Three-tier contributor model
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docs(2g): corpus-wide mechanical quality pass
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ title: "Three-Tier Contributor Model" slug: contributor-model category: governance type: topic quality: core quality: complete short_description: "The Three-Tier Contributor Model organises PointSav substrate contributors into Core (4–7 salaried engineers), Paid (50–100 contracted project contributors), and Open (10,000-plus public participants), with explicit mobility paths between tiers." status: active bcsc_class: public-disclosure-safe @@ -16,9 +16,7 @@ paired_with: contributor-model.es.md --- > The Three-Tier Contributor Model organises PointSav substrate contributors into Core (4–7 salaried engineers), Paid (50–100 contracted project contributors), and Open (10,000-plus public participants), with explicit mobility paths between tiers. The PointSav substrate is too broad for any single team to maintain and too valuable to lock to a single team's release cadence. The **Three-Tier Contributor Model** that follows from this constraint produces three distinct tiers — Core, Paid, and Open — with explicit mobility paths between them. This article describes the tiers, the mathematics of why the model works, and the architectural primitives that make it tractable. The PointSav platform is too broad for any single team to maintain and too valuable to lock to a single team's release cadence. The **Three-Tier Contributor Model** that follows from this constraint produces three distinct tiers — Core, Paid, and Open — with explicit mobility paths between them. This article describes the tiers, the mathematics of why the model works, and the architectural primitives that make it tractable. ## The three tiers @@ -78,15 +76,13 @@ The path: each Foundry-shaped customer who runs the substrate becomes a candidat It is not a hierarchy in the dignity sense. The Open tier is not lower than Core; it is differently scoped. A contributor who ships a substrate-shaping LoRA adapter as Open is doing work the Core tier could not have done alone. It is not a replacement for governance. Core makes architectural decisions; Paid implements; Open contributes. But the Constitutional Convention process per Doctrine §III is the venue for substrate-level disagreements, and any contributor can bring an amendment. It is not a replacement for governance. Core makes architectural decisions; Paid implements; Open contributes. But the platform's constitutional convention process is the venue for architectural disagreements, and any contributor can bring an amendment. It is not a venture-scale labour model. The 50–100 Paid tier sustains on multi-tenant aggregation revenue without venture-scale capital — the unit economics work because the headcount is small, the deliverables are bounded, and the customer base pays for outcomes rather than tickets. ## See Also ## See also - [[compounding-substrate]] - [[apprenticeship-substrate]] - [[customer-hostability]] - [[canadian-simple-copyright]] ## References