WikiEcoGnomia — Actional Economics in Action

Imagine a system that recognizes, properly assesses and rewards every contribution that you make toward a better web. Any time you edit a Wikipedia article, leave a useful review on Amazon, write something others find valuable on Facebook, something that receives claps on Medium, somebody who earns points being a Google guide, etc.

Imagine if you had a way of searching for and reading content that takes into account the rating of the content accuracy, usefulness, relevance, clarity, readability, grammar. And what if you could up or down-vote every text, audio or video you find according to these and other criteria, including criteria you define?

Imagine if there is a transparent way of addressing disagreements or grievances, with an efficient way of escalating the review of important disagreements to a wider pool of unbiased judges.

Imagine if this could seed a system that could vastly reshape the way humans and organizations interact, simultaneously producing a broadly positive impact against every major societal problem that we face.

That would really be something we should all get excited about.

INTRO

I propose just such a system, so that anyone interested in experimenting with it or challenging my thinking about it, can do so.

It is based on the theory that network effects for knowledge creation will make a system that enables open massive collaboration better at value creation than a traditional competitive system, enough so to absorb the overhead needed to promote and police this new system.

In the next few pages, I will layout who can participate, how they can contribute, how their contribution can be tracked, validated, and assessed, how it can be rewarded. Next, I will explain the distributed system for governing the process, conflict resolutions, auditing, and control.

For the sake of simplicity, I will apply the concept to Wiki-style contributions to sites like Wikipedia, but the same logic easily extends to just about any other knowledge creation and sharing, feel free to adapt it, steal from it, change it. I know we will all be better off for you doing so.

Who can participate, how they can contribute

The system would be set up for anyone to potentially be engaged either as an individual, or as an organization, or as a government entity. We could start by tracking existing Wikipedia contributors and evaluating their contribution. Any person can assume one or more roles and will gain reputation in each role, as well as overall contribution score based on their participation in the process.

Every contribution would be assessed for value contributed through a combination of an algorithm and human recognition of the contribution.

For, example if a Gnome cleans up articles and adds comas, each sentence they improve contributes to their score in proportion to the article popularity or other weight criteria. However, if their contributions are then changed back by someone else or are flagged by another user, the contributional points are reduced to reflect the actual contribution minus the negative contribution (time and effort by others to edit after the person).

A similar approach would capture the value contribution of someone who creates a new article, particularly to the degree that the article becomes popular and is assessed to be valuable by readers.

Feedback providers can contribute to the ecosystem by rating articles, paragraphs, individual sentences, or feedback provided by others for their value from the standpoint of importance, originality of expression, readability, etc.

Auditors and reviewers can contribute by auditing the contributions and score allocations, challenging likely conflicts of interest and other opportunities for abuse, policing the participants. Every time a challenge is completed successfully a percentage of points challenged is awarded to the auditor. They also seek to uncover instances where a person is already being compensated for contribution and has failed to disclose doing so, to ensure proper attribution.

Arbiters are randomly selected and can participate as jurors when auditors present their findings or when any two parties have a dispute that cannot be settled otherwise. They get points for their involvement regardless of which side wins in the dispute. Their points may be adjusted by an appeal to an even broader juror pool. For example, if two people can’t agree any random currently available person is assigned as an arbiter. If at least one of the sides is not satisfied with arbitration, they can request an ever increasing number of jurors, given that they have sufficient reputation and sufficient reputation at stake to justify the involvement of such a broad pool of people.

Advisors and coaches earn their points by onboarding new participants, advising participants about the best ways to contribute and guiding them to avoid negative contributions like violating rules and procedures.

An alternative way of contributing

Another way of contributing is through the donation of resources, provision of services and discounts to the participants.

For example, a cafe can provide a 20% discount to anyone with a reputation above tier 10. Every time someone enjoys the discount, cafe gets its own reputation points that are an equivalent to the points they would have received for a donation of an equal value. The final value would be adjusted based on feedback by system participants on the quality and value of service received. Since participants could earn points as an auditor they have an incentive to challenge excessive/unreasonable awards or other unfair practices.

Alternatively, the cafe can accept monthly points as a form of payment, but it would not gain any reputation for doing so. Nevertheless, it could then use the monthly points as a form of payment for its own needs.

Beyond expressly contributing through discounts or freebies, or accepting monthly points as currency, a business can earn reputation points by having participants rate it highly for service, environmental impacts, etc, indicating that the value created is greater than the transactional value that is covered by price alone. On the other hand, low ratings would translate to a negative reputation.

