 So this is the fellowship of the link call from, sorry, Wednesday, May 10th, 2023. And we were just, Fluncin was just saying that one of the things that we might be able to do that would be really productive would be to write a book about the commons and how we think about the commons and how to bring one about. And I'm like, yeah, we started talking about our Monday calls, right? And so I just shared with him in the chat the Mattermost link to the Marley calls, which are Mondays at 10.30 AM Pacific. You are completely welcome to join. And I would be very happy to join you in like figuring out what a book or on that topic looks like. So that would be great. You could count me in as part of your writing team. That will seem amazing to me. I mean, yes, I started with just a document, okay, a document. We'll talk, I will say, but yes, a book would be like an amazing number term. So I should explain that it started out as let's write a book and then we sort of folded onto it other ideas about how the book is kind of the attractive, well-known social artifact. But really what's interesting is shared knowledge under the hood in a wiki or a series of wikis or other sorts of tools. So that what is written is actually more useful and connected to resources and to communities that are talking about the issues and everything else that we can think of. So that is at least as important to us as producing a book. But our goal is to churn out something that looks like an e-book or an e-pub book or a Kindle file format book ASAP so that we have a finished thing that we can point to and go see. We did that. Amazing, yes. Right along with that. So, Francine, as you're thinking of doing that, I would like to pitch you on an organization structure. I have to let you know that I pitched the Marley project on this organization structure and they kind of like nixed it. They were like, yeah, too complicated. We said sort of maybe too soon, but we had a bumpy call on Monday. Is it the Heterarchical Commons First Anarchic Organization? What's that? It's an organization proposal. You can pitch it, but is it like Heterarchical and Commons First? I think it's actually even better than Commons First. Okay, let's go. By the way, I have to say I may need to go away for two minutes because the bell will ring. He has a friend arriving. I don't know if right now is the right time to pitch it. I totally could, but I don't know. Share the links in the chat so that Francine can go read what you put out. Yeah, or just add it into the notes, yes. Because Pete did a bunch of work over the weekend basically fleshing out a model for how every project might need to be its own little organization. And here are sort of the framings and ground rules for how each of the organizations might structure itself. Pete, correct me if I'm stating it wrong. No, that's perfectly right, yes. That's great. And then even to the extent that... So I think we'll see what Marley decides to do as a project. It's got its own organizational structure, and Jerry's right. It may have just been a little bit too soon to talk about the structure with Marley. But the way I would set up the way Marley works is Marley would be a project with an organizational structure, and then each book that Marley produced is probably going to be another organization. A fractal approach. Yes, exactly. There's also a holonic approach. I actually don't know what that means. And I was thinking toward the end of our call Monday that maybe what you're doing is reinventing holocracy or something like that because there's definitely this idea of circles. Oh, there we go. Here, there's definitely this idea of circles and responsibilities and how these circles communicate and what their responsibilities are, blah, blah, blah. I'm not trained in holocracy, but it felt sort of similar. Yeah, it's solving the same problem in probably a similar way. I think there's a holonic is another thing. There should be a high holonic. I know exactly. So I would love to give the pitch. I don't know if it's on topic for this group. It's kind of my hesitation, I think. Along with not wanting to drag Jerry through it again, but Jerry's fine with that. What is the pitch? Organizational structure for small projects. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Is this like the Medigov folks? Yeah, except that it's probably smaller and rougher and more like agile or something. Yeah. Medigov, holocracy, yada, yada, yada. So how about if I pitch it? Sure. And it's something that I wrote down for a project that I want to start. It includes a lot of discussion actually with Jordan Sukut of Leinsberg and David Boval of Map of the Future. So they're both working on templates for organizations in large ecosystems, cooperating organizations in large ecosystems. And they actually have more kinds of organizations and they also have the idea of connecting it to legal structure like LLCs or corporations or partnerships or co-ops or all that kind of stuff. And in different places around the world, they've got a better sense than I do of which organizational or which legal structure maps. So I kind of start at how people are working together and then they pick up on how you map that into legal space, including Leinsberg has a way to connect lots of things that are non-profits that aren't legally non-profits into legal non-profits in a way for Flansien. He's just getting the door and then he'll be back on the call or he's, you know. Yeah, I think he's letting a friend in. It's funny and I thought that the keyboard sound was coming from Flansien. So then when he muted and left and the keyboard sound kept going, I'm like, wait a minute. What's, you mentioned map for the future, but I don't know that one. It's, I think that's the right link. Yes. They have very little documented. They have a lot of work. David