Reward System for Contributions

Behaviors and actions that should be rewarded are of different kinds. Some are more beneficial than others. Some are easier to quantify and identify than others.

1. Identify the different kinds of activities that can be performed
2. Categorizing activities into different kinds (based on the kind of effort that's needed)
3. Identifying activities that are more beneficial but less likely to be performed because of the larger amount of effort involved

Types of Activities:

• Editing tasks
• Meta/Standardization

High Quality/High-Value Contributions

Some activities involve above-average intellectual energy and intensity and therefore it is extremely important to reward these activities so people are motivated to do them more often and learn how to do them. Also it should be noted that people's intellectual energy varies with time and interest and everyone can contribute. People should be rewarded for these highly important kinds of contributions:

• Taking initiative, thinking logically and rationally, being detailed-oriented, staying focused on the goal, foresight and vision and knowing how to get there, acting as bridges and resolving conflicts and helping people work together, sacrificing or ignoring personal gain and caring about how something benefits everyone, innovative and creative ideas and problem-solving
• Taking genuine interest in the project, showing care and thinking about what needs to be done
• Engaging in 'meta' actions and behaviors that have far-reaching affects
• Open-source product design, testing and manufacturing
• Turning ideas into reality
• Helping solve problems in other countries
• Motivating more people to get involved and making initiatives more main-stream, publicly known and accepted
• Recognizing others for exceptional contributions
• Researching and gathering (additional) evidence, facts and statistics related to a problem or a theory. This evidence would help people make decisions.
  • International Research: Gathering information about solutions to existing problems found in other countries and regions can be very valuable.
• Expanding and evolving this Rewards system

These kinds of actions and behaviors are extremely important. They are rare to find. Many of these require a lot of intellectual energy in terms of quantity and intensity. Usually people only care about engaging in these kinds of mental activities if its something that affects them personally or for some other reason.

We need a reward system that actively searches for these kinds of actions and behaviors and provides an appropriate reward that would motivate them to keep doing what they're doing, doing it better and inspiring and driving others to do these same kinds of actions and behaviors.

We also need training so people can learn how to make high-quality contributions. Also, no one does these things all the time. Everyone has a moment of creativity where they realize something valuable.

Reward systems could be gamified and follow reward systems found in computer games (this needs to be investigated and tried out)

Awards

To motivate and encourage others to contribute positively and keep doing it, we need to regularly give out awards for users who demonstrate excellence in high quality contributions. Awards can be of various types such as financial, visual recognition (on the website), and other benefits (e.g. points that they can redeem at participating service providers). Organizations that accept these points can be given special classifications that recognize their positive presence in the community. The awards system will be complex so we can start simple and evolve it with time. Financial awards will be available in limited amounts initially and later we can crowd-fund them as the website becomes more successful.

Links

• Incentive-centered_design (Wikipedia) - ... "system designers can observe systematic and predictable tendencies in users in response to motivators to provide or manage incentives to induce a greater amount and more valuable participation."
• Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors - Consider that editors are a very small percentage of readers, this shows how rare and difficult it is to find volunteers for any initiative.
• Points, levels, and badging - Example of a rewards program for activities that benefit everyone (making improvements to Google maps)
• Points, levels, and badging for Local Guides for Google Maps (different activities have different rewards points although its not clear what any perks/rewards are for contributing)
• Offering actual money as a bounty? (user asks this question but gets downvoted. One response talks about at least trying it out and responds to some of the concerns)
• StackExchange: What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?. Also see Privileges