Level Of Commitment

Contribution measured as a negotiated reciprocal commitment on a scale of 1 to 7, agreed between a person and their community and revisited every couple of months — the unit the currency is denominated in.

Before it proposes anything, the canon rejects the two obvious alternatives, and the rejections are the load-bearing half.

Not time. Accounting for hours on task is named a major failure mode from direct experience — the builder's world of time-and-materials, unit pricing, lump sum. It measures the wrong thing, and the illusion of time-as-unit quietly imprisons the people inside it. Yet the deep value of working alongside one another, staying present to what emerges, processing what arises between people, is real and must not be lost — which is exactly what an hours ledger cannot see (Honesty about time).

Not value. Value matters more than time and is still the wrong meter. It can be perceived as scarce. Much of it is invisible. And measuring it requires surfacing and broadcasting everything one does — the precise opposite of doing the wise right thing at the right time for the right reasons, especially when nobody is watching. The person who is the glue of a community will always price themselves low; the person who performs will always price high.

So the unit is commitment: a co-commitment, spoken in both directions. Here is the level of commitment I am making, and here is the value I believe I can create toward our goals. The community answers, and together they land on one of seven levels — fewer levels in a young body, more in a mature one — reviewed every month or two, in the open. The bands run roughly from a tenth of oneself through a quarter, a half, three quarters, to what the canon calls full consciousness: not merely full time but the condition in which the work is what you think about in the shower and in your sleep, and which makes room for the epiphanies that cut whole seasons off the path.

It is a qualitative and human negotiation, and the canon says so plainly rather than apologising for it. Disagreement is expected; honest people sharing a feast make sure everyone is fed and that nobody takes more than their share, and that instinct — not a formula — is what the scale formalises. Grandmother on the couch being fed is contributing, and so is the person being helped; the return on that investment arrives in forms nobody can measure. What the scale does guard against is a different thing: someone contributing enormously to something that is not advancing the goal at all, which is Waste however sincere (Throughput · Design To The Goal).

A consequence is stated and not worked out: if this scaled to all humanity, the whole society would operate inside a 1-to-7 income band — a compression sharper than the 7:1 the cooperative tradition names (Compressed Pay Ratios), with standards of living adjusted across contexts as the old world's money is grappled with. That is a claim, made once, with no mechanism and no transition path behind it. It is recorded here so it can be tested rather than assumed.

Also called: the 1-to-7 scale · Level Of Commitment 1-to-7 Scale · the 1-to-7 Society (the same scale read at civilisation scale) Stands on: Commitment · Value · Consent · Trust · Dignity Opens onto: Energy and Commitment Based UBI · Compressed Pay Ratios · TimeEnergy · LUV · Proof-of-contribution · Kept as a share of made · The Offering · Honesty about time · Waste · Throughput · Economy · Money · Equal Opportunity For All · The states of a commitment In play: Home · beyond — agreed between a person and their body, and revisited at each turning Sources: Level Of Commitment (root page, draft; a working-session transcript in parts, with a summary paragraph appended) · Energy and Commitment Based UBI (root page, draft) · Audit Ledger memo R-5 ("Level Of Commitment 1-to-7 Scale") · lionsberg.wiki: Level Of Commitment Open: The seven levels are never enumerated. Five bands are described in one place (tenth, quarter, half, three-quarters, full consciousness) and seven are asserted in another; no page reconciles five with seven. · How a disagreement between a person's self-assessment and their community's is actually resolved is left to "wisdom and discernment," which is honest and is not yet a mechanism. · The 1-to-7 society is one sentence of inference; at what scale a ratio is measured — a Cell, a Company, a federation — is unstated here and in Compressed Pay Ratios alike.