himself has got a lot of work and then in connection with Map of the, one of the sponsors of, or maybe sponsor of Map of the Future is MOTI, an organization called MOTI. So they've got a lot of work that you don't see on that website, but I think that's the best website they've got so far. There is actually also a, they have a massive wiki. But I think it's even more bearer than, than the website or about the same amount of bear. So, yeah. And then there's also Linesburg. Linesburg has a lot of this written down, but it's, there's, there's a lot to go through. I'm still waiting for Flatsion. Unless I should just go and repeat the stuff from Flatsion. And we could wait a little bit. I'm looking up some of the other ones. Interesting. Linesburg out of curiosity while we're waiting is Linesburg like a group of product? What is it? It's, it's the, it's, it's kind of both the ecosystem and the organization that drives, you know, or that's specifying the ecosystem. So the ecosystem is, is pretty much empty right now. It's, it's gone through a couple reboots kind of, and we're right in the middle of another reboot. So literally like last week and this week, we're talking about the first four or five organizations starting up in an ecosystem. And I can, I can probably add a little bit of color while Flatsion is managing his friend. Linesburg was started by Jordan Sukut, who he mentioned who used to be in construction and had kind of a crisis of conscience some years ago and saying, do I want to keep like flattening land for more buildings to go up or do I want to do something else. Did a whole bunch of research and ended up deciding that the most stable organizational structure to build lots of different ventures atop that would mind the comments and be hard to take over and all that. This is something called, what's it called again, steward ownership and steward owner, the TLDR of pseudo ownership ownership is that there's a nonprofit that owns 100% of the shares of a for profit. And that that combination has a whole bunch of case law is that that's well understood in the world. And that also, so these things are easy to set up and that in combination you can then run a whole bunch of different kinds of entities on top of that platform. There's a basic starting point for Linesburg, but there's also a whole bunch of other kind of philosophy about things folded into it. And Jordan is nothing if not a big picture thinker. So there's a whole bunch of other things and Pete can point to if you want to read about the philosophy and everything else, you can go to a wiki that Jordan's been using where he's been putting a lot of this stuff down. And in fact, Pete already put a link to the wiki in the chat. I missed the pitch, but that sounded very, very promising. No, we totally waited. I was filling time. Okay. Okay, but that's a better interaction. Let me do the pitch real quick. And Michael, we're hearing we're hearing some sound coming from your mic, Michael. Oh yeah. You have a tab that's playing or something like that. Yeah, I know you. There we go. So it's funny calling it even calling this a pitch and making a big deal out of it is kind of overweight. So this is, this is something knowing that David is working on stuff and knowing that Jordan is working on stuff and has more templates and things what I did is I wrote down kind of the simplest thing that could work. So let me it's, it's kind of all in the wiki there's there's it's an interlocked set of pages that you kind of need to read all of them to get any of them so that I don't know that there's a good overview of everything but the idea is, let me go back home and see if that's a good place to start. The idea is, it would be really cool to have a news, I already published a newsletter that's a news, a news newsletter. I thought it would be really cool to have kind of an art art newsletter instead. It's little stories and images that go with it. And the kicker, the thing that makes this a weirdo project is that it's totally fine if the little things are generated by AI. They need to be curated by humans. So a human needs to like think about what they're submitting to the journal but it's okay if they're generated. This is attractive to some people and anti attractive to some people. Well, this project is going to go. But I'm pretty, pretty excited about the organizational structure and it can map pretty quickly over to something like writing a book. So, so the idea is that there's an art journal. This is one issue. This is a very small issue. It's got two and a half stories kind of and, and stuff and a place down here at the bottom that says answer a questionnaire. Would you, would you, should I keep going on this or not is the question of the. I am interested in the concept of the org structure a little bit more than I am the AI art side. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, that's the only time we'll go back to the AI art thing. So now forget that. Forget that. So what I'm presenting is the org structure. So there's people in project roles. And I'll start this is kind of reverse chronological or something I'll start actually maybe I won't in the steady state there's contributors and subscribers and editors and stewards. So stewards are the governance committee. Editors are an editorial committee stewardship committee makes decisions about, you know, what, you know, should we change our domain name? Should we do marketing? Should we fold the tent and go home and not do this anymore, whatever, right? So those are stewardship kinds of decisions. The editorial committee probably if I click on this editorial committee sets contribution standards. And maybe makes a publication calendar. You know, when do we publish special issues and things like that. Contribution standards are kind of what you would expect. You