RADAR is launching into the next phase in its Proof of Community journey: a 10 week collaborative research process built to bring the community together in service of a singular brief; to converge, diverge and use our collective intelligence to reimagine the way futures work is created and conducted. For a deeper view of this process, check out our recent update here.
For now, we wanted to share a bit about the internal economy we’re creating as we tackle our first internal brief. As the community matures, we’ll take on both internally-fueled and commercially-driven briefs, but on both sides of the equation, we’d like our compensation process to stay in keeping with RADAR’s founding ethos.
Our focus has always been to facilitate a more equitable flow of value: compensating the influentials, innovators, and trend makers who inspire this work by way of $SIGNAL and giving them a stake in the future of RADAR, while paying transparently, at every level, the researchers, futurists, and contributors who play critical roles across the holistic process.
A New Futures Economy
Get paid for independent research, get paid for multiplayer research.
When it comes to futures work, too often, value is centralized within a standardized hierarchy — despite the truth that, much of the time, it’s a few small multiplayer insights that shape everything. This truth is rarely reflected in how compensation and attribution are distributed.
At RADAR, we’re building an internal economy that balances both the necessary centralization of jobs-to-be-done with progress toward the more equitable and decentralized future we imagine. For the work to get done, we realize that we need a strong central project team within the process, but not at the cost of shining a spotlight on all voices involved.
It’s also critical to us that we’re vested in the futures we’re curating and cultivating. As a result of the industry’s siloed nature, futures consultants and trends authors become detached from their and their clients’ work…with no real incentive to track the futures they report on. With a process that takes futures full circle — from research, to incubation, to delivery — we’re building a flywheel that demands real intentionality and real commitment.
How it works
Since we’re building the first Futures Economy within a decentralized structure, we recognize that this will be a bit of a trial & error process — and that we’ll continue to evolve as we go. But for now, we’re focused on 6 distinct processes that leverage a mix of UDSC and our $SIGNAL token depending on the contribution. This mix allows contributors a balance of spendable currency and community governance making getting involved more accessible.
- Project Team: Base Payment at Kickoff (USDC)
- Project Team & Community: Self-Reflective Contribution Tracking & Coordinape Allocation (USDC & $SIGNAL)
- Research Lead: Contract (USDC)
- Project Team & Community: Hold Back Pool (USDC & $SIGNAL)
- External Contributors (Experts, Influentials and Features): Combined incentive for featured interviewees (USDC & $SIGNAL) and $SIGNAL pool for people & projects spotlit within reporting
- Community Contributions: Tipping ($SIGNAL)
Project Team Compensation (roughly ~ 5-10 hours a week)
To ensure a high-quality output and drive accountability, each research brief RADAR takes on will have a dedicated project team. This team of 4-6 members will be composed of people with a variety of skills & interest and experience relevant to the project — researchers, futurists, strategists, writers, editors, and multi-hyphenates alike.
The Project Team will be compensated in two parts:
- Base Payment at Kickoff
- To kickoff the research process, the Project Team will receive a base payment of USDC & $SIGNAL to compensate their work throughout the project process. The remainder of their compensation will come at the project’s conclusion.
- Retroactive Compensation through Coordinape
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At completion of the project, retroactive compensation will be allotted via Coordinape
To combat recency bias and ensure everyone who contributed is accurately accounted for, contributors will be using a self-reflective form to document the value they believe they’ve created on a weekly basis. The Research Lead will check in with this form biweekly to ensure we’re keeping up with documentation.
This retroactive compensation pool will be open to contributors who sit outside of the core Project Team, to any RADAR member who feels they’ve meaningfully contributed to the project.
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While it’s likely that the vast majority will be allocated to the Project Team, we’re excited about the opportunity to open the floor to all members so that their contributions can be recognized via USDC in addition to $SIGNAL tipping as covered below.
As we mentioned in the introduction, often, pivotal insights stem from unexpected places — and we wanted our compensation process to accommodate, credit, and compensate for that possibility.
Project Lead Compensation (~10-20 hours a week)
Driving progress throughout the research process will be a designated Project Lead. This Lead will bring a high level of specialism and expertise to the process, and will be responsible for facilitating the balance of progress and decentralization, ensuring decisions are made as needed. As we scale and begin running multiple research processes simultaneously, ensuring we have trusted Project Leads on each brief will be critical to RADAR’s success.
The Project Lead will be compensated by way of a set rate distributed half at project launch and half upon completion. It was important to us that the Project Lead’s compensation be a blend of USDC and $SIGNAL to build their long-term stake in the future of the community.
Leads cannot be compensated through the retroactive Coordinape round, but will be responsible for distributing our ‘hold back’ (as outlined below) to overlooked contributors.
Hold Back
From the overall resource pool, we’ll be holding back an allocation of both USDC and $SIGNAL to be distributed to members who made an impact but may not have received the compensation they deserve through our other processes.
It’s easy for this to happen when individuals contribute early on in the process and are then forgotten by the end, so it will be up to the Project Lead to keep this allotment in mind throughout the project.
External Contributors (~1-2 hours a week)
- Featured Interviewees:
- Throughout the research process, RADAR will tap into a network of experts and influential consumers that are relevant to the topic at hand by way of 1:1 interviews and other forms of outreach. In a traditional model, these individuals are given a one-off fee as transactional compensation, never to be contacted again. Regularly, they’re not even alerted when their ideas and insights are published.
We believe in engaging these experts and influentials more deeply, and bringing them into the fold of the RADAR community so that they have a stake in the futures they’re consulting on and, in many cases, already operating in. From a compensation standpoint, this means a mix of USDC and $SIGNAL.
- Featured People & Projects:
- Similar to the state of expert accreditation, people & projects are often cited as illustrative examples or quoted in research reports without ever being told, let alone compensated. It’s always been our mission to snuff out cases like this in our future of futures — so we’ll be purposefully allocating $SIGNAL for these individuals and project leads to claim, even after publication.
We’re excited to distribute $SIGNAL in both of these external cases bringing more futures thinkers and futures makers into the RADAR community and offering them a meaningful stake in the futures we’re manifesting together.
Community Compensation (~<1 hour a week)
As always, the primary way our wider RADAR community will be compensated is via tipping with $SIGNAL. The Project Lead and Project team will have the $SIGNAL pool to distribute throughout the process to any community members who contribute and/or support the Project Team in meaningful ways.
We know! That was a lot! But we’re just too excited about designing a futures economy that makes this kind of work accessible to a wider community & establishes a practice of credited contribution and future legacy for those who engage.
You can see a WIP costing breakdown here and learn more about $SIGNAL on our wiki.
And while we know this is very much a V1 that will evolve over time, we hope you enjoyed the look into our approach, leveraging a combination of native token and Stablecoin to bring meaningful value to our contributors and community throughout this inaugural process.