Roles vs Full Autonomy Working Structure

Reasons for using roles or giving full autonomy to contributors in terms of their working structure

Roles

Contributors specify their professional background, existing contributions and also pick a roles (e.g. development, coordination, marketing) where they will spend the majority of their time whilst contributing to the ecosystem.

• Provides clarity on where contributors are interested in focussing their time. Contributors can mention a main role but could provide support to other areas in the ecosystem.

• Provides clarity to the community on how the ecosystem functions and what the key areas are in the ecosystem which require the help from contributors.

Full autonomy

Contributors have the freedom to work in any area of the ecosystem and only provide information on their professional background and existing contributions.

• Provides complete freedom to the contributor which may be an appealing factor for becoming a contributor more than having a specific area of focus.

• Risk increases for not having enough people for specific skills to move the ecosystem forward. For instance if many contributors got hired where no one had development experience there would be little development of the product from a technical standpoint. This outcome would slow progress down for ecosystem improvements.

Summary

• Any organisation would suffer from having too many of one type of skill set to manage their ecosystem. Due to this contributors should have an area of focus in the ecosystem.

• To provide flexibility contributors specifying a role can still help in other areas. The contributors main task is to provide maximum impact to the ecosystem which might mean helping in other areas. The contributor should aim to spend the majority of their time in the role they specify. Contributors can change their role in future funding rounds.

• The ecosystem will benefit from having a balanced amount of skills within a cohort of contributors. To achieve this a minimum threshold can be applied to each role so that the minimum required positions are filled when a cohort of candidates go through the process.

• A surplus amount can be included in the total budget to allow for flexibility in the type of contributors included in the cohort. As a surplus flexibility example, an entire contributors budget could be $500,000. The minimum role thresholds are 4 development, 2 coordination, 1 analysis and 1 product each with a capped salary of $50,000 for 6 months. The surplus in this scenario would be $100,000 meaning at a minimum two contributors could be introduced that have any role. Contributors beyond the threshold would be selected based off who received the highest votes after the thresholds were met for each role.