know, here's, here's how much tax, here's how much image. Here's the quality of them. And I don't know if it quite says us here, but we're not going to publish it editorial committees. The yay or nay on whether or not this story goes into into the next issue of the journal or which issue it does. So, so then contributors are the people make the phrase a story in this space includes both the image and and the text. Subscribers are the people who provide or who make who pay for the journal. The way my existing journal works. You can be a subscriber and you can pay $0 or you can you can pay like a dollar $2 a month or or $2 a month or $20 a year. So this this kind of works the same a subscriber might be paying they might be not paying. I chose to say that subscribers don't participate in governance. Contributors do participate in governance as well as editors and stewards. And then the I think it's maybe in here. Actually it's in stories. So I did a weird thing I said stories are are what we what we build what contributors build. I'm also going to call the in game currency stories. So when you're working on the stewardship committee or the editorial committee, you actually track hours and then you convert them to stories. Story domination currency at the rate of two stories per hour. Because the stories are really small and then quick to produce with AI and stuff like that. You should be able to knock them out pretty quick. So if you're spending an hour in an editorial meeting that's worth two stories. So then I think like the idea of the link in the time investment to something that reminds people of the primary output of the project. Yeah, I, yeah, thanks for appreciating that and the other thing that I ended up realizing is as I described it as other people, one of the comments Jerry made a great comment which is okay Pete so it's super confusing that currency is called a story and your your thing is called a story. It's a good and bad thing right it leads to confusion but it also says hey all we care about his stories you know we're in the process in the in the business of making stories. There's a ledger central central ledger in air table. If, if this wasn't. If this wasn't a project amongst friends if it was people who didn't know each other as well you might put that on blockchain or something like that. It's this is more or less a nonprofit thing, generally cash unusual. There are, there are expenses, the primary expenses as server to run ghost on. There might be other things like a domain name or something like that. I was hoping the way I wanted to set this up is, you know, subscribers pay some money, some some subscribers pay some money. We pay for expenses. We keep a little bit for rainy day fund. And then we donate some. And then we probably actually also pay Jordan calls this a tithe. It's not the right word to use, but in the Lionsburg network, you get benefits from being a member of the network, including things like you would typically get from a PEO. You can get you get the option to be a nonprofit and a 501 C3 nonprofit. They handle like routing the funds to you. If it's if you're for profit thinking you actually have employees they'll handle HR and benefits and stuff like that. So, so as a Lionsburg nonprofit, there would be I think a voluntary but kind of assumed donation of some kind donations maybe the wrong word payment is probably better. It contributes to ecosystem health and pays for, you know, services and things like that. I think, you know, 10% is probably like if you if you're getting them to take care of health insurance and HR and that's probably actually an additional charge on top of kind of a network, you know, network benefit fee. So then finally, if there's remaining profit, it gets paid to contributors, the people are actually working. So I actually like that a lot. I think I went through most of it you can kind of I didn't hit all the pages and this isn't completely well organized for presenting like this but you get the idea. Thank you. So quickly, David when actually maybe an important part to hit is the proportional share is of profit sharing and governance. So if you're contributing stories or ours that get contributed converted to stories. Proportional votes in proportional shares and profit sharing and proportional votes and governance. And that's over time in the same way that slicing pie works or dynamic equity splits. So you keep track of everything that's ever been contributed to the project. And, you know, if if the project has 100 stories contributed so far 1000 stories maybe it's a better thing. But if you've if people have put to put in 1000 stories, and I add five stories, then I get five times 1000 of the profit the next time profit gets distributed. I've got a five out of 1000 vote in governance. So in the in the project roles, I have a role called founder, I'm the founder, and I award myself some certain founding things like, you know, writing all this down. I paid myself six stories or something like that. There's there's kind of another thing which I said I called it a founder contribution bonus. There's there's kind of an intangible set of things that a founder does like telling people about this or listening to it or thinking about how the how this is all going to work or something like that. So I kind of wrap that up and said it's a founder bonus. So, so and it's big right now it's you know the I own 20, 20 shares or something like that 2020 stories. So the next person who puts in one story. You know, I've got stole a lot of say, but as soon as we've got 20 people who put in stories or two people who put in 10 stories each. You know now I'm down to 50% and by the time there's 1000 stories, the founder part of it is very small. So those shares aren't equity. They're of governance and of profit, but they're not of equity. So, for