Subspace project, not just those involved in the category.
5.2. Assessment should be in two (or three) categories: purely technical skill or craftsmanship, creative hit (i.e., how well the work succeeds in its intended purpose, as judged in advance) If it is roughly done, but has power. These different scoring criteria will help to evaluate the work of an ambassador more adequately. Because sometimes under the influence of a strong emotion a reviewer can overestimate or underestimate. Whereas if you make him pay attention to different aspects of the evaluated work - he will be able to put everything in its place and make a more informed decision.
5.3. The rating scale should be large enough to ensure a large difference between the lowest and highest rated projects. I think 1 to 100 is a convenient scale. In this way, projects in which a lot of effort or innovation or unusual creativity has been put in will be able to earn their authors much more achievement points than a mediocre copy-paste.
5.4. Assessment should not be anonymous. And I’ll explain why as the text progresses.
If it is anonymous, it will not be decentralization by definition. Whether it will be possible to manipulate these numbers or not is not known. Of course the algorithm would have to be opensource, but it could be much simpler. This is a plus for the internal ecology of one organism’s psychology. And, attention, due to the openness of assessments, and thus transparency and understanding and feedback from the assessor, the assessed will have the opportunity to appeal - that is, to ask for an explanation of such a grade of his labor.
Moreover, the correspondence on the case of challenging the assessment between the performer and the reviewer should be available to all members of the Subspace project.
5.6. For each work of each ambassador in his profile card will be displayed the arithmetic mean of all evaluations given by the reviewers.
5.7. Since the assessment will become critical, because it is + to his salary, then again due to the openness of the list of those who voted will be visible to those who did not vote. And at the same time the one who missed voting (or assessment) will have some indicator, for example, a red dot in his form card.
5.8. How will the length of the contribution affect the payment to the ambassador?
– The same number of projects he has completed.
5.9. The weight of the vote based on his accomplishments, checking, as I wrote in previous posts, I think, should not be done. Due to open voting (assessment) any grading is discussable and should always be resolved by mutual understanding. And in case of disputable cases - a ticket will be created, as a result of which the truth will always be found. And the voting power will be the same for all ambassadors.

6. CHECKING OF THE CHECKERS

6.1. At the same time, if someone started to abuse or to exploit the voting system, then any member of Subspace ambassador ecosystem should be able to read even a correspondence about the explanation of such grading. If the assessed ambassador wants to challenge the grade and has contacted the verifying ambassador.

7. PERIODIC CONTRIBUTION

7.1. How do I rate a Subspace ambassador ecosystem member’s contribution if he has not done individual mini-projects but moderated the chat?
– The same way we do it now - grading based on his monthly contribution, which will be noted in his work list. Periodic contributions should be counted every equal period of time and rated by the reviewers on the same scale, but according to the evaluation guide this type of contribution cannot be too high unless it is absolutely outstanding. I think the assessment guide should put it in the range of 1 to 40, maybe 50. Maybe more. (just need to invent a good rules about how to assess different kinds of contributions)

7.2. Miniproject is complex and requires a lot of manpower, and compared to some sluggish activity in chat rooms or other leisurely crafts should be paid more. How to realize it? I think that the assessment should be made not just on a 5-point scale, but for example 10-point or 100-point. Because there should be a big difference in payment for projects that have a big difference in complexity. You can even make a small guide to assessment, approving the norms of assessment. Say writing an article is in the range of 1 to 10 points. Where 10 is just a killer article, or, since we’ve (almost) agreed to apply multiple grading scales, it could just be a very nicely and unusually and uniquely designed article, albeit a very mediocre rehashing of what’s already been said. But an assessment guide would solve a lot of the issues here. Theoretically, it should even be possible to draw a frog and get 100 points for it, if this meme later becomes a symbol of the whole project.

8. CONFLICT RESOLUTION

8.1. And only if there is a misunderstanding here, for example, if an ambassador has done a work that he highly appreciates, but someone gave him an “inadequate” penalty, then a special ticket shall be created and assigned the status of “dispute” and thus the case shall be transferred to the Subspace Labs team for consideration. then a special ticket is created and assigned the status of “dispute” and thus this case is passed on to the Subspace Labs team.
These grades are essentially payment for our labor. Therefore, it is very important that any factor affecting these grading is open and clear.

