Author: Mike Manfredi, ƒractally team member

Personal Mission: Build Beautiful Things

Note: These are my thoughts and views, not necessarily those of the ƒractally team.

Summary

What to value in meetings hasn’t been (and perhaps can’t be) reduced to a simple, complete articulation. So stay alert and do your level best to value what you think will benefit the community most, consistent with its mission statement. In the case of the Genesis Fractal, it states:

Genesis Fractal seeks to build the technology, raise awareness and grow adoption of ƒractal governance, as outlined in ƒractally's white paper.

Background

With EdenOnEOS and the Genesis ƒractal meetings, we have prototypes of the tools for independent self-governance and voluntary coordination.

There’s been plenty to learn through these iterations about:

• duration and frequency of meetings,
• compensation vs. budget allocation,
• number of participants per meeting,
• how to grant increased power to people without centralizing control,
• the list goes on…

There’s a particular item that needs further attention that I’ll discuss here and propose some mindsets for: How should a ƒractal’s members value community contributions in the weekly meetings?

Let’s discuss some of what could be valued, including some of what has been suggested we value.

What to Value

Each ƒractal will have a mission statement coupled with a set of core values its members generally share. Weekly ranking of contributions must reflect those values, but there are subtleties:

Consider how mission statements might inform weekly ranking:

• Does the ƒractal call for valuing the promotion of a particular artist’s work?
• Does it value open source contributions on a particular blockchain to a particular application’s end?
• Does it value contributions to the cleanliness of the streets of a neighborhood in Seattle?

Consider what a member might take into account in weekly evaluations:

• We could value past contributions, future potential contributions, promised contributions, (celebrity / expert) presence.
• We could value a member’s mindset, set of values (the things they choose to rank high), and behavior (including collaboration, respect, etc.).

How to Value

• We could value completed contributions from the recent past, say the last week since the previous weekly meeting.
• We could value all past contributions until we deem them sufficiently compensated.
• We could require proof/evidence of the contribution.

Our Brains Love Efficiency

There’s a problem with all of this though. As humans, we’re literally wired to look for efficient paths. Our minds are shortcut finders and encoders. Ever notice how you can drive home from work, get home, and realize you don’t remember any of the drive? That’s because your brain has mastered driving the route home and found such efficient mental shortcuts for doing the drive, which have been encoded at such a low, simple level, that it takes none of your conscious attention, allowing you to daydream or rant at other drivers or think about how happy your dog will be when you arrive.

That nature of ours to identify and function on shortcuts is relevant to this inquiry of what to value. It will manifest itself as seeking rules for evaluating value and then sticking to those rules (even if they don’t make sense or are incomplete). We may even find ourselves arguing for them rather than reconsidering them when needed. Let’s examine an example from our recent past.

The Basic Guideline for Evaluation

The basic guideline is people should be valuing people’s past contributions relative to their past recognition and ranking people according to the most under compensated. Said another way, we should be compensating contributions until we feel they have been sufficiently compensated.

A misunderstanding from the very first weekly meeting was repeated between members and became the over-simplified “ranking what people did in the past week”. Let’s call this the “Previous Week Only Rule”. For many weeks following that first meeting, I participated in meetings where members repeated this simpler rule, arguing that a particular contribution wasn’t made and completed within the previous week and as a result, shouldn’t be valued. For reference, Dan clearly articulated how “life time” past contributions should be valued in the very first week’s post-meeting, in reference to a question that stated the "Previous Week Only Rule". The suggested rule for what to value (with no time limitation) is then articulated in writing in the March 23rd pre-meeting at 23:33 minutes into the recording.

What were we doing at ƒractally while those discussions were happening? We were ensuring the rules made sense (Remember, this is all an experiment, and we’re refining it as we go). We were listening to feedback and observing outcomes to ensure the proposed rule took into account the right things and had the intended effect.

Let’s look at some examples of how the misunderstood Previous Week Only Rule is deficient.

Some Contributions are Not Short Lived

What if someone completed something in Week 1 but couldn’t attend the meeting at the end of that week? Do we not value their contribution in the Week 2 meeting, just because they made the contribution in Week 1? That doesn’t make sense.

What if someone contributed something in Week 1 that might have ripple effects on the community for months? As an example, perhaps they attracted the attention and attendance of a celebrity who hosts a massive media platform, which led to that celebrity singing the praises of ƒractally to a multi-million person audience, which in turn led to tons of additional positive press and massive growth in fractal attendance by high-quality people. Do we value that in that one week (before you even know how big an impact it might have), and thereafter don’t value it at all in subsequent weeks? This obviously also doesn’t make sense.

