Chore Wheel Onboarding Community And Use Cases Kronovet
Speaker 1: Awesome. Welcome to Medigap seminar. Today, we have Daniel Cronovid who's gonna give us a overview of his work and with a chore wheel and invite us into some new fun, applications of the chore wheel in the Medigap space. So, Daniel, take it away.
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Transcript
Awesome. Welcome to Medigap seminar. Today, we have Daniel Cronovid who's gonna give us a overview of his work and with a chore wheel and invite us into some new fun, applications of the chore wheel in the Medigap space. So, Daniel, take it away.
Thank you, Val. So happy to be here. Yeah. So I'm pretty amped for this week's seminar because it's gonna be, you know, less of a presentation and more of a invitation to interact. I'm gonna be presenting a project I've been working on for many years, Truro Wheel, and I've spoken some of you were here at the seminar twice about it. Torill was initially designed for coliving houses as a way to help a group of people kind of in a decentralized way organize essentially their care work and their regenerative labor that it takes to run a house. You know, the idea was that, you know, a lot of these boring tasks no one wants to do, no one does, and so the communities end up sort of falling apart. And if there was a way to organize it so that the burden didn't fall on one person but could be shared easily among many people, it'd be easier to keep a house going. So that's. For those of you who don't know, I actually started a coliving house, like, a physical coliving house in Los Angeles called Sage House, which was the first group to use. And they've been using it for three years, and it's going pretty well. We published a research paper about it, which I, you know, I've also sort of discussed in this group, which I will post a link in the chat if you want a little bit more kind of theory about it. But, you know, at this point, I think this project has gotten fairly mature. And the next kind of big step was to try it out in the Medigo Slack. And the idea was, you know, this was designed for a physical community, but, you know, ultimately, it's a digital tool. So maybe we can use it to help supercharge a digital community as well. And so this is gonna be less of a presentation and more of an actual tour of the usage of tutorial in the actual Medigov Slack. So I'm gonna share my screen, but if all of you want to just in the actual Medigov Slack, go to the Jungle Gym channel, you can basically follow along at right right right along at home. So I'm gonna I'm gonna share my screen. I'm gonna talk about and show you Trobio in the Medica Slack. I'll invite you to participate if you want, and, ideally, we can just kick off, you know, an ongoing community sustaining process, all of us together. So that's basically that. I'm gonna any questions before I I kind of do an overview of the actual tool live, or should I just kick it off? Okay. Well, let's let's
Just one more time. What's the name of the channel on Slack?
Jungle Jim.
Jungle Jim.
I'm not seeing the channel.
We're gonna see it all right now. I'm gonna share my screen. I'm gonna share specifically Slack. There it is. Okay. So everyone sees me sharing my Slack. Alright. So here we are, the Meta Gov Slack that we all know and love, you know, all the normal channels. And look look at that. What's that right over here? Wow. The Jungle Gym channel. Everyone, you know, check it out. You can you can follow right along live. So this is, this is the channel Jungle Gym. It's just a Slack channel, you know, innocuous like any other, but this channel has a little bit of a secret. There's something more going on here. What are these what's this? Chores? You know? What what else do we have? Hearts? I don't know what's what's going on. Why don't we click on the Chores app? Oh, go to app. What's this? You know, here we have on the side, we see the the kinda apps, the apps list. You know, right next to our favorite koi, we have chores and hearts. We go to chores, and look at that. It's a whole new game like experience that we can IRL participate in. You know, the game world and the real world have become one and the same. So I'll do a quick overview. Welcome to chores. You know, we kinda go down. We see, oh, I've earned a 125 of a 103 points this month. What does that mean? I'll tell you. There are eight people around today. What does that mean? I'll tell you. Events will be posted in jungle gym. That one you should probably able to figure out. And then we have got a couple buttons. Let's go to claim a chore. Claim a chore. Oh, Oh, look at that. A bunch of chores. They're worth points. Amplify medical socials at 87 points. That's a lot. Other ones worth less. I think for those of you who are just joining, if you've never you have to opt in to the Chorus app. So you might just have seen click to activate yourself. And if that's what you see, then, you know, if you wanna participate in this Chorus system to help make the Medigap Slack super amazing, activate yourself. If you're not ready to do so and you just kinda wanna observe, then, you know, don't, or you're not gonna be able to have as much fun as we're having.
So Also, just to realize, make I wanna make sure everyone is in MetaGov Slack in general. I most of you, I know are, but just in case you're not in the Medigov Slack, I just posted a link in the Zoom chat that you can join us there. Yeah. Just wanted to make sure.
