I'm kind of shocked by the heat that this post is generating and I don't want to escalate the discussion into a more defensive place. But I believe that Hive account@tmaust has raised some necessary, if uncomfortable, questions about the issues of fair compensation and the ethical/practical sustainability of this project as it currently stands as a model for a more widespread funding strategy. He's laid out a reasonable argument and argues his point in reference to established professional ethics standards within the public history field.

Part of our job as public historians is to pose tough and thorny questions of our own work and that of our colleagues; evaluative self-reflection is a natural outcome of the advanced training in critical thinking for which we are going to graduate school to attain in the first place. The point of an experiment is to identify what works and what doesn't. The next iteration will look different, and the next after that further still. I don't see Hive account@tmaust disputing that anywhere.