this project, it owns itself and nobody owns the equity except the project. That works for nonprofits, and that's actually like that will connect up with the way that Linesburg needs to specify nonprofits legally and the lawyer that they were the lawyer who's a core founder actually of Linesburg. What he says is if that's fine for a nonprofit to own its own all its assets and own itself. If it if it ever needs to get dissolved or something like that. It needs to the whatever assets are there and need to be given to another nonprofit that has the same kind of nonprofit charter that you know a compatible charter, or it needs to go to the state. So you can't set up a nonprofit, you know, contribute a bunch of stuff and then somebody walks away with all the assets at some point. It has to continue to be nonprofit forever, which is fine for this. I think a for profit thing I'm working on a similar model for a for profit co-op of people doing consulting. And I think, I think somebody is going to end up owning, you know, there's, I think the founders are going to end up owning equity, which kind of makes me nervous and stuff. So David Boval, his model is slicing pie by equity splits of equity. I think he's equity. Maybe he doesn't. He's, he's not I think about it. I don't think he calls it equity. I think he's got fake equity. He calls it fucked up equity actually fucked up shares. So maybe it's not real equity the way that, you know, a legal thing would work. I've got a similar thing in mind. His organizations have a fiat balance internally, a potentially crypto balance if people are interested in crypto, a mutual credit balance. So as you do work for a company, you might, you might be your different roles. If you're a graphic designer and you're just coming in to like help out with the website and then you leave. Maybe you don't want governance shares and maybe you don't want profit shares. Maybe you actually mostly want fiat and, and or mutual credit. They might, the company, the project might say, we don't have a lot of fiat. How about if we pay you like, like a tenth of your normal rate in fiat because, you know, everybody's got to eat a little bit or buy, buy espresso or whatever. But how about if we pay the rest of you, the rest of it in mutual credit. And then the web designer might accumulate enough mutual credit with that project or several projects to say, hey, I need a, I need a coder. Can I spend some of my mutual credit and get, you know, to help me build this web app I'm developing. I'll do the design that I need to pay a coder. And then can I pay you mostly in mutual credit? So I'm super excited about Linesburg and Map of the Future and a little bit frustrated because they don't have any of this written down in a way that made it made it make sense to me. So I wrote down my little model here is where this came from. SJ, you've stepped into Pete explaining an idea that came to him over the weekend that he crafted up and put on his wiki for a structure that organizations could adopt. And the idea being that almost every project is its own organization. And he's kind of designing this in parallel with Jordan Sukkot's Linesburg organization and David Bowville's multiple projects trying to do this kind of thing. It's a little bit sort of parallel to maybe holocracy or other forms of organization, but it also has an aspect of trying to manage distributed value creation and sharing and recognition, which is an important question, I think in our sphere. And I'm just wondering if anybody has questions for Pete or comments or whatever from what he's just said. It's also a little bit parallel to DAOs. And David will actually call these DAOs sometimes, but DAO has this implication of mechanistic, you know, rule based distributions of stuff. Yes, holocracy. And also DAOs imply I think blockchain. Yeah, probably. Well, they certainly imply it. I don't know if every DAO necessarily is on blockchain. Right. I think it conceits something a little more broad. But I think generally in practice, if you say DAO, people expect it's on blockchain. Also like the disco, as attracted as, you know, like sort of like a DAO beyond that particular like infrastructure. Yeah. And with a cooperative, you know, like focus. Yes. I mean, I guess I can start like, I thought it was very interesting. Thank you, Peter. I liked the idea of framing the cooperation on the project, sort of like as an as part of as a narrative, right? That is self-documented to extend the project content implementation for all. And I understand being like a wiki or a repository that self-describes, at least as a bootstrap, you know, mechanism for coordination sounds precisely like I think that's spot on essentially. And, you know, it's extensive and so on. So that was very nice. And I mean, the, I think, so I'm on the fence on the go, they focus on governance and roles. I guess my first question, and this is just like a basic question, but like, I mean, five roles, I guess you have six roles. They seem, I mean, I guess my first question is why six or, you know, maybe it seems like a bit. Maybe too many just because I haven't thought through about like the whole of the governance implications. But like, you know, I guess for like a minimum bootstrapping of coordination, I guess my personal, personal, traditional approach is no roles or maybe like two, right? Or like in the sense of like just let the community define the roles or like have it like more like a more liquid definition of roles. Of course, like, I guess this can complement this other approach because like the same person could have many roles. It's a good observation and more or less a good chunk of the reaction from the Marley team. I'll continue to think about it. The definition of the roles is the, so one thing is that a modality, maybe I'll pick on OGM a little bit. A