So, yes, the so the basic idea behind the Chores app is that there are a lot of things that we wanna do to sustain a community. We call this, you know, care work. We might call this regenerative labor. It's the kind of tasks that, you know, aren't just one and done, but we have to do over and over again. You know, I think the iconic example is doing the dishes. Right? You know, there's there's this great, quote by Dorothy Day who was a famous labor activist, and she said, everybody wants a revolution. Nobody wants to do the dishes. And so figuring out a way to divide this necessary work that no one really wants to do in a way that it gets done without feeling like a burden, was the real sort of task that, this project was meant to solve. And so the way that we go about it was, you know, we didn't want there to be a schedule. You know, people talk a lot about bragging boards, which are totally opt in. We felt like that was a little bit unreliable. You know, in our case, we didn't wanna hire staff to do these tasks both for cost reasons and for values reasons. We wanted the community itself to to to do this work. And we didn't really want one person to be in charge because that ends up being a kind of thankless task and, ultimately, a lot of strain on that person. And I think that a big goal was, you know, avoid making any one person the kind of psychological scapegoat, but really divide the work amongst everyone using a tool that is seen as neutral and legitimate, in the eyes of the participants. That was the idea. And the way that we went about doing that was by saying, okay. If you participate in this chore system, then you owe 100 points of chores every month. The reason why it's a 102 is the reason I'll explain momentarily. But everyone owes a 100 points per month of chores, and you earn chores or you earn points by doing chores. As we saw, you go to claim a chore, and you say, oh, like, these are the different chores that are available. You might be asking, why is Amplify Medigap socials worth so many points and everything else is worth so few points? Such a great question. The answer is the the kind of key dynamic that drives the choices and that lets it work in a sort of unmanaged way is that the value of a chore goes up the longer it's been since someone did it. So if you look at the Jungle Gym channel, you'll see that all the point values that everyone has seem to be not quite random, but they're different. Right? You know, Natalia shared something positive for 50 points. Ian responded to a post in peer review, actually my post for 47 points. And you might be saying, what what are these? I responded to a post in peer review for a 103 points. You might be saying, what's this about? Well, the idea is that there is no, you know, schedule for doing a chore. People do chores whenever they want to to get to a 100 points per month. But the longer it's been since the chore was done, the more points it's gonna be worth. And oh oh, look at that. So it seems like a chore is missing. What's what what hey. Look at that. Elrion, do you wanna chime in about what had just happened?
Do you wanna tell us a little about what you just did? Well so I still need to submit my proof, but I am adding the Medigov Twitter and stuff, if y'all have an x. X. I I actually forgot, but I just claimed the chore. Thought I'd be the first to do so and grab that 87 points.
Tell us more about, your thought process and, like, what what's going through your head right now.
Number go up. Yeah. I mean, it's it's a bit of the FOMO side of things, but more on, like, a positive spin. Right? Like, seems like it was something that doesn't take too much out of my day, but it'll make it so I can help the community and, you know, get my chores over with.
Exactly right. And, you know, I I really appreciate that. And I think that, you know, the the idea behind the chores full system is that, you know, nothing is that hard. We just need everyone to kind of do a little bit of it, and we want everyone to do it on a somewhat regular basis. But we also want them to use their own judgment about when and how to do what. And so the idea is that, you know, every chore and I think over time, chores will end up it'll become sort of known what the chore is meant to be worth. In their early stages when people are figuring it out, the values might seem like they really fluctuate. I think over time, we'll say, you know what? 87 points is actually kind of a lot for that chore. Maybe next time when it's 40 points, I'll do it. You know, maybe people start to say, you know what? I could do it when it was 30 points. You know? Because what what ends up happening is that without a, you know, a person kind of making these decisions explicitly, the the whole community kinds of organ ends up kind of organically realizing what fairness looks like because everyone wants to get a 100 points. Everyone wants to get a 100 points relatively easily. No one wants to be doing extra work.
And so it
might be that someone else in a couple days says, you know what? I need to get 30 points. I could meta amplify Medigap socials, in ninety seconds. I'm gonna claim it at 30 points instead of letting it get up to 87, which I would say maybe is overvalued. And so over time, the whole community kind of aggregates around fairness, and we end up kind of just doing the work that needs to be done at a in a way that feels very dialed in.
Do choke set to zero, and do they all increase at the same rate?
So the first answer to your first question is yes, Steve. The answer to your second question is no. Right? So now we see we go back to the chores, and now respond to a post to peer review is worth 19 points. Share something positive is worth nine points. You know? Yeah. So on and so forth. And I would say right now, these chores are actually not very valuable because people have already done stuff recently. So right now, you could say we're in a bit of a cool down phase where we're gonna now wait maybe one or two or three days. People who haven't earned all their points yet are gonna come back. You know, I, having a 125 points, I'm done for the month. I don't I don't need to this is no longer my problem. I'm I'm basically out. I can go live my life. You know, other people who maybe haven't contributed anything yet, they have to get some more points this month. So they're gonna have to come back and say, okay. You know, let me see what is available. Claim a chore, and they're gonna, you know, find some way to contribute, and they're gonna have to get their 100 points somehow. And and, really, you know, what you want is the more often that you are checking, the more likely you'll be able to do chores that are, you know, in your opinion, highly valued. If you sort of wait till the last minute, you might find that there really aren't any there's nothing left for you to do, and then you might have to do more work to get a 100 points or maybe even not get a 100 points at all, in which case there'll be a sort of consequence. I'm gonna just kind of show one more thing, and then, Steve, I'll get to your question. So you may be asking, what does long term accountability look like? What happens if you don't get a 100 points in a month? What happens if you get extra? What is this you know, what what are we doing here? The answer is the, the hearts app, which is a second complimentary piece of the puzzle. Hearts is basically a you can think of it as a reputation system. You can think of it as a life bar. You know, I drew very, explicitly on the kind of gaming vernacular, the idea of hearts. You can see, you know, this is the whole the whole Slack community's, like, hearts board. We can see, you know, how is everyone doing in their not in their once a month contributions, but in their longer term contributions. So over multiple months, as people do chores or don't do chores, they will gain or lose hearts. If they run out of hearts, then they are basically kicked out of the program for not participating. If they gain extra hearts, then we might give them additional benefits and bonuses. I think it's really up to us to decide how to operationalize this idea. But the idea of, like, a longer term sort of accounting is what hearts is meant to do. And I know that now everything is still kind of getting shaken out. And so, you know, maybe people weren't doing anything or or last month, no one really participated. So it's fine. I think you can actually see if you go up to Slack, what happened at the end of last month. Let's go yeah. So every month, the app will basically post a kind of summary of the month before, and we can see, you know, some people didn't participate at all because they just this is all very new. Some people did a lot. But every month, we'll sort of see who's doing more chores, who's doing less chores, and the longer term accountability ends up being sort of captured in the heart system. So we have, you know, kind of permissionless participation, very dynamic sort of market based allocating of who's doing what. We have longer term accounting through the hard system. And kind of end to end, we have a system where everyone participates on their terms. No one is really in charge. No one has to do the management work, but we still get flexibility. We still get accountability. We still get fairness over a longer period of time. So that's kind of the overall concept. I'm gonna go over a few more features of the chores app and the hearts app, and then I'll open it up for questions. Are there any questions at this point in time, or should I continue with the expedition yet?