Some Contributions Don’t Come with Simple Proof

What if someone spent weeks getting the attention of a celebrity and is saying that celebrity will bring great people to the fractal? It might be true, but unfortunately, following the Previous Week Only Rule, we can only rank highly the work done, and we can’t see the future to consider how much value that work might bring.

What if a dev does a write up of code they wrote for a tool that sounds useful, but you’re not an engineer. How do you evaluate the tool? How well is it written? How useful will it be?

A final real-world example of this phenomenon would simply be the ƒractally team’s contribution to the weekly meetings. The ƒractally team is committed to sharing as much as possible and being as transparent as possible. That said, we are a private company, doing what we think will realize these tools best in the smallest amount of time, and there are times when sharing every detail as it happens doesn’t work very well. For instance, at times we will want to do a proof of concept to test out an idea we’re not yet even sure is worthwhile; we just want to peek at a potential future quickly and maybe scrap the idea based on the outcome. We don’t want to publish blog posts about why we’re exploring that particular direction or we simply don’t have the means of collecting and handling feedback to the idea (besides we won’t want the feedback if we end up scrapping the idea; the point was to get a quick peek and move on–fast). We, at times, will prefer to do things quietly and share them when “they’re ready” or once we’ve chosen a direction or once we know we can appropriately digest the inevitable feedback.

Forms of Contribution

How might we value ƒractally’s contribution when a particular bit of code isn’t yet public or a proof of concept is in progress but not shared publicly? To answer that question, let’s distinguish 2 forms of contribution:

1. presence/legitimacy, like that of the hypothetical celebrity just mentioned: is the ƒractally project better off, more likely to succeed, and more likely to attract more of the right type of attention with the team present that developed and are realizing the ideas? We leave that to you to decide (and we appreciate all who are already valuing us that way).
2. past public contributions: do you think ƒractally as a private company with no income from services and no IPO/ICO, has been sufficiently compensated for:
   1. the book More Equal Animals (available as a free PDF),
   2. EdenOnEOS, the realization of much of the vision of the book, which is now operating independently of ƒractally (see note immediately below for important details), and
   3. the ƒractally white paper, which represents a complete overhaul of the expression of the book’s ideas, in an attempt to better represent the concepts in the book and our common mission.

Important Note: The initial EdenOnEOS effort was funded by the EOS Network Foundation (100,000 EOS). So any consideration of valuing this contribution further should be appropriately discounted by that ENF funding, and any additional valuing of ƒractally’s contribution to EdenOnEOS would be over and above that initial compensation or valuing the work done since that initial work was completed, which would include operation of subsequent elections, bug fixes, the account recovery/replacement feature, portal hosting, and on-going hand-off activities to empower the EdenOnEOS community to be fully independent of the ƒractally company.

Again, we leave this value judgment to the community and appreciate all those who have already been so supportive of what we’ve done.

Evaluation of Valuation

Back to cognitive science really quick to discuss what comes next: humans will tend to jump to updates to the rules to try to correct the previous problems without considering the big picture. So maybe we modify the rule based on the first scenario above (a contributor being absent for a week) by making the new rule something like “Value contributions made until they’re sufficiently compensated.” That’s a pretty good start. It handles past contributions until they’re sufficiently compensated, as long as–and this is important–we continue to ask whether a particular contribution has been sufficiently compensated. For instance, in the second scenario (celebrity presence) if a celebrity moves on to discuss other topics before returning 6 months later to talk positively about the ƒractal, leading to renewed growth of the ƒractal, we would be smart to go back to valuing that contribution. Perhaps we highly value the legitimacy their presence brings the project early to encourage their promotion of the fractal.

Network Effect

Another important detail in that last example: say Bob invites Mr. Celebrity to participate. Mr. Celebrity is too busy to participate in weekly meetings, but he tracks the project, reads the book and white paper, and talks about the project on his media outlet weekly for 3 months because he’s so excited about the potential of the project. Do we value Bob for all of the media attention Mr. Celebrity has brought to the project? I’m not sure there’s a “right” answer to this question (which is a great reminder of my overall message that relying on a single, simple rule without considering each circumstance likely won’t fulfill our intentions). Personally, I would value Bob for much of the celebrity’s contributions (given the celebrity isn’t present to collect them directly), but you can see it’s not an obvious link, and I think plenty of people would only value Bob for a week or a few, and then attribute the rest of the value to the celebrity (who isn’t there to collect on that value). Perhaps Bob could collect some of that value by announcing that he’s transferring the earned Respect to the celebrity? Point is, there aren’t black and white, universally-agreeable answers to these questions, and we need to stay alert and be vigilant in asking and answering them.

