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The DT4T Community will officially launch later this year. Before we open our community up to vetted Members, we're presenting our complete Community Blueprints for public comment.
If you want a say in how this community will operate, you can add your feedback at the bottom of this page.
To peruse the rest of our Community Blueprints, click here.
Stewards are the Members who keep the gears turning behind the scenes to ensure a safe, accessible, well-functioning community for all of us. Stewards:
vet our Members
mediate conflicts
design and run our website and app
securely maintain our Member data
send out Member communications
market our community to new Members
manage our finances
and more!
Stewards are compensated modestly out of our Central Fund.
Because we are all disabled, we don’t get the same output from putting in the same amount of effort. Sending an email, for example, is a task that some members can do without disrupting their day, while other members would view it as their main activity for the week.
We don’t believe it’s fair to pay those people the same amount for sending that email when one of them puts in significantly more effort to do it than the other has to. So, at DT4T, how much we get paid is about how much effort we put in, regardless of the size of our output. Organically, members who are more severely disabled will end up being paid more per hour than less-disabled members will.
To make “effort” a less ambiguous thing to measure, anyone who performs Stewardship work will log those efforts in the DT4T app as “Spoons,” rather than hours. We assign specific values to different quantities of “Spoons” (see below).
The name “Spoons” comes from “Spoon Theory,” which is a common framework in the chronic illness community for assigning value to our limited capacities. We don’t endorse Spoon Theory as an accurate descriptor of our universal experiences; we just use it as a linguistic framework.
1 Spoon: This task didn’t take much effort. I didn’t need to prepare or recover.
Despite our best efforts to standardize it, effort is a subjective measure. Stewards can record any number of Spoons, using the above as a guideline. We use an honor system and trust our guts in deciding how many Spoons to log.
At the end of each quarter, our Central Fund’s financial surplus (any profits we make after paying off our expenses) will be divided proportionally among everyone who logged spoons that quarter.
Because DT4T is not a registered business or charity, we are not equipped to withhold taxes nor supply tax forms. Stewards are responsible for reporting their own taxable income to the IRS.
After 6 months, Members can either opt in to help with administrative work (no additional qualifications necessary) or apply for a specialized position on the Vetting Team, Conflict Resolution Team, IT Team, or Finance Team. The existing members of each team review incoming applications.
Members who consult on accessibility protocols can be compensated even if they haven’t been Members for 6 months yet.