Thank you @gideonro soo much for the work you have done bringing us to this very moment, from all the hours spent laying the groundwork for and developing the concept of the Sampo WG to making those on this topic board aware of new posts through any and all other means available. You have championed this cause and we all infinitely appreciate every effort you have made.
As for the responses presented here thus far, every response demonstrates intelligence and is marked by the most encouraging of all sentiments, hope. If each respondent here did not believe actions taken immediately, whatever they might be, could not effectively contribute to an eventual, or immediate, partial solution to the crisis we are staring down, they would simply not have spoken as the result would have been a foregone conclusion in their minds. Cumulatively, their voices are the substance of that hope. So letās re-examine each one, and find the commonalities that shine through.
Let me respond to each, starting with the newest. Thank you so much @vasilysumanov for being brave, poignant, and timely with your first response here. The prescient nature of your words and the deep subject-matter expertise they carry cannot be overstated.
Iāll very quickly state openly my alignment with your first point and the most concise summation of responses collectively. I agree that immediate earning is paramount. Iāll return to the other side of that coin momentarily, but I want to first thank you again for acknowledging from the beginning, that while the ideally simple maxims are completely appropriate for this discussion, in practice, they are exceedingly difficult to achieve. From the most sensible mathematical standpoint, balancing this equation can be accomplished quickly, and easily. Simplicity is elegance. On paper and strictly by the numbers, I agree with @trentmc0 in that cutting spending, nearly to or outright to zero, may be required, but perhaps, just perhaps, we can ideally avoid that amputation if we focus our collective will on the earning side of the equation. I think that is, after all, the foundational concept of Sampo, and the economies of abundance that we all have hoped to implement.
To your second point, thank you again for acknowledging that the overall task of treasury management is NOT easy, while providing a number of the prerequisite tasks. This is thoroughly appreciated. It has given me personally, a straightforward, easy-to-understand, starter playbook for trying to contribute to supporting this WG. Iāll be returning to this post frequently in the coming days/weeks/months. Chances are it will end up pinned on my wall somewhere within 3 feet of my head. 
Your final recommendations are really top-notch in that they provide us practical steps for what feels like crisis triage, and will lead me to a simple exit poll on this (my first opportunity to offer a relevant poll question). Iāll try to contact @gideonro to see if we canāt begin drafting a six month max spend proposal, but if anyone else wants to start that immediately, please donāt hesitate to reach out and weāll at least get the ball rolling together. Iām available for this all day/week. After this post, Iāll go ahead and create the preceding prereq forum topic to begin the necessarily controversial discussions. Iām confident we can keep things productive and civil no matter how hot the topic gets, but it is very smart to give that itās own space.
Without a doubt your most controversial point, and in my humble opinion, your most critical point is bringing up the issue of a special treasury committee. This is a sticky point but represents a stern test for our governance system and current structures. How do we select an objective group with the necessary knowledge that can make effective, immediate term decisions ie made within the next 5 mins? The culture of TEC has, and always will, emphasize the principles of transparency and community, and while many, many eventualities were foreseen and planned for, this particular circumstance I feel represents a position we had hoped not to find ourselves in, and perhaps was somehow, unfortunately overlooked. With the benefit of hopeful hindsight, perhaps we can use this opportunity to build yet another standout cultural primitive.
I typically try to avoid editing forum posts to hopefully demonstrate as much forethought and attempted organization as possible, but I want to post this and keep the discussion rolling, so I will be editing this post over the next several hours, copiously, 1 edit at a time, to include each respondentās points and how I perceive the overlay and interplay. Please feel free to reach out in between for further discussion if so desired. The last thought Iāll leave everybody with for now as a relevant thought experiment, apart from the poll is, āWhat would be required for TEC to earn itās first income, say, before the end of today? How do we make our first buck? And where do we hang it?ā =P
- Does this moment represent an existential crisis for the TEC? Does it justify suspending cultural practices like community voting in order to prioritize survival?
- Yes and Yes.
- Yes and No.
- No and No.
- No and Yesā¦
Responding to @akrtws , thank you so much for all of your efforts within TEA and TEC. It is such a refreshingly benevolent demonstration of kindness and patience. With regards to this post, I have an unbounded respect for your opinion on any topic, but I am particularly intrigued by your statement on needing to be faster and more radical. Furthermore, your sharing the insight regarding the drop in TEC price deriving from a hatcher who had significant confidence previously and has now run out of patience, combined with your further explicit admission of existential concern for the TEC outright, is essentially a room stopping statement, mic drop, all ears moment.