modality that we have in OGM is we do that liquid roles thing. We do it super, super well. We do it so well that nobody is ever in charge. And so project management never happens. Or project management happens, but it's because somebody is pushy or bossy enough to just make it happen. Or I think this happens with me sometimes. Somebody starts doing project management and they're doing a fair amount of work of project management that does not get recognized and nobody cares about it. And it's, you know, so I think that the part of the definition of the roles is defining what they do. And that's like the classic role thing. Really, the important part of this is what, who's in charge? Is there somebody, you know, is there leadership? Is there governance? And for leadership and governance, all I'm talking about is let's help the team recognize that. Let's make sure we know all the decisions that need to be made and articulate them rather than laying them sit around and not get articulated. So let's articulate decisions and let's have a process for making decisions. So in the benevolent dictator model, kind of a classic open source model, so Linus Torvalds or Guido or Jimmy Wales, the way I think of them is they're farming these questions out of, a good leader will farm questions out of the organization, right? So you guys are stuck. Why are you stuck? You know, oh, we needed to choose the framework. Oh, you know, she wants to use rest and I want to use go. Oh, you know, and a lot of times the organization won't realize why they're stuck, right? They'll actually express that as something else. We keep talking about frameworks and I love my framework and, you know, I'm not sure it doesn't rise to the level of a decision. So a good leader leadership, you know, governance, a lot of it is let's flesh out. Let's let me let's find all the decisions and put them in a queue and then have a, you know, the benevolent dictator mode is I'm going to delegate the decision. You know, Jimmy Wales doesn't need to decide whether or not that we're going to use markdown or media wiki syntax because there's experts who know the pros and cons of that, right? But he does need to make sure that, you know, okay, let me go back to the go and rest thing. Okay, guys, we actually have to do decide this, you know, and I'm going to make sure it gets made and, you know, and we'll convene a committee. We'll pick subject matter experts who is just going to make the call, you know, I'll make the call, but even though I don't know anything about it because nobody else would make the call. So that governance thing is super important. Leadership thing is super important. The other thing that the role definition does and the fine grain role definition six instead of zero or one, it starts to value the contributions differently. And I think that's really important. And I think that's why I've got six all of a sudden right up front. It's because, you know, you want, you want to be clear. Like, and I think the failure mode that I observe is that somebody joins a project and they don't know how they're contributing, right? It's like, and maybe, maybe for a book or for a journal, you know, I think I want to do this editor thing. I don't want to write stories. I don't want to make decisions. I don't want to make sure decisions get made. I don't want to do project management. What am I doing? So, you know, actually having specific things that the project needs to do and then specific ways those contributions are recognized. I think helps people plug into a project instead of it. The way I set it on the Marley call was it feels like I love liquid roles and things like that. The failure mode is you get a bunch of people having effort and it doesn't get anywhere. So it feels to me kind of like you want muscles and muscles contracting to do work, but you actually want to attach the muscles to a framework, a skeleton, so that they're actually pulling against something to make output, productive output instead of just twitching. That's kind of the picture I have in my head. And so the liquid role thing, you can get people who join the thing. They don't know how they can contribute. Nobody recognizes any way they can contribute. You can't, there isn't a way in the project to say, you know, what do you want to do? How can you help? Let's, let's structure that and let's attach it to a skeleton and then, you know, you can actually do work instead of just kind of being around. Thanks for letting me run out. A couple of things that I'll have to put in the conversation. There's sort of a little different from each other. The first one is this idea that Pete, I think that when you were describing this, that the roles are very local to the project, meaning the roles that you saw in the project that Pete shared are very much publishing roles about what Marley is doing, which is writing books. If the project were of a different nature, there would probably have different kinds of roles to find appropriate to that project. Correct? Yes. Cool. So the roles are very flex and depend on who is doing what for that particular organization. The second thing is, just in reflecting back on OGM and some of our neighboring communities, we had these information needs early on like, who the hell is here and what are they good at? And we've spun like crazy for a really long time on just building any kind of information source and Vincent Arena went and built a whole thing that he came out of college with that is called Catalyst and has a couple of other names to it. That was a directory, but it's also a directory of organizations and organizational meetings and a bunch of other stuff. But just, there was a general need to say who's here and what are we good at or what can we do? Then there was a need of what are we doing and how are we doing it and why, which