Reward Systems: The Heart of DAOs

Transcript

hello everybody sorry for the delay and Technical problems here uh it's very nice to see this full room I'm really enjoying this conference and happy to be talking about reward systems which is a topic um very passionate about so to think about rewards we first need to understand the two broad categories in which tasks are separated algorithmic and heuristic oh here's my an algorithm is a step-by-step procedure that can be used to solve a specific problem algorithmic tasks are objective like the process of running existing

code then the method used to solve mathematical problems heuristic tasks are subjective and much harder to measure heuristic is derived from the Greek word to discover they represent the discovery of our own solution to problems they are creative and don't work well within formulas and today I want to explore the dilemma and rewarding heuristic tasks and interesting Pathways we've been finding for it punishment and reward systems are based on the values upheld by the social framework we are inserted in capitalism for instance is an economic and

political system most of the world is operating by and has its essential feature the motive to make a profit this is no news for anyone but profit as a purpose is not the problem the issue is when the value system underneath is limited to financial profit private property private control of the factors of production accumulation of capital competition extractivism these are facets of the systems main value which are exclusivity and enclosure but there are a whole lot of values that we uphold I'm sure most of us in this

room uphold that are not aligned with the system that our collaboration communal Management Open Source sustainability regeneration restfulness and Longevity genuine expression and less can go on and on everything that can't be turned into a product or service that creates direct supply and demand Dynamics therefore enhances profit in the short term won't be put as a priority often heuristics fall under this category because intrinsic motivation is the drive for creativity which comes from our joy of existing and it can't be controlled by exclusionary markets multiple uh research experiments have

shown how rewarding algorithmic tasks is somehow is somehow straightforward and effective but rewarding heuristic tasks often leads to a loss of intrinsic motivation which compromises the effectiveness of rewards in incentivizing desired Behavior to top down incentives aligned with the capitalist value of private control of the factors of production losing control of the creative forests and Society is not the most desired outcome so we'll come back to the desert to the incentive part later and now we'll focus on Rewards um in the in the paper written by Edward

dassey the effects of externally mediated reward on intrinsic motivation he concludes that when money is used as an external reward intrinsic motivation tended to decrease whereas when verbal reinforcement and positive feedback were used intrinsic motivation tended to increase this is precious information for successful heuristic rewards and I want to introduce praise to exemplify that praise is the reward system that invites communities to build the culture of giving and gratitude involving contributors at every step of the process praise allows communities to

acknowledge the full spectrum of value-created ranging from small to large contributions with praise we're not locking a top-down value system in place but we are constantly listening to what does the community value and praise Works in four steps so I'll dive a little bit into it here the first step is acknowledgment so community members are allowed to praise any type of contribution for example I really want to praise the East Barcelona organizers for the care they put into making this a welcoming safe informative and fun event and environment

and following this uh the Praises that are given are Quantified so a group of appointed quantifiers are responsible for assigning a numerical value to the subjective praise data quantifying each phrase based on their perception of the value of that contribution how much is facilitating a working group worth compared to let's say organizing a conference quantifying praise is also an interesting way to receive decentralized updates about what's happening in the community Through The lenses of gratitude the third step is analysis we can analyze the previous

we can analyze the praise and the quantification behaviors calculate Genie coefficients compare distributions to previous periods categorize buckets of contributions make visible relationships between contributors and much more you can apply multiple metrics to it and the first fourth step is distribution so the Quantified value of Praise will become a score to each contributor that can become reputation or financial rewards in the end of each period with praise we are able to reward heuristic contributions financially without harming intrinsic motivation

because it brings the verbal enforcement and positive feedback so the negative effects of a direct Financial rewards are mitigated praise has been an incredible tool not only for rewarding but also for mapping contributions and Community Values we can access a rich database of warm data Forum data in reference to Nora bettison that can be analyzed in many layers of complexity with different metrics and that's where incentives come in not top down where a few community members want to nudge contributors to a certain direction but bottom up where the reflection of everyone's contributions

guides what's considered valuable or not doubts are Innovative engines how many people here are part of Adele everybody those are Innovative engines and we're solving problems we don't have a manual for more often than not which means that most Dow contributions fall under the heuristic category and the last the lack of heuristic rewards and the lack of such warm data over the years have left us blind to what people actually value in Social environments uh in my opinion the highest and biggest

potential of crypto is the ability we have to map invisible value flows tokenize them and bring them into visible giving us means to create more complex and reach economic and political systems instead of exclusionary ones um thank you very much everyone and engaged with [Applause] thank you I wanted to keep sharing that just for the QR code if anyone wants to engage with praise in the common stack I don't know everyone back there tech support if you can

um well talk to me if you want to learn more about praise or engage with praise and I see we have 10 minutes left so I would like to take some questions if there are any yeah right now to implement phrase in a doubt it's already running uh plug and play uh open source download on what I do right now to implement praise Plug and Play or what do we do um well there is a way in which you can do it yourself it's everything open source so you can start running with it but also praise is a cultural tool and the common stack and

the common stack has been having a lot of experience with this cultural implementation and understanding what can be used for what are some possible issues what are some things that are interesting to consider so we can also support in the first stages of deployment thank you thank you okay oh you my favorite part about praise is just how much love it brings to the community is

it it's so beautiful to have this acknowledgment and gratitude become a practice of how people interact with each other and always put interactions through a positive lens because it's not that people are perfect all the time but if you always uh magnify the good that people were doing and things that are interesting I feel like this creates very meaningful relationships I feel like the Tec Community the the token engineering community where we've been using this for almost two years it is really a family and I think a big part of that is because we created

so much space for gratitude yeah hello hello [Music] the analysis part yeah so uh right now the analysis lives in Jupiter notebooks but the idea is to create a dashboard out of that we were calling it rad dashboard rewards analysis and distribution um but it's still in in a build phase and I think the most interesting part of the analysis is just being able to

process data that is not super objective and straightforward that has multiple colors and qualities to it so this process of investigating which are the best metrics um how can we categorize something that is not like that doesn't even have the same words to express similar things so also creating kind of a language pattern and there's a whole team of very talented people looking into red and D analysis and the powerful cultural feedback that can have because when you look at the data and you see the patterns of how uh this of of what people value in the

community there is a lot of room for uh reflection and understanding if the collective is going in a Direction they really want I couldn't hear you I'm sorry I'm just wondering if you're in your testing so far you've had any issues with people gaming the the praise yeah that's a good question I feel like a lot of people are worried about that like oh ain't everybody gonna gain the system but then if you create a system where you feel so good to be in it and there is a lot so one of

one of austrum's Eleanor ostrom's principles in her book governing the commons is the importance of mutual monitoring and this idea of not having someone that is on the top overlooking the what is happening in the bottom and to have monitoring as a practice that can be Collective and peer-to-peer so praise offers a little bit of that accountability layer also because when you're seeing what people are valuing that others did you're kind of getting updates from what people did and then if there's something like crazy that someone is praising someone for

something they didn't do praise passes through so many people that it would be hard for that claim to survive until the end without nobody questioning it so in the quantification process for example we have four people quantifying each set of Praise so we have four opinions minimum about the value of that praise so if there is someone that saw that as a suspicious Behavior they can raise a flag about it we haven't had any problems actually so far here um just one question is this a erc20 token which gets distributed when you have the prices

any token can be distributed you can you can create a reputation token praise is basically um setting up a score that you can transform that score into any type of token to be distributed and I see people where like waving at me so I'll close thank you very much everyone foreign