So letās really get into the details point by point. The yield farming idea is brilliant. For starters though, should we/you create a separate forum topic to center discussion this concept around? Seems like it would be particularly ideal. Or is it all more appropriate to house here for context? If creating and driving a new topic is something you donāt have the bandwidth for, thatās completely understandable. If that is the case, maybe we could begin the discussion on parameters and the technical details of how one might go about accomplishing this? Iād love to learn, and would do my best to continue to drive the discussion and construction of a functional version of this. With your demonstration of the huge difference in outcomes acting now versus later, I can personally justify suspending any other hypothetical task for the sake of saving those kinds of numbers for the Common Pool. I have zero experience in constructing yield bearing mechanisms short of playing with LP farming on my own, and very shortly with Giveth on rinkeby in a little test party just before their token launch. I didnāt understand much if anything then, and only marginally more now, but admittedly havenāt dedicated myself to that explicit task like I would in this instance.
On your second point regarding token utility, Iāve had several ideas for some time now, but lacked the confidence to share them for fear of sounding foolish. The time for being afraid has now passed; perhaps never was. Fear is real, but often invalid. In this instance, I should have been braver despite my fear, and just spoken up. If nothing came of the ideas, fair enough. No worries. But if I had spoken up and we were able to use anything that resulted in any form, more value would have been created versus the zero value preserved saving my ego in the shadows. Sincere apologies for that, and thank you for making this feel safe enough that I could speak on it. I wouldnāt call myself a Token Engineer yet, but am aspiring to be able to justify the moniker someday. Iām very much looking forward to TE Fundamentals.
On your third point regarding limiting proposal amounts, I guess I would just ask why specifically $25K? Is there a good reason for a fixed number, or should this limit be something like a function of their previous burn rate? Perhaps even weighted according to the necessity of the group from a purely survivalist viewpoint? I think the question could possibly begin to force WG stewards to postulate whether their day-to-day operations represent completely necessary functions, or whether they represent building functions that would add future value to the TEC in an idealist sense. At this present moment, itās important to get everybody to acknowledge survival is what is at stake, and to accept that suspension of certain ideal states, for a time period, might be necessary. Or else all our idealism wonāt matter any longer.
In response to @trentmc0 I wanted to take this opportunity to personally thank you for being kind to me one day when I peeked my head into a TEA session months ago, and when I had the good fortune of being tasked with messaging you in a ācold callā dm on Telegram on behalf of the TEC regarding the āHatcher Outreach.ā Both instances were firsts for me. First moments of a TEA session of any sort, and first day even using Telegram. You were kind and encouraging, and Iāll never forget that. Thank you for Token Spice and Ocean Protocol. Each is a wonderful tool for our collectively burgeoning ecosystem. Your time and applied expertise has and will continue to provide value to hundreds/thousands/millions of individual human beings going forward.
With regards to this response, there is a great deal said here with few words. I wish I could channel that kind of efficiency into my communications. Maybe I should get back into coding again. 
I would absolutely concur itās great to see you posting serious discussion, for the first time, about the most important topic of all. There are so many outstanding human beings on the Trusted Seedās member list, and while each has their own personal obligations to other communities, of much greater scale no doubt, this community represents that focal, or Schelling, point that game theory predicts. Perhaps this is one of those inevitabilities foretold within āThe Strategy of Conflict.ā While it is completely understandable that time has not permitted you to share your words with the rest of us aspiring Token Engineers more frequently, we all draw immense benefit from sharing time, space, and ideas with each other. I daresay we all would do better to share and offer more of ourselves with each other, more frequently.
As for the yield bearing strategy and mechanism, awesome. And the simple maxim, also awesome. Only spending what you can earn is a perfectly reasonable and succinct codification of a functionally sustainable strategy. Also, itās fair. I like fair and sustainable things. Lots. Thanks for keeping that short and to the point. Iāll go ahead and consume yearn.finance this evening and bring back what I learn to Sampo.
This was a wonderful life lesson that you blessed me with, in the space of a forum post. Thank you sir. 
In response to @Letty , I want to express my appreciation for you expressing everything you have with the Omega viewpoint. I have loved the concept of Omega ever sense I read about it on the website in August, the first day that I learned the TEC even existed. The cultivation of self-knowledge and self-care are of the highest magnitude of relevance for each of us individually, and all of collectively, if we are to achieve the ultimate aim of thriving. I am not a steward/WG lead either, and it took a lot of time and quiet effort learning about the culture and structure of the organization to even be able to begin to understand that there might have been certain truths playing out that were less than ideal. That said, the fact that you stuck with it, learned what you did, and were brave enough to elaborate on exactly what it was that was less than ideal, speaks volumes about your perseverance, fortitude and character. Thank you for you.
