Consider:

1. Most orgs have unsolved research questions and people paid to work on them. This includes orgs that do knowledge work, product development, global strategy, or engineering. (Often the mission statement is itself a Turtle Question: "How best to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful?", "What does it mean to build community and bring the world closer together?", etc.)
2. Most orgs also run experimental platforms—social networks run sociology experiments and data mining, media channels test different kinds of content, product and marketing companies run a/b tests, etc.

While some orgs want to capture research results as trade secrets, for others an extra-org pool of researchers, sharing the same turtle questions, would be attractive. If such a pool existed, it might be able to use experimental platforms from several orgs to accelerate the resolution of these questions.

Open Source has been a way to do just such a deaggregation/reggregation in software development—to bring it outside of the walls of individual corporations. Could we do the same with research questions and experimental platforms, and create a market much bigger than the market for open source? This is one of the lofty goals for turtleocracy: to make a robust market for both turtle-y researchers and social experiments that operate within orgs, between orgs, and outside of orgs.

Economic Model

• In order to participate, organizations and researchers have to clarify their research topics into Turtle Questions which are then networked into a HS Web of Questions.
• When an org cares about progress on a question, it can attach money and researchers to it.
• Questions are linked to together via various relationships as described in Constructing the Web of Questions.
• Money flows through the web. Money which funds a question also funds nearby questions which can inform that question.
• Participation in the turtleocracy also involves taking certain experimental apparatuses or channels within an org and making them available to other researchers.
• Flow of payments could be managed via blockchain tokens or via a periodic settlement platform like Stripe Connect.

Transformation of Work

Such research agreements can transform organizations: reconfiguring relations between workers and bosses, and altering which assets are under control.

• No bosses. When an org places one of their researchers into the Turtleocracy, there could be an agreement that the org no longer can tell that person what to do or what to work on. Instead, their work is monitored by the Turtle Check process within the turtleocracy itself. From the org's point of view, they can place people and funds into, or pull them out, of the turtleocracy, but they can't micromanage.
• Experiments from outside.
• Shared retreats.

Some Accounting Details

• Each person gets paid based on the proportion of their week that they're being a turtle for each question, combined with an assessment of their neighboring turtles about how marginally difficult it is to find a turtle like them.
• Turtles can shift their allocation between questions, and based on that shift, neighbors get a support request and can authorize the shift.