Ground in equal, open pay
Goal: At the foundation of budgets, start from the assumption that every member’s time is equally valuable and reflect that in a flat rate. This approach assumes that the hours worked are what ultimately make the biggest difference.
Everyone involved in a project is asked to provide feedback on the number of hours they think they'll spend and the budget and hours overall, including expenses. Project participants include people who are working day to day on the project, as well as people who give regular or infrequent advice, like collaborators.
Embodied Characteristics
Tensions
Do years of experience or certain kinds of relevant training make a person’s time more valuable? Is it truly just for us to pay everyone at the same rate? What if you are used to a higher rate or your participation includes mentorship?
We’re not always able to meet our budget goals. Also, we are sometimes required to begin work on a project before we've achieved our funding goals.
Project participants might change. It isn't always possible to have project participants in place throughout the lifecycles of both fundraising and carrying a project out. While any collaborator is able to see our budgets on request, we also don't have a process in place to gather feedback from people spending much less time on a project.
How We Handle Tensions
For now, we are reliant on volunteer hours across the board, which leaves us at the early stages of applying all of our policies to their fullest extent. Also, collective members have similar enough years of experience or complementary skills to apply a flat compensation rate. Our policies will evolve, but it is more important is for us to resist following status quo standards of value, such as “going rates” or benchmarks. For now, we rely on the value pool to leave space to discuss what is “just.”