[wilyam]

9. ‘LEAD AMBASSADOR’ RANK

9.1. I propose not to introduce the position of lead ambassador at all. With such a decentralized scheme of organizing rewards, there is no need for any lead ambassadors at all. Because it is quite possible that the holder of the rank of lead ambassador (or some other distinction) will work less than someone else who does not have this rank. As mentioned elsewhere, the “Sponsor” or paying entity will allocate a fixed number of tokens to all ambassadors, and then they will be distributed within the “free ambassador ecosystem” based on achievement points. So the one who knows more or is more hardworking will be paid more than the one who did less work or was graded less. For example, we open the card of an experienced and old ambassador and see there a lot of progress and good grading, a lot of projects, including joint projects, and newcomers will have correspondingly smaller amounts, and thus there is no point in creating ranks, if you can distinguish yourself by labor and the degree of contribution to the project.

10. AD-HOC COMMAND

10.1. Why team up?
Because one industry made you a bike, another made you clothes, a third made you mosquito spray, and a fourth made you a protein shaker, so your endurance and adaptability is a hundred times greater than if you were alone.

11. ASSESSMENT OF THE MINI-PROJECT DONE BY AD-HOC TEAM.

11.1. In the card of an ambassador there should be a field “completed projects”, and there should be the usual list of his works with links or explanations, but where the work was done jointly with other participants, there should be links to the same field and to the same entry in the profile card of these participants. And praise (achievement points) for this project should be added to each participant equally ! If there was an unequal distribution of labor within the Ad-hoc team, it should be settled with the help of internal currency - or more simply the possibility to transfer achievement points. Realize the ability to transfer achievement points - it is already a very difficult task. Therefore, for the first time we can be satisfied with the fact that all participants will be awarded an equal amount of points. Dividing the whole reward for work equally within a small team is normal and the most common practice. Though we can make something up if will need to.
For ex. 15 points each. Teaming up will be profitable, and it is important to select only trusted and verified people, or on the basis of the information in the questionnaire, to share the reward with them.

12. REALIZATION

12.1. I think that the coda platform will be quite suitable for implementing such a model of organizing the internal work of ambassadors. I have already started to develop some forms there, and unless we want to do it completely on our site, it is flexible enough to provide such a board and such questionnaire cards and a voting or assessment system. It could even be anonymous, but once again - openness will allow all of us to be sure that everything is fair, and to go through the details of different views on our work, to work out mistakes and even to create a dispute.

[wilyam]

13. OVERLAP OF ACTIVITIES

13.1. It should be noted that there are cases when people are doing the same thing over and over again. This is where every man for himself and it leads to unequal distribution of labor resources. It is a waste of time for those who did even better, but presented the work later by 1 day. This happens in some projects.
I suggest incentivizing ambassadors to openly post on their profile card
It’s okay if several people came up with the same idea - as they could better team up and get grading for this mini project all.
In his/her profile card the ambassador should write in the appropriate field what he/she is working on at the moment. It should not be a mandatory field. But it will protect him from an unexpected competitor who will do the same and present it to the community. Although, however, this is possible, but thanks to the logs, it will be possible to establish the date when the first person announced this mini-project.
13.2. Here, of course, there is a field for deception. For example, it is possible to have good ideas and get them under yourself by writing them in this field. But it is possible to make a system of tracking deadlines. Because together with the idea of a mini-project its author should specify the deadlines (which should be mentioned in the instructions). However, it is necessary to think more deeply how to do it better. But this approach has its disadvantages (slowness) and advantages (equal distribution of labor resources).

