Hi all, My response to Robert below is a bit long, but I hope various folks in the community will take the time to read this, weigh in, let me know if I'm really clear, if there are questions… It would be great to get some others to give us feedback by putting these issues in your own words.
On 06/19/2015 05:45 AM, mray wrote: > > > On 18.06.2015 17:02, Aaron Wolf wrote: >> >> I don't see why we *need* losers. I think we *accept* that there will be >> losers and that's okay. Snowdrift.coop is largely a consensus-building >> engine that coordinates the community and discourages fragmentation. >> Those qualities are good. But I wouldn't say that having losers is >> *necessary* for our success. > > I guess we are almost completely on the same page here. > "need" might be the wrong term here, we rather have to expect and accept > (or better embrace) them. > The "needing" part was actually more related to the fact that we need to > offer many projects to choose from. If just the big well known players > (aka. non-losers) are available we don't trust our own system to prevent > spending money ineffectively. Remember we want people to rather support > many than few projects. The incentive to chip in should be low. > > Also Snowdrift should give the community a *new* voice, not just echo > the status quo. > I agree that low-risk of pledging (it's small, and won't grow unless others join and help!) is an important element for us. I don't think it's the primary focus though. I don't think we *have* to embrace having lots of "losing" projects, although I *do* think we need to accept that it will happen some. Following up on both this and chat on IRC. I think I can make this fully clear, and I had been working to express all this in the current writings already, but it doesn't help to reiterate: We want to be conscious of the vague long-term, but we really need to focus on immediate goals: get launched, fund ourselves and our early projects, iterate, respond to concerns… We must avoid excessive discussion / decision-making that is based only on speculation. We will see how things go and react as we test more with real projects. Those things said, I see it this way: There could be projects that fail to get critical mass regardless of our network effect. In other words, they simply don't have enough community support. We can provide guidance about how to best reach out to supporters etc. but we can't make every project succeed here. Now, the concern about star projects "winning" such that it causes other projects to "lose" *only* happens in zero-sum situations. If the total donations from the community one month are $8,000, and next month a project that had gotten 10% of that now gets 25% of the same $8,000 — that is a zero-sum game with winners and losers. But if a project grows from 10% to 25% at the same time as the total community donations grow by 10x (to $80,000 in this example), then, in that case, the massive success of the one project does not take away resources from others. How can the total size of the pie grow? Well, our primary goal is to reach more total donors. However, we *also* want to encourage patrons to increase their budgets. We want patrons to feel that *because* so many others in the world are helping, it is *worth* it to figure out how to donate more than they otherwise would. Today, I might budget $100 a month at the most, but I would switch that to $500 or more if I saw that doing so was truly making the most amazing changes to the entire world for the better. I can say this with certainty: my view of my own budgets and prioritize *will* change along with changes in the world and in the behavior of others. Many people deny this, but science bears this out as one of the most predictable of human behaviors. So, it is possible, in principle, that everyone continues to increase their budget to cover all their pledges and never ever hit a limit. Realistically, people will eventually hit limits they simply don't feel comfortable lifting. At *that* point, THEN it becomes true that successful star projects could make others lose donations (depending on the precise ways that people handle their budgets at that point — there might be a general *leaving* of the popular project as people feel less inclined to support an already successful project, and that might completely offset the popularity, we don't know; it will probably vary greatly case-by-case). Regardless of the details, when we get to the point where people are hitting their limits and not willing increase their budgets any further, we will be a real success. Such a point will definitely not happen early on. So, **our goal today is to get to that point**! For our presentation to the public now, our answers about these issues need to focus on the idea that we work to grow the pie, not just manage how it is cut up. There will be successful and unsuccessful projects (because that happens in any market), and our network effect encourages democratic collaboration around the most deserving consensus projects. But the system will not *initially* take money from less popular and give it to more popular because that will only happen once we're successful enough already. We can then express that we *do* have ideas for ways to address the issue long-term. We want a balance where the winner/loser effect is somewhat mitigated (such as through patrons setting up multiple separate budgets, for example, if I budget some money for music projects and another budget for software, that means projects in one area or the other won't compete for my funds — and we *might* even let people set a budget that only includes a single project; those things will not be implemented at launch and aren't certain). We also want to figure out ways to help niche projects work well in the system, such as possibly offering them a different minimum base pledge setting. To summarize our key presentation points for NOW: * We acknowledge that network effects have winner-take-all properties * But, at least for a long while initially, there will not be zero-sum competition * We will continually grow the community and encourage patrons' generosity * By the time zero-sum issues become a real concern, we will be a success, and we will have real-world data to use to adapt and adjust the model and address concerns instead of designing based on speculation * Of course, a degree of long-term winner/loser dynamics is *acceptable* because we care more about FLO succeeding overall than about having every project succeed. Reducing fragmentation and coordinating everyone together is good. However, we *do* recognize that there are both pros and cons to winner-take-all types of network-effects, so we intend to be sensitive to the issue, and as a cooperative, the community will have the power to adjust the models and priorities to best balance all the concerns. So, again, we have no *need* for their to be winners and losers. What we want is FLO projects at Snowdrift.coop to win and proprietary projects to lose (or switch!). The winner-take-all effect we want is for it to draw money away from proprietary projects. We want people to increase their Snowdrift.coop budgets by reducing their spending on proprietary things. I do still agree with and like the idea that the market itself and the network effect *allows* us to have lots of projects and let the natural market system and network effect choose winners. I do think that's important and positive. But we need the language to talk about reducing fragmentation, coordinating, consensus etc. and not use the language of zero-sum competition. Cheers -- Aaron Wolf Snowdrift.coop <https://snowdrift.coop> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.snowdrift.coop/mailman/listinfo/discuss