So I'm
assuming the oh, sorry. The No. Go for it. On the thing or just to confirm that, like, the chore has been done. Right? Like, to, like, the like, a verification?
You're You're saying the thumbs up, thumbs down? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
The the three pieces. I did I did the three.
And and and there and now, I've just given you a thumbs up. So yeah. So the you know, part of the you know, our slogan our slogan during development was, you know, no managers, no meetings. And the kind of, like, no manager kind of distributed decision making ethos was really core. And so, you know, if people are gonna be claiming chores, there has to be some way to embed that claim in some kind of pure judgment. And so, you know, anyone can kind of say I did something. And to prevent someone from outright lying, there had to be some way for the rest of the community to basically endorse or challenge that claim. And so it's this is what it looks like. Yeah. I mean, I think it's very rare for anyone to give a thumbs down. I think, you know, at at Sage House, the Culliving House, we had one person who, like, would lie about their chores, and so they were the only person who ever really got thumbs down. Yeah. I mean, we actually had to ask that person to leave. And I would say something I'll say is that, you know, people kinda a lot of people, like, raise their eyebrows with this whole system. But when you're operating in a highly regulated rental market like Los Angeles, where it's very difficult to make anyone leave, it turns out that this worked really well.
Mhmm.
You know? And I think the scenario where you know, I talked to a lot of people in the intentional community world, and a fair amount of them are very skeptical of why any of this is necessary. I think a lot of them are very vibes oriented. And it's, like, one of those things that works until it doesn't. And then when you have someone who refuses to leave and you realize that you're in a rec control district and you actually can't make anyone leave, then they're like, oh, wow. This is this is when structures really would have been helpful. I'm like, well, that's right. So, yeah, I mean, you know, people sometimes people who wanna be very vibes forward will say, you know, what's the point of this? And the answer is the point of it is when you have a real problem and you need some structure, and then you're gonna wish you had it. So that's kinda what I have to say about that. But, yeah, we actually you know, we were able to convince someone to leave, I would say, in a very someone who really didn't wanna go, we were able to convince them to leave, I would say, very pleasantly in not that much time because we have this sort of apparatus, you know, under the hood. Whereas in other cases, someone could refuse to leave them like that.
Sheer preponderance of evidence. It It was just like, and you did this and this, and they couldn't argue with any of it. Right? Okay.
It it was it was a mixture of, like, an audit log. It was a mixture of financial penalties. It was it was also a mixture of just everyone being on the same page versus having to have ambiguity that someone could then use to, like, to exploit. I think all of those things together made it very easy to ask someone to leave when in another case, that could have turned into, like, a huge nightmare scenario. So I think that is something that I was I was I'm not obviously proud that someone was asked to leave. That's not what I want, but I always sort of I was sort of I I noted that the process in my mind went actually relatively smoothly. Okay. So I'm just gonna go over some of the features
question. Okay. Just some if if you do extra chores one month or something, then, like, does that roll over at all to the next or probably not. Right?
Great question. No. You know, chore the chore points were really meant to be very ephemeral, and so they really only exist within a single month. And, you know, we we built it around the idea of these epochs. You know, there's an epoch around which everything occurs. Like, you have one month to do your chores, and the idea was to give people flexibility. You know, like, maybe you wanna wait till the end. Maybe you wanna do all your chores at the beginning. Like, to allow people to have many strategies for, you know, what they wanted to do within the epoch of, you know, every month, that's kind of the unit that we care about. And then in the next epoch, we reset back to zero. And, yeah, I mean, I've heard people say I I've gotten feedback about, can you have points roll over? If people don't do all their points, maybe that those get added to their next month's total. You know, like, I I've had many suggestions about how to do continuity from month to month. I think the position I've always taken is that's what hearts are for. You know, hearts capture the sort of longer term continuity, and so I don't wanna to overcomplicate the chore system just yet. I would say they know you know, if we make it to, like, dozens of houses using it and we start to get a lot more data about use cases, I think that would be worth I think at that point, it would be worth exploring, adding maybe more layers of complexity. But I've I've been pretty resistant to adding those things in just yet until I'm very convinced until I really understand what the what the feature is. I think I would want a lot of clarity about what exactly we would be doing before we made a change like that because it would add a lot of complexity. And I would say I think one thing I've been happy about was that these systems have been pretty robust in practice. I think there have been little scenarios where they they didn't work perfectly, but they've never really broken down. And I think that's partially because they were kept pretty simple and pretty intuitive from the start. So, yeah, I think that I think that at this point, I don't I would I wanna keep the complexity pretty low until there's a compelling reason to add more complexity has been my approach as, like, a, you know, project lead. Okay. Okay. So I just wanna quickly go over the rest of the features, and then we'll do a q and a. So we've already seen claiming a chore. Claiming a chore is the main kind of interaction that everyone does. You could really live in a house and never interact with a single other feature. So there's, like, the the one required loop, so to speak, is claiming a chore. So, you know, you you come to the app. You just you see how many points you need. You claim a chore. You see what's available. You do the chore. And at minimum, that's all that anyone needs to do. The other features allow for, obviously, more nuance. So the first one is you can take a break. So if you are going you know? And this was designed for a physical house. Say you're going out of town for two weeks. If you're not living in the house, you're not contributing to the mess, and so you shouldn't be responsible for cleaning up the mess. And that way also, if you're going out of town, you're