I propose the following project for RadicalxChange Colorado's first working group.
- Begin an RxC reading group using polis for online discussions of readings.
- Identify a metric for the most nuanced or useful contributions in these polis discussions.
- Grow the reading group sustainably by rewarding the best contributors financially, possibly with PoolTogether.
We will need help with marketing, design, coding, and much more to do this well. Reach out in the RxC discord or email me ([email protected]) for ideas of how to help.
Feel free to open pull requests / issues for questions, comments, concerns or ideas!
The goal of this project is to increase the awareness and understanding of the ideas surrounding RadicalxChange. These ideas are not always intuitive, and they take some work to become comfortable. These ideas are about social impact, and we need as many perspectives to understand them and weigh in on their potential benefits as possible. The reading group will itself be useful for simply coordinating our collective attention capital towards important sources of ideas. Some examples we'd begin with are the blog posts from the RadicalxChange site, the Radical Markets book, and more.
The polis project has found success at facillitating online discussions which are nuanced and useful enough to inform democratic governance processess, such as the vTaiwan project. We can try tweaking these open tools and processes to fit the context of a reading group, encouraging a useful online discussion. Ideally we can find a credibly neutral way to measure the "most helpful" members of the discussion.
By financially rewarding the best contributors, we can incentivize those who are already familiar with these topics to explain them well and answer questions. We also attract more people to these ideas who might not have looked at them otherwise. The funding source could be as simple as getting donors or sponsors or a gitcoin grant. One more interesting way to fund this would be to clone PoolTogether's system whereby we'd require participants of the reading group to temporarily deposit some funds in order to participate, then use the compound interest of the pool as the reward for the best contributors. Everyone would get their own money back, but some people would win the pool rewards. There are threats to any online financial offering, and we'll be vulnerable to sybil attacks and other collusion points. XKCD is relevant. Limiting membership to attendees of at least one chapter meeting for RxC can potentially provide some sybil resistance.