There are numerous additional “exceptions” that require further modification of the valuing rule: what about a celebrity who simply attends and tweets once that the experience was fun? One tweet doesn’t sound very valuable, even by a celebrity. Yet that celebrity’s (publicly announced) presence in the ƒractal that week might be plenty enough to attract many more great people to the ƒractal. What is it specifically that they’re “contributing”? Legitimacy. Endorsement. Celebrities have plenty of people trying to get their attention to promote various things. How a celebrity allocates their time is sometimes a strong signal of something valuable. So do we add to the rule that celebrity involvement should be valued? Well we better not answer that question and instead keep inquiring because…

What if the celebrity that attended brought plenty of attention to the project but that attention attracted a pile of the wrong people, and the ƒractal’s “shared values” got “diluted” by people who didn’t share those values? Not such a great contribution, despite the celebrity.

We come to a meta-lesson about what to value that demonstrates the messiness and need for continual reconsideration of what you are valuing and why: you might value something that turns out to be a terrible idea/contribution.

Solving Wicked Problems

To start to wrap up my thoughts, I’m reminded of the book Range by David Epstein, in which Epstein discusses a type of problem humans are uniquely suited to solve: a “wicked problem”. Go read the book for an accurate description of the phenomenon, but what I took out of it was the following: wicked problems are those that have no clear finish line and are governed by unclear, fuzzy rules. These types of problems are not easy for humans to solve, but we are uniquely capable of solving them.

Dan deals with wicked problems. His entire career has been governed by a self-articulated mission: “to create free market, voluntary solutions for securing life, liberty, property, and justice.” How do you know when such a mission has been fulfilled? How do you go about enacting such a mission? None of it is clear. Dan has devoted his time to making progress in that mission, despite the challenge such a mission offers, given its nature as a “wicked problem”.

Let’s look at the valuing rule through the lens of a “wicked problem”. About the ƒractally weekly meetings, Dan quite eloquently said:

The tools that we use are indeed not very precise, and as a result, we have to take lots and lots of measurements. Each of us is providing ‘a measurement’ of the relative value of everyone’s contributions. Each and every one of us is going to be wrong at some point, in our judgment. There is only so much resolution that we have in our ability to determine if contribution A is more valuable than contribution B. No single measurement can yield consensus, and hence why we employ multiple measurements.

That resolution problem Dan refers to includes incomplete information as well as our inability to see the future to see what impact a particular contribution might have. What kind of rule can we create about what to value when the data at hand is so “low resolution”? Well, we’re left to do our best. What does that mean? We’ve got to be paying attention. We’ve got to be considering our instincts about what to value and trying to articulate them. Sometimes instincts really should be listened to, and we ignore them; sometimes instincts are wrong, and we need to discover that they’re wrong and why. If something didn’t sit right with you when the rule was articulated as,“value the previous week’s contribution”, I hope you inquired with yourself and/or with others to get to the heart of what was missing in that rule. When we mention humility, this is partly where it’s required: know that we may continue to be imperfect in our formation of parts of ƒractally. Assume something might be less than optimal about any part, and we can continue to inquire into how things could be better.

Your Journey Awaits

What does it look like to participate with the ƒractally team in that mission? Well, keep examining, keep inquiring, keep participating. Bring humility, bring gratitude, bring collaboration. None of us know what’s needed, and we need to work out the details– together.

So what’s my best articulation of the valuing rule for weekly meetings? Well, first I request you don’t adopt my rule as if I’ve solved this problem and have the right answer; I may have updated this rubric by the time this blog post hits the web. I also request you take a moment now, and each time you’re in weekly meetings, to consider what you think should be valued and deal critically with others’ proposals about the same, so we can find the best way to value contributions. May the best, critically-examined ideas win. Cracking that code will have us promote those things that will produce the best outcomes for the ƒractal, ƒractally, and people, which–after all–is what we’re all here for. For what it’s worth, my rule is something like “Rank contributions made, based on their impact on the future, i.e., what I want the ƒractal to achieve, given its mission statement.” But please don’t take that as the truth; I’ll invite feedback that has me form a better, more complete rule.

Lastly, if you’re not participating in Genesis ƒractal Weekly Meetings, I encourage you to. First off, the process is unlike anything you’ve likely participated in. Second, it’s generally quite fun: the community is full of awesome, collaborative people, and you’re likely to meet people you want to talk to more after the meeting.

The meetings we’re running are a grand experiment and may very well have a massive impact on humanity. It is why every member of the ƒractally team gets up and puts their time and passion into what we’re building. We always love having another committed, humble, critically-thinking member join us in our mission.