Decision
The thing being built now — the structured, canonical franchise pages — is the network layer, not the communities. The economy is split in two:
- Network layer. The clean, centralized franchise data rendered as user-friendly canonical pages. These pages carry ads whose revenue feeds the network fund, link out to communities, and serve as the annotation source for community writing.
- Communities. A separate, feature-rich, modernized wiki-farm built on top of the network's clean data — largely a future layer (Entry 037 specifies how it is authored).
The fund model that governs them:
- Network self-sufficiency first. The network fund (network-page ads + API licensing + other network revenue) must cover all network expenses on its own before anything is pulled from communities.
- Community contribution is a backstop. Communities carry their own ads into their own treasury. Only when the network fund cannot cover expenses does the network draw a percentage from community treasuries — and a per-community ad toggle is therefore a governance lever.
- A slush fund seeds new communities. Funded by a small guaranteed slice of network revenue plus a top-up from surplus, it fronts the one-time data-processing cost of onboarding a community (wiki import + franchise-data import) as a repayable advance, recouped from that community's treasury once it earns. The slush therefore revolves. Awards are sized by a rubric on expected network effects, with discretion.
Why
Network-self-sufficiency-first keeps communities unburdened until the network genuinely needs help — consistent with the welcoming, wiki-farm spirit, and with contributor ad sovereignty (Entry 005) and the revenue waterfall (Entry 004). The slush fund lets a new community start without immediately facing its own economics. Deferring the exact percentages until real per-franchise revenue and cost numbers exist avoids picking blind.
Open threads
- The community-pull mechanism: how the backstop percentage is sized dynamically as costs and usage shift, and the trigger threshold (a recalculation engine).
- The cost-overhead allocation model that feeds that recalculation.
- Scholarship caps and rubric weights (config-level, not blocking).
- How a community commissions and pays for a feature from its treasury.