Starfish & the Spider

A while ago when Adam B. Levine asked for ideas before deciding on LTB forum, and LTBC, he mentioned “The Starfish & the Spider”. There was a presentation to Google, among a few other things in that discussion. At least one of which was a management system with the “Starfish” model. It allowed people to join in & work on any effort, review & be reviewed, get paid, etc… When LTB.com was updated, I think those discussions disappeared, and I haven’t found many of the things I read about in them since.

I’ve thought that a forum that could incorporate the same “starfish” model would be very useful, and I’d love to see something like it on SAFE Network.

Does anyone else remember this, or otherwise know about any of the projects that enabled people to run organizations with the “starfish” concept?

Edit…

I got the idea to use the way back machine to try & find the discussion I was referring to. I don’t believe that I did (though I did find this), but I found links to leaderless, collaborative, organization, tools;

Loomio
Asana
Trello
Sqwiggle

Unfortunately I can’t point to the one, or even tell if it’s one of these, that I remembered and was so intrigued by. I think about it on occasion when I think of sites like Github, or reddit, or any other forums. We desperately need an uncensorable forum, but at the same time, most people believe they’d be rendered useless with spam, and trolling. My thought was that the model I remembered reading about on the LTB forum could be used, so that the group of people who used the forum most, &/or maybe for the longest period, would have the most influence as to how it was managed. This system wouldn’t allow for any one person to censor, and if one, or a few, were to abuse their influence in the eyes of most, they’d lose their ability to influence (there was some sort of scoring system of the peers that was used to calculate who had the most influence).

I’m sure I’m not doing a great job of describing it. I was hoping that maybe someone else here remembered the discussion and could chime in. I also don’t know if it’s technically possible to build something like that in a decentralized forum.

Occasionally I think that if it were possible to create a decentralized forum, or cryptocurrency, with that “starfish” model of system in place, it might solve a few of the problems we have with both today.

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You might check in with @Seneca and see what he’s doing with #Project Decorum

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I’ve talked to Adam about DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations) and smart contracts. We went over our google docs on the topics and he has some really good ideas. I am guessing the starfish stuff was along the same lines. I got the impression he wants to focus on the stuff we can actually do right now without the need of smart contracts (IE Tokenly).

I think we will see so many ideas come through in the next couple years and many proof of concepts that will “allow people to join in & work on any effort, review & be reviewed, get paid, etc”. I am hoping we in the safe network have our very own and perhaps many different forms of it. It’s what I’m pushing for with the CrowdFounding idea that I hope will take the best of all of them and the strengths of the Safe Network and put it all together. We are a ways from making this happen though, though I will continue to push it to build momentum.

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The star fish and the spider was an awesome book.

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