Alpha School is our first school partner
Alpha School families are the first cohort capturing household clips for Node Data bounties — students do the filming, parents approve every clip and hold the money, and the school's founder has backed it.
By Casper White
Node Data has a school partner: Alpha School. Alpha families are the first cohort capturing the household clips that robotics companies commission on the bounty board, and the arrangement was agreed with Joe Liemandt, who founded the school.
It matters because of what is scarce. Physical AI is bottlenecked on video of ordinary tasks in ordinary homes — the kind no lab can manufacture and nobody can scrape. Alpha already believes the premise this rests on: that students do real work for real customers to a real standard, and that money is legitimate feedback.
What an Alpha family actually does
A company posts a bounty — a specific task, a number of clips, a quality bar — and funds it into escrow before anyone records anything. A student points a phone at the task with ND GO. Every clip is graded automatically against published criteria before a human sees it, and a rejected clip costs the buyer nothing.
The student is the camera operator, never the subject. The skill being paid for is framing, coverage and steadiness — which is exactly what the grade measures.
The money, plainly
- The company pays $2.50 into escrow per accepted clip, up front.
- The family receives $1.00 per accepted clip. It settles to the parent's account — a child never holds a balance, never withdraws, and never transacts.
- Contributing families keep 55% of every resale of those clips, pro-rata by clips contributed.
- A clip that misses the quality bar pays nothing and charges nobody. The bar is published, and it is the same code that enforces it.
What a parent controls
- A bounty is reviewed by Node Data before any child account can see it.
- A parent unlocks a chore for a specific child. A child cannot take one on themselves.
- Recording, delivery to the commissioning company, AI training and resale are four separate permissions, each withdrawable, each timestamped. Resale defaults to off.
- A parent approves every finished clip before it is delivered. Denied clips are deleted, not held.
- No audio is ever recorded and no location is ever collected. A clip with a person in frame is rejected on the phone, before it uploads.
“A student points a phone at an object. Never at a person. That is enforced in code, not in a policy document.”
— Casper White, founder
Where this goes
The chore board is live, the grader is live, the consent architecture is live, and the escrow and payout paths are built. What the partnership changes is the supply side: a trained cohort of households, starting with Alpha families, who can fill a spec a robotics company actually needs.
If you are a robotics team who needs real-home manipulation data, post a bounty and price it per clip. If you are an Alpha parent, the family setup and the chore board are both on nodedata.ai.
