Exploring a 4opens-compatible funding experiment with no post-deployment human decision-making #18
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This issue follows from the ongoing discussion around survivability, DIY culture, and implicit funding models under 4opens:
#17
I am not proposing a solution or a replacement for existing cultures. I am proposing a bounded experiment, intended to explore whether some failure modes can be reduced rather than eliminated.
Context
Repeatedly, funding and survivability problems appear to concentrate informal power in human decision-making: fatigue, bias, capture, personal networks, crisis pressure, or post-hoc rule changes. Even when intentions are good, this tends to reintroduce opacity and authority over time.
At the same time, survivability is often treated as implicit or deferred to wider social change. In practice, this selects for people with unusual resilience, safety nets, or tolerance for precarity.
This experiment is an attempt to treat survivability as a design constraint without defaulting to NGOs, professionalization, or heroic self-sacrifice.
The experiment (not a solution)
The core idea is simple:
Before release, a very explicit and restrictive rule set would need to be agreed:
Once deployed, the system cannot be modified.
Funding would be:
Failure is expected and acceptable. The goal is learning, not permanence.
Transparency
The entire system would be designed to be transparent by default.
The rationale, decision logic, and execution process would be entirely public. This includes:
The intention is that not only outcomes, but the thinking encoded into the system, is visible and inspectable by anyone.
Fund flows should also be transparent and auditable. Some form of distributed ledger or crypto system could be used purely as an implementation detail to make flows visible and hard to quietly redirect, not as an ideological commitment.
What this is not
It is a constrained probe into whether specific power concentrations can be reduced under #4opens constraints.
Open questions
Personal note
If this direction is of interest, I would like to be actively involved in its design and development. I am not seeking endorsement, only a clear sense of whether this is a space OMN considers valid to explore.
OMN Path
I think this appears #4opens-compatible on the surface, and while it is not in the spirit or culture of the PGA, it might even be possible to “slip it past.”
But it fails many of the deeper #hashtag story themes that OMN is built on.
#Geekproblem
At its core, this approach is fixated on control. OMN is built on social trust first, not control mechanisms.
Specific issues:
“Define the rules before deployment”
This is a heavy, brittle process. That energy would be better spent building the tools we actually need in the first place.
“No human makes allocation decisions”
This is first impossible, and second undesirable. OMN projects are human-community-first. This path reproduces the #geekproblem rather than resolving it.
“Explicit and restrictive rule set”
This is the opposite of OMN’s path. Our history consistently shows that rigid rules fail where living social processes succeed.
“Once deployed, the system cannot be modified”
Why do we need this? The pattern here should be becoming clear.
“Explicitly experimental”
We already have a hashtag for this: #nothingnew. OMN projects are grounded in existing, working social practices and existing #4opens technology. That continuity is a strength, not a weakness.
“Stopped automatically if conditions are not met”
At this point it begins to sound like a blockchain project with smart contracts, and that is precisely the geek failure mode.
“The thinking encoded into the system is visible and inspectable”
Yes, this is already how the #OGB works.
Distributed ledger / crypto
Yes, this is the problem. History here is not neutral.
“A probe into reducing power concentration under #4opens”
This is already core to existing OMN projects: #indymediaback, #makinghistory, #OGB so #nothingnew, again.
#OMN is already approaching the funding problem effectively by first addressing:
History and memory #makinghistory
Media #indymediaback
Governance #OGB
We can look back at what worked (history), communicate what we learn (media), and make and enforce decisions collectively (governance).
That ordering matters.
Hope this helps.
The #OMN is a good-faith project, so let’s begin from that assumption.
I don’t value the mainstreaming of this podcast, but it's a useful thinking point when considering our project outlines. It highlights pressures and narratives that any open project will eventually have to navigate when we choose diversity of paths.
Yes, it’s always possible to play any system, including those built on trust. That risk never disappears. The difference with trust-based projects is not that they are immune to gaming, but that they consciously try not to optimise for it.
Instead, they rely on serendipity, social norms, shared myths, and lived traditions to provide balance when people do start to “play the game.” These informal constraints matter more than formal rules, because they shape behaviour without hardening into control systems.
This is the tension space #OMN operates in: resisting the urge to over-engineer against bad faith, while nurturing cultures that make bad faith costly, visible, and socially discouraged rather than mechanically policed.
Hope this helps us find the "native" path.
You describe this proposal as fixated on control, while OMN is built on social trust first. I want to clarify what I am actually trying to control, and what I am explicitly trying not to.
In issue #17, it was stated that all previous attempts at OMN / #4opens-aligned funding models have failed. From my understanding, the dominant failure vectors in those attempts were:
My proposal is not an attempt to replace social trust in general. It is a bounded experiment that removes only those two variables in a very specific context, with full consent from participants and funders, and with explicit acceptance of failure as an outcome.
In this sense, it is not about exerting control, but about removing the burden of discretionary power from individuals in a scenario where that burden has repeatedly proven unsustainable.
You state that “no human makes allocation decisions” is impossible and undesirable. I believe it is both possible and, in this narrow case, in the best interest of the human community, precisely because it prevents fatigue-driven authority, informal capture, and personal cost being concentrated on a few people.
This is not a claim that such systems should replace living social processes. It is a probe into whether specific, well-identified failure modes can be reduced without expanding scope, scale, or permanence.
When this is described as #nothingnew, I struggle to find concrete examples of this exact structure having been tried: small, time-limited, non-scalable, non-evolving, with no promises of continuity and no governance theater. If such examples exist, I would genuinely like to study them.
Finally, if there is a list of tools OMN considers actually needed, or concrete, current examples where the “history - media - governance” ordering is actively solving survivability problems, I would appreciate pointers. As a newcomer, much of this appears fragmented and difficult to evaluate from the outside.
My intent here is not to argue ideology, but to understand whether a narrowly scoped counterfactual experiment is considered invalid in principle, or simply misaligned with OMN’s chosen path.
We need #OMN paths to be #4opens human trust building, based on something grassroots and progressive that all ready exists in both the social and tech path.
A project of "scarcity" is not useful for the #OMN path. So happy to call diversity of strategy here and let you focus on the paths you find valuable. If you make this happens build a bridge if you like.
#DIY culture comes at the price of complexity and commitment, it's not for everyone, but its outcomes can be :)
Strong post on this https://hamishcampbell.com/the-mess-if-you-dont-value-things-you-destroy-them/