kjn start 2013-03-02T11:54

# Start

I want to create something.

The project itself
might be interesting, or it might not - I'll get to the project in a bit - 
but the more important thing, the reason that I'm
writing this, is that I want to try to create a new way for people to
work together for profit. I'm tired of corporate feudalism. So, I want
to try building something, as a side project, that people will be
willing to pay money for. At the same time I want to try a radical experiment 
in the distribution of the wealth that we can
collaboratively create. I apologize in advance if this runs a bit long. 

## The Experiment

The experiment is, briefly, this: I have an idea for a form of
partnership where a partner's equity is directly based
upon the amount of time they've contributed to the effort, with a
simple algorithm for allocating revenue among the partners. The thing
that's somewhat different about the experiment is that, unlike every
model I've seen for business, this one is designed explicitly to work
only in an environment of honesty and mutual trust. It's kind
of intended to be the economic equivalent of functional programming,
where instead of throwing out mutability and side effects to gain
confidence about the correctness of our code, we throw out the
assumption that we have to agressively defend ourselves against
malicious actors with structures of control. 

Personally, beyond the
love and well-being of my family, all I really want from life is to be
able to do interesting, creative work with a group of good people in
an environment of honesty and openness. The purpose of this experiment 
is to see if I can make this happen.

## The Project

Back to the project for a moment. This is an almost trivial bit,
but I want to get the high-level "what" out of the way so that I can
focus on the "how" without feeling like I'm dragging you along to get
to the punchline. I want to create an online environment for
collaboration on creative work: think Github, for everything that's not
software - instead, for all the other creators, of music, video,
3D-printing and CNC enthusiasts, hardware hackers, whatever - a place
to version, derive, digitize, share, and document the artifacts and
process of their creative work. People have of course been doing this
with the web forever, and the OSS movement has got it down to an art,
but none of the other makers really seem to have available to them a
service that provides the same kind of amazing tooling we have for
doing this sort of thing with software. I think that such a thing
needs to exist. The details, we can talk about later.

So, there's something that I think I would like to build, something
that I think has enough value that people might pay for it, and I'd
eventually like to be able to maybe even support my family as a
consequence of building it. The "natural" thing, according to the
dominant culture, might be to start a company. But, as I said, I'm
sick of corporate feudalism and its assertion that the hours
one person's work is self-evidently worth more than the hours of
another. TO HELL WITH THAT. Each of us has just a few hundred thousand
hours of life to live, in the best of circumstances, and to me the
notion that the hours of my life that I might spend working are more
(or less) valuable than someone else's is bloody offensive. We have been 
conditioned to think this, and expect it, but I think this idea is not merely
wrong, but damned evil. So, I want to propose a gloriously naive other
way. 

kjn stop 12:51
kjn start 13:12

## The Value of Time

Time is fleeting. In every job I've ever had, even though I love the
work that I do, I feel like every minute that I'm working I'm stealing
time that I could be spending with family, friends, or just alone with
my thoughts. Likewise, when I *am* doing those things, I feel like I'm
giving up precious moments when I could be moving the project I'm
working on forward. I haven't ever been able to strike a balance and
usually end up working too much, then trying frantically to recover
lost time with my children and my wife and parents and friends (even
lost sleep) in compressed, hyperactive, unnatural segments of vacation
or weekends. I guess I've been well-conditioned to believe that this
is inevitable, but logic and history tells me that it's not the only
way. What I want to create is an opportunity to do profitable creative
work, to create wealth, without compulsion to spend a certain number
of hours in a certain place doing a certain task. The way I see it,
such compulsion is only necessary in the absence of honesty and the
absence of trust. This so-called industrious state lacks true industry.

Here's how I think that a group of people collaborating for profit
should work. I hesitate to call this a "company" because of all of the
implications of that term, but I'm going to use it for now because I
can't be bothered to think of a better one and I don't want to use
"cooperative" or other, loaded alternate. But I'll urge you to, in the
following, think of the term in a more classical fashion; perhaps,
when you see it, think of the term as in "the company you keep."  

I believe that, when honestly applied, that the time a person spends
working toward a goal has value - the value is exactly that of the
hours of life that have passed, hastening toward that person's
inevitable end. The question to be answered is, what is the objective
worth of the work produced during that time? This, of course, can only
really be judged at present by the uncompromising metric of what
someone else is willing to pay for it, over the lifetime of whatever
"it" is. Ultimately this is just a proxy for the number of minutes, or
hours, or days of *their* lives they're willing to devote to procuring
whatever it is you've produced. For this moment in history, money is as
good a proxy as any for this. So, basically, I believe that people
should be paid for their work, according to the price that other
people are willing to pay for it. Simple enough. What's a little
different about what I'd like to try is the method for how this
payment is allocated. 

## Compensation

If we, in company, can produce something that someone pays for, we
should immediately divide up that payment according to the cumulative
amount of time from our lives that we've each devoted to the
production of the thing being paid for, adjusted for the eventual
depreciation of our labor. So, each person working on the project
counts up the hours they've put into it, and that fraction of the
total value accrued by all of the participants is paid out to him or
her, with one adjustment that is a prospective answer to the question
"for how long is a given bit of labor valuable?"  

