This is the second Public Work Log entry for Coεmeta, a Public Benefit company providing data & sensemaking services with positive externalities. It's intended as a window into our journey & playbook as it develops, in the spirit of working in public, contributing to knowledge commons, "finding the others" & leaving a trail + some resources for those that follow. I hope it inspires more folks to follow a similarly rewarding path & find similar (if modest & provisional) success. Feel free to reach out at any time, I'm happy to help however I can!
- Daniel McNichol, founder & Chief Data Scientist
This post is mirrored at: Github (primary source & version control) & Roam (navigable outline format)
...comments, forks & pull requests are welcome!
It complements our Open Source Strategy repo, which offers more discrete, version-controlled resources related to the strategies & frameworks discussed here in more narrative form.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
🙏🏼 Support Coεmeta's public benefit work with a donation via ko-fi or paypal!
💡 click headings to expand sections, then the Contents links above will work
Coεmeta is an attempt at an infinite game. **The goal of infinite games is not to win, but to keep playing. **
I consider this the metagame (as opposed to endgame):
a more balanced, integrated, enriching & impactful life in greater community
To pursue this metagame indefinitely (aka "infinitely"), I needed to reclaim some agency & autonomy in my work. So Coεmeta is also currently a Pennsylvania Public Benefit LLC, serving as a vehicle for more traditional freelance & consulting work, as well as broader public-benefit oriented activities.
(My longer-term vision for Coεmeta as a formal entity is something more like a worker-owned cooperative or DAO with shared collective ownership, or at least part of a federated network of mutual aid & partnerships with other "self-sovereign" ᵋ groups or entities. This is part of the "in greater community" aspect of the metagame.)
So Coεmeta is not exactly a traditional 'venture' or typical small business or startup etc, but assumes some of those trappings for now. The previous log entry recaps more of the motivations & considerations underlying all of this, & our Open Source Strategy repo describes some of the strategic planning & wayfinding models used so far.
As elaborated throughout these artifacts, public work & contributing to knowledge commons are core parts of the overall metagame strategy & ethos. So these posts are part of that: figuring it out as I go, learning while doing, in public. This entry picks up where the previous left off. (The timing & titles of the first two entries should make the intended heliocentric publishing cadence clear.)
ᵋ NB: I'm generally skeptical of this terminology & its associations with neoliberal / libertarian fantasies of fully atomized "sovereign individuals", but "independent" isn't quite adequate either.
In the previous entry, I discussed feeling good about finding some of the greater balance I was seeking, along with a more integrated, rewarding & palpably impactful work life. I discussed my gratitude for this provisional success, which was mostly due to luck & the kindness of others. And I mentioned looking forward to shifting to more of an outward focus, enabling clients & collaborators to be more impactful, & growing mutual capacities together.
In this entry, I'm happy to report on some progress towards that outward focus & mutual capacity-building, as well as new opportunities again arising primarily from luck & the kindness of others.
I also discuss how some of that prior balance has given way to seizing these opportunities (or at least has been stretched over a longer timescale). I also note a growing salience of looming risks & shadows, but how I'm nevertheless looking forward to continued cultivation & harvest, & wrestling with ideas of further scaling (or sporing) these efforts for greater impact & a greater common good.
A brief timeline of relevant events, from the vernal equinox of Mar 2022, to the time of writing on the midsummer solstice of Jun 21, 2022.
(see prior timeline here, or the full timeline to-date here)
Mar 2022 (post-equinox)
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Contribute to DuckDB docs after exploring the trending open source in-process database – sort of an OLAP SQLite. Trying to be a good open source citizen & get some practice with proper open source contributions.
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Figure out estimated quarterly taxes for the first time (with this endeavor), which was MOSTLY fine...
- ...with the exception of Philadelphia's odd & onerous additional layers of business / self-employment taxes, which as of writing in June I've still not succeeded in fully submitting, despite months of emails (mostly ignored for weeks at a time) & hours on hold with the Revenue Department, who would ultimately tell me I needed to send an email.
