Evaluation Advisory Team

Ralf, Vinay, Inga, Edward, Franz, Jeb, and Lucas,

As True Fans or dedicated supporters, I ask you all to be on the Evaluation Advisory Team for Dedicated Project Visits.

Lawrence Kincheloe, collaborator, is currently finalizing a proposal for a month-long project visit to build a replicable, low-cost torch table for digital fabrication assist. This is to be applied immediately to CEB production for external markets. The proposal will be accompanied by a contract that clarifies duties or expectations for both sides.

We have learned recently that it's cricital to communicate goals and expectations clearly. This is our first test of the new standards in practice, and marks an exciting opportunity for scaling our development efforts.

Your role is simply to provide advice, by email or voice, after the collaborator nears completion of their proposed project. When that time is approaching, I may notify you of the performance review. I am hoping that your position is merely nominal, but in the contingency that there are difficult decisions to be made, I will call on you for help. This is to address the need for transparency and accountability. It is also to make sure that I, as director of FeF R&D efforts, am not only accountable to the proposal contract, but also make sound decisions on retaining collaborators. As you know, I do not compromise the goals of the project, and this should be clear to everybody. I am looking for win-win situations.

Performance review should be based on Minimum Acceptable Performance for retaining collaborators. The first month is based almost exclusively on performance - and if we find that the collaborator is both performing and we are getting along well, then we may extend the stay, for another month, based on another proposal. The second proposal is to be written within a week of the project's end, while the collaborator remains at FeF. Response is given to the collaborator within a day of submission.

We see this as an appropriate mechanism for building our community. Sure, we still consider everybody! Except they have to tell us what they are going to do up front, we have to agree on it, we have to make it formal, and then we can evaluate.

As such, we are positioning ourselves as a research and development community (see Factor e Farm Position Statement. The goal of this community is not only to develop the GVCS, but also to eat its own dogfood. That means that the developers themselves play a part in creating an experimantal post-scarcity community of 30, based on a 1 acre per person baseline. This implies that parcipants must produce, and do it effectively, to demonstrate that abundant provision of needs is feasible with minimal time requirement. This is our experiment. Our primary goal, after demonstrating feasibility, is to demonstrate replicability, and our experimental design is based on this criterion. Collaborators are required to keep this position in mind.

With this said, I ask you to respond whether you are willing to be on the advisory team. I will listen to your advice, possibly go through iterations of discussion, and then I will make the final decision towards supporting the FeF position statement.

Please let me know if you think the advisory team itself is sufficient, or if we should add or remove any members. I introduce Jeb to you here, a new True Fan who visited us at FeF yesterday after Inga's community birthday party. I include Jeb becaus he's the only person who said that FeF actaully looks BETTER in real life than in the vidoes. This is of course not to mention his ideological and technical alignment.

Also, let me know if it's ok to blog this letter. I think it is important to do so, as Lawrence also follows with a blog post regarding his proposal.

Moving forward, Marcin