what we are not interested in
“Sometimes rejection in life is really redirection.”
Travis Smiley
The TL;DR
We are committed to our path of open-source software and that all profits we generate after development and maintenance costs be returned into the commons through democratic means. We are thus unable to collaborate with any partner who’s ambitions are personal profit or proprietary code.
Aligning With Mission and Vision
Social Systems Lab has been active since first opening our doors in 2018 with the project Open Democracy. We’ve hit plenty of roadblocks along the way, hitting some of them at full speed and with reckless abandon. Needless to say many, many mistakes were made. We’ve explored a number of methods, seen an almost equal number of spectacular failures to deliver, and have iterated upon our processes to find a format that works.
When it comes to bringing new core team members onboard, we follow an established vetting process. We start with a volunteering-based arrangement where we can evaluate both contributions and personal alignment. If this goes well, the next tier is a basic income level remuneration, allowing talented contributors to dedicate themselves to the cause, as it were. If this proves beneficial and we have the funds to pay more of a salary, we will employ the team member on a project basis. Should Circles or The Altruistic Wallet or any other of the projects we are working on provide sufficient financial means, we are prepared to pay a salary that is closer to market value.
However, it is unlikely that we will ever be able to pay the kind of top salaries you can expect from a startup in the private sector with proprietary code and investors. The best you can hope for with us is a decent salary and possibly a seasons bonus paid into your Altruistic Wallet.
If you are a funder keen to back projects that aim to create a more equitable world for your children and grandchildren, we are absolutely open to talk, but any funding that comes with stings attached that seek to pull us in an unaligned direction is probably a nonstarter. We will absolutely take your priorities into account, provided they are part of our roadmap, but we have no plans to pivot into a different trajectory. There is no scenario where we exit, sell our software to the highest bidder while selling out our community. This would go agains the entire reson for our existence.
We are not doing this to profit ourselves but to return as much value value back to our communities, to prototype what we call Custodial Capitalism, which we can only do by walking the talk. You know our mission, and we know we can deliver. Give us your trust and we won’t disappoint.
If you are a business with a corporate social responsibility budget that needs deploying, we have a few tricks up our sleeve that might tickle your fancy, but if your goal is more symbolic than substantive and you just want your logo showing up in the right places, then maybe not. We are serious about being transformative, serious about making a structural difference. If you are too, then let’s talk, but if its more of a show for the galleries, there will be plenty of others shows out there more than happy to sell you tickets.
Basically, it’s this: if you are serious AND committed to the hard and badly paid (if paid at all) work of transforming our current s**t show of a system and you have the kind of talent needed to play at the level we need to play at, then try out for the team. But anything less, then this is probably not for you. It doesn’t mean we can’t play together in the future.
That said, we are all in this together. There are lots of great projects out there, and lots of great people. And countless ways to get where we all want to be. If we make it far enough, all paths will converge. Look forward to seeing you there, if not before!
Sincerely,
The team of Social Systems Lab