14. INFORMATION PAGES

14.1. We need to create another separate page on the site (or in coda) with a list of mini-projects that are currently in the works. i.e. there will be data that will be read from the profile cards of ambassadors from the “what I am working on now” field.
14.2. In addition, there should be one more information page, which will not be in any way connected with the questionnaire cards of ambassadors, on which the ideas of what should be done for the project will be written down. And accordingly, even these ideas the author has the right to present as his contribution to the development of the project. And receive grading for them. But the main advantage of this information page is that anyone who is ready to work for the good of the project and be fairly rewarded can just start from this page. There will be a list of things that need to be done, but which are not currently in the status of “in progress” in the corresponding half of the profile cards of any ambassadors.
As soon as someone has started doing it - this line will be removed from this list and will appear on the third information page - “who is working on what”.

SO THERE SHOULD BE 4 PAGES:
1 - a board with cards of ambassadors with the possibility to open each card and see all available information about the activity of the ambassador.
2 - an information page that reads and displays the fields “I am working on such project” from all the cards of all ambassadors.
3 - information page containing all To do’s sent by different ambassadors with their names.
4 - page with current tickets, made to resolve disputes.
5 - assessment instructions.
Everything should be done in different colors, so that all important information is clearly visible.

[Jim-Subspace]

Some interesting ideas here @wilyam. I have a few points/questions.

• I’m intrigued by the idea that achievement points can be used as a currency including the ability to pay for specific services on a particular project.
• You describe a UI to view ambassadors and their history in some detail. Do you see this is a tool we have to develop in-house or are you aware of something off-the-shelf we can leverage? (sorry, just read section 12 - you are proposing Coda? That would be fine.)
• The assessment weighting sounds quite complicated. I assume you intend this would be automated in some way with the logic/arithmetic locked in code?
• Maybe when achievement points are to be distributed within an ad-hoc team the amounts (%) for each role within the team would be decided up front so could be discussed and agreed based on expected relative effort before starting work?

Overall, I’m really pleased to see such thoughtful proposals and am interested in how @jrwashburn feels about them. I expect the process of reaching a v1 governance framework will benefit from picking the best suggestions from a number of engaged parties. Let the debate continue!

(note you sign off with “there should be 4 pages” and then list 5)

[wilyam]

Thank you Jim for appreciating my work
well assesment instructions is not a page after all , I mentioned it should be just a part of the ambassador-board. Anyway this article yet in raw form…

[jrwashburn]

@wilyam

It is also a fee-based organization when it comes to salaries, with an internal and mutually agreed upon distribution of the rewards received among its members according to internal rules.

In our case, the Ambassador Program does not actually have any treasury or currency. We could implement a point system to have variable payments that we could direct the Sponsor to enforce, but this feels quite complicated to me for the first round. Is there a strong sense that we can not use a simple approach for now? (The time-based vesting structure that has already been communicated?) My primary reasons is that we don’t have the tech right now, and need to get v1 in place asap.

@wilyam

Ad-hoc team - a short-term association of a small number of specialists from different fields to achieve a clearly defined goal within a certain timeframe.

I am less formal than this and more principle-driven: I think we want to be as permissionless as possible within the program, so I don’t care if an ad-hoc team is cross functional, has a clearly defined goal, or a timeframe. It can be whatever the team wants. I would expect clearly defined goals would be more likely to get an approval to become an Official team, so it may be a good idea if that is the intention, but I wouldn’t put any parameters on what is or is not an ad-hoc team - I think it can simply be any group of >1 person.

@wilyam

Free specialist ecosystem

I like this idea; I’m not sure how we would factor it in to a demand-driven recruitment process. How would specialists come to join the program? Simply present themselves and if the Onboarding Guild thinks they are interesting, they would be added? Perhaps there is a way to have free join/leave protocol for apprentice ambassadors - and anyone could request to be an apprentice, which would land them in the free specialist ecosystem? Then it would be up to them to create value to be able to be selected to become an Ambassador. @ALPHANOMICON I’d love to get your take on this.

@wilyam

What about guildmaster? What about lead ambassadors? We wanted to make several different guilds, in which the most senior, most experienced professionals will be able to correct the work of all the others and be representatives in the highest governing bodies.
– The answer is this. A decentralized reward system is quite capable

I think we want a more democratic approach. We may want the most junior, least experienced professionals who also happen to be excellent at generating consensus or excitement or. … whatever. My perspective is: teams should be choosing their leaders - period. A technical attempt at meritocracy will not capture all the nuances of people working together, and I think to have legitimacy, we need a clear way for ambassadors to express their consent to the leader election.

