Pioneer: A Utopian Leaderboard
An insight into the most important dynamics of the Pioneer tournament to unlock your Oasis
Pioneer is a virtual home for the creative outsiders of this world. It is a game that helps bring out the best in people and their projects through constructive feedback and anonymous accountability. Heavily inspired by the famous dystopian novel, Ready Player One by Erneste Cline, the game is ruled by a leaderboard, which rewards progress in your personal project which can be part of a very broad range of fields ranging from biology to philosophy.
During the December tournament in which I participated, I was positively surprised to see how a simple leaderboard brought out the best in me, pushed me to work harder and made me reach more of my goals. Thanks to the game my Easter Egg (a hidden 💎 in the Pioneer game 🗝), a project called Merit which is an artificially intelligent job application platform, advanced faster than it ever did before, making me one of the December finalists.
Even though I did not become a pioneer last tournament, which is supposed to grant you access to the Oasis, I am very excited to be playing the game again. Not only is it fun and inspiring, but it is most importantly incredibly valuable to have an accountability framework that pushes me to invest a lot of time and energy in my (side-)project. Upon re-entering the competition I also received a Pac-Man Coin worth 10 points, which could come in handy, for the spread of the leaderboard scores is not extremely large.
Just like Cline describes it in his book, the score increases in the leaderboard can seem random to both outsiders and other players. That is why as a data-driven person, I made it my goal to demystify some of the information that can be derived from the very rudimentary data-points that make up the leaderboard.
Demystifying the game
At all times the top 30 scores for all the different geographic regions are published online, these regions are Africa, Americas (non-US), Asia & Oceania, Europe, US East, and US West. The overall highest scoring profiles are published in the Global Leaderboard. Points are attributed at different stages in the game:
- Application: Signing up for the tournament and submitting all the requested material, gets you a set of points. This is obviously a level playing field, for this is the same for everyone.
- Problem Solving: After submitting your application, you are asked to solve a set of problems. The scores awarded for this part is how well you perform in relation to the overall group. If you are in the 70th percentile, 70 points are added to your score.
- Persona Selection: During a first round of voting a selection of the applications are shown which gives some insight in the person behind the pseudonym, her/his achievements and her/his commitment towards her/his project —in Pioneer as in the Oasis, gender is always abstracted. There are some fascinating people participating! You receive a fixed set of points for this.
Voting in the Pioneer tournament is always done in a binary fashion. You are given two descriptions and are required to up-vote one and down-vote the other while submitting feedback, tips or things you liked. The number of up-votes and the score of the person up-voting you will determine, the increase of your points.
- Progress Update: On a weekly basis, you receive points for looking back and planning ahead. Firstly, you submit a description of what you have worked on the past week, which can include your major achievements or the problems you encountered and solved. Secondly, you put yourself a new set of specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based goals guiding your next week.
- Progress Selection: The progress update everyone submits on a weekly basis serves as the input for other participants to up- or down-vote work. In order to incentivize people to invest time and efforts into discovering who made the most progress, you can gain bonus points by correctly up-voting a Pioneer-generated progress update.
- Board of Advisors: If you are among the top participants in the game you get the opportunity to reach connect with a set of 3 experts in your field, whom you get to select out of a total set of 9. You can interact with them, and if they are impressed by your work they can significantly increase your score.
Now that you understand the scoring system, I would like to give you the possibility to play around with the data I gathered over these past few weeks.
Disclaimer: I only gathered publicly available data which means that participants that were at least once part of their respective geographic top 30. Whatever conclusions are drawn from this data-set cannot be generalized towards the whole group of pioneer participants nor can I guarantee the correctness/completeness of this data.
The interactive graphs below give an insight into the geographic distribution of the participants. We can also break down the most popular main categories of the top performing projects. The third graph shows a scatter plot of the age versus the accumulated score in the tournament. We can see for almost all large enough subsets of the data that age is negatively correlated with success.
The interactive table below is a reconstruction of the leaderboard after the different voting events. Round one is the sum of the points for your application and your problem solving, round two is the result of the judgment of your persona and from there on they represent the additional points received through weekly progress voting. Below the table, you can see the average increase between the different rounds for the selected data.
A couple of things I found interesting here:
- From the data, we learn that people who make large progress tend to keep the flywheel going and keep being rewarded for it. Which is why the people in the global top 30 have a large staying power.
- We see that only 11 out of 30 people originally in the global leaderboard managed to stay in the global or local leaderboard at all rounds. Which is surprising because of a higher initial score can stem from the returning Pac-Man coin, worth 10 points, which would indicate that players know the game and are better equipped to play it well.
- The last thing worth mentioning is that apparently, the pioneer team re-calibrated the scores after round three, as the average increase went from above 500 points per round to only about half that.
My Easter Egg
With the project I have been working on these past few weeks I am trying to solve some of the pains I got acquainted with in a prior venture, called the London Banking Circuit. It is an agency that helps students and young graduates break into the finance industry by introducing them to our partnering investment banks, with whom we have close relationships.
From this experience, I learned among many other things that applying for a job is a hard skill in itself. Applying for internships or jobs requires strategy, structure, and feedback.
The aim of Merit is to help students and young graduates build and execute a job application strategy. I am building a free applicant-first platform, which allows job applicants to build an application funnel, keep track of their progress and get individualized data-driven advice.
As part of these past few weeks, I have been working on 3 main topics:
- Users: I have been interviewing my target group to make sure I understand the pains they have and validate the way I aim to remedy those pains. As a mission-driven project, bringing value to the young job applicants to help unlock their potential is the core of my ambition. With Merit, I do not want to become the 10^6th B2B HR-tech company.
- Product: First I designed a first version of the product after which I started building the minimal viable product — be it with large technical debt. I have launched a v0 of that MVP to be able to let users interact with it in order for me to learn. The MVP focusses firstly on building a structured platform to
- Algorithms: Because I believe that data-driven advice is one of the key value-driving pillars that will be instrumental for the success of job applicants and therefore of Merit, I am building and training machine learning algorithms. Using both implicit and explicit data to be able to do career path analysis, and interview success analysis. First, I focussed on the Finance industry because of the structured application processes and because of the training data-set I have access to.
Continuously inspired by the Pioneering universe of creative builders, I will keep building my project, hopefully unlocking the Pioneer Oasis one day. Nevertheless, the real Oasis is the one you build yourself. In my Oasis, young people will be able to unlock their potential during their job applications thanks to better structure and data-driven advice.
If you are interested in what I am building, you can subscribe on my website or drop me a DM on twitter.
In case you are a creative builder eager to find like-minded people, then you should really check out the pioneer website, and apply straight away for the next tournament.
