Rewarding Our Community's Contributions

The scale of a socioeconomic system doesn’t destroy culture as long as the institutional structure of the system is based on fundamentally sound incentive structures. This is one of the reasons why the Scandinavian countries have become so successful by every median income and human development metric, while many other countries have languished and fallen behind over the past decade in the same metrics.

Effective incentive structures scale well and they don’t depend on altruism. It’s really about Game Theory: When the incentives of the game are designed properly, people don’t have any incentives to undermine the game. This is because their interests are fundamentally aligned with playing the game by the rules. Cardano’s Ouroboros PoS protocol is actually a great manifestation of this and it’s one of the most significant reasons why many people have confidence in Cardano vs. most other blockchains.

Human nature is fallible so we should always expect some bad apples in every environment. That’s a predictable threat that can be reasonably mitigated. However, the few bad apples are not the biggest threat to a socioeconomic system; the biggest threat is incentive structures that are designed so badly that they actually transform many good apples into rotten apples, which unnecessarily injects many more bad apples into the system. This is what occurs in the U.S. political system today: We have many thoughtful, smart people who go into politics wanting to make a positive difference, but the incentives within the U.S. political system are so broken that they transform most of the good apples into rotten apples over time.

All socioeconomic systems are successful to the degree that they avoid creating an unnecessarily high number of bad apples in proportion to all the good/neutral apples within the system. That’s exactly what Cardano is designed to accomplish.

@ADALove I really like the idea, I have never used steemit, but I get it, I like Dan (he is another fearless crypto dev) so maybe now that this has come up I will go and try out steemit see what I like and what I do not - I will check it out over the next couple weeks - but somehow I think it would be better built through a contract and not as ADA being the coin used to distribute the wealth, ADA will be very volatile over the next couple years and a smaller cap coin would be much better suited for the venture I think, something along the lines of Doge coin would be perfect I think, keep some fun in it, I also believe we ought not recruit the team behind Cardano to set up something that taxes the development team - we the community should take responsibility for what we want to come of our invested interest, ADALove it appears to me that you could pull off a smart contract and do this if it is something that you wish to do, but let’s not tie everything we do within the community back to the dev team, nothing wrong with recruiting them to be involved, but I think it should not be ADA but another on the Cardano platform.

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@anon20038177 Interesting points. I addressed the “distracting the team” issue in a previous post earlier in this thread. But to save you the effort of searching for it: In short, if fanatical community engagement is important to the team, then it’s not too much to ask the team to provide simple tools that magnify our community’s impact. And Charles is already pretty good at delegating and hiring new devs for each new project and sub-project; so, the distraction factor is not that significant IMHO. (But of course, prioritizing time and resources is always important.)

However, these are not mutually exclusive ideas, i.e., there’s nothing stopping technically skilled members of the community from volunteering to build anything and coordinating their efforts with the team. If I was still in my 20s and didn’t have many other managerial responsibilities, I would not hesitate to create the plugin myself. However, I haven’t had to write mission-critical code for years since I always have employees to do that for me while I’m more focused on management these days. So for those reasons, I’m probably not the best person to write the plugin code. But if this is still an outstanding issue in the coming months, I may put one of my engineers in one of my companies on the task at some point.

Regarding the use of ADA and its volatility: This is an interesting issue. There are philosophical and practical components to it. Over the past week I’ve been thinking about a lot of things that relate to this point. Soon I will address this point within the broader context of several other issues. Then we can revisit your specific point after I’ve laid out the broader ideas as an RFC from the community.

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Thanx for the reply, i think I could support asking the team to get involved, considering the resources they have, might be a good distraction if it ends up being distracting at all.

Thanks @ADALove for starting this thread. I have been thinking about the comments for a few days. It brought me to the realization that I am not 100% sure what the ultimate “function” of the Cardano community is, beyond larger community (of ADA holders) = more decentralized = more secure network. Also, more community activity = more potential for adoption by real world commerce = increase demand for ADA = rising price. Oh, yeah, don’t forget crypto-kitties. What else?

These things are obvious, but is this the fundamental and ultimate purpose for community involvement? Get more people and convince them to stay longer because increase community = increased security & value of my assets.

In a local (analog) community personal relationships are grown and the social aspect has meaning and value. I can see value in a digital decentralized community in that it brings together people of a common interest to share experiences, thoughts, ideas, etc. So we help each other learn, enjoy each others company. We enjoy socializing around common interests. Is that all, or is there more to it?