I was also particularly surprised that a yield farm had not been considered until now. I spoke about this several days ago in another forum post, and it felt like a novel concept here; that felt odd. I agree that while the price has fallen, it has not been a dramatic decline and is in line with expectations per market conditions. If I may, in the second sentence of your first point you reference āburn out rate.ā I think you are referring to the burn rate, or just spending rate, that is taking place and if so, then I agree that it can at least be made acceptable again once we begin to understand our rate of income. Everyone is reasonable, and if adjustments need to be made, each can make their own determination whether they can afford to continue to participate. I, for example, live with my mother, who is an exceptionally patient woman. I donāt have a paying job, but I still do my best to participate and learn simultaneously, in the hopes that I can eventually do something I love to do, and be fortunate enough to be paid something, really anything, for the privilege. That said, not everybody is as fortunate as me with respect to being able to live with their parent. There is also another connotation perceivable from āburn out rateā that I donāt think you were referring to, but your words are particularly serendipitous if not intended, because it brings the concept of āburnoutā up at a particularly good moment for this discussion. While there is no permission required to participate in a DAO like the TEC, there is also no practical means of deciding where and when to stop participating, short of our physical bodies beginning to give out. Since I am not a paid full-time contributor that can demonstrate regular income to my family, it is exceedingly difficult for anyone without the guarantee of regular income to justify participation to the outside world, much less our own minds. Tugging at this thread begins to unravel one of the darker truths to these kinds of organizations, or really any org without sustainably fixed salaries. We have been relying on human extractable value. Sweat. Tears. Maybe even blood. Weāve been squeezing time and money out of each other, and while this was likely never the intent of any one individual, it is now, with the benefit of hindsight, somewhat inevitable, just like a moment where a special treasury council would have been required. It could have been, and was, hoped that these issues could be avoided through sheer willpower alone, but that would have required perfect prediction, and flawless execution from day one. Something like divine foresight. I believe in God, but I think divine foresight is a myth, even for the Creator of the complex, adaptive dynamic system we all live in. In a way, thatās what makes it all the more beautiful. What we can do to honor such a lovely world as the one we inhabit is to accept the futility of infallible prediction, and learn from our mistakes. This topic is a great place to begin doing that.
To return to the āburnoutā rate, if we acknowledge this is a real phenomenon and not just something Iām expressing alone, then I think we need to re-task some of the already budgeted funds to begin a very human to human survey of everyone who has made even the minimalist effort to participate, and just make sure people are ok, and find out the concerns they might have had. @Juankbell introduced us at Gravity to a wonderful DAO Health Survey that could be incentivized in a way that we begin to care for the āburnoutsā and begin to understand what we can improve on. Maybe it is also time to begin discussing our own UBI, but that is for another topic.
As far as going through point by point, Iāll ask your forgiveness for not highlighting each one of your well stated points and offering why I think you are correct on all accounts, but please momentarily accept that I do agree with each of your points regarding the inability to easily identify and describe the value offered by TEC, the unfortunate truth about the lack of internal coordination for funding proposals, the reality of the fragmented TEC, the fact that the story could have been different yet isnāt, or the fact that what is functioning, at least from a certain point of view, is a knowledge of internal operations and subsequent salary distribution machine. Inverse Sampo. Extracting from the decentralized world to feed the core. But it doesnāt have to be that way. I suppose the choice is all of ours whether itās even worth fixing. For token holders, thereās no question. But for those like me, without being a hatcher or having any income beyond my GIVstream (thank you Giveth team and @Griff ) I have no tokens to preserve. And none thawing. So Iām going to take the rest of this Sunday evening to rest my mind and body a little, before going to learn all I can about yearn.finance, while deciding for myself, contingent upon the receptivity of the other participants here, whether we can truly iterate on TEC towards something capable of facilitating the ability to thrive, or whether we will deceive ourselves into thinking we can solve all the worldsā problems from our keyboards. I know what Iāve believed up to this very moment, but Iāll have to think and pray on this long and hard tonight. If you are reading this, I appreciate you more than further words can describe. I look forward to engaging with you all again tomorrow. g3n3.
