A basic outline of Lambda Guilds

LambdaGuilds.md

Lambda Guilds

This is heavily inspired by Lambda School, a startup school where students pay nothing up front, but upon getting a job pay 17% of their income for 2 years capped at 30k USD total.

Lambda Guilds is a generalization of that idea. A marketplace of Guides can bid on the right to an Apprentices future income, and the responsibility to support their learning.

Once an they've been approved by their Guide and have passed a set of assessments, they become Journeymen and can accept jobs within the guild. A percentage of the money they earn will be given to their Guide for a fixed period. Once their debt is repayed they graduate to Guide and can accept Apprentices of their own. The Guild also collects a tax on all jobs which gets put into communal coffers to be deployed for shared infrastructure.

Table of Contents

• Lambda Guilds
  • Architecture
  • Minimal Process
    • The Guild
    • The Auction
    • The Apprenticeship
    • Journeying
  • Goals and Incentives
    • Maximize Skills and Earnings
    • Create a Marketplace for new Talent
    • A trusted liquid skills marketplace
  • Extensions and Questions:
    • Parameterized Apprenticeships
    • Liberal Radicalism for allocation of Guild Coffers

Architecture

Lambda Guilds will be composed of several smart-contract components:

• Bounties Network for doing work and getting paid
• Fathom Network for getting assessed and measuring knowledge to graduate
• ENS Auctions for setting up an auction of apprenticeships

Minimal Process

The Guild

1. A guild is created by a Guildmaster and a set of foundational fathom concepts. These are what Apprentices must learn in order to move up.
2. The Guildmaster can:
   • allocate funds in the Guild Coffers or assign a smart-contract to allocate them
   • Assign a new Guildmaster
   • Add Guides

The Auction

1. An Apprentice can apply by signing an application form off-chain. This will then be broadcast to current Guides.
2. Any Master can start off the auction by placing a secret bid on that Apprentice (identified via their signed application). Placing a bid requires locking up funds >= the amount of the bid. The auction will be open for 1 week.
3. Once the auction is closed all bidders reveal their bids and the highest bidder is assigned as the Guide to the Apprentice. However they only pay the value of the second highest bid. 90% of this is transferred to the Apprentice and 10% to the guild coffers.

The Apprenticeship

1. The structure of the apprenticeship is up to the Guide and Apprentice. However they must document their work and structure publicly.
2. Once the Guide thinks they're ready they can give their blessing to the Apprentice via an on-chain transaction.
3. Next the Apprentice must pass a Fathom Assessment in the concepts defined by the Guild.

Journeying

1. Individuals and organizations can post bounties to a closed bounties pool. Only Journeymen of the Guild are allowed to accept these.

2. Once a bounty has been completed it's paid out through a smart-contract which sends:

   • 80% to the Journeyman
   • 15% to their Guide
   • 5% to the Guild Coffers

3. Once 2 years have passed the fee to the Guide is no longer paid and instead returned to the Journeyman. If by this time the initial debt has been paid off, they graduate to Guide. However if it is not, the Journeyman will have to repay it if they wish to take students of their own.

Simplifying Further

While the auction mechanism is very valuable (as it raises funds that will subsidize both the Guild itself and individual learners.) it could be removed at the start to have a simple first come first serve process. This works well if the initial Guide pool is small.

Goals and Incentives

Maximize Skills and Earnings

The main goal of the Guild is to align the incentives of Guides and Apprentices to maximize the Apprentices skills and future earnings. This is accomplished via the portion of earnings distributed to Guides. It's further enforced by the requirement to have the Apprentice pass a Fathom assessment. This creates an incentive for the Guide to support the Apprentice in the skills they actually signed up to learn, instead of just throwing them into the market place as a Journeyman as soon as possible.

Create a Marketplace for new Talent

On a higher level it's also to create a market around new talent in a given community. By allowing Guides to compete for the best students you're creating an incentive to seek out and engage with underrepresented talent and to resolve market inefficiencies.

A trusted liquid skills marketplace

Having a guild in a particular field should be a mechanism to create a liquid marketplace around tasks in that field that maintains standards and trust around the work done. Employers should be able to quickly provision work and have guarantees around the quality.

Extensions and Questions:

Parameterized Apprenticeships

Instead of having fixed terms for an apprenticeship (i.e 10% of money earned for 2 years) you could allow each apprentice to set their own terms. This has dangers of being exploitative, but allows for more freedom and potentially more complicated schemes (tokenizing future earnings anyone?).

Liberal Radicalism for allocation of Guild Coffers

Liberal Radicalism is a process by which individuals can essentially vote with their money on how to allocate a central pot of money.

In a minimal version coffers can be centrally managed, but in order to make this more self-sustaining you could allow funds to be allocated via an LR process with Journeymen and Guides allowed to participate.

I think this rough outline has a lot of promise. Two thoughts did come to mind:

1. To succeed, the system must be capable of accommodating traditional full-time employment, paid via fiat currency. This is what most people seek and is the most culturally well-established form of employment / economic participation.

The success of this system depends heavily on encouraging present action for future ROI (i.e. % of future earned wages).

A realistic assumption can be made that most people will seek full-time employment. Thus, if the system can only capture value earnt via bounties / outside the scope of fiat currency, it would represent a fractional % of an Apprentices total future income, requiring more time to pay back the agreed amount and reducing the incentives to the Guides.

2. By not imposing regulations on Guild creation, competition is encouraged and a healthy marketplace will emerge with the top Guilds standing out above the rest. Important social benefits will arise beyond education, such as access to social networks and social value signaling (e.g. "great guilds = great talent").