I went to a basketball game tonight with my family and before the game started they sang the national anthem. People put their hands over their hearts, but I have a difficult time with that and just can’t do it. I don’t feel a strong “allegiance” to the flag or nation. I feel disconnected, manipulated, and mis-represented. I don’t agree with the politics, policies and practices that are going on.

Should not community run deeper than “my money is secure and growing” and “I enjoy chit chatting with those guys”? I don’t personally have a deep interest or lasting need for that kind of a community. But yet, I want to be part of something that is grass roots and that I agree with philosophically and that seeks to fundamentally change the world for the better. Lots of people do, and realize that change must begin “outside the camp”. That kind of a community is not just about gaining wealth or intellectual stimulation (although these are good things), but also taking action and making the world a fundamentally better place. It is not only about what I personally can gain, it is about paradigm shift for the potential betterment of humanity, or perhaps some small or large slice of it.

Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself with all this, but I am struggling to see what the ends of this decentralized community will be, what good will become beyond increased value of ADA and pleasing interaction, why I should invest myself deeply into it, and what are we trying to accomplish. I think this revolution is (could be) much deeper than just a “new asset class”, there is something more meaningful going on. Those we seek to displace will soon realize it too, if they haven’t already.

I am behind Cardano all the way because it is the superior technology in the space, Charles has convinced me of this. I want to be involved in the community deeper but my time is scarce (and therefore valuable). Investing money is easy. Investing time is difficult (for me personally). But, if there was a compelling vision for the community, something more than increased value & security of ADA, something I could be more fundamentally passionate about, I would invest my time (and myself) and could passionately sell it to the millions of people who feel like I do.

I think the Cardano Foundation should start speaking and doing videos/interviews to relate deeper the humanity side of the vision of Cardano to the world (Charles covers the tech quite well already). Perhaps they do this already? @jonmoss do you work for the CF?

Sorry for rambling, anyone following me? Constructive criticism welcome!

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Quick follow up… you may wonder what my post has to do with incentivizing the community. Incentives are typically in the context of achieving some goal, hopefully something more meaningful than to “make crypto great again”. As I started to run “thought experiments” about the different directions this could go, I quickly realized I don’t really have a grasp on the underlying vision (what the tech will seek to accomplish in this world). The best I have heard is “to be the financial stack of the 3 billion without access to basic financial services” (or something like this). What does that mean? How does that look? What about me, I already have access to financial services, why do I need Cardano beyond as an investment?

Before commenting on incentives I would like to be clearer about who “the community” should be and what function “the community” is suppose to serve in the vision of the Cardano Foundation?

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Hi @ADALove, I really like the concept of a tipbot for this discourse forum. I have recently come across this reddit post where community members have managed to create a beta tip bot for the CardanoCoin sub reddit. Perhaps we should reach out to them :slight_smile:.

@Bullishdong LOL, that’s a pretty funny app. Well, as much as I like experimenting with new ideas and encouraging everybody to contribute, I noticed a couple significant issues on that Reddit post that we should point out here.

  1. When projects that significantly impact the community are not coordinated transparently, redundancy and broken expectations can emerge. This happened with that tip-bot app because somebody else was already pre-hired to create a tip-bot in exchange for some ADA from the community. I saw one of the moderators on that thread complaining about this; so, it’s a good reminder for us to communicate our intentions to the community first before we do any significant work on behalf of the community. This will avoid hurt feelings and wasted time/resources.

  2. That tip-bot is currently centralized and controlled by that random developer. He’s probably a trustworthy human, but I have no idea who he is. Additionally, the whole point of building Cardano is to eliminate our dependence on fallible human nature. So, this is an important factor when we discuss any new projects: If the project requires any centralized management of ADA/USD funds, then I don’t think we should do it unless the core team manages the project directly. They’re the only group that we should trust when it comes to the custody of any community funds. And as a matter of principle, even they know they need to gradually build out all the decentralized treasury features so that we don’t need to trust them in the future, either.

This brings us back to my original thought process for this project: We need to lobby the core team to build it because it requires substantial treasury features that I don’t think anybody outside the core team can effectively manage without creating some anxiety about trust issues throughout the community.

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Good points, let’s lobby the core team after the release of Coguen. Because it would require smart contract functionality as you rightfully suggested.

Edit: Since it will also require treasury features and they will not be available untill the voltaire update, I’m interested in finding an alternative to rewarding our community’s contributions in the meantime. I do agree on your points made about the reddit tip bot, I did not consider the intricacies of such an endeavour.