- TLDR: my initial tax account was set up incorrectly as a corporation, & I was able to pay BIRT (fka "Business Privilege Tax") through their new web portal, to which all previous online resources now redirect in a Kafkaesque labyrinth of live & dead links. However to submit NPT (which corporations don't pay), my account needed to be recreated as a disregarded entity (essentially a pass-through to me as an individual), which required a new form, & resulted in my old account & BIRT account being closed. Leaving me in this current state: unsure if my past BIRT payment will be recognized as applying to my new account, & still unable to figure out how to submit BIRT & NPT payments under the new account. After explaining the situation & open questions (+ several unanswered followups over 4 weeks), I received this cryptic reply:
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Thank you for contacting The Philadelphia Department of Revenue.
The NPT account XX-XXXXXXXXX was open under the PTID of XXXXXXXXXXXX.
COEMETA LLC XXXXXXXXXXX is listed as a Disregarded Entity.
We are marking your email as resolved. If you have more questions, please feel free to email us back for help. - Entirely unsure what to do with this information, I decided I'd handle it later ...or wait for the inexorable march of institutional rot & decay to fully take its course. Whichever comes first.
Apr 2022
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Begin initial exploratory sessions with folks who expressed interest in aforementioned calls for microsolidarty-style small groups of mutual support & community-building. Nascent but promising efforts towards a core pillar of the broader Coεmeta mission: better relations via collaboration, partnerships, mutual capacity-building, etc
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Continue other core mutual capacity-building efforts, via ongoing mentorship + a sort of apprenticeship model: onboarding folks into some internal business & client work, to help upskill & gain hands-on, paid experience with data & digital freelancing tasks, while also building internal capacity at Coεmeta.
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Some heads-down sprints on both freelance & social / relational efforts, related to above points as well as some spikes in client demand.
- This motif of greater-than-expected client work displacing other planned activities, which began last quarter, continues & accelerates throughout this quarter, compelling me to rethink my pursuit of metagame 'balance' in terms of a more cyclic, longer-term time-average vs the ensemble average of current work allocation... (which I'm calling hyperopic balance)
- ... & also recalls the ancient twitter proverb: thinking is a winter sport
- & thus I began to think of these periods as cultivation & harvest seasons
- This motif of greater-than-expected client work displacing other planned activities, which began last quarter, continues & accelerates throughout this quarter, compelling me to rethink my pursuit of metagame 'balance' in terms of a more cyclic, longer-term time-average vs the ensemble average of current work allocation... (which I'm calling hyperopic balance)
May 2022
- Ship the Coεmeta Open Source Strategy repository in honor of May Day, as proper version-controlled artifacts reflecting our latest thinking & enabling greater collaboration & collective-sensemaking, as promised in the prior Public Work Log entry.
- Ship open source repositories for SADDERmetrics & NLP / Text Mining web app prototypes, as part of the commons / public-goods toolmaking pillar & positive-externality focus of the broader Coεmeta mission.
- Set up patronage platforms on ko-fi & paypal, begin adding links to repos & other public-facing resources — part of revenue strategy experimentation & diversification, as depicted in OKRs & other artifacts.
- Word of caution re: Paypal donations – After my first donation through the paypal interface, an automated, apparently anti-fraud system kicked in & held my funds hostage until I could jump through a bunch of nonsensical hoops, like providing proof of shipment of goods sold (of course there were none), proof of 501(c)(3) status (there is none expressed or implied), etc.
- I had to upload nonexistent documents through automated forms with no opportunity to add other details or explanation, or talk to a human. So I basically ended up providing proof of legitimate business, & solicitations for non-tax-deductible donations / patronage, & just submitting screenshots of the explanatory text I couldn't provide otherwise, in place of the nonexsitent docs they were requesting. Eventually there must have been some human review / intervention, or the bots were sufficiently appeased, because they released my funds without further harassment.
- Brief, spontaneous salience-filter-driven deep dive on community currencies, mutual credit systems, LETS, timebanking, etc — including building an MVP implementation in Airtable to wireframe the data structures, mechanisms & minimal architectures required for a working prototype.