@wilyam

1.2. I propose to omit all these minor and far from balanced divisions into guilds or other entities, but to give special properties to the specialists themselves.

I like the idea of things being more flexible and think this is really interesting. I’m wondering what it would look like in reality - I think we will need one or more “teams” that agree to take responsibility for support and being active in discord. What do you think about the idea of defining Roles which specialists can choose to adopt - so they may participate in many different activities? I think we will still need a few permanent teams to coordinate core activities of the program - e.g. someone focused (perhaps with the specialist skill of “lead” or perhaps “coordinator”) on coordinating the activities around various roles. I’m thinking taking responsibility for seeing if we have roles missing, or that we don’t have enough energy in some roles, etc. Would a role-based system make sense and fill the needs you see?

[jrwashburn]

@wilyam

find a specialists to delegate work for a reward or a companion for a mini-project or suitable ambassadors who are online and who can cover the demand whatever it may be.

I like the idea of a system to help us coordinate. I’m opposed to the idea of delegation (meaning telling someone else what to do) - this should all be consent-based, permissionless, etc. I think that’s what you really mean but want to make sure.

@wilyam

From these grades will be added up two resulting grades of their performance for equal period of time + for mini-projects.

What is the benefit of the additional complications here? It adds a lot of infrastructure which requires a lot of care and maintenance - all adding overhead costs and friction. What is the upside? If there is strong consensus that we need a proof-of-work based system I have many ideas around this too, but don’t think it’s worth it (at least, not yet.) Maybe it’s something to have on the roadmap, if there is sufficient demand? In general, I have wanted the program to not have treasury, but maybe that needs to be reconsidered and a variable payment system would be better. I’d really like to see more opinions on this. The scheme must have a warrant/validation program if it is implemented. Too easy to game otherwise.

@wilyam

5.1. Assessment should be done by all members of the entire Subspace project, not just those involved in the category.

I agree - I think this is how it works today.

@wilyam

Assessment should not be anonymous.

I disagree with this. The ability to appeal can be supported by providing reasons for scores, and an appeal would need to re-evaluate in any case. I think there is too much risk for retribution in scoring over time if we don’t maintain some level of anonymity. The sybil risks can be avoided with various mechanisms - this is a permissioned group so we can identify those entitled to score.

@wilyam

projects. I think 1 to 100 is a convenient scale. In this way, projects in which a lot of effort or innovation or unusual creativity has been put in will be able to earn their authors much more achievement points than a mediocre

What is the benefit of a wider scale? I think you will get less useful results as people will cluster in certain natural bands. I don’t have the research to prove this, but I think it’s out there.

@wilyam

5.6. For each work of each ambassador in his profile card will be displayed the arithmetic mean of all evaluations given by the reviewers.

I think this is going to demand to much energy. Scoring each bit of work will take a lot of time, and while it’s precise, I don’t think it’s going to be significantly more accurate or meaningful. Currently, we are just scoring monthly activity - what about showing that score over time? I guess we need to decide on Variable or Fixed compensation - if variable, we would have to score each thing … that’s a lot of work. We would probably need to make that (activity of scoring) paid work as well. We could of course over complicate it with a prediction market and stake

@wilyam

Theoretically, it should even be possible to draw a frog and get 100 points for it, if this meme later becomes a symbol of the whole project.

This would (presumably) require retroactive funding.

@wilyam

be transferred to the Subspace Labs team for consideration.

I think we will want an internal jury to pull from.

[jrwashburn]

@wilyam

It could even be anonymous, but once again - openness will allow all of us to be sure that everything is fair, and to go through the details of different views on our work, to work out mistakes and even to create a dispute.

I don’t think we can use coda if we want anonymity. We would have to use something that supports it and does not allow self-scoring/sybils.

@wilyam

SO THERE SHOULD BE 4 PAGES:
1 - a board with cards of ambassadors with the possibility to open each card and see all available information about the activity of the ambassador.
2 - an information page that reads and displays the fields “I am working on such project” from all the cards of all ambassadors.
3 - information page containing all To do’s sent by different ambassadors with their names.
4 - page with current tickets, made to resolve disputes.
5 - assessment instructions.