@chad.stewart I deeply appreciate the authenticity of your post for many reasons. Based on the thoughtfulness in your post, you probably already know most of what I’m about to write, but it never hurts to rekindle the power of our core values from time-to-time. . . .

I am not 100% sure what the ultimate “function” of the Cardano community is. . .

The Socio-Biological Purpose of Our Community. Nothing significant in this world can be accomplished without a community of like-minded humans working together at various levels. “Working together” requires an emotional connection based on some set of shared experiences, shared values, and shared beliefs about how the world works. The emotional connection is the invisible glue that keeps humans together when they’re working toward hard goals, which no single human could accomplish alone. So, that’s the socio-biological purpose of our community.

The Functional Purpose of Our Community. Building world-changing systems is hard. The Cardano team can’t do any of this without a fanatical community of like-minded people preaching the Cardano gospel from every valley and mountain. Cardano is competing against far more powerful organizations with much deeper pockets, including governments and Fortune 500 behemoths. Cardano will lose market share to inferior platforms if we, the community, don’t help offset the hype and propaganda coming from those other groups. Failure to capture a critical mass of market share would be bad for our political freedoms and for our pocketbooks. So, we must fight alongside the team with every ounce of available time and energy to prevent that from happening.

We enjoy socializing around common interests. Is that all, or is there more to it?

When Time is Scarce, We Can Still Allocate Some Mental Space-Time-Energy to Preparation. I’m an introvert and socializing often drains me, but when it comes to things and people that are important to me, I still try to allocate some mental space-time-energy to thinking about how to contribute something meaningful/productive to them in some incremental way. Sometimes time is so scarce that we can’t even act on our thoughts, but the process of thinking about the things/people that are important to us prepares us to contribute in meaningful ways later when more time is available. That’s how I approach this community.

I don’t feel a strong “allegiance” to the flag or nation. I feel disconnected, manipulated, and mis-represented. I don’t agree with the politics, policies and practices that are going on.

The Path to Enlightenment and Joy is Paved with Disillusionment and Despair. I understand and appreciate your comment above at the deepest possible level. I served in the U.S. Air Force and worked inside the USG (specifically, in the intelligence community) during the first half of my career. They brainwash everybody into believing the U.S. is the greatest country in the galaxy. Then, as I observed how the USG systematically sabotaged, manipulated, and destroyed entire countries and its own citizens, I become deeply disillusioned and depressed. I wrote several books and immersed myself into building several companies, but those were just distractions from the deep sadness that I’ve had since my eyes were opened to the truth.

Cardano = Realistic Hope and Hope = Inspiration & Joy. Now, for the first time in my life, I see a realistic path forward for humanity to restore trust in capitalism and democracy. It won’t be easy. Many special interest groups will fight us at every step of the way. But that’s OK because we only have one life to live and we may as well do something interesting and meaningful with our lives while we’re here.

A Life with Purpose Creates Endless Inspiration & Motivation. Having a sense of purpose in our lives is one of the greatest gifts that we can ever receive. I’ve had a sense of purpose for many years now, but Cardano super-charges my feeling of purpose by giving us the technical tools to make a truly global impact, which was not possible up to this point in human history. I can’t imagine a more exciting and meaningful purpose for our lives than to build more equitable, trustworthy, and sustainable economic and political systems for our future and our posterity.

Should not community run deeper than “my money is secure and growing” and “I enjoy chit chatting with those guys”?

Yes, I hope my comments above convey a deeper purpose.

I don’t personally have a deep interest or lasting need for that kind of a community.

As an extremely busy introvert, neither do I. But where there is purpose, there is endless inspiration and motivation to contribute as much as possible to the fulfillment of our shared purpose.

Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself with all this. . . .

Not at all. Everybody must find a path between lethargic disillusionment and energized purpose. Your path is probably different than mine, but hopefully my path gives you some ideas about how to find your own path to purpose within the context of our community.

. . . if there was a compelling vision for the community, something more than increased value & security of ADA, something I could be more fundamentally passionate about, I would invest my time (and myself) and could passionately sell it to the millions of people who feel like I do.

Vision without Community is Delusion, but Vision with Community Fuels Life-Changing Revolutions. The vision for what we can accomplish with Cardano is crystal clear to me, but the drudgery of everyday life can sometimes cloud our vision. This is precisely what community is for: When we perceive the world in isolation, it’s easy to forget why we are here, what we can do to contribute, how to overcome life’s challenges, etc. But when we open ourselves up to a community of like-minded humans, we reinforce our purpose, our vision, and we become more than the sum of our parts. This process is what empowers small groups to make a big impact in the world.

