Over the few weeks, more and more issues have seemed to come up surrounding our PAN payments system. To summarize, these issues have been called out:
New contributors not receiving as large of a reward as we intended when the system was created
Praise not integrated into the adjusted cred score
Praise is counted equally for someone who spent 8 hours hacking on an issue and someone who spent 5 minutes on a task sometimes
Not a good/receptive system for objections or criticism
One person adjusting the scores for everyone is too much responsibility for one person and also leads to inaccuracies since it’s impossible for one contributor to know what every other contributor has done - we all do too much good work for that to be possible!
Due to these issues, we met and tried to hack on a solution. Here is what we propose to help with the problems above:
Use grain instead of cred for our SourceCred calculations. This is more representative of current contributions and doesn’t allocate as much to those who once contributed but no longer have contributed for a long time.
Integrate praise into the overall contributor adjusted score.
Develop new formula that uses both grain and praise.
Make it possible to give different levels of praise from 1-5x. When you dish praise you can give praise worth 1 praise for a smaller task, or a praise worth 5 for a larger task, or 2, 3, 4, for anything in between accordingly.
Rather than one person adjusting scores, each of the circle leads will meet once every 4 week period after the Cred and Praise scores are generated. They will each propose their own distribution of payments, advocate for people who have helped in their circles, and come to an agreement to propose. They will post this to a forum/channel and ask for feedback, contributors will have 4 days to give objections. Once objections are given, they will meet once more and further adjust the scores, then payments will be sent out.
We were thinking we could try this system by next month, and see how it goes for September to December, then revisit and see if it is working well or if we would like to make further changes.
Please leave ANY feedback you have below, this is all open to criticism and new ideas
Reading this post I see that all these headaches about praise accuracy, distribution methods, formulas, scripts, calculations so on and so forth is the fact that we are rewarding people with cryptocurrency that has real value.
I have been thinking about the praise system in general and I’m convinced that correlating praise to monetary gain is inherently a bad way of going about things.
Money makes everything more complicated and contentious and I think we need to find of a better way to reward people, especially if we are using an arbitrary method of acknowledgement such as praise.
At Camp Decentral where praise (and shame) was first battle-tested in the Black Rock Desert praise was in itself its own reward, giving out money as a result of praise is a far deviation from the environment where it was first implemented.
To that end, in starting to think of a better praise system there’s some questions I ask:
what are common things we value that is giftable?
the act of praising and getting praise feels good, why is that?
how can we spread the giveth mission with our praise system?
how can a praise system be used to retain new contributors who don’t have work agreements?
There’s a lot here that could be said and I’m sorry to sidetrack your post but this all seems to be related to a bigger issue.
I think we need to be careful not to confuse Praise with PAN Payments as a Reward.
Praise in and of itself is a Reward, AND, it is also being used as a factor in calculating/quantifying Value being contributed to the Community.
Black Rock and DECENTRAL are deeply and purely in the Gifting economy, we don’t pay people to work at the Camp it’s all a gift to the Community and the Reward is the Collective Experience.
At Giveth we are co-creating Real Value, that the Contributor added to and is thusly deserving of receiving some of that value back in recognition of the work that went into creating it, and as incentive to keep participating in the Community to maintain and grow that Value.
This is not to dismiss your 1DEA @mitch , I think it’s a great concept to explore other ways of using Praise.
But it is only a small piece of the Contributor Reward System, the piece that has been used to give out PAN that we receive through GitCoin in order to demonstrate Giveth Values Contributors, AND, to drive participation in the Panvala staking and matching opportunities.