I like this a lot, but if we are using it for scoring, etc. coda is not a good fit. (Or at least not unless we start paying for it - then I don’t know.) Right now, anyone can overwrite anything that anyone else has done. I could edit your cards, or delete the entire board, and so could anyone else. If it’s not related to money and performance, then I think it is good enough to try. Which would be basically #1 and #2 on your list. Do you have any other platforms that might be a good fit?

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

I think we want a more democratic approach. We may want the most junior, least experienced professionals who also happen to be excellent at generating consensus or excitement or. … whatever. My perspective is: teams should be choosing their leaders - period. A technical attempt at meritocracy will not capture all the nuances of people working together, and I think to have legitimacy, we need a clear way for ambassadors to express their consent to the leader election.

What meritocratic system does is only that contributions are evaluated based on their quality and usefulness, rather than the status or position of the individual who made them. And how do we implement it? Well, we have more opportunity to make it perfect than the Athenians.

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

I like the idea of things being more flexible …
What do you think about the idea of defining Roles which specialists can choose to adopt - so they may participate in many different activities? I think we will still need a few permanent teams to coordinate core activities of the program - e.g. someone focused (perhaps with the specialist skill of “lead” or perhaps “coordinator”) on coordinating the activities around various roles. I’m thinking taking responsibility for seeing if we have roles missing, or that we don’t have enough energy in some roles, etc. Would a role-based system make sense and fill the needs you see?

1. I get it - who is going to give the participants those roles? where in their profile will appear skills that they possess, right?
   As I said in the main article, ambassadors get to fill in the fields themselves in their profiles.

2. Only the task complicated is a system of evaluating contributor’s competence or expertise.
   What kinds of contributions we know? And what are their commonalities for evaluation?

• writing articles: grammar & punctuation; readability (formatting, style); completeness; integrity
• translations: correctness (including control of machine translation artifacts - we have tonns of them), Re-structuring
• memos, graphics, video, logo etc: idea, qwality, the cost or apparent contribution of resources
• soc.activities: idea, qwality, the cost or apparent contribution of resources
• chat groups assistance, consultat.; quantity, qwality
• coding: idea; qwality (clean, well-structured, and maintainable code that follows coding standards and best practices); depth of technical knowledge, etc;

I see it possible to invent few different very simple evaluation schemes for each of those activities. Only a positive grade can be given for any work - from 0 to 5 points. Or even 3 grades (like pointless, more-or-less and useful).

Another variant is just introducing two facets of every contribution (simpliest):
‘idea’ and ‘realization’ or the amount of resources a person has invested what can be money, time or labor!:

• Idea includes aspects such as: uniqueness, feasibility, creative impulse and relevance to current needs or solving a project-defined problem
• Realization and execution includes aspects such as: thoroughness, attentiveness, adherence to rules (literacy, etc.) , involvement (e.g. it is evident that the persons have spent a lot of their resources) etc.

Such separative facets evaluation helps evaluators to be unbiased,as under influence of strong emotion they may consider ‘highest’ or ‘lowest’ grades, where the job has other merits. And it helps to evaluate the work on different facets.

2. 2. Problems with the current evaluation process.
      At present, ambassadors evaluate each other based on the descriptions of their contributions that they themselves have written and that Fradique sends to our e-mail. But these descriptions often do not contain links, and there is no way to check what specific answers to questions and in which social networks the assessed ambassador performed

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

I like the idea of a system to help us coordinate. I’m opposed to the idea of delegation (meaning telling someone else what to do) - this should all be consent-based, permissionless, etc. I think that’s what you really mean but want to make sure.

Yes I really mean that ) A free ecosystem is both where everyone can depend on each other and where they can be independent, all at will

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

In our case, the Ambassador Program does not actually have any treasury or currency. We could implement a point system to have variable payments that we could direct the Sponsor to enforce, but this feels quite complicated to me for the first round. Is there a strong sense that we can not use a simple approach for now? (The time-based vesting structure that has already been communicated?) My primary reasons is that we don’t have the tech right now, and need to get v1 in place asap.

