The Guild

This is a placeholder name for a concept floated on a recent call about #maintenance in the scuttleverse. Here's my understand of this idea sofar. Think think this could be one of the parts for thriving and strong longterm patterns - there will be other threads and stragies needed as well

The seed observation is that the people who find it easy to fix problems are the ones who have the most context. Unfortunately there are not necessarily that many people with intimate knowledge of each domain in the scuttleverse, which means a lot of work can fall on a few people.

The other observation is that we've had some success (planned or accidental!) with supporting people into gaining context / mastery of particular domains. Concrete story: @arj took on a task to do Benchmarking alongside @dominic. This is a really specific task, and has also meant that Arj has been compelled into exploring some of the backend, and this journey has changed him. In particular he recently caught a bug that Dominic had overlooked. It seems like he has a massive increase in context.

Naming the pattern

In the above story, Dominic was a community member with mastery (broad context) of a domain, and supported Arj on a quest or journey which has moved him observabley towards mastery.

Perhaps then we can think about difference levels and behaviours like:

QUEST - clear to describe in a sentence

• There is a big goal, and we know what the work is

JOURNEY - know kinda where you're going but a lot of learning along the way figuring out what you need

• There is a big goal, but we're not sure what the work is
• e.g. Piet working on the gossip scheduling

GARDEN/ TRADE/ MAINTAIN - familiar enough with the parts that you can move fluidly and adapt to needs

• There's a problem and you know how to fix it quickly
• There are many atomic parts, but you're aware about the system of parts, how they interact, and what experiments or strategies this might suggest for the future
• You can scope and support smaller pieces of work which support others growth - Quests and Journeys

Dominic noticed that this pattern already exists in the world - PhD's have advisors who perform the higher level coordination / support, and students are sent on quests. The same thing used to exist in the trades with the concept of Apprentice / Journeymen / Master. I personally feel a little funny about the titles, but like some of the underlyind ideas (e.g. I prefer talking about a person having mastery within a particular domain rather than having masters echh).

cc #ssbc #community-gardening

@Alanna I was part of craftworks too. (for those reading here, it was an earlier iteration of a code contractor collective).
Craftworks tried to have masters support apprentices, but in practice we never had enough rescouces (both money and teaching skills) to really support apprentices well. It was fantastic for intermediates (like me) though.

The learning there is that creating Quests, whether they be well scoped grants, or scoped spec'd ability appropraite contract work, TAKES work, and a lot more than you'd think.
It's an expensive, long-game ... I wonder if this is where there are some roots for being very clear about the sort of people I'm prepared to give generously to - i.e. people who care about others, and are likely to perpetuate generosity?