not coming back and you have to scramble to get a 100 points of chores. So you can basically say I'm going out of town, and then you'll owe fewer chores for the month for the time you're gone. So if you're gone for two weeks out of a four week month, you only owe 50 points that month. And so it's a way to to scale your obligation to your actual, you know, I would say, towards your your impact. So that's taking a break. If you have extra points or if you just have points at all, you can gift your points. For example, I'll say, you know, giving Val 10 points, Running a great seminar. Resubmit. Boom. You know, Val's got 10 points. I have 10 fewer points, and that's kind of that. And so, you know, we can you know, by by having a point system, we actually allow for, like, a whole kind of secondary economy to emerge where people have extra points can basically say, I'm gonna I'm gonna give out 10 points for some tasks. So we actually what this actually allows pretty organically is for people with more points to basically define their own tasks saying, look. Anyone needs points, if someone wants to, you know, clean out the if someone wants to reorganize the the free pile, I'll give them 20 points for it. Or, like, hey, everyone. Like, someone says, hey. Like, I just did a task, and I wanna give me some points. So there's earning the points originally through the, like, automatic, you know, point increasing system that's built in. But once people have earned some point, there's a whole secondary layer of, like, repoint giving that can emerge organically based on whatever the people want. So that's something that I think is neat. Also, people don't wanna do that. They don't have to. It's also if people wanna split a chore, they can split a chore using that. So, like, gifting points actually allows for a lot more complexity to emerge, right on top without any real additional, like, code complexity. So So I think that was cool. I wanna answer your question. I'm just gonna finish my exposition, and then we'll get to your question. So adding a special chore, this is something that actually I added only recently. So initially, everything was just you make a chore, and then they all kind of repeat. And the idea is that every chore is a repeating task. But something that I heard a lot was that, you know, sometimes we wanna do a one off task, like reorganizing the closet or reorganizing the library or some big task that is really not a recurring recurring task, but it's like a one off. And so you can say, look. I wanna add a chore. You say, I I want it to be worth so and so points, and this actually kind of is a different paradigm from the ongoing auction of the right recurring chores where the the value keeps going up until someone claims it. With a special chore, you define in advance how many points it's worth, and then the number doesn't really change. Someone has to do it. And this is also why I owe a 102 points because if you create a special chore, and I'll show you in the Jungle Gym channel what it looks like, those extra points get added to everyone's requirements. And the kind of reason why that's the case so right here. We created the special chore via MediGov navigator, and that added, you know, two, three points to everyone's requirement because it was more points. And and the kind of the the the core the core kind of what's the term I'm looking for? Invariant to the whole core point economy is that the amount of points that are created and the amount of points that are owed are the same. Right? So points entering the system and points leaving the system are the same, and so we always end up in kind of a steady state of points being created and points being consumed. So the the overall, you know, points economy doesn't really inflate. You know, you don't wanna be in a situation where everything is worth 500 points and people do one chore for five minutes, and then they're done for the month, but then things aren't being done. We actually there was a bug, maybe six or nine months into the house being open where I actually was overproducing points because I was not calculating breaks correctly. There was a bug in my SQL code. And so we were producing points much more quickly than people owed. And so people would get all their points, like, the second week of the month, and and then we were like, well, we all have a 100 points. It's like the fifteenth. No one's doing any more chores because we all have a 100 points, but things still need to get done and things are still worth points and actually caused, like, a little bit of a crisis. You know? So, obviously, this is not as complicated as the real macroeconomy, but, you know, there is a small points economy that does have to stay balanced. It's very it's very real. And I think it was it was, I think, actually quite interesting to see the way that, you know, points inflation meaningfully stress people out because we don't know what to do. We all have a 100 points, but, like, things need to be done, and we just don't know what to do anymore. So people give me a lot of crap about whether this whole thing is necessary, but I will say, like, when the points economy was inflated, people did not appreciate it. So that was interesting. Two more features. So I'm gonna skip to edit chores list. So this is more if you wanna change a chore that goes into the recurring chore process. You know, if you wanna add a new chore for ongoing use, you do this. If you wanna change an existing chore, you know, let's say I wanna edit let's say we wanna I want to respond to
a post to peer review.
Let's see. And me then. Alright. So let's say we actually wanna be able to review something in any channel, not just in peer review because people post interesting things all over the Discord. Now we're in jungle gym, and I say, like, I would like to edit the chore. So edits have a higher upload threshold because it's a bigger change, and so more people have to approve the change for it to go into effect. You know, a a big design sort of tool throughout the whole chore wheel stack was the idea of adaptive upvotes. So there's no idea of a quorum.
The idea that we need
a certain amount of people to participate doesn't exist. Instead of a quorum, we have the idea of an upvote threshold where it's not we need a certain number of votes in total. We need a certain number of upvotes for a vote to pass, and that's something that's sort of provided by the system. So the idea is that it's not yes versus no. You know, the idea is that people really rarely downvote things ever. So framing things more as are we crossing a threshold of upvotes versus the status quo actually ended up being a much more useful framing overall. So it's every vote has a certain upvote threshold, and you have to clear it. If you don't clear it, then the vote automatically fails. And so no one ever really downvotes things. It's always just getting enough upvotes to clear the threshold. So, you know, we'll see if this vote we'll we'll see if this proposal passes.