I don't know exactly, but a scheme I'd like to try is: after 6 months,
the value of an hour of labor in the pool begins to depreciate by
something like two minutes per month. This means that the value of
that labor goes to zero after three years; if we tried 6 months and
one minute per month, it'd be five and a half years. It's probably an
imperfect scheme, and it very deliberately ignores the question of
good work versus bad, because to be honest I don't want to collaborate
with someone who produces bad work; I'd much prefer to simply, sadly
let them know that they're no longer welcome on the project (but that
they will continue to be paid, as everyone else, for the value that
they contributed while I/we trusted them.) The advantages, though, are
prodigious. Each participant can expect to be fairly and impartially
compensated for the time they've spent on the project, insofar as
there's any compensation to be had. There is no lower bound, and a
very natural upper bound, on the amount that anyone can work. If
someone ceases contributing or becomes unwelcome, their share of the
overall total will fall off at first slowly, then with increasing
rapidity as the total amount of effort invested by others grows. And,
if the project is to be successful, then the benefits will accrue to
everyone who has participated in making it a success.  

kjn stop 14:07 
kjn start 14:22

## Bootstrapping

There are some things that this company, if I am to be a part of it,
must never do, though hopefully the design of the system I'm proposing
for the distribution of income would make them practically impossible
anyway. First, we will never take outside investment or borrow money,
except as individuals. No one will ever be compelled to take on risk
for the benefit of another. In past eras, this would have been a major
impediment to getting started, but of course with the kind of project
I'm talking about here there's no such problem. The need for up-front
investment is low enough that the participants can simply pay for it
out of our own pockets. The problem with investment in particular is
that it structurally promises potentially indefinite future benefit
for a one-time infusion of value, and this is antithetical to the
underlying principles of the compensation scheme. There is, of course,
nothing that should prevent a person from selling his or her accrued
hours to a third party, if they wanted to bet against the success of
the company in that way. Second, there should be no central "entity"
that accumulates money for any period longer than, say, a week or so,
but any revenue should *immediately* be paid out to the
participants. Avoiding the central accumulation of a pool of money
seems like the most straightforward way to avoid any sort of
corruption. 

So, it seems to me that the only viable way to proceed is in the way
that every open-source project (and a great number of successful private
enterprises) does; to bootstrap ourselves. It seems to me to be the
most honest way to proceed; in bootstrapping, unlike in
investment-funded startups, it is impossible to hide from the truth
about whether what you're doing is actually valuable or not. 

## Costs

This brings up another issue, that of how to handle ongoing costs, and
here again, the answer is startlingly simple in an environment based
on trust. If we genuinely trust one another, there is no inhibition to
regularly pooling our resources to pay for the services we consume. I
trust that if I spend some money to benefit everyone, that repayment
of that will be treated as a moral (and no other) sort of obligation
by those in company with me. I want for nothing stronger than the word
of a good person as a guarantee. Likewise, if, at some point down the
road we wished to invite a new member to our company and that person
could not financially manage to survive on the value produced by their
initial contributions of time (due to it being a small fraction of the
amassed total value) I would have no compunction about issuing that
person a series of loans, to be repaid as they are able (providing
that doing so would not jeopardize my own well-being.) For, of course,
inviting a new member requires that he or she be entrusted with far
more than just a bit of money. Costs would have to be distributed in
the same manner as compensation; this is of course equivalent to simply
subtracting costs prior to the distribution of dividends if it's more
convenient to do it that way, though I'd almost prefer distribution
first and contribution to costs second. After all, this shouldn't be a
problem in an environment of honor and trust.

kjn stop 15:05
kjn start 15:46

## Decision Making

I'm going to hedge a little bit here, because I don't actually have
any great answers as to what the best mechanism is, but I think that
the open-source community's model of consensus and forking is probably
the best guide available. A creative works license can be devised that
incorporates the compensation scheme described above, and all of the
creative work that is produced by the company licensed under it. If
someone or some group wishes to fork the project, it does little
harm. A harder question is how to collectively come to the conclusion
that someone is untrustworthy or unwelcome and thus remove them from
the company; here I suspect that some democratic process requiring a
supermajority in favor of removal is the best we can do. It's an
imperfect world. I can only hope that the foundation of only expanding the
membership of the company by explicit invitation to individuals known
worthy of profound trust will obviate the need for much of a formal process.

## Customers

Perhaps at this point the following should go without saying, but if
we do not extend the environment of honesty and trust to the people
who might buy our services as well as the people around us, then this
experiment will have failed utterly. No admission of fault will ever
be withheld from our customers, if we are so lucky as to have
them. The truth will always be known anyway; it's best if we're the
ones telling it.

## Finish

I can see that there's
a lot left unspecified by this proposal, and ultimately I hope that 
what remains can be argued over, refined, adopted or
rejected by a group of people whom I respect for their honesty. The
best that I can hope for is that this experiment is interesting, and
perhaps makes a little headway exploring the ways that people can
work together. I invite you to
experiment with me.

This is what I want to create.

kjn finish 16:37

I have willfully chosen to spend 3 hours and 59 minutes of my lifetime writing this document.

Edits:
kjn start 2013-03-03T08:55
kjn stop 09:28
sabrnu start 2013-03-03T11:25
sabrnu stop 12:36