The Aggregate

How teams agree to assess and compensate each other for contributions.

How this helped: This was helpful when we weren't sure how much a project would cost or how much time it would take to deliver, but we were sure on rough estimates.

Structure

Flexible Compensation

Compensation is defined as a range upfront, where upon delivery (or reassessment) players decide where in that range the contribution fits.

This structure reduces pay related conflict with a smaller increase in coordination costs from needing to assess and assign value.

Examples

• A proposal to create an app with ABC specifications for $30K-$70K. Delivery is binary and ABC is unclear.

• A role assignment to deliver ABC over N period at a B3-B5 complexity level. Each cycle other members assess where between B3-B5 they feel the member contributed.

Suggested When

Teams are doing similar work and they have a high degree of innate wisdom on roughly how much things should cost.

Teams are not willing to invest the time upfront to assess and define a value before starting a contribution to the community.

Teams value the feedback from their members.

The flexibility to shift pay based on delivers may make teams more willing and trusting to enter into new relationships and experiment with new types of contributions.

Known Pitfalls:

Members don't always know how much another members should get paid and don't always want to spend time thinking about it.

Members may end up making assessments on superficial reasoning or not participate in the process at all.

Members may not like the idea of judging/assessing each-other and look at this as a harmful activity.

Hypha DHO Template:

Authored by Rieki Cordon, Hypha DHO