I have only spoken to Heather Kopsco and Bowen Jiang on the phone. The rest of the reviewers committed through email.
Fay-Wei, For the past few months, we have been working on getting Experiment to a point where it makes more money than it spends. We did it. We spent $3,807.08 and made $4,065.79 in May, and we plan to keep expenses and costs this way until the end of the year. Our ultimate goal is to put Experiment in a position where the crowdfunding platform can be used as a public utility without the support of full-time staff. This summer we are piloting a Reviewers Program, which is where I could use your help. I'm starting this out with 10 reviewers. The time commitment is 4 reviews a month, or 2 hours a month, for 2 months. Of course if you want to contribute more, I would love that! Denny and I have built internal review software and will be iterating on it over the summer. Before we open it up to more researchers we need experienced reviewers to test it out. I am optimistic we can build system that relies entirely on the community by the end of the year, but if it doesn't work there is a chance I will shut it down. I want to be up front about that. Let me know if you're interested in contributing and I can tell you more! Heather Kopsco/Bowen Jiang phone call:
Sustainability Experiment is now a staff of 3 people: Cindy Denny and Nicole. We have been working to get Experiment to a point where it makes more money than it spends every month. May was the first month that that happened! We are spending and making around 4k a month. What this means for the platform is it now has the opportunity to live forever, if the community wants that.
What does the current product do: Experiment does 3 things right now that requires humans.
You have experience with all 3.
Intention Denny and I are still working full-time and by the end of summer we would like to free up 95% of our time, so we can continue to build products that democratize the research process.
For July and August we are piloting outsourcing reviews to successful researchers with each reviewer committing 4 reviews a month. This is an experiment, so I will be providing updates every week on our progress on the product. On August 15th we will evaluate how the program is going to evolve. We may also shut down the program.
Next Steps
What the expectation is: We will give you access to the internal review software. We are moving off of Google Docs. During the next two months we will be using the website entirely. Every week we will give an update on bug fixes and product fixes.
How to communicate with our team: There will be a Slack room set up for #reviewers that I’ve already invited you to. You can also email me directly if you don’t want to use Slack. Slack is used so that you can have access to me Denny and Nicole at all times. I live in there.
We need your product feedback. If something is hard to use tell us. If you don’t want to click a button two times tell us. The more specific you can be about your feedback the better.
How does reviewing work? I will send out instructions, but for now you will see a review dashboard.