This is a really insightful discussion, generating much thoughts.
This scenario seems the most likely, even if all players have good intentions. Imagine you’ve put in 5 years of hard work on SourceCred, put in your blood, sweat and tears, weathered growing pains, taken on financial and emotional risk, have scars to prove it, and have come out victorious. The community is thriving! Your financial investment has paid off, and you have the time and resources to continue innovating. You have big ideas. And those ideas are surely the best ideas, considering your position and experience. Well, yes, and no…
Imagine it’s 5 years from now, you’re a new contributor and have put in 5 months. You’re excited. You’ve finally found a system that aligns with your values and rewards your OSS contributions. You can say you’re changing the world for the better with a straight face . But, you soon start to see some issues…That’s fine. Not system is perfect. These issues aren’t insurmountable, and you have ideas for how to address them. You invest considerable (potentially unpaid) time analyzing the issue and proposing a solution in chats. You get…crickets. Or told you just don’t understand how the system works. Or that there simply aren’t resources for that. Those resources are needed by the ‘cred elite’ to implement their better ideas; in fact, you are one of those resources btw).
The truth is, that the ‘cred elite’ will have the same universal human limitations as any other group, namely:
- Limited bandwidth: As the project grows, no individual person will have the cognitive capacity to have visibility into and understanding of all parts of the system.
- Limited experience: If successful, the SourceCred of 5 years from now will be very different from what it is today, even if if SourceCred manages to scale its values. Cred elite will have not have experienced coming up in this new system. Just as it is impossible for me to truly understand what it’s like to be black, or female, it will be impossible for cred elite to understand the day-to-day reality of newcomers in the trenches. They will have a different set of problems, pain points.
- Limited information: In addition to limits on the ability to process information (limited bandwidth), any power imbalance will keep those with less power from fully expressing themselves. Period. We have all experienced this in our personal and professional life. There is no avoiding it. Telling people, “don’t worry, we’ve built this totally enlightened system and there will be no negative consequences if you speak up”, will not work. Even if the cred elite are walking the walk, nearly all contributors will be coming from coercive hierarchical power structures, and will not take that at face value (and should they?). Compounding this, if SourceCred is indeed successful, its leaders will be subject to a constant barrage of illegitimate criticism. From competitors, to coordinated FUD campaigns, to bad faith concern trolling, sensational media narratives, etc. This will make filtering legitimate criticism from illegitimate difficult, both cognitively (see limited bandwidth) and emotionally.
- Limited empathy: neuroscience has shown that power literally rewires your brain. Psychology experiments show giving people even temporary power makes them less empathetic. Do we believe that because our are intentions are pure (and I believe they are), that we are not susceptible to this?
I think everyone on this thread is aware of these limitations, but just felt like fleshing them out.
The only way, IMO, to keep this from happening is to give the ‘new guard’ (and other groups) enough power to speak their mind. Which is why I’m heartened to see this thread. If you are laboring in the system, you need hard sovereignty. The ability to meaningfully influence the system, and not worry about paying rent if you raise an inconvenient truth, even if it causes the cred elite cognitive dissonance and forces them to direct resources from their better ideas. If we can balance the powers well, this can hopefully be avoided in the first place, as the system will develop as a collaborative effort, with all parties feeling seen and heard (by actually being seen and heard, even if they lose some). Where power balances cannot be avoided (for instance, due to gaps in knowledge/experience (old guard will be better at deciding some things)), the “deal”, and any paths to more power need to be explicit and clear up-front, so that newcomers can make an informed decision before investing with their time and labor.
I will admit, I hesitated to even reply to this. Mainly because I’m currently living paycheck to paycheck and do need to sell some Grain every month (in addition to selling other crypto from work in another DAO) to make this financially feasible–as you can see from the Week 8 Grain Distribution, I’m the only one currently selling grain. Not because I fear speaking out (I’ve felt free to express myself since the beginning and we’re still in Level 1). But because I can’t afford to participate in governance for free. This work takes time, energy, and emotional labor. I decided to write this anyway because a) I may get cred->Grain for this post if people find it valuable, b) enough of my previous contributions were found valuable to, in aggregate, to generate “royalty payments” via the CredSperiment, de-risking any single contribution and c) if we get this right, this is a system I’d like to be in long term. The typical time for money dynamic is less present. Note that I realize the risks here and am OK financially if Grain payments stop for some reason.
It’s important to note also that I am an ‘interest group’ here, with my own inherent biases and limitations myself (I don’t pretend to understand a founder or VC’s day). Just wanted to add more data to the process.
I’m not sure how best to accomplish this, but impressed by the ideas and discussion here. @decentralion’s idea of giving different groups different ‘levers’ of power (e.g. cred and grain minting) feels promising…One property it has that I would like to see generally is simplicity. Too much complexity inexorably tilts power to those with the time and resources to exploit that complexity (i.e. those already in power). It also increases the educational barrier to entry for new participants.