Inherent tier based rewards

To launch a system a set of inherent tier based rewards should be made available. This will eventually get augmented by other contributors, organizations and governments adding tier specific perks. Each tier takes exponentially more effort to reach (Tier 3 is 100 times points Tier 1)

Here are some ideas for rewards, with each being cumulative for each tier added.

1. Someone just joined. They have permission to contribute.
2. Can pick an avatar and create a basic profile.
3. Can create a limited structured format “About me” page.
4. Can invite others and receive 2% points of the people they invited.
5. Can request services equivalent to level 3 points every month from others in the community. If the services create value for others, the award goes to the requester. (Each next tier increases the number of points ten-fold)
6. Has publically visible presence that highlights contributions, is allowed to advertise their standing as a WikiEcoGnome.
7. The participant can use their monthly points to request direct communication with other participants in the network. Their communication is rated for contributing or destroying value and appropriate points are allocated.
8. The participant can use their monthly points to promote themselves, their cause or organization on the WikiEcoGnomia portal (and participating sites). Promotions are rated by others and are awarded additional points if the promotion warrants it.
9. The participant can use their points to acquire non-exclusive intellectual property rights to the content that was developed and is owned by WikiEcoGnomia for private derivative work creation and distribution.
10. Participants are invited to exclusive and private events and trainings.
11. Participants enjoy flexibility in using their monthly points by being able to accumulate or withdraw early. Accumulating or loaning points carries a nominal interest that becomes more favorable with each subsequent tier.
12. The participant can create teams and earn points based on the participation of each team member. They can award bonus points to team members for personal development, participation, and other contributions.
13. The participant can propose policy or governance changes without serving on the committee or going through ordinary whetting process.
14. Etc.

Additional tier based rewards

As the system becomes stable and sustainable, contribution by corporate entities, governments, and philanthropists can enable additional tier benefits. Ideally, once a person has achieved a certain level of reputation they should ideally be able to sustain their life relying only on the value they already produced in the system. This is an aspirational goal, but in this feedback rich system that creates value exponentially with every contribution, it may actually be achievable form most of us.

Governance

I propose a somewhat ad-hoc governance model where only a limited number of standing committees is necessary, with the rest of the issues being addressed as they come up. Membership in committees, including Policy (focuses on long term visioning), Governance (Legal and financial compliance and transparency), and Executive (managing the day-to-day operations) would be assigned randomly by an algorithm from all registered participants (each additional tier increases the likelihood of selection) and meeting competence qualifications for a given role, who are willing to serve in that role for a period of 18 months on a rolling basis.

Free online training would be available to ensure that anyone who is willing to put in the time can have a chance to participate. In person testing and accreditation may be used for some of the more sensitive roles like Chief Counsel, Chief Financial Officer or Chief Compliance Officer.

Participants rate each serving member on their contribution, impacting their rank and potentially earning additional points for next random selection, or on the contrary barring the participation.

Future

This system would not be perfect, but it would have a built-in mechanism for continuous improvement and refinement, thus allowing an ever greater number of human activities to be ever more accurately recorded and assessed.

Eventually, as the system becomes more valuable a distributed record will be created, to ensure that no one party can alter it unilaterally. Various audit and compliance teams, policing teams and authentication teams will further enhance the quality of underlying data.

Since the record of action would be public, alternative valuation systems that have alternate sets of values and priorities can be concurrently setup based on the same set of actions.

When this system fully matures, it may be able to augment and eventually replace our current economic system.

Conclusion

I can see Google Maps or Amazon or eBay rapidly incorporating this model into their system to potentially unlock a tremendous amount of value. I see sites like Medium, already doing it to one degree or another.

Ideally, I would love to see a consortium of governments and major organizations that make this model work standalone, with everyone else integrating into it, akin to the way internet was originally developed. But any format of adoption would put us one step closer to truly being in the information age.

This would have the long term potential to unlock abundance economics of public contribution in ways that actually rewards contributing to the commons and discourages publishing content that is false, irrelevant, or hurtful. It could even spill over into every other facet of global economics, addressing the tragedy of the commons in every facet of human life.

It would be a by far greater transformation than the transition from a Feudal to transactional economics that enabled the Industrial Revolution. It could impact every social and political issue that we face.

If this stuff gets you excited - let’s talk. I would love to hear you thoughts and ideas.