Shared Vision Is Our Bridge from Dream to Reality. When we think deeply about what Cardano realistically represents for humanity, the vision of how we can harness it as a community should emerge spontaneously, like a spark in the darkness. Once you see that vision, it is breathtaking; and you can’t stop thinking and talking about the vision and what you’re doing to contribute to the fulfillment of that vision.

I think the Cardano Foundation should start speaking and doing videos/interviews to relate deeper the humanity side of the vision of Cardano to the world (Charles covers the tech quite well already).

I appreciate your sentiment here, but I think this is asking too much from the team. Their job is to build the technology (which is already very hard) and the community’s job is to reflect and amplify the human elements of the technology so the rest of the world can see and appreciate our shared vision. Yes, the team can spend more money on marketing, hiring some pretty faces to regurgitate some talking points, but ultimately, the humanity of Cardano must bubble up organically from our community. Truly authentic communities can never be created from the top-down; they must always emerge from the depths like a natural spring bubbles from the bottom-up.

Sorry for rambling, anyone following me? Constructive criticism welcome!

Perhaps our collective rambling will help others to connect with the community in some meaningful way.

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Hello @chad.stewart

I do work for Cardano Foundation :slight_smile:

I’m reading everyone’s contributions here - so many thoughts and insights. This whole area of thinking is of real interest right now…

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@ADALove Your writing blows me away, I was spellbound reading your last post,I had to get past the ‘Socio-Biological Purpose of Our Community’ paragraph first to really dig into what it was you wanted to point out cause I have never truly been able to 100% connect with any community as a modern humanist.
Yet day after day I appreciate your contributions to this forum.
Thank you!

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First of all, thank you @ADALove for investing into the community, and me personally (by taking the time to answer my questions/comments). And thank you for sharing personally, it helps to create that invisible glue you describe, it makes you more than a representative of ideas but a living person experiencing the joys and trials of life.

Your reply helped me the most in that it solidified the reality that the “community” ultimately determines what the community will be. Such freedom is liberating and inspiring. I determine what will become of Cardano in this world, working together with you and eventually millions of others. The first challenge is to deliver the tech and fight for it, as you have rightly stated. Then we can get on with the business of changing the world.

I have much to say about your reply, but I have 12 minutes left until I am picked up for my next meeting. Such is every day for now. I am actively studying economics, decentralized systems, governance, and other areas of relevant philosophic thought in my spare minutes to give flesh to my skeleton of thoughts about where Cardano should go. For me this is a revolution in the making, at the core is personal liberty and security brought about economic freedom built upon a truly free and decentralized market with the basic rights of identity and private ownership.

All I have time for now is to say thank you for your comments and I will elaborate as time permits.

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I visited steem and wholeheartedly believe that this would be an awesome tool for many of us, I have always, wanted to build revenue through video’s and would like to be able to on the cardano platform and hopefully get support from cardano community.
If there is a route to take that could bring something to the cardano community that we could be rewarded for content we post I would stand behind it.
(I like to recreationally prospect for gold and my video’s would be on that subject in a reality setting)

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@ADALove Well put. I’ve also been interested in this topic recently. However, I’ve mostly been thinking about how to unify the developers. There must be a way to use this cooling down of activity to built a more tight-knit developer community for Cardano. There are currently quite a few people doing random dev work on either the platform itself or Cardano related work and we all don’t know each other… I would try and message everybody I can find individually to reach out but I’m not really sure what platform or how we would unify together. We should pick a way for all developers to congregate and unify behind it and then push it hard

I guess this topic also needs to cover how the community can help in initial stages.

Me personally, I tweet and steem about Cardano.
I do this because, I really wish someone introduced Bitcoin &/ Cyrptocurrencies to me earlier! I felt like a late adopter (bought my first share of bitcoin in late december 2017). and want to contribute in any possible way to help spread awareness of Cardano.

I agree that rewarding community members is key in motivating them

@SebastienGllmt This is an interesting idea. There might be a few dynamics that work against it, though. So, here are some quick bullet points to consider:

  • Every open source dev community is comprised of highly independent souls who often prefer to work independently; which is often due to their. . .

  • introverted human nature; and the

  • solitary nature of the programming process.

  • Most software projects are not large enough to justify large teams/communities, which keeps most communities fragmented or only loosely affiliated.

  • Large projects tend to be commercial projects due to economic reasons.

