NVC Video Prize
Jacob's $1,000 bounty.
What it is
"Have $1,000 prize out for whoever makes the best 20-minute video on how to learn nonviolent communication."
The thesis:
- Nonviolent Communication is high-leverage and underdistributed
- The barrier is not the protocol's complexity — it's that the existing introduction materials don't optimize for the new-learner case
- A great 20-minute video would lower the activation cost dramatically
- $1,000 is small relative to the population-scale benefit if a great one exists
Why a contest
Two reasons a contest beats just paying a known producer:
- Search vs. commission — you don't know in advance who can make the great video. Surfacing through a contest is more reliable.
- Visibility — the contest itself raises awareness of NVC among potential producers, all of whom learn enough to enter.
Why 20 minutes
Long enough to actually transmit the NVC moves. Short enough to be watched in one sitting. Most existing NVC explainers are either too short (TED talk-style, no hands-on transmission) or too long (workshop-recording, requires investment).
The larger pattern
This is one example of a class of moves: small bounties on the production of high-leverage instructional content. The same logic could apply to any of:
- Learning qigong arms-up well
- Linear algebra intuition (Jacob mentions this as something he wishes he'd had earlier)
- Adult-development introductions
- The Wu Wei Disclosure talk
- Iyengar yoga first-month curriculum
If you have a small grant budget and a list of high-leverage underdistributed topics, bounty-funding instructional content has a high ROI structure.
Related
- Nonviolent Communication — what's being taught
- Marshall Rosenberg — the originator
- Healing Arts Grant — same pattern (small money, high leverage, distribution problem)