is like task management, Kanban, something else, I don't know. And we never adopted whether it's Trello or Osana or some other thing to sort of go into that. We've always had like, there's this question about how to do these things and there's a question about platform choice. Then part of what happens is we want to get things done, but any of these systems present overhead for the group to use them. And if you're going to be accounting for time, you've got to do something to account for the time and then have a place to put it and some way to add it up and some way to source it. And there's a bunch of communities and I put the link in the chat earlier for the thought in my brain distributed accounting of value flows, which is a really important question. And there's co-makery, coordinate, disco.coop, which Flansian mentioned, Sensorica. And then there's one called Open Collective that we're pretty close to and there's another one called social.coop that we're also pretty close to because these are being built by friends. I wanted to bring that up, social copas, an example of no rules, everybody presiding governance and how that works. I will be happy to mention that later. And every one of these includes personal profiles and a bunch of other things that are layers of software that they've written that preclude the use of other platforms because once you sort of dived into one and made an architectural choice to be in that particular community, you're sort of down that highway and kind of stuck with it, I think. So there's a really important question here about should we try to reinvent this from simple working parts, which is sort of what Pete did over the weekend. It's like, hey, look, I can sort of put these things on markdown pages and we can kind of share things and we might have to upgrade the air table to do the project management department. We don't know, etc., but that's kind of hard. And I'm really interested in anybody's favorable experiences with any platforms like this. And I'm aware that one of the things that created Holocracy was the software that they created called GlassFrog. And people did not like GlassFrog, and GlassFrog was apparently, I have no direct experience of it, but it's apparently a shitty way to sort of do project management for a large group of people, even though a lot of the ideas of Holocracy are pretty cool and pretty interesting. So I think that, unfortunately, our desire to feed the commons, to recognize value, to have lightweight ways of working together that does all this stuff sort of around us, is hobbled by fricking software issues, like left, right, and center. And anybody who's got like strong opinions on this or really good experiences with this or a perspective on how this is going to play out, please jump in. With that, I'll stop my rant. SJ, what kind of script? And Lumio is like the Inspiral Network and Lumio, yes. But Lumio is mostly kind of a polling interface. It seems to me Lumio took a very, very thin slice of what this could be. Yes, yes. And I could go on for a bit on the complaints about Lumio. Complaints in an endearing way. It works, it's there. Yes, it has this, and we keep reflecting as a community on whether what we actually want is something Fediverse based. So essentially like Mastro in itself. And in that note, I have to ask how you heard of Bonfire. Have I heard of Bonfire? I think so. Yeah, so Bonfire is one of the most promising like new players or something in this space. Yeah. It's essentially Fediverse activity-based instance with, which is explicitly also a platform for coordination and cooperation. And it's started by Mariel de Borneuil, who is the founder of Social Call. But has more. Yes, but I mean, I totally agree with the, I guess this is also what I came back to like Peter's speech, if I may, like why I like the idea of starting with a narrative of the roles over the specific platform. And I do believe that text is a universal platform in this sense. So, you know, like texting a repo, this is also why I mean the hour I sort of like the same as I repository, which describes itself, right? And that seems like a very, you know, for the final commons and so on, or a project seems like I would like as close as possible to universal base as we can get. But yes, I mean, I think this will go back to some extent to the idea of like, to which extent we need to do the due diligence of like charting the space, mapping it, like we have been doing with the tools for thought space, right? And to some extent, I guess this could be, and I will shut up after mentioning the roles again. You know, I like the idea of like the roles explicitly recognizing different tasks, different classes of tasks to make sure they are prioritized from the goal. I guess, going back to the social co-example to close out, I guess I would personally maybe think that we can start, and we have fewer concerns from adopting parties like you mentioned, Peter, if we start with just the contributor role and we say these are the ways you can contribute. Because having that separate has a nice thing that it forces you to define a task list and it says like there are a lot for wraps, right? And you can still define the perceived value of every complete task and so on without maybe like introducing this thing which may remind some people of like a class hierarchy or something. Other thoughts? Are we barking up the wrong tree? Is this urgent but broken? All thoughts welcome. And has anybody had a good experience on any of these systems or others that were missing on the list? What is the primary goal of the systems? The system is in some sense helping a group of people get things done and recognizing contributions in case at some point there's cash in the system and you need to distribute it or in case you want to have credits on the works as they come