Hey @Matthew_Graham, thanks for sharing your feedback !
As a first note on this :
It’s important to clarify that, rather than a top-down approach, the general intention of this proposal is to empower / incentivize the community to develop and take ownership of new product ideas from the bottom up.
This has worked before with MVI and I’m sure can work again - we just need to get the framework right to make it :
1/ Enticing (both for methodologists and the Coop) : acknowledge the work that is going in a methodology prior to submission / inception, support the project in its bootstraping phase, associate the methodologist and the project contributors with the product upside - all funded in the most sustainable way, hence the proposed structure.
2/ Transparent : both in terms of organization (who’s doing what), budget (who’s paying who) and reporting to the community.
3/ Scalable : can it be replicated for several products without exponentially increasing our structure’s complexity ? As such, I agree with you and @jdcook that creating a WG or even a Pod for every new internal product might not be the optimum solution.
However, we should keep in sight that this proposal covers an initial period of 3 months, not (deliberately exaggerating) 15 years… We might as well see this as the 1st opportunity to iterate on some kind of accelerator for internal products such as iRobot, SODA or YHI ?
It’s worth noting that the funding structure proposed by @overanalyser for YHI is similar to iRobot’s, with the Coop retaining the methodologist bounty and methodologists being compensated via working group rewards !