Friday, September 19, 2014

Have an idea for a flat job-assignment structure for a consultancy or small-jobs company. The company has one corps of engineers who work client cases. Clients work specifically with one of these agent-engineers as long as the relationship lasts and they coordinate feature additions, formulate engineering tasks from customer issues, advocate for the task-engineers (we'll get to them), negotiate the up-front price of the task, and input tasks for completion. A second corps of engineers, when tasks are input, self-assign to the tasks they want to work on. Task-engineers can bring in or agree to work with other engineers and either work out a payment split among themselves or formally agree on how to split it. Task-engineers can also suggest changes to the payments which would encourage them to work on the task.

Naturally, there would be some tasks that virtually no one wants to work on because they're mundane, no one has the skills, or no one likes the company, or any number of reasons. For these tasks, there should be a coercive rule that, for instance, requires junior engineers to take tasks no one else acts on. Alternatively, there could be something like a points system. Really guaranteeing liveness of every task is the hardest thing to manage when you have self-election. It could be necessary to remove the guarantee of completion -- which would be awful -- or to outsource the tasks or to have such a large pool of workers that tasks rarely die and can be handled on a case-by-case basis.

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Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger is credited with founding modern birth control tools and education for women in the United States. She began her campaign for women's health and welfare in the 1900s during the same time as the Comstock Laws (effective from the 1870s), which restricted the transmission of contraceptive information on the grounds that the materials were obscene.

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