I don't really know if it will. And the
last thing, let's see if this gets to your point. So another feature that I was quite proud of was the idea of setting core priorities. The idea is that not every task needs to be done the same. Some of them are much more important than others. You know, the classic case is dishes need to be done much more often than other chores. So we could say, I wanna we so we allow people to prioritize or deprioritize different tasks. So let's say, you know, I wanna prioritize I wanna prioritize sharing something positive because I think that more positivity is gonna be a good thing. I want more people to be sharing positive things. I want this chore to be done more often by the people in the Medigov community. And let's say I wanna prioritize it by a small amount because I think it's doing fine, but I want a little bit more positivity in the Slack. And we say, okay. So, you know, I wanna prioritize, share something positive by a little bit. So then I have to say, what do I want to deprioritize? You know, ultimately, the amount of points is fixed, and so we can basically allocate almost like a river where we wanna put more resources. And these are always framed as relative choices. So So let's say I want to prioritize share something positive, and I wanna deprioritize update song in the day and amplify Medigap socials because I think that those are done often enough. I go to next, and now we say, okay. So after this update, share something positive will have a priority of 344. And this is basically, you know, percentages times 10, so out of a thousand, because just cleaner than out of a 100. But Or we're gonna share the priority of, share something positive so that, you know, really 34%, you know, of all the points now are gonna go to, this chore. And the nice thing is that this is a change that I can make unilaterally so everyone can basically update their own priorities as they see fit, and the Chore system as a whole will reflect that. So this is a way to really aggregate individual people's preferences without needing to have a synchronous meeting process. So that was the big idea was how do we do collective decision making without, a synchronous decision process? And this was basically how we approached it. So I'm gonna basically increase the priority of this task. Now if you go to jungle gym, you see that I prioritize. I anonymized it because I didn't want people to feel like their preferences were had to be public. But now share something positive is going to gain, I would say, about twice as many points per day as it did before. And this is not something that's gonna go into effect immediately. If you go to claim a chore, it's not going to immediately be worth more points. But over time, you know, every hour, every couple of hours as chores accumulate points, you'll see that share something positive will accumulate points more quickly. And then if down the road, we say, you know what? We actually wanna prioritize we wanna prioritize respond to a post in peer review because that one's really important. I wanna prioritize this a lot. I wanna prioritize it more so than share something positive. Right? Because we're always saying, you know, what is the trade off going to be? Right? If I want more peer review responses, what is it that I'm willing to trade off against? In this case, I wanna trade off again, share something positive, And now it's gonna be a, you know, another increase, an increase of also a 150 a 147 points per thousand. And that's gonna be another change. Submit that change. And now we have responded post in peer review is now even more important. And if we go back to chores, we'll see that the priorities of all the chores now have have really changed a lot where right now, responding to a post in peer review is almost half of all the points. Share something positive is about a quarter. And sung in the day and amplified socials are at about, you know, 15% of all the points. And other people, based on their own preferences, what they wanna see in the Slack, can can make their own changes. And over time, as more people kind of make their relative preference changes, we're gonna converge onto a pretty stable set of priorities that will remain more and more consistent the more people put in their inputs. Right? When there's only one person making inputs, the changes are gonna be wider. As more people contribute their priorities, then the allocation will stabilize. Because they'll be you know, when we think of the graph, there'll be more edges on the graph, and so the graph will become more stable. That's maybe more of an advanced topic for another day. That's the idea. Yeah. So I think that was basically it. Adrian, do you wanna ask your question?
Yes. Okay. One thing that I was really curious about and my initial intuition on the special chores was that it was kinda more of a bounty system, such that, like, akin to the gifting your chores, you can, like, put a chore up and, like, spend your points to request somebody else to do something. I I feel like currently the special chore as it is is good, but potentially a little overcomplicating things. I was a little confused as to, like so it, like, down regulates the points needed and, like, the there's, like, a a decent amount of, like, economic fluctuation that occurs through that. But I I I think a more direct way or just an additional feature that I would really enjoy would be a way to, like, spend my points on a request, if that almost makes sense. Like, because through the through the gifting system, I believe it was, like, alluded to that that would be a use case of the gifting system, but I I would like an autonomous, like, to be able to have it. So it's like my pen points get immediately spent. Right?
