# PEP-16: Universal Contributor Income **URL:** \ **Category:** Ecosystem\ **Tags:** proposed\ **Created:** [November 19, 2021, 4:58pm UTC](https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-16-universal-contributor-income/1275 "2021-11-19T16:58:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 17
**Author:** ![JackALaing](https://forum.pokt.network/user_avatar/forum.pokt.network/jackalaing/32/39_2.png) [@JackALaing](https://forum.pokt.network/u/JackALaing)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2021, 2:27am UTC](https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-16-universal-contributor-income/1275/17 "2021-12-12T02:27:08Z")
# Addressing concerns about the kinds of contributions we are valuing > [@Jinx](#): > > I would like to see some sort of taxonomization of contributions with potential multipliers. > [@Jinx](#): > > make sure that rewards flow to where they are most valuable, and a flat economic system doesn’t allow for internal weighting of the value contributed. > [@Jinx](#): > > I would like to specifically exclude public short form content like memes and tweets, as we can reward useful/successful content of that nature directly via PR initiatives like some of the proposed content reward models. > [@PIP-8: Use Coordinape for Contributor & Voter Onboarding](https://forum.pokt.network/t/pip-8-use-coordinape-for-contributor-voter-onboarding/1274/2): > > Instead of attempting to build a reputation/reward system based on the estimated value of an output, we should instead think of how to align the “way we work” and value that. ## Philosophical Misalignment Firstly, there’s a philosophical misalignment that I’d like to highlight here. I think clarifying this will help set the context for the rest of my answer. My view is that the governance mechanism should be neutral to outcomes, empowering participants to impart their own localized value judgments, rather than trying to enforce monolithic value judgments. Coordinape alludes to this in [their docs](https://docs.coordinape.com/welcome/who_to_gift): > each member should allocate their GIVE tokens to other members using whatever logic that makes sense to them with the goal of making sure valuable contributions are recognized and compensated as accurately as possible. > The goal is not to share money equally, give from obligation, or to pay people for spending time within the organization (unless you think that is valuable). > … > Try not to allocate GIVEs based on who is “supposed” to get them, or based on hype. Give them where you see value happen. Give them to people that help you. > Don’t worry too much about getting the numbers right, go with your heart. We should trust each other to allocate resources sensibly. Given that this power is gated behind the vouching system, contributors can enforce their preferred culture based on who we permit to join the gift circle. If Pat believes we should reward each other based on how much we exemplify Pocket Network’s values, he can advocate for other contributors to reflect this in their gifting decisions, and if they agree with him they will do so, but we shouldn’t enforce it as a monolith. As Shane & Dermot said, > [@shane](#): > > The contributors are the closest ones to the productivity of the project, and with that comes a perspective and they will require a lot more convincing to just give resources to those who do not produce value. > [@Dermot](#): > > You only get into a system like coordinape once you are “vouched” for, ie you align with the values and we expect you to be additive to the culture, so I see Coordinape more as a reflection of our culture, not necessarily the way to embody it. If we go the other monolithic direction, we risk over-engineering the system, creating more friction and disenfranchising categories of contributions that we didn’t account for in our taxonomy. It will also be harder for us to calibrate when this inevitably happens. Look to the Pocket Arcade quest system, which doesn’t account for every kind of contribution, for an example of how hard it is to calibrate a system like this. Dermot brilliantly echoes my views on localized governance here > [@Dermot](#): > > Boots on the ground will always be much better at calibrating in real-time the activities that are most valuable to the community. I’m really excited by more localised decision making in Pocket. The alternative is a static system of categories and multipliers that may have to be updated and voted on every month or two to stay relevant. It’s scary to give up control, but we can only see the true power of the DAO once we do so. I will generally be pushing for us to localize our governance more over time, for the above reasons and because I believe it is the only way for us to achieve true decentralization. ## Functional Misunderstanding In focusing on the value of specific contributions, we’re forgetting how Coordinape works. GIVE allocations are not tied to specific contributions, which means we can’t exclude contribution categories or enforce contribution tiers even if we wanted to. And we don’t need to. In a contribution-based evaluation system, like SourceCred, it’s easy to overpay individual contributions in isolation without realizing that this on aggregate results in the contributor being overpaid compared to another contributor who has less frequent and/or less sexy contributions. I believe this is the kind of outcome that Jinx and Pat are (were?) worried about. However, Coordinape is a _contributor_-based evaluation system. Since we’ll be evaluating each other wholly as contributors, not evaluating individual contributions, I expect that this will help us to make sensible comparative value judgments with the full context of the impact of our decisions on the macro-level distribution of value. Coordinape is not an “output-based reward system” (as Pat cautions against), it is a contributor evaluation system that is agnostic to whichever methods contributors use to evaluate each other. ## Iterating on a Simple Foundation Lastly, I’d like to provide more detail on how I envision this system evolving over time. Coordinape allows organizations to have multiple circles, with their own epochs, tokens, contributors, and thus their own culture of value. Rather than enforcing value systems as a monolith, we can allow localized gift circles to be spun up, with competing value philosophies, and request their own % of DAO revenue. These could be circles dedicated to specific types of contributions (satisfying Jinx’s taxonomy idea) or specific value philosophies (satisfying Pat’s “Value our Values” idea). In the long run, the budget allocated to these competing circles can be calibrated by the DAO based on how successful they’ve been at fostering ecosystem value broadly. Calibrating this will be much easier than calibrating a monolithic value judgment system. So I would suggest we start with a broad POKT DAO gift circle, see how that goes, then community members can spin up their own circles if they feel the POKT DAO circle is imperfect in some way. --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-16-universal-contributor-income/1275)._