Are you recruiting for people to offer bounties or to complete them? I'd suggest making this clearer in your post.
We are recruiting people interested in using Rallypoint in any way. The form has an optional question for what you hope to get out of using Rallypoint. Even if you don't plan on contributing to bounties or claiming them and just want to see how others use Rallypoint we are still interested in your feedback.
Yes. If the feedback from the beta is that people find Rallypoint useful we will do a public release and development will continue. I want to focus on getting the core bounty infrastructure very refined before adding many extra features. Likely said infrastructure would be easily adapted to more typical crowdfunding and a few other applications, but that is lower on the priority list than getting bounties right.
We are requesting beta testers for the closed beta release of Rallypoint: A platform for the creation of bountied requests related to AI safety. We offer a convenient means of requesting a good or service in exchange for a financial reward that is able to be crowdfunded.
The utility of Rallypoint is best communicated through an example.
Bob could benefit from someone doing X, so he creates a bounty backed by $5 for the completion of X. $5 is deposited from Bob's account into an escrow account. A bounty is similar to a prediction market; it describes a thing that could happen, and includes instructions for what to do if that thing happens. Those instructions detail how to distribute the funds sponsors have contributed to the bounty. Bob's bounty could look like:
After Bob has created the bounty, Alice sees the bounty (maybe Bob sent it to her or she saw it on a LessWrong post Bob made). She knows she doesn't have time to do X, but she would also like for someone to do X, so she contributes $10 to the bounty. $10 is moved from her account to the same escrow account as Bob's funds.
While the bounty is up, claims can be submitted. Claims are public appeals to the creator of the bounty that some work the claimant has done meets the resolution criteria. Bob will review these claims, and when he feels that one satisfies the resolution criteria, he declares such. After a review period, the funds in the escrow account will be released to the successful claimant. If there have been no successful claims before the expiration date, the funds are returned from the escrow account to the contributors.
We imagine Rallypoint could be useful for tasks such as:
More details about the bounty process will be publicly available when we fully deploy Rallypoint. The exact mechanism behind bounties could be subject to change during our beta testing round.
To become a beta tester, we require only your email address. You can also optionally provide a description of yourself and some other details. Please fill out this form if you are interested. We will contact you via email in the coming weeks with more details about Rallypoint and the beta testing round.