- Hope to road-test this a bit with our fledgling crew, do some refinements then ship a public template, at the very least.
- Client work stabilizes & ramps up:
- Agree to an ongoing, open-ended engagement with longstanding clients City Bureau: the amazing, inspiring, visionary & deeply values-aligned Chicago-based nonprofit building capacity for participatory community-journalism as a public good, [mentioned previously]Begin client work based on initial discovery sessions, including with City Bureau, an amazing nonprofit org from Chicago with values & vision deeply aligned with Coεmeta's, building capacity for participatory community-journalism as a public good.).
- Begin new engagement with The Baltimore Banner — another deeply-aligned nonprofit local news startup, taking on the parasitic hedge funds & lumbering legacy orgs currently overseeing the desertification of local news & associated fallout. Crucially, I'm once again wholly indebted to luck & the kind referrals of others for this engagement, for which I'm deeply appreciative, humbled & hoping to repay or pay forward at every opportunity 🙏.
- Continue relational & mutual capacity-building efforts with slim remaining energy & bandwidth, via aforementioned crewing & mentorship / apprenticeship efforts, albeit at an admittedly minimally-viable level.
- Am gratified to witness inter-crew collaborations emerge on both paid & personal projects. Hope to build on this fledging social fabric & interdependent exchange.
Jun 2022
- Working 60-70 hr weeks due to spike in client work, minimal maintenance of some other pillar work, abandon most content creation & social posting plans etc – will revisit after harvest season.
- Quarterly taxes due again, generally easier the 2nd time around, with the exception of the Philly tax saga which is still unresolved
- Draft & publish this Public Work Log entry for the 6/21 midsummer solstice.
- (more to come...)
I'm keeping the raw scorekeeping & evaluation metrics out of these posts in favor of a more narrative & vibey approach. And to be frank I still haven't further developed or formalized my metrics framework, partly due to lack of time, partly due to lack of need: things are going well at a high-level & there's not much more to evaluate. (resist vanity metrics!)
But a few snapshots of my provisional metric tracking make that story pretty clear:
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I've more than doubled my original freelance work targets, more or less kept pace with relational & toolmaking work targets (albeit somewhat perfunctorily), all mostly at the expense of content work (& unpictured: social poasting & engagement, on which I've got some updated takes in store...).
And while my Q1 OKRs landed in a solid place, Q2 ...not so much, mostly due to lack of need (or capacity) for further revenue experiments — plus content creation, social posting, & peer-collaboration getting crowded out by the sudden spike in client demand (which has been greater than planned since month 2 of this journey — for which I'm fortunate & grateful!).
This is a situation where I might revise OKR targets to reflect changing circumstances, or score some KRs > 100% during evaluation to reflect the overperformance in some areas which resulted in corresponding underperformance in others. But ultimately I still consider these all valid goals in the long term, & expect things to even out over the longer time-average.
So getting to the vibe check...:
- I still feel really good, & immensely appreciative of my good fortune so far in this journey
- ...if a bit more tired, & more alert to potential looming risks on the horizon
Some of the greater balance attained last quarter has given way to the longer days of cultivation & harvest season, & longer shadows have been cast by the growing sun:
- recession risks, inflation, war & its nth-order effects on food production & supply chains during an ongoing global pandemic, in a time of generally high volatility & civil turmoil, etc.
So I'm not taking Coεmeta's salad days for granted, or expecting any sort of new long peace.
History never ended except for the airport literati.
But I am making the most of current opportunities & cherishing the greater independence, the variety of work itself, accelerated learning, & more palpable impact. All while staying humble in the face of unknowable & risk-laden future trajectories, maintaining alertness & requisite optionality, keeping the OODA loop looping & the strategy emergent.
I look forward to building on current momentum & leveraging this harvest for continued mutual capacity-building & an eventual return to planned vectors of more scalable & social work & impact, whether via scaling or sporing.
Which is all to say... the infinite game is made for playing, so game-on.