Is it one share per ten hours?
In fact it seems to me that ideally we should at some point no longer need to pay authors by the word, because, hopefully, we will eventually be able to do authors the same way we do any other developers of free open source software, which is to say, if we find a good author who habitually as a lifestyle spends ten hours per week creating free open source stuff they should be able to get onto the receivers list as a developer of free open source stuff.
Notice that they get the same one share regardless of whether they only spend the absolute minimum - ten hours per week - working on such stuff or they do such stuff 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week or whatever.
The idea was we are looking for those people who already naturally as a lifestyle contribute their time freely to free open source development.
In fact it seems to me that ideally we should at some point no longer need to pay authors by the word, because, hopefully, we will eventually be able to do authors the same way we do any other developers of free open source software, which is to say, if we find a good author who habitually as a lifestyle spends ten hours per week creating free open source stuff they should be able to get onto the receivers list as a developer of free open source stuff.
Notice that they get the same one share regardless of whether they only spend the absolute minimum - ten hours per week - working on such stuff or they do such stuff 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week or whatever.
The idea was we are looking for those people who already naturally as a lifestyle contribute their time freely to free open source development.
Did you read the above paragraph of mine that you quoted?
As it answers the question you posted above it.
This intrigues me, because ideally I think you're right that the audience should be people who 'naturally as a lifestyle contribute their time freely to free open source development.' Even within that model there could be room for one-time or not-that-often contributors.
I've got 200k + word I could *conceivably* post on Devtome, but I won't, because it's not polished, or not finished. I'll post it when it's ready. I care about creating quality writing. I'm really passionate about gift economies and openness, so in spirit I really liked free culture licenses, but I clung to the non-commercial clause out of fear of abuse. Investigating Devtome and looking at Sita Sings the Blues http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/ convinced me to put my licensing in line with my beliefs. So I spend 40 + hours a week writing that will now all be published under CC BY-SA. I think all those elements make it natural for me to gravitate toward Devtome.
I think a ton of other writers would, too, once they got over their hangups about copyright (which is rampant in the writer world, for a number of reasons, some of which are they they *care* about and *value* what they are producing, but also hubris around 'originality'), and were able to see that they can meet their material needs with Devcoin. Devtome has attracted a few of those, but also a lot of people who are fine with putting out 'open source' material because they *don't* care about what they're producing.
The Devtome model as it stands now isn't perfect, but it's a place to start.
How would you propose shifting it to paying ongoing writing 'developers'? I think you'd need to wait to do it until you had a stable of committed, high quality authors.
I've got 200k + word I could *conceivably* post on Devtome, but I won't, because it's not polished, or not finished. I'll post it when it's ready. I care about creating quality writing. I'm really passionate about gift economies and openness, so in spirit I really liked free culture licenses, but I clung to the non-commercial clause out of fear of abuse. Investigating Devtome and looking at Sita Sings the Blues http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/ convinced me to put my licensing in line with my beliefs. So I spend 40 + hours a week writing that will now all be published under CC BY-SA. I think all those elements make it natural for me to gravitate toward Devtome.
I think a ton of other writers would, too, once they got over their hangups about copyright (which is rampant in the writer world, for a number of reasons, some of which are they they *care* about and *value* what they are producing, but also hubris around 'originality'), and were able to see that they can meet their material needs with Devcoin. Devtome has attracted a few of those, but also a lot of people who are fine with putting out 'open source' material because they *don't* care about what they're producing.
The Devtome model as it stands now isn't perfect, but it's a place to start.
How would you propose shifting it to paying ongoing writing 'developers'? I think you'd need to wait to do it until you had a stable of committed, high quality authors.
40+ hours per week is "at least 10 hours per week" so should qualify.
The thing is though, why would you settle for only one share for all those hours instead of getting one share per 1000 words?
Well one reason, I suppose would be if you didn't want to post the material to Devtome.
But basically the crazy-high pay currently going to Devtome authors kind of discourages anyone from going for the lifestyle author of free open source software option, not to mention the vast number of shares that go to Devtome authors grossly dilutes the actual value that a lifestyle author's lonely single share would actually be worth on the exchanges.
So basically Devtome is maybe kind of shooting itself in the foot too not just shooting down all other categories.
Although to fully make use of lifestyle authors Devtome would have to be even more open than it currently is regarding "collated" articles, since a lifestyle creator of free open source content is not constrained to post that content to Devtome or any other specific repository. So if a lifestyle author of free open source writing happened for example to post all their free open source writing to their blog instead of to Devtome, someone would have to collate it all - grab it all - onto Devtome in order for Devtome to directly benefit from it all. But since we are talking free open source, presumably grabbing all of it from their blog and pasting it to Devtome (with attribution) would presumably be okay as far as their license is concerned. It is only Devtome itself that currently would seem to require who-ever grabs it and pastes it to hack it up instead of simply pasting it.
We could though maybe make a "grabbed wholesale" category that pays even less than the "collated" category, like maybe a share per 10,000 articles or a share per 1000 articles or somesuch, so one person with one script could suck into Devtome all the new blog posts made by all the lifestyle free open source blog authors and stuff like that and get enough pay from that to pay them for the computer resources it'd take for them to have their 'cron' daemon automatically go grab the articles and paste them to Devtome...
-MarkM-