# Collaboration platform MVP notes
*After Feb 16 conversation with Liam*

## Imaginary blog post from a User: "Thoughts after a year in Colabora"
Since people are asking me; 'What's Colabora like?', I thought I'd set out what it looks like to me, as an ordinary member.

Most simply, I experience a messaging feed as my key interface. I can swipe between different feed streams. Each stream kind of feels like a place: my home, my groups, the world.

I'm in Colabora because I hope to increasingly experience combinations of: work that is meaningful, congenial colleagues, viable rewards, acceptable autonomy/constraint balance, high productivity, work that feels like life, minimal system-imposed bullshit.

At Home, my feed consists only of messages and sources I have elected to see. Then I can jump into a Group I'm connected to (Groups tend to have a few sub-channels, too), or I go out into the World to look for something new.

I review Propositions in my feed, and upvote those which seem interesting (*this costs a credit, but it sort of works like a bet - successful Propositions can generate quite a network income in transaction fees; you can get a little payout, and it's fun to try and pick the likely ones*). I apply to participate in a few. Because this costs a few Credits, too, I appreciate the community's tendency to upvote Propositions which offer clarity as to intended outcome, context, commitment and reward.

At the beginning, I, along with other noobs, was encouraged to take part in lightweight Propositions with light commitment. Doing these, I met lots of other people here, found a few I liked (as well as a few I decided to stear clear of), at the same time as contributing to some useful outcomes for the sponsors, and earning some Credits, too (*the community has begun to rank the level of commitment of a Proposition in terms of journey type: short ones are 'Hops' or 'Leaps'; then more involved 'Trips' or 'Cruises'; then real 'Voyages'; a Proposition which has enormous ambition gets labelled called an 'Odyssey'*).

Work to fulfil a Proposition takes place in Groups - which are pulled together from people willing to commit to the outcome. Over time, as people here find other people they really like to work with, they start to agree to join Groups together.

When people like this decide to stay together and take on various Propositions over time, they upgrade their status to 'Crew'. It's sort of the point here, and something I definitely aim to do. Crews can have Reputation, just like people, and the strong crews tend to get preference from Sponsors of longer Cruises and Voyages. Odysseys tend not to get going at all without a few high reputation Crews signing on.

I found Credits weird at first. They aren't money, really - you can't cash them out like a crypto, at least. It's more an accounting system - very simple and quite cool, actually. There is no token, no fiat unit creator. Instead, when any two parties do a trade, their balances (which start at zero), move in opposite directions - if the amount is 1000, then one goes +1000, while the other goes -1000. Every member has a limit, both + and -, which starts quite small, but the more you do here, the wider your limits get. There's no concept of interest.

What this means, is that anyone can make a Proposition (it costs a few Credits to post one, and the norm is to offer Credits as payment for a successful outcome). There's $ money, too, but it all goes through the system - some escrow service. Small transaction charges on both Credit and $ support the network and pay for growth.

My most recent experience changed the way I think about Credits. As an early supporter of a Proposition, I was invited to join a couple of Hops that refined the idea. The original Sponsor pulled out, but a few of us had got quite excited about a variant we'd developed (a cute little browser extension), and in the end, we pooled quite a few Credits and made a Proposition around it. This worked well and it turned into a viable $ earner out in the world - nothing spectacular, but a nice regular income between the 5 of us.

But here's the thing - to keep developing the extension, we needed to get people here to come and work on it - so we needed Credits. In the end, it made sense to start taking payment from users in Credits as an option. Also, there are Propositions here which connect up real world $ businesses with this network - so that I can actually buy some real-world stuff for credits, too. That's got me quite excited, I have to say. If I can get what I need here, and get paid here, in Credits, then my $ can go a lot further towards rent and stuff.

There's one more thing I should mention. Unlike plenty of other platforms where the word 'community' gets mentioned a lot, but where in reality there is a company funded by a VC at the centre, a company which owns all the tools, the data and all the network value of the community, in Colabora, everyone is sort of an owner. At least, we all get to vote on changes, and no-one can sell the platform to some mega-corp. There's more to it than that, I know, but I haven't got too involved in that stuff yet. I might do, though, if this "*Credits are better than $*" thing takes off. We'll see!

* MVP FUNCTIONALITY AS A STEP TOWARDS THE ABOVE:
* Messaging / Social Network interface as the primary experience, with
* Feed
* Group chats, channels
* DMs
* Messaging protocols (implemented through bots), for some key functions:
* Proposition publishing
* Proposition Review
* Polls
* Mutual Credit accounting
* $ transfers
* Mutual Credit accounting for internal economy
* No external exchange value,
* Maximum and minimum account limits, algorithmic
* Most Bot-powered actions have costs
* Monthly membership fee.
* Multi-axis Reputation
* Contribution
* Reliability
* Collegiality
* Quality
* Analysis