Yeah. That is a That is a good point. That's a really good point. I think that that's a good point. I could go into, like, kind of why this was done the way that it was. I mean, I think that the the reason why yeah. So the reason why this was done this way was because, you know, I guess, like, the the idea of creating a, you know, basically, creating almost like a donation bin of, like, I wanna propose a chore and people can donate their points into the chore, and then that bounty will increase. We're just like it was just a basically, another whole logical branch that didn't already exist. Whereas, you know, once I had infrastructure for doing proposals and I had infrastructure for having chores, you know, adding a special chore as a proposal to create a chore, just it basically was something that it could be done more directly given the structure I already had versus creating, like, a lot of new concepts. That was it. And and, also, I think I think that the idea was that when you create a special chore in this way, the burden is, like, pretty equally shared among all the residents. So we're basically voting to increase all of our requirement by a small amount to to share that burden equally versus, you know, maybe having it be, like, a donation thing. Yeah. So those those are some thoughts. I one thing that I sort of left is, like, an open question was to what extent participants would develop their own systems. Like, your point of, you know, what if we had a what if we had a kind of a you know, there's nothing stopping anyone from saying, like, I wanna do a chore. Can someone commit to if can people commit to gifting points? And someone says in the Slack, like, hey. You know, what would people gift me for this chore? And then people can say, I would give you 10 points. I would give you 20 points. And then someone basically just says, I did the chore, and then people give that person points. Like, there's no reason why just in the Slack, people can't develop that practice on their own, but it just hasn't happened yet. And so I think an interesting question for me is, you know, what can I realistically expect people to do on their own versus what, like, what requires software structure for people to be able to do? You know? Is I think an interesting, like, longer term and higher level kind of research question that I think tools like this can help us answer? Because I would say I think I think when I started, I assumed that people would be more, like I don't say
I I assume that there'd be
a little bit more, like, people figuring out ways to leverage the affordances. In practice, that doesn't really happen that much. Yeah. So those are some thoughts I have on that question. Okay. I wanna quickly go over the HEART system, and then I think we'll go into q and a. Yeah. So the HEART system is meant to be a longer term accountability structure. The kind of idea is that, you know, five HEART is the baseline, and people gain and lose hearts, in a variety of ways. And over time, we always return to the baseline, which is a way to really operationalize the idea of forgiveness. It is that over time, people return to kind of a social baseline. So if you lose a heart, every month, you regain a quarter heart just automatically. And so if there's some kind of if you don't do your chores one month or there's some conflict, you know, you maybe suffer a penalty. But then as long as you kind of return to acceptable behavior, over time, that penalty is lost. I mean, it is forgotten, and you return to five hearts. By the same token, if you do extra chores, you gain special karma. Over time, that returns to the baseline. So the idea is that we're basically kind of operationalizing memory and forgiveness directly into the system in a way that, you know, obviously, like, you know, I've only done a little bit of research on this from the Sage residence, but it does seem like people have feel as though this actually quite meaningfully allows them to, like, let go of conflict and not have to remember things themselves because there's a certain trust that the system will keep track of things for them. And that's something I was quite proud of. Two things is you can give people karma. Right? So I can be like, oh, yeah. I'll give you, say oh, yeah. And I'll say for asking such questions. And now we see, you know, there's some good karma. You know, people actually, this ends this feature ends up being used quite a bit. At Sage House, people do this pretty often. And so this is, like, another way to acknowledge behavior. You know, if the chore system is meant to acknowledge, like, big tasks that people, like, wouldn't otherwise do, you know, the karma system is a way to maybe acknowledge, like, smaller tasks that don't need all this definition. And so, you know, the idea of multiple mechanisms that all kind of complement and, like, all kind of fill their niche means that the system as a whole ends up being, like, pretty comprehensive as we have multiple systems that all kind of complement each other in, like, various sort of subtle ways. So that's that. And the last system is settling a dispute. This is, like, the big conflict resolution. You know, we have to do a vote now, like, type of thing where, you know, you can actually give someone a challenge saying, hey. You know, Steve, I thought that you were extremely hostile in this chat, and I think you should lose a heart. And, you know, I'm gonna do my thing, and then it's gonna go to a public vote. And but the thing about the challenge does product was symmetric. So if I were to challenge someone and lose, then I would lose the heart. It is you really wanna prevent people from, like, grieving. You know, I thought a lot about the security of these systems. And, you know, every system, I would say, is fairly secure and that there's really no way to grieve anyone that doesn't actually just harm you, the griefer. And so, you know, this is really this is actually designed for a pretty adversarial setting. I think in practice, it's only been deployed in very friendly settings. But the actual fundamental design is, like, pretty robust in my opinion. I'm not saying it's perfect and you know? But I think it's, like, pretty decent. So, anyway, that's the whole system. Let's go into q and a. Yeah. Elrian, what you got?
I think I think Steve had a few comments that Oh, yeah. Just quite yet, and then I can go as well.
You see all my stuff in the chat that you just wanna read it?
Let me pull
up. I
haven't denied the chat. Open. Let me pull up right now because I was just I was running the Slack. Okay. Let's see what we got.
Maybe.
Yeah. Add more trust to the wheel. Okay. Yes. Exactly right. So the priority system is definitely based on BudgetBox. That's exactly where it is under the hook. Yeah. This there was basically a way to take that technique and just put it into practice in a in a new setting. And I know in my mind, kind of show off the technique and how it works. Is there tracking over all gifted points? No. As I said before, points only really exist in the, like, epoch of the month. And so once the month ends, the whole system turns over, and we just go back to zero. The idea of points somehow being counted over a long period of time is, not something that has really occurred yet. And, yeah, and I think to your point about Goodhart, I totally agree. I think the idea of having multiple different systems, that all interact prevents having, like, a single number, which ends up getting which ends up collapsing. We end up with a system that's actually fairly dynamic, fairly socially embedded, and fairly nuanced. So there's no you know, I I think I think that I think we've done a pretty good job of having the kind of symbolic system state, like, map pretty, I would say, accurately to, like, the the house's social state without too much, like, negative like, people don't feel oppressed by the system. I think they feel as though it actually is quite empowering to them because all of the symbols end up feeling pretty accurate and legitimate in their minds. Not always. I think there's rough edges. But compared to other things that are out there, I think this does a pretty good job of, like, really legitimately embedding a social sphere into, like, a symbolic state. More questions, or I can just kind of respond to comments.
John has a question.
Yes, John. Yeah. Daniel, thanks
a lot. Appreciate the presentation. Two questions. One, when you when you were redistributing values on shores, was there a had you thought about putting that to a vote? Or and if so, was there a was there a reason you you sort of let that sort of water level find itself over time? That's my first question. Second one is on a dispute resolution, when people are voting on that, is that anonymous or not in terms of, you know, how how they would come back and and and voice their opinion over a dispute? Yeah.
