ABE launch announcement

[Siddhartha Kasivajhula]

Friends,
It gives me great pleasure to announce that we recently launched ABE on the pilot projects and successfully delivered the initial payouts [1, 2, 3] to contributors who were identified through DIA! 🥳 💰 🎩

Now, the amounts may seem small from the perspective of each contributor, but I wanted to highlight a few things about what we've accomplished together to put things in perspective:

• We paid actual money to six actual people, while dozens more have small amounts owed to them that are publicly recorded [1, 2, 3]. These people -- like most of us -- contributed freely without expecting to get paid. Yet, payment for value provided is necessary to the best outcomes for all of us. It is a privilege to be able to recognize these contributors and you've made it possible.
• We've appraised two medium-sized and established open source projects via the fledgling process of DIA [1, 2] -- a new process that we are still defining together, and which improves itself each time we do it.
• We've created technological aids to automate various aspects of the social processes powering ABE.
• Draft founding documents for the new economic system, including a complex financial model, which gives us a concrete theoretical foundation that is already informed by input from experts and will continue to benefit from expert review and modification.
• An accounting system (Old Abe) that implements many of the rules described in the financial model and can be used by any project that wants to adopt ABE.
• And last but not least, I want to highlight that the $400 that ABE projects have received so far are a testament to the generosity and vision of our founding investors. ABE doesn't need "angels" with deep pockets. Our "investors" are ordinary mortals among us - just the kind of people who can make (and are making) a real difference.

There are still a few follow-up items we will be addressing in the coming weeks to make Old Abe more fully featured, and that will round out the initial phase of ABE.

In the next phase, we will be looking to demonstrate (1) that ABE can generate enough revenue to sustain open source software development (and the people behind it!), (2) that it can scale in its implementation, and (3) that projects will adopt it.

These are difficult problems, and the road ahead is long, the destination shrouded in fog. After all, no one has managed to crack the code yet. But just with us each contributing where and when we can, and with the amount of talent that we already have here and the resourcefulness and generosity that we have already seen (which I am honestly humbled by), we have made these tangible and promising strides. I cannot doubt that we will get there.

ABE is based on the simple yet revolutionary idea that if we empower value that we recognize -- all value that we recognize and not just some value accessible to some heuristic like supply and demand -- that alone is enough to achieve good outcomes at arbitrary scale, to make all of the rhythms of our complex world beat in consonance. Today, by our collective efforts, we've managed to start to do just that. Thank you!

-Sid