# Collaboration Any member can pledge their time in hours to any product during the following life cycle stages of the product. 1. Production 2. Maintenance ### Production The renumeration can be equity ownership conversion or monetary reward or a combination of both. If the product does not meet *monetary voting threshold* to receive seed funding from root fund, the developer(s) can still ask the community for time contribution against equity without monetary reward. In the worst case scenario, the founder(s) themselves can pledge the full hours or raise external funding to hire employees and facilitate monetary rewards. In any case, the production of the product begins only once the estimated hours are pledged. The renumeration can follow milestone based offering, like first 50 hours contribution will only be monetary and from 50+ onwards, the member can choose to use their time contribution against securing equity ownership. The equity ownership conversation and vesting schedule must follow org's bylaws. ### Maintenance The renumeration will be primarily monetary with equity rewards occasionally according to number of hours or contribution milestones. ## Pledging and membership status A member should contribute the pledged time without fail. A member who fails to contribute their pledged time will be penalized with suspension of further contributions. A user can choose to pledge the *minimum thresholds* set by the project in that particular segment like design, coding etc of that project. There is no restriction on how many hours a member can pledge in total but, the member should manage to contribute to the project once the project commences and should meet the *minimum rate threshold*. Ex: 20 hr per month A member will have the choice to contribute as many hours as they can, as many projects as they can. Member will have the discretion whether to take risk and choose equity conversion or monetary reward or a combination of both. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://papers.21n.org/soft/how-it-works/collaboration.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.