John, it's great great questions. I'll take them in opposite order. So as far as disputes, all the votes are anonymous. So if you go to the, you know, Jungle Gem channel, you'll see that every every vote is just an emoji, but you don't see who the votes who the voters are. And, you know, a a a big thing that we've talked about during the early design was what information should be public and what should be private. You know, I think, you know, if some if if if something is too private, you can get people who have abusive behaviors. But if things are too public, then people might not be honest. And so what is the balance between public and private in a system like this? And I think where we ended up was, you know, a challenge should be public. No one should have to respond to an anonymous challenge. You know, any kind of claim or assertion should be public, but, like, a vote or an opinion, should generally be private. And that was where we ended up. So if I'm gonna challenge you, John, then it would be public. You'd know that I challenged you. But everyone's votes would be private. That was the way we did it. As far as, like, what kind of deliberation there is, so the the system itself encourages, like, a just a kind of a text blurb of what the, issue was so that everyone in the Slack can at least read that. You know, I would say, in practice, I would expect I would want a more involved process. And if you go to this link, there's actually, like, a whole page about conflict resolution. I really encourage people to to use, like, a a more involved process. You know, I was really inspired by Frederick Lawley's book, Reinventing Organizations. The idea was, you know, if there's a dispute, you know, first talk to the person one on one. And then, you know, if that doesn't work, then find a a third party to help you mediate. The idea was, you know, you only really get to a public vote like this once the other steps in the process have not worked out. So the idea was not you just, like, wake up and you're in a bad mood and you said you challenge someone. I mean, the reason why the punishment was symmetric was to actually discourage people from briefing the system. And so, ideally, by the time you've gotten to this point, the issue is actually fairly well understood by the participants. That was the idea. To answer your second question, so the reason why the prioritization system is the way that it is was because, number one, I really wanted to minimize the reliance on in person synchronous meetings. I thought that, you know, after, like, having 10 people in a meeting, talking about whether this should be worth five points or eight points, just seemed like the worst. It just seemed like a nightmare. You know, I've done a lot of I've been a lot of co op meetings, and there's so much bike shedding and, like, minutia. It just seemed like that is that would just be an experience that no one would be happy with. And so I thought, how can we how can we do something very different? So the idea of a, you know, kind of asynchronous collaborative process. And I think in in my mind I don't think we've achieved this in practice. But in my mind, the idea would be you would not even be really going to set priorities. It wouldn't really be something that you'd have to make an effort do. It would be something that would emerge naturally. You know? Say, for example, you're like, I'm, you know, going about my life, and I'm like, I realize, you know, I'm I'm out I'm in the house. I realize, you know what? I've been noticing that the upstairs deck is pretty dirty. Right? So there's a real world trigger. I feel as though the deck is dirty. I feel like the deck is consistently dirty. Right? So by the time you even enter into this flow, you already have a task and a direction that you wanna fix. Right? So you're not coming in here in the abstract trying to assign values in the abstract. You are responding to a real world stressor that you've experienced. I think the deck is dirty. And second, I think the deck is dirty, so I want to prioritize cleaning the deck. And so by the time we even arrive at this flow, let's say let's say I want I think that I want, you know, whatever it was. Like, let's say that, you know, shows something positive. I already, by the time I enter this flow, know what these things are. So the only question that I need to answer now is I want the deck to be cleaner. What am I willing to have be less clean? Right? What am I willing to trade off? And so my my hope is that by structuring the decision in this way, we actually people are basically halfway to the finish line by the time they even start the process, And we avoid these, like, very circuitous abstract discussions about value in a very disembodied way. That was the goal. I think that I don't think we've quite reached that in practice, but I think we're, like, on that road. So those that was the reason why I did it that way. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. That that that does. And I think that's brilliant, actually. Thanks.
I appreciate that, John. Elriano, would you like me to Elriano, what you got?
Forgot to unmute myself. Couple things. I'm I'm a little confused on how the karma, like, reintegrates into the heart system. I I believe you mentioned it, but I must have, like, glossed over it in my attention, and I apologize if so. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah.
Yeah. And your second question?
Second was just more just a a comment. Having everything in one channel, I think I mean, I just sent the little little bounty message. But I I think having that be in the same channel with the log of everything else, like, I I see that there's two messages of karma. Like, any action gets pumped, so that's gonna get lost in the feed, like, really quickly. So I was curious if there's functionality to have this be over multiple channels or if this is just contained at the jumbo gym or what the logistics of that are.
Great question. So actually, you can have multiple channels. So I'm gonna very briefly show you I'm actually not gonna show you Sage house because I think that would be a privacy violation. But every every app you can basically configure to its own channel. So I actually I did this at first because I wanted to keep it simple, but we could very easily have a Chorus channel and a Hearts channel. And it really kind of it really depends on on what people want. So, you know, the channel is something you can configure. We thought because, you know, we just want there to be one place for people to pay attention to. We're gonna put everything in one channel, but we could have separate channels if we want to. That's first question. Second question. So the way that Karma works you know, going back to what I said before about wanting the thing to be quite robust. So under the hood, basically, what it does is at the end of the month, the karma all gets added up, but not just added up in a simple way. Basically, the amount of karma the the amount that your karma is worth as a giver is divided by how many karma you've given out. So if I've given out 10 pieces of karma, then every one of my karma is worth point one. And then, basically, we add up how much karma someone has received, and then we take the top three. The idea is that if two people are just kind of spamming each other karma, then it's gonna end up being worth one for each person, if that makes sense. And so the idea was to basically avoid make it make it just make it harder for people to to cheat the system by doing it that way. And so if I give a lot of people karma, my karma is worth relatively little. If I only give one person karma, that karma is worth a lot. Initially, I actually had a I used the budget box algorithm also for karma. It was more of a page rank system, but that ended up not working because I didn't want giving Karma to actually take away the Karma that you had. And if you use the page rank budget box algorithm, then you end up losing your own Karma as a giver. And that ended up not being the right model. So I ended up going for something a bit simpler, which is just, like, adding up people's, like, average karma. That's how that's how it works. Yeah. And I think I think that in practice, it ends up the people who get the karma are the people who receive the most karma with a little bit of that regularizing to prevent, people from cheating.