  • The exceptions of course are all the projects managed by the Apache and Mozilla Foundations; and those a good models, but they’re managed by paid employees of the foundations. In our case, of course, the Cardano Foundation would be the managing entity before we moved toward Apache/Mozilla, but this observation brings us to a fundamental reality . . . .

  • No completely decentralized software community (that I’m aware of) spontaneously produces anything worth deploying in a mission-critical environment. Every major software project (open source or commercial) requires substantial financial resources, leadership, and QA infrastructure. This is true for all Linux distros and every open source project that I can think of at this moment.

  • That means any project beyond relatively simple plugins and Dapps generally requires substantial centralization.

  • That means financial resources will be required, which means trying to organize devs before the treasury features (Voltaire update) are added will be a very difficult task. This is because the biggest hurdle for most projects is finding a way to incentivize devs to work for free.

  • However, after the treasury features are implemented, it will be relatively easy because there will be virtually unlimited funds for all the most popular projects, as voted for by the community. And at that point, it will simply be a matter of galvanizing support for the most popular features and then the treasury system will do most of the heavy lifting associated with expectations management, incentive structures, performance accountability, talent retention, world peace (ok, well that feature might not be available until the Gandhi update a bit later).

So, based on those quick observations, IMHO, I don’t think we should bash our heads against the proverbial wall trying to organize the dev community in any major way until after the Voltaire update.

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I see where you’re coming from but I disagree.

The Voltaire update is way too far away to just sit idle and let IOHK lead the project IMO. It’s detrimental to the health and growth of the project for reasons I will explain after.

Current state: If you look at the IOHK Github repositories, nearly every single contribution is done by somebody who works for or is contracted by IOHK. This is partially because there is no efficient way of having a discussion with anybody who works on the code and also because IOHK purposely withdraws a lot of information from the community about the actual daily work behind the project (they only have the occasional broad goal).

Result

  • Development of features are slower and more expensive because everything has to be done by IOHK and the community can’t easily build features themselves.
  • IOHK has a harder time recruiting since they can’t just hire active developers on the repository (people who have shown they are skilled and knowledgeable)
  • People who want to build tools on top of Cardano as it stands have to ruffle around the codebase to try and find how stuff works before extending it because there’s no good way to just ask.

I think everybody in software understands that open source projects need a healthy community of contributors behind it and Cardano clearly isn’t where it should be.

Here’s another way to think about it: Think about how much money IOHK & the Cardano Foundation has and the market value of ADA right now. Now compare that to any other open source project. Except for maybe a few, Cardano just completes blows them out of the water. So how come those projects have an open source community multiple orders of magnitude larger? Doesn’t something seem amiss?

I’ll just say this in the context of community development that my hope is we see finances needed for developers and projects alive and well in the Shelly staking era. There is no reason to think that Cardano won’t be one of the more developer centric ecosystems out there, and thus the votes/stakes given out to staking pools should directly relate to the major stakeholders interest in each of the pool’s projects.

The 25-100 initial pools will be essentially 25-100 projects that will receive varying levels of support based on their perceived worth and value to the network. Then in the future, upon the backs of these grass roots projects and the works of IOHK more formal projects may be funded with the establishment of the treasury in the Voltaire era.

I think now is the time to for the Foundation and IOHK to make clear the culture around which these staking pools get formed. From what I can see over 80% of ADA is held by large holders, so their influence will be felt.

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@SebastienGllmt You articulated your points well. In contrast, one of my implicit points probably wasn’t very clear (my fault); so, here it is more explicitly: By the time you exert all the time, effort, and resources to organize the community yourself (or with a group of us), the treasury features will already be implemented or close to implemented. Then, the entire ecosystem will likely change and move away from whatever community structure you’ve created because the treasury features will have an unprecedented impact on the entire ecoystem.

That’s a big risk for you and anybody contemplating such an endeavor.

Also, there’s nothing stopping anybody from rolling up their sleeves and building stuff now. The Daedalus API, Cardano Explorer API, and other technical docs are not that hard to find. And the Developer’s forum provides feedback for dev questions.

Of course, the staking guidelines, docker images, etc are still pending, which I understand can be frustrating, but that’s coming very soon.

Given that the MainNet just launched in late Sept/October, and given everything we’ve seen so far, I think the project is progressing at lightning speed. And I see how efficient their development process is overall; so, I’m not concerned at all.

In some engineering and software dev environments (and even some geopolitical environments), “doing something” is the worst thing we can do because some processes are already optimally designed and any attempt to speed them up can create unintended consequences.

Anyway, I’m open to other logic and facts, but I don’t see how we are suffering from any truly major risks at this point.