I see. What are the deadlines btw? Of course its possible and interesting to try and introduce an internal currency, e.g. in the form of achievement points

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

I am less formal than this and more principle-driven: I think we want to be as permissionless as possible within the program, so I don’t care if an ad-hoc team is cross functional, has a clearly defined goal, or a timeframe. It can be whatever the team wants. I would expect clearly defined goals would be more likely to get an approval to become an Official team, so it may be a good idea if that is the intention, but I wouldn’t put any parameters on what is or is not an ad-hoc team - I think it can simply be any group of >1 person.

well those are just definitions, don’t pay much attention to that. It doesn’t matter what it’s called. They were bricks.

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

I disagree with this. The ability to appeal can be supported by providing reasons for scores, and an appeal would need to re-evaluate in any case. I think there is too much risk for retribution in scoring over time if we don’t maintain some level of anonymity. The sybil risks can be avoided with various mechanisms - this is a permissioned group so we can identify those entitled to score.

I realize that openness in all its forms is a very fragile phenomenon and requires a wild calculation.

@jrwashburn

What is the benefit of a wider scale? I think you will get less useful results as people will cluster in certain natural bands. I don’t have the research to prove this, but I think it’s out there.

the benefit (i did explain it ) was in the increasing difference between really bad and really good. But I agree with u that it’s vague atm, need more research.

@jrwashburn

I think this is going to demand to much energy. Scoring each bit of work will take a lot of time, and while it’s precise, I don’t think it’s going to be significantly more accurate or meaningful. Currently, we are just scoring monthly activity - what about showing that score over time? I guess we need to decide on Variable or Fixed compensation - if variable, we would have to score each thing … that’s a lot of work. We would probably need to make that (activity of scoring) paid work as well. We could of course over complicate it with a prediction market and stake

That’s the way it is. Who said the perfect algorithm has to be simple? )) It may be very difficult to adopt a complex model at once. But this is inevitable where there is no centralization
No one is really evaluating anyone right now because there is no data! But it’s easy.

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

I disagree with this. The ability to appeal can be supported by providing reasons for scores, and an appeal would need to re-evaluate in any case. I think there is too much risk for retribution in scoring over time if we don’t maintain some level of anonymity. The sybil risks can be avoided with various mechanisms - this is a permissioned group so we can identify those entitled to score.

Good point you make - about retaliation for a low grade.
Meditate on this I need.

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

We would probably need to make that (activity of scoring) paid work as well.

necessarily, (wonder if I missed it)

@jrwashburn

We could of course over complicate it with a prediction market and stake

[Jim-Subspace]

@jrwashburn

I think we will still need a few permanent teams to coordinate core activities of the program

The idea of “core teams” sounds good to me. There could be a process to create/disband them but the expectation is they will have more permanence in some way.

@jrwashburn

Maybe it’s something to have on the roadmap

Sounds like a roadmap to capture these future efforts would be useful for visibility.

@jrwashburn

I don’t think we can use coda if we want anonymity. We would have to use something that supports it and does not allow self-scoring/sybils.

Any suggestions on a platform? Would a privately verified wallet address work as an identity here? Just trying to get an understanding of how this might work. Maybe the foundation could manage the verification with a contract that owners are never divulged unless in extreme situations and to tightly restricted audiences as specified by the program itself? There’s a wider discussion here about where sensitive data is stored. I’m available to start that conversation whenever we feel ready.

@jrwashburn

Right now, anyone can overwrite anything that anyone else has done.

We have just upgraded the subscription on Coda to address this but are definitely open to discussing more appropriate platforms to support where we’re going.

@wilyam

Well, we have more opportunity to make it perfect than the Athenians.

@wilyam

Yes I really mean that ) A free ecosystem is both where everyone can depend on each other and where they can be independent, all at will

Love this!

Enjoying the discourse here guys

[wilyam]

@jrwashburn

I don’t think we can use coda if we want anonymity. We would have to use something that supports it and does not allow self-scoring/sybils.

Coda supports anonymous forms, I made one back then for the sake of experimentation