Public Roadmap and Open-Source Gateway

Decision

Four commitments, made together because they form a single posture toward who builds OLN and how their effort is recognized:

1. Publish a public roadmap. A third corpus, parallel to the Journal and the Register: projects are first-class records (P-NNN), with status, target milestone, summary, and a credit value attached. Viewers can read the roadmap from day one — the work is public the way the decisions and gaps are public.
2. Priority signal from viewers. Each project carries the same reaction primitive used on Journal and Register entries (Entry 015
   • G-036). Anonymous reactions are accepted; registered reactions may be weighted differently per G-036. The signal is advisory, not binding — it informs founder prioritization without taking the decision out of the founders' hands during the founding phase.
3. Open-source contribution gateway. Once the surface is published and stable, contributors outside the founding team can claim projects, submit work, and earn credits when their work is accepted. The claim semantics, submission flow, and acceptance gates are open (see G-038); the principle that there is such a gateway is decided.
4. Founder time accrues credits at the same denomination. The time the founders spend building OLN during the pre-launch phase is recorded against projects on the same roadmap, in the same credit units, as future contributor work. Founder credits are visible — anyone reading the roadmap can see how much Power founders earned for which projects — and are subject to the same calibration as contributor credits.

Why

Publishing decisions (Journal) and gaps (Register) without publishing the work that turns gaps into decisions is incomplete transparency. Visitors who agree with the project's framing can already react to entries; the roadmap gives them a place to push beyond reaction into participation.

Priority signal from viewers does what reactions on entries do, applied to forward-looking work: it tells the founders which projects the people who showed up actually want, which is information the founders cannot generate from inside their own heads. The signal is advisory because the roadmap during the founding phase is a Creator-level document; community governance over roadmap priority is itself a future register entry, not a launch-day capability.

The open-source gateway is the answer to a question Entry 005 implicitly raises: contributor sovereignty has to mean something operational, not just rhetorical. Letting outside contributors do real work on real projects — and earn real Power for it, not just a thank-you note — is how the contributor side of OLN becomes more than aspirational.

Founder credits at the same denomination is the most consequential of the four. It does three things at once. First, it makes founder Power scrutable — anyone reading the roadmap can see what the founders did to earn what they hold. Second, it sets a precedent: founder time is not intrinsically worth more than contributor time at the same task. Third, it disciplines the founders' own behavior — when the rate seems wrong, the founders feel it before the contributors do, which is the right incentive direction. The alternative posture (founder equity is set opaquely; contributor credits are pegged to it after the fact) is the default startup posture and is one of the things OLN is structurally designed against.

Alternatives considered

• Private roadmap; public only after launch. Rejected — the same argument as the Journal. Privacy here would make the open record one-sided: decisions and gaps published, but the bridge between them withheld. Visitors who care about how OLN gets built deserve to see the work the same way they see the decisions.
• Public roadmap but no credit attachment. Rejected — credits on tasks are the signal that the work is real participation, not unpaid labor. Publishing tasks without credit values reproduces the Fandom dynamic where contributor work generates value the contributors do not share in.
• Founder time credited at a different (higher) rate. Rejected on the same grounds as making founder equity opaque. If founder time is worth more, that's a calibration question the public deserves to see and challenge, not a fait accompli baked into the rate sheet.
• Wait until launch to publish the roadmap. Rejected — the pre-launch phase is exactly when the roadmap signal is most valuable for course correction, and exactly when early registered users (Entry 015) most need somewhere to engage beyond reactions on Journal entries.

What this leaves open

• G-038 — roadmap surface design and credit calibration. This is the big one: the credit-value methodology, claim/submission/acceptance flow, anti-gaming posture, founder-time logging procedure, and the relationship between pre-launch credits earned through tasks and the broader pre-launch credit accrual question (G-037).
• G-035 — comment / Q&A model. Comments on roadmap projects share the same design space as comments on Journal and Register entries.
• G-036 — reaction system parameters. Priority signal on projects reuses this primitive; the parameters are still open.
• G-006 / G-033 — platform economics and power dilution rates, which the roadmap's credit values feed into.