out and have a ready list of who did what where or something like that. If you want to add reasons, please do. A big part of it is I see lots of projects that don't have enough. I don't know if this metaphor makes sense for folks but it makes sense to me. They don't have enough skeleton. They don't have enough framework to pull against to like let people contribute in different ways and so people don't contribute. So the worst case is like I see this happening less so that's good but for decades the way it works is it has worked. It's getting better. If I teleport myself back five or ten years it's like I want to contribute time to this project. There's no way to do any kind of participatory distribution of maybe profit or maybe governance or God forbid equity. Since I want to work on this project you can't pay me. There's no way to pay me because I'm not an employee of you. There isn't a way to pay me. So I'm happy to donate my time but then everybody has to donate their time because I don't want to be the only one donating time and everybody else is getting paid or something like that. This used to be a big conundrum five, ten, fifteen years ago. So you'd come together to do this project for good. Everybody would say yep I can donate 40 hours. The project would run and then it's like okay can we do this longer? It's like well I've got a day job. Well I could do this longer if I was getting five bucks an hour but since we can't figure out how to pay you five bucks an hour the whole thing dries up and goes away. So that's kind of an over dramatization of it but that's the problem that I see a lot of projects have. It's like another failure mode that still happens. It's like oh my god there's money involved. Money destroys everything. Let's not do that. This is a horrible project because it's a for-profit and for-profit has destroyed the world. It's like come on guys. If we're writing a book or making a journal and we're getting a few dollars in it adds up to maybe 50, 100, 200, a thousand dollars a month and we distribute that to people who are contributing. I get that we've connected up to the fiat machine and fiat corrupts absolutely but maybe it doesn't. Maybe if we build enough layers and stuff and that's what Lion'sburg is working on. Lion'sburg when you hear the pitch from Jordan he's like there's billions of dollars non-profit dollars that want to go someplace. There's thousands or tens of thousands of little organizations that want to do good. All of those tens of thousands of organizations cannot hit the bar of being a 501c3 to legally accept money from those. So what do we do? Tell the money people no don't give us any money because we can't figure out how to take it and for the people doing good it's like I'm sorry if you were making a million dollars if you were doing if you needed a million dollars then we could set up the legal structures to do the blah blah blah it's like that doesn't help anybody. So Lion'sburg has developed an interface layer where they confront the effort and the money to do the legal stuff and then they can also hook up to tiny little things as big as this journal where it's three or four people working together. I guess the interesting thing about it is I see this problem too the idea that there are small projects that could use funding I'm wondering like the setup that you have has assembled pieces that I understand are mostly from Lion'sburg but is that are all those pieces required? You said that one of the things you mentioned was like it had to go public go to the non-profit or go to the state but what is the state in this case? Does the state mean Lion'sburg? Let's say we wanted to follow a model but not necessarily have the same structure you do is that possible? Yeah definitely. What I mean by state by the way because I'm sitting in the U.S. what I mean is the U.S. state corporations are regulated corporations and non-profits and things like that are regulated in the U.S. by the states individual states California New Hampshire, Delaware, Wyoming so in the event that you're non-profit you've got a non-profit charter from California in the event that your non-profit California doesn't want to see the thousand dollars of value or ten thousand dollars of value or a million dollars worth of value that somebody's pocket it needs to go to another non-profit or it goes to California California will end up owning it The sheet is the technical term which I always think sounds weird That's very interesting so like does California just own a whole bunch of non-profit organizations that just sit like in perpetuity? That's a failure mode the success mode is it gets assigned to another non-profit I think it's very that's the fall back mechanism I don't know how much it happens so another way that we've been getting around this is like open source projects don't they don't have assets they don't have assets because they've donated everything to the public already public get already all the code is copyright MIT license or whatever they don't end up with this chunk of assets that has to be distributed some way there's still a problem of who owns the copyright so that's a tricky bit and that's why you have things like Linux foundation or Mozilla foundation because then you don't have to worry that a bad guy is owning it and is owning it or whatever I like the fact that you're using it to leverage things and kind of lift things up off the ground and it's particularly useful in cases of diversity where marginalized people who can't afford to become involved never will because they don't have they need some income to do that the one thing I would worry about is on the polar opposite side of runway success someone sooner or later is going to figure out what your payment model is and game it and then you're stuck with problems with like Gresham's law where