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Hi, thanks for sharing your thoughts, as Nick mentions in https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickdrage_we-are-hiring-freelancers-via-upwork-if-activity-7150472280601509889-uX_Y the environments I have created using Upwork are very similar to the ones your describe above.

One thing I would note on your YC community, is that you need a way to "make it easy to join and easy to remove" (or you will have a "tragedy of the commons at hand" and will really struggle with communication and culture)

here is the model/conundrum:

- If you don't make it easy to join, you gain some initial quality control, but lose on diversity, community, value creation, trust, alignment, and fun/friendship

- but if you make it easy to join, you will find the right talent/people/individuals, but they will be in the middle of lots of other "not good fits" for your particular community

- the key is to create a good, pragmatic and logical way to remove the ones that don't work out (i.e the one you mentioned that "...seem not so good right now (maladapted, 'low quality')..." , and eventually given some time ,you will find amazing teams, environments and individuals

Btw, I don't like the term "quality" to classify the ones that are a good fit or not, since "quality" is already quite a loaded term. I prefer some like "culture fit and alignment" . In our Upwork model, we basically measure the deliverables, the culture fit and ultimately who the team want to have in their "dynamic squads"

Basically it should be easy and with no "people drama". i.e. it just works

I'll be happy to expand on this topic , share how the Upwork model works for us and learn from your experiences.

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Oddly I had suggested something like this when I was asked to consider how to set up a community of practice in my org. The issue was that no one wanted to join formally for fear to having too much to do (esp all the performative activities that tends to happen with such initiatives). So I had the (more crude) idea of allowing people to have differing levels of participation and responsibility. And those roles could be fluid - someone who is on the periphery today just sharing his thoughts or findings could become a project leader in the future if he comes across a project that he's personally invested in.

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First, killer version of Blue Bayou. Second, your piece prompted the question, “are there good organizational inefficiencies, and are there bad ones?”. I would think the answer is yes, but what’s the criteria? Fatness of resources of money and time seems to be a good inefficiency for an org to perpetuate. A bad one might be filtering too lazily for participants(in an amorphous org setting). Thoughts?

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