III. Do So Sustainably
How we pay for what we do
We're building an economic ecosystem as much as an applied metatheory one. Here's how:
Integrative metatheory is a relatively new, advanced and niche public good. Funders don't realize they have metatheoretical problems, and most of society's best innovations draw on some manner of cross-disciplinary thinking, but often without an active recognition they're doing so. This creates a central challenge for metatheory as a leading-edge public good: it needs support to foster integrative solutions, but without funding cannot easily create those solutions to begin with, a classic chicken and egg problem (one which, in most other instances of this kind, leaves it to donors and government to fund through quasi-academic institutional channels).
The Institute of Applied Metatheory has been setup to ensure it's resilient and diversified in the face of this challenge. We've geared the effort for long-term sustainability, wide sharing of incentives that get "distributed to the edge", and diverse opportunities for project sponsorship:
Passionate leadership. Everything we do starts with passionate, generative leadership. During this early phase, the organization's leadership itself is all-volunteer or donated so that all funding can be pushed out to the edge.
Community funded. The Institute is designed as a platform for raising money from the nearly 100,000 people (and the institutions they represent) in the global integrative metatheory community. The power of metatheory works in our favor when we can address any topic that a funder needs to understand in more rich detail, all while tapping into that same community for the expertise to do so.
Diversity of sources. The Institute is designed for a diversified source of funding from individual and institutional donors, institutional sponsors, platform access, and professional service fees (e.g., in the case of implementation of enterprise-level initiatives).
Economic cooperative. Money in goes out to the edge where the work is being done, either in initiatives, platform development or otherwise. For example, one of the Institute's early Initiatives is to map the implementation of a proprietary community cryptotoken that tracks and incentivizes value contribution across the entire applied metatheory movement.
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