Open petar opened 4 months ago
Should I add this to the project's Wiki?
I also have some suggested edits that might help with readability for people who are new to open source (such as myself).
Please @gardenenigma!
@GlenWeyl @petar I have added it to the wiki with my edits. Feel free to change edits as needed.
⿻ Plural Management of ⿻ 數位 Plurality
Plurality aims to tell the world how collaborative technology can remake how we work and govern together. Yet it also aims to show these ideas working in practice, building the book according to the principles the book articulates. This is a challenge, obviously, because it is a book about innovation and thus platforms for the things we want to show do not exist: we are building them as we go in the process of writing the book! This document aims to outline for users the who, what, why, when, where and how of participating in the book’s creation.
Goals
We have several interlocking goals in the design of our management system:
A key device to jointly accomplish these goals is our system of plural credits, a non-fungible community currency of credits.
Plural Credits
Plural credits (PCs) formally recognize contributions to the project. These will be initially fungible, quantitative and divisible indicators of extent of contribution, but not transferable across individuals and thus not saleable. Soon after we plan also to introduce qualitative tokens indicating type of contribution (e.g. writing v. design v. technical). While of no (direct) financial value, PCs will entitle holders to several social benefits:
@plurality.net
email addresses, GitHub Pro coupons and any other benefits (including possibly financial compensation from funds raised by book sales, all of which will be donated to the community’s collective governance) voted by the community consistent with our status as fiscally sponsored by the Open Collective Foundation, a US 501c3, thus requiring any such compensation to be reasonable, consistent with our mission and transparent.We will shortly release a “social capitalization table” that will make the allocation of plural credits now and in the short term clear; future evolution of social capitalization will be determined collectively by the community as discussed below.
Gov4Git
While we will initially release the social capitalization table as a simple spreadsheet, the authoritative copy of it will eventually live in a distributed ledger maintained by the community through the open-source Gov4Git (G4G) protocol, a blockchain-like structure where a ledger of credits is mirrored by the git repositories of all members. In contrast to standard blockchains, however, G4G does not include financial incentives and instead relies on community members to mirror the underlying database for the same reason they mirror the code of git projects (to participate in the community) and resolves conflict through governance procedures described below.
Plural Management Protocol
While G4G offers a substrate for an essentially-arbitrary range of governance mechanics, the mechanism we plan to implement is the Plural Management Protocol (PMP), which harnesses and combines a range of the mechanisms described in the book to allow us to achieve the goals described above. While we defer the full details of the protocol to the paper, the basic idea is that contributors use their credit to prioritize work on the project as formalized by the set of GitHub issues and to approve or reject contributions/edits formalized by the set of git pull requests (PRs) to the book. They may earn credits by making contributions (having pull requests approved) and by predicting the outcome of a PR approval vote to help others triage these PRs.
Let’s break these processes down a bit more:
Join us!
We hope you’ll be excited to join us! You need PCs to really get into the heart of the system. The simplest way in is to submit a PR on a currently outstanding issue. Community members can also create an issue that they fund just to get you access; if your submission is approved (if the community collectively thinks you should join) you will become a member with the bounty associated with that issue. If you wish to know the current priority of issues but are not yet a member, you can contact a current member (such as Glen Weyl). Please join our Discord channel to discuss and reach out to Petar Maymounkov if you are a translation fork or other affiliated community that wishes to use this workflow.