you have the bad money driving out the good someone will figure out how to gain your system take over control and get the money and vote it away to themselves and the one this has been happening a lot in actual capitalism where robber barons are going in and buying up newspapers selling off all the assets pocketing the money or in the case of like Sears the CEO comes in creates a real estate trust puts all the real estate in it which he owns and controls and then Sears itself as a company goes bankrupt while he's left with real estate assets which is so screwy things like that are happening and in extreme success you may have to worry about those and I don't know what those look like because right now you're just looking to get the thing off the ground but often the future you'll have to worry about those things great observation just in the wishful thinking vein it would be lovely to have a platform that was modular the way Unix is modular and I don't know if that means Fediverse or Indiverse or whatever or Indiweb or whatever but something modular so that you could click and place different things that you wanted to use it would be lovely if you could sort of pick from many items and say oh I've got a new project this project is going to be under the generative commons agreement I'm going to want the benevolent dictatorship role model I'm going to want to enable paying people for their time if they sign up to do that and other people may just join the project because they love it and just want to be there at the periphery and they have a choice coming in and the interface will sort of just fold that in as you wish a couple other layers of what this might be with some IP terminology and other kinds of things kind of taken for granted but available in depth by reference like oh here's what this body of agreement kind of means in terms of the specifics as you went through it and that would be lovely because then anytime you spun something up the effort involved in making those choices and making them explicit and offering them up to people would be really pretty low it would be a tiny lift if your actions during the day made it really simple to say these hours go here these hours go there then the allocation of your participation across multiple projects would be simple to trace etc without then going to a timekeeping platform and trying to bridge it over to some other platform and trying to it's like the moment you're once you pick three tools you're kind of baked for whatever else and you've locked in whatever features and value you might get for a long time and if like Lumio they don't just richly add stuff and make it better over time you're going to get bored of doing like pie chart polls over and over again it's not going to actually function as a civic democracy platform which it could or should have might have wanted to have been I guess it ends up being in my mind another appeal for the commons and the federation of the federation like Lumio is actually not part of it and to some extent that makes it so that even though it's open source impractical it also has a host of features and people are not developing a lot for it so yeah I get this to be said that the minimum the designated coordination platform should be either very basic almost a point of trivial like what Peter started with you know I think like you know like the repository with descriptions or like something that includes federation so I love these ideas and I think Jerry's right to point to this sort of lock in which is not necessary and I think tackling it as though there should be a rationalized complete crisply defined system leads to getting stuck with a particular definition the most successful models and the other thing is people often tie governance and equity people often tie governance in terms of day to day decisions governance in terms of absolute decisions like should we convert you know should we transfer this whole project to the local use of asset sharing or share in some kind of conversion if the whole thing is converted to some other system and those don't need to be the same so you could you could define a social norm that says here's day to day governance here's some very small more traditional group that deals with absolute governance and here's the current rule of thumb for any asset distribution if it happens those things those things will take strong hints from these other distributions so that they're not acting completely arbitrarily in figuring out how to cross those streams but you don't have to bind them together either legally or through a system to do a lot better than what you normally have which is absolutely no coordination or clarity and a version that I have really enjoyed is a system where everyone can self-assign roles and self-report the time that they're spending doing things like whether they actually did that for a given year and you sort of have a large family of badges that are I did this thing for these three years and this thing for these two years and it's not going overboard and trying to specify how many hours were spent doing each thing of course you can do that if it's easy if you make some of these things easy people can do it more granularly and for that to be weighed by the colloquially but seriously in a consensus making process where you're not making a vote anyway so the process of yeah and I don't know whether this is a successful model but another way of doing this is periodically having everybody vote on everybody else's participation and the value they created and then having some kind of algorithm to unify that so there's no time tracking or hours spent in zooms or whatever else you wanted you can do some of that but everybody could sort of say well like the most value for this project was created by these two people and that could factor in alongside