So but then, I I it was mentioned that the top three of the karma selected and then what is there an incentive to that or something with the heart system? Or I I I still am confused as to how to integrate with the heart system.
You get a you get a bonus heart if you are the karma if you get the karma. Yeah. So you get, like, a whole extra heart. So the way it works is if you do if you do all if you do a 100% of your chores, you get an extra half heart. If you get karma, you get an extra bonus heart. And if you don't do chores, you lose a quarter heart for every five points that you're short. And if you lose a dispute, you, like, lose how many hearts do you lose. So that that's that's kind of the current tuning. I'm actually exploring making it possible for communities to basically override those parameters and kinda configure their own, like, rates. I haven't I haven't done it yet because I had to, like I'm an opinionated this is an opinionated product, a user configurable product. I think that I'm gonna move away from that slowly, but it's just like a feature I haven't gone to yet. Any more questions? I know we're almost at time.
Hi, Daniel. Yeah. I've got a question about scaling. Obviously, the point system and the hearts and everything will work for as many people as you want, But the feed doesn't really scale. Right? Because, you know, already in the time that we've been going through this in this hour, all we can see is what we've done on the call. So how do you think about scaling in the context of this?
Yeah, Richard. It's such a great question. I would say that so I say, you know, I think Sage House has 10 people. You know, we have 10 people active here.
I would say that I I would wait I would I would
I would say wait and see. You know, I think in this call, this is maybe not indicative of normal use because we're all, like, here. We're experimenting. We're trying to set out. We're demoing. So I don't think this level of activity is indicative of of organic use. I think that it's, like, a little bit artificial. I would say that I would say that I would probably at 50 people, I would say between forty and fifty, I would expect it to become a little bit unwieldy. But until then, I would I don't expect too much of an issue. I think that I think that most things do not really require most things don't really require engagements. I think that if people if people need upvotes, you know, I think they can basically ask others to, like, upvote them. I think that kind of scanning the list and, like, giving thumbs ups is not such a involved process. So I I I think that it's a great question, but
I would say I would just I I would
not expect problems to emerge in organic use until, like, the 40 or 50 person mark. I think that if we end up in communities of a 100 people plus, I think figuring out a yeah. I think I think at that point, we might wanna think about what to do about that, but we haven't gotten to that point yet.
Yeah. Yeah. When I was guessing your your house, there's probably fewer than the 15 that we got on this channel.
Exactly.
I I just wonder what like, how would you how would you think about scaling it in larger communities? Because, obviously, the the, like, the points mechanism works well, but it it seems to me that it's really, like, sort of, like, the the ongoing feed, which is the problem. And you see the same in group chats. Right? Like, once you got too many people on a group chat, it becomes difficult. So, I mean, do do you have anything sort of in the back of your head?
Yeah. It's a great question. I have thought about allowing people to define, like, almost, like, suites floors. You know, imagine that, like, this is the First Floor, Second Floor. So within the app, you know, I think initially, the idea was that the Slack is one unified community. But I could imagine you could have, like, you know, we're gonna have we're gonna define, you know you know, squad a, which is these 10 people, squad b, which is this 10 people. And so we're gonna actually just kind of subdivide a bit, and each one of those could have its own channel. Like, squad a will have channel one, squad b will have channel two. Maybe even it'll have its own chores and points pool. So I I can imagine basically just allowing for an installation to be subdivided or even just keyed on, like, some arbitrary sort of, slug or to allow for a subdivision. I think that would be the way to do it that would require the least new code. But I think, yeah, that that's basically as far as I've gotten with it. I I would kinda wait to see what emerged and kind of engineer around that. Alright. Thank you. Yeah. Of course.
Kind of building on that if we've got time. I I was curious if the the uploads, do they scale with the number of active users? Or Yes. Yes. Okay.
They definitely do. I can even show you like, if if you go to the code base, there's a a configuration. Everything is expressed as a percentage of the users. So I think, like, you know, 40%, 70%. Yeah. So, generally, everything scales with the size of the house. Yeah. The only thing that doesn't is if something is more than 10 points, you need two upvotes, and that is hard coded. So that the number of upvotes for a chore doesn't scale. The idea was you need one person to verify you. Everything else scales as a percentage of the resonance.
I'm clearly already having way too much fun with this. Thank you so much, Daniel. I, yeah, I'm really excited and encourage you all to keep playing with it and earn your Yeah. Earn your oh my gosh. My computer is, like, freaking out.
I mean, I think I'll no. Yeah. Sorry about that. I don't wanna say something.
Yeah. No. Just earn your points and have fun doing it.
Yeah. I I mean, I think the one thing I say is, like, you know, this this is here for us to use. I think that the idea was that people in the Medigov community can use this tool to basically help guide and enhance the community itself. Right? So this is, like, this is your tool to make the Medigov community the the community that you want it to be. So I would welcome everyone to participate and use it and, like, help help grow this community and make it even richer than it is today.
Hey. Cool. Well, thanks everyone so much, and thank you, Daniel. Let's unmute. Give Daniel a big round of applause. Such a cool project. Thanks for sharing it with us. And have a great rest of your day, everyone. Propose some seminars. I'll add that to the chat wheel maybe.
Anthony, what what are we doing? I gotta talk to community call versus seminar thing. Okay.
Alright. Messaging.
Messaging. Okay. Bye. Bye. Yeah.
Thank you.