I love this idea but I would passionately suggest the following.
Value our Values.
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.
Risks of output based merit.
- flashier stuff gets valued more
- complex contributes limits the ability for others to fairly value
- timing matters, if the SME’s are busy or if there are parallel workstreams that need someone’s limited attention, it is not valued the way one believes it should be.
All of these things lead to an inaccurate estimation of the value of our social network and run a high risk of a political climate that is more about campaigning to the invisible power structures then it is about collaborating for the common good.
Values in an organization are already established for the purpose of aligning around “the way we work”
My fundamental assumption for putting this forward is this.
“If the values are comprehensive and widely acceptable, then valuing them at the core of a rewards system will not only create the outputs we believe will result in a better ecosystem and product(s), but also the culture that will give it sustainability.”
I believe valuing the values will do the following.
- Allow the majority of contributors to fairly determine the merit of a given work
- Minimize the political/output driven evaluations and there risks.
- Create and environment where values are always at the top of the conversation which in the long run will make the culture outputs more sustainable and autonomous.
- does there need to be more documentation/explanations?
- do some need to be made more clear, added or removed?
It keeps the most important aspect of a community “culture” the top of mind, because people’s rewards depend on it.
What would be needed.
Exercise with the values as they exist to see what aspects need to be reworked, removed, added, or additional education (examples, documentation, etc) to see.
Dissenting Opinions
The values as the are described now won’t work
Excellent, sounds like our new growing community should do an exercise to iterate on them in a way that makes them able to be demonstrated in a merit system.
Demonstration of the values does not account for domain expertise
This may be true, but a community rewards system does not need to solve for this.
We have other mechanisms that are better suited for that anyway, the DAO proposal system and VC funding are two examples. What a community rewards system should optimize for is decentralized autonomous organization, literally. You do this by focusing on “how we work” not “what we work on and how hard we believe it is to get done.”
You can see in the language of output driven rewards system that it will inherently create separations, and classism.
I would also add the values can be described in a way that is inclusive of difficulty or expertise required. For example some the concept/elaborations around a value like “relevancy” focuses contributions and their subsequent rewards throughout time.
Interpreting the demonstration of a value is more subjective then an output.
I believe this is a risk if the language, context, education and support that exists anyway, but the sbutle beauty of using the values in this way is that it is a forcing function to make them explicit enough to be widely accepted.
I would also argue that is possible to make there demonstration more objective, using “remove dependencies for others” as an example we can refine that language and context to result in a culture where every contribution is documented, curated into single sources of truth and embedded into our commons channels such that new people do not need to start from scratch and take others time.
Using ROSE bot as an example. you could say “rose bot took X amount of time to set up and required these skills therefore it is worth Y” which is very zero-sum gamey.
Or you could say “Rose bot enabled community members to rapidly onboard and educate new members on the most common questions, as a result saving the core team hours a week which they can spend on providing deeper compounding value to the community”
Which is more valuable? The skills it takes to set up a bot, or the empowerment of others because of it?
In conclusion
They’re called Values for a reason, Value them.