How values get set.
The formula computes; it doesn't decide what counts as good. Every variable weight, every coefficient, every judgment call about a contested benefit comes from somewhere — and that somewhere is people, organized in a specific way. This page is the machinery of the machinery: who supplies the numbers, how, and with what limits.
MethodHow to read this page
This page covers the value-setting process itself — the division of labor, the Citizen Jury procedure step by step, and its jurisdiction — and then something rarer than design doctrine: a real proceeding. One Citizen Jury actually convened, in November 2015, during the Chico demonstration pilot, and its full ruling survives. We walk through it, caveats included.
Read The Formula, Annotated first if you haven't — this page explains where that formula's inputs and dials come from.
The division of laborThree layers between the world and the number
"The algorithm decides" is shorthand. In full, three distinct layers feed every reward, and keeping them straight dissolves most confusion about who's actually in charge:
The data
Consumption records, satisfaction reports, scientific measurement, third-party verifiers, watchdogs — the streams that establish what happened. Judges, field workers, scientists, statisticians, and members of the public all feed this layer without belonging to any organization.
The Copiosis Organization
An all-volunteer body with exactly one job: ensure producers are fairly rewarded. Its Payers run the algorithm, determine working values case by case, and codify jury rulings into the variables. It executes; it doesn't legislate.
Citizen Juries
The public's control surface. Where a value is subjective — how much a contested practice benefits people, how heavily to weight an endangered species — juries of ordinary citizens hear evidence and direct the algorithm's planners. The dials belong to everyone.
The procedureA Citizen Jury, step by step
Selection, by lottery
At a set period, a random draw of device serial numbers selects the jurors. No volunteering, no campaigning, no way to seek a seat — the same randomness that makes bribing a jury impractical makes packing one impractical too.
Orientation
Experts first teach the jurors the process itself and how the algorithm works — what the variables mean, what the jury is being asked to set, how long the change will last, and how it will be implemented.
Testimony
Then the substance: researchers, statisticians, scientists, technicians, producers, and consumers present data and experience relevant to the question — new findings on an endangered species, a novel industrial process, a contested practice. Jurors question them. The format is a grand jury's, not a trial's: no defendant, no verdict on a person — a ruling on values.
Deliberation and ruling
The jury deliberates on specific posed questions and issues its ruling, directing the Copiosis Organization's algorithm planners to change the relevant variables in light of what it heard.
Codification — with a sunset
The Organization codifies the ruling into the algorithm's values for the period. Then the built-in humility: rulings last until the next period, when they expire and the question can be reheard with fresh evidence. No jury binds the future.
Jurors get paid
Serving produces net benefit, so jurors earn NBR for it — jury duty as rewarded production rather than conscripted burden.
Field evidenceThe one jury that actually convened
In November 2015, during the Chico demonstration pilot, a Citizen Jury met to answer a genuinely hard question: how should the algorithm value Reiki — a healing practice with sincere practitioners, satisfied clients, and a scientific mainstream that considers it pseudoscience? It's hard to design a better stress test for public value-setting: real money economies answer this question with lobbying, licensing fights, and marketing budgets.
The deliberation, question by question
Look at what the ruling accomplished. It didn't ban Reiki, didn't endorse it, didn't split the difference arbitrarily. It routed the judgment to the people affected: objective claims got a neutral value pending better evidence, and reported experience got the weight. A contested practice stayed legal, its practitioners stayed rewarded in proportion to the satisfaction they demonstrably created, and the whole reasoning went on the record — reversible at the next period if the evidence improves.
JurisdictionWhat juries can — and cannot — decide
Jury power is real but narrow, and the boundary matters as much as the power:
| Decision | Who actually holds it | |
|---|---|---|
| CAN | Set and revise the algorithm's variable values for subjective questions | Juries, per period, on evidence |
| CAN | Adjust the fine-tuning coefficients — the visible dials on the formula | Juries, per period |
| CAN | Direct algorithm changes when loopholes or new information surface | Juries, informing the Organization's planners |
| CANNOT | Set a Gateway or dictate how any producer distributes luxuries | The producer alone — Gateway and consent |
| CANNOT | Compel anyone to produce, or to tag output a certain way | The producer alone |
| CANNOT | Punish anyone — fines, seizures, sanctions don't exist | No one; the design has no punishment machinery |
| CANNOT | Withhold anyone's necessities | No one; necessities are unconditional |
The pattern in the table: juries govern measurement, never people. They can change what an act is worth; they cannot change what anyone is allowed to do. That's a deliberately small surface for majoritarian power — a jury that dislikes your work can value it at 1, but it can't stop you doing it, take your property, or touch your necessities.
The craft"More art than science" — and saying so out loud
Between jury rulings, the Payer Organization determines working values case by case — and the practice was described from the start, disarmingly, as more art than science: a living process, refined with every new conversation, where no single example describes how it happens every time. During the pilots, value-setting sessions were sometimes recorded and published so anyone could watch the sausage being made.
It would be easy to read that as a confession of weakness. It's better read as the design's central honesty: every economic system sets values through human judgment — markets through millions of pricing decisions, regulators through rulemaking, courts through damages awards. The difference here isn't that judgment disappears; it's where it lives and who can see it. Personal beliefs get an explicit channel — juries exist precisely so community values shape the variables — while the structure keeps any one belief system from significantly swaying the whole calculation.
Not a bureaucrat's number
No official sets values by decree. The Organization executes rulings and works cases; the values themselves trace to public process, expert testimony, and randomly drawn citizens.
Not fake objectivity
Where a value is genuinely subjective, the process says so and handles it as such — the Reiki ruling's neutral-plus-amplified-satisfaction structure is exactly what honest handling of uncertainty looks like.
Being honestWhat this page can and can't claim
Keep exploringRelated reading
The Formula, Annotated
The equation these values feed — every variable and dial, worked by hand.
Read this →Who Actually Runs It
The wider no-rulers architecture this value-setting machinery lives inside.
Read this →Can It Be Gamed?
Why bribing or packing these juries fails — the full threat model.
Read this →Now watch the values at work
Values set here flow into every calculation — follow one loaf of bread and watch them price a whole supply chain's worth of contribution.
Net benefit, farm to tableBack to Deep Dive