GOSPEL FAQ #1

In between building and researching, I’ve been posting a bit on Twitter. I wanted to share my experience creating a pseudonym. In doing so, I attracted a decent amount of interest to GOSPEL.

One pseudonymous person, who goes by the name of Grok, started helping build out a community around GOSPEL and asked some great questions. Most of our discussion is publicly available on the new 777 discord server. However, I thought I would post these questions and answers here.

There are a lot more FAQs that I need to cover, so this newsletter issue will just serve as a part 1 of many to come.

What is GOSPEL? And what is it not?

[Editor's note: the URL below was updated upon re-posting]

Here is the post where I introduced GOSPEL. GOSPEL stands for Global Open Source Permissionless Enterprise League. First and foremost, GOSPEL is a set of companies (an enterprise league, if you will). Companies in GOSPEL are committed to open sourcing as much software and business information as possible. They are also committed to working remotely and asynchronously, so that they can collaborate with people around the globe. Lastly, they allow anyone to audit their open source code and are willing to pay them if they submit high-quality contributions.

Any person or company working in this way is operating “according to GOSPEL.”[1] The phrase “according to GOSPEL” is shorthand for “In accordance to the principles adopted by the enterprises that are a part of GOSPEL.”

In this way, GOSPEL has two meanings: It refers to the global open source permissionless way of working, as well as the league of enterprises that adopt this methodology.

There is no formal list of “GOSPEL members”. Any enterprise that operates in this way can claim to be a part of it. GOSPEL cannot and will not claim or verify membership. There is no official website nor intellectual property associated with GOSPEL. GOSPEL itself is free and open source.

GOSPEL is NOT a company, software project, DAO, foundation, partnership or formal entity.

What does the end goal for GOSPEL look like?

The future is hard to predict, but my general thinking is this: GOSPEL will allow companies and workers to drop pre-Internet constraints. Companies will operate in an asynchronous, permissionless manner that enables employees to contribute remotely from anywhere in the world. This will provide opportunities to billions of people around the world and massively boost the talent pool for available to companies.

With that said, this description is an effort to couch things in language that we understand today. This question is almost like asking “what does the end goal for the internal combustion engine look like?”. My answer might be “carriages will be able to travel faster, longer, and farther — breaking away from the constraints of horseback.”

Nowadays, we don’t think about carriages much. We approach things differently and the automobile has reshaped society in many ways (for better and for worse).

Going down this path will take us to new places. The Internet is the most significant breakthrough since the discovery of fire. It will fundamentally reshape us. GOSPEL is an attempt to define how to adapt to this new landscape. A better way may become clear in the future. You will not find me defending these ideas if they are proven to be sub-optimal. In the meantime, we have a lot of learning, building, and experimenting to do.

How does this benefit…?

Companies

• Open source software and transparent business practices build trust with customers, partners, and the community.
• Releasing materials for free is a great form of content marketing. This can lead to new investments, deals, customers, and employees. People understand that writing free articles can help do this, but don’t realize that releasing other content for free (such as source code and business plans) can do even more.
• Working in a globally inclusive way (remote and async) creates the potential to hire more top talent; AND
• Allowing anyone to audit your code and permissionlessly get paid to contribute makes finding this top talent much easier.
• It makes companies more robust. If an employee leaves, their knowledge is likely already documented since everything is coordinated asynchronously and openly.
• Welcoming permissionless contributors is a great funnel for a traditional employment recruitment pipeline.
• It turns a centralized company into a distributed system. Some of these practices may slow down individual participants (due to needing to document everything, communicate in long-form writing, follow processes, put in place checks and balances, etc.). However, the system as a whole should scale much better[2].

Workers

Also known as “participants” or “contributors”.

• The identity of the contributor can be concealed. Therefore, contributors will not face bias or prejudice. They will also be able to maintain privacy from their employers.
• A determined contributor is able to work for whichever company they choose. They just need to read up on how the company operates and contribute to the job they want.
• There are no artificial barriers. Someone who only wants to work 5 hours a week and only going to bring in $700 per month can do so even if no tradition job would have such low hours.
• Design your own responsibilities. For example, a contributor that only likes writing front-end JavaScript but not doing CSS can find work that meets those specific requirements.
• Don’t ask for a promotion, just take it. Instead of waiting to be promoted and paid more, a contributor can just take on bigger tasks with higher bounties.
• Clear, merit-based compensation. Negotiating skills don’t matter as much. Instead of wages being set for a year of full-time work, payment is delivered as work is completed. Much of this data would also be public, so comps can be evaluated.
• Wages would be flexible. If inflation increases, so too would the cost of each task for companies. As a contributor, this is another benefit of not being locked into a yearly contract.
• Live anywhere, work anytime.

Does anybody lose out from GOSPEL?

Hopefully not. This is not a silver bullet. If this doesn’t work for a company, then they shouldn’t use it. If it doesn’t work for certain employees, then they should work for companies who don’t operate in this way. Many companies will likely adopt a hybrid model of putting some employees on salary and paying the rest via bounties. This can give employees the option of higher pay potential or more stability. A healthy economy will contain companies utilizing a diverse array of tactics.

[1] For what it’s worth, I didn’t intend to use religious phraseology for this. But it just kind of ended up sounding right. Probably because people are used to using the word “gospel” in a religious context. GOSPEL has nothing to do with religion and is not trying to imply any sort of divinity with its name.

[2] This is because recruiting is one of the biggest bottlenecks that businesses face while scaling. Instead of trying to hire one engineer who can complete 10 issues (which is hard), you can pay 10 engineers to complete one issue each (which is quicker and easier), synthetically creating a new employee without going through the arduous hiring process.