n.V3-3.03 | INSIDE A PROJECT: TASKS, THE DRM, THE REWARD
01| Open a funded project and you find a plan made of tasks. Not phases, not workstreams — tasks, each one small enough that a single person can be held responsible for it and each one carrying a stated reward.
02| Every task has a Direct Responsible Maveriq. One name. Shared responsibility is how tasks die quietly in every organisation ever built, and a barrio team of eight friends is more vulnerable to it than most, not less, because nobody wants to be the one who names the person who did not deliver. The DRM structure moves that confrontation from the social plane to the plan. The task did not get done, and the plan says who owned it. That is easier to say out loud than "you let us down."
03| Tasks are designed with a role in mind — the project needs someone doing outreach, someone handling procurement, someone keeping the numbers. But if no Maveriq holding that role is available, someone else takes it. We are not building a guild. In a barrio with twelve active Maveriqs, role purity is a luxury that would stop projects from happening.
04| Between 35 and 50 percent of a project budget goes to the Maveriqs who do the work, including hired help from the SmarterCrowd. That range is a design decision with consequences in both directions, and it deserves to be argued rather than stated.
05| Push it higher and PI Production becomes a jobs programme wearing a project's clothes. Materials get thin, the quality of the delivered thing falls, impact buyers notice, and the Exchange stops clearing. Push it lower and the Maveriq is a volunteer with extra steps — which is the model we came here to destroy. The band is where labour is genuinely paid and the thing being built is genuinely built.
06| The reward attaches to the task, not to the person's seniority or their hours. This is the sharpest break from how the social sector pays. A senior Maveriq who takes an easy task earns what that task is worth. A rookie who takes a hard one earns what the hard one is worth. Income tracks contribution, visibly, in a document everyone on the team can read.
07| That visibility is doing more work than the money. In most poor communities, who gets paid what by an outside programme is a rumour, and rumours about money are how community projects turn into feuds. A published task-reward table does not eliminate resentment. It makes resentment specific and therefore arguable: not "she is getting more" but "that task is priced too high," which is a conversation a team can actually have.
08| Task pricing is where we expect to be wrong for a long time. We do not yet know what a barrio outreach task is worth, and the first CITI will get it wrong in both directions — overpaying for the visible work, underpaying for the coordination that holds a project together and that nobody notices until it is absent. Pricing will be corrected by data across many projects and many barrios, not by a committee deciding what is fair. We should say plainly that early Maveriqs will carry the cost of that learning.
09| One thing the reward structure deliberately does not do is pay for effort that produced nothing. If the project was never funded, there is no budget and there are no task rewards. The plan exists, the Exchange rejected it, and the team is out the design work. That is the next chapter, and it is the one people argue with most.
