How to Earn TEC Tokens Now: An Inside Look at Impact Hours

It’s been three weeks since we officially kicked off the cultural build of the Token Engineering Commons, and the ecosystem is rallying around the vision of a world with safe digital economies that protect and support public goods. And not just talk, but building towards a Hatch 🐣 that will bootstrap an economy around the emerging discipline of Token Engineering. The community is from a diverse array of backgrounds — engineers, scientists, researchers, educators, ambassadors, philosophers, artists, journalists — all aligned around these values, and a passion for creating tools that any community can use to coordinate, and share the benefits of, a Commons.

The TEC economy will be based off of 1Hive’s Gardens template and have a bonding curve that feeds into a Conviction Voting DAO. The TE Commons is an intentionally-designed, dynamic relationship between the TEC token holders, the resources they collectively steward, and the protocols that govern their interactions. By protocols, namely, this includes the smart contracts that manage the use of funds as well as the culture and social norms of the token holders that manage.

We are on track to launch the TE Commons token around the end of the year, and the TEC will be launching at least two test deployments before the official launch to iron out the tech and cultural processes surrounding the build.

Rewards TL;DR

Community stewards and contributors from around the world are working together on the foundations of the open source project based on a rewards system developed by the Commons Stack known as Praise. Through Telegram and Discord bots and bridges, community members dish Praise to each other to recognize work. The Praise is dished according to a Tier system developed by members:

Praise Tier system

Tier 1 — Concrete unpaid volunteer work for building the TE Commons smart contract system and culture around it that is needed to accomplish the roadmap — 100% “Power”

Tier 2 — Work that supports the Tier 1 actions like donations, TEC promotion, votes on proposals, etc — 25% “Power”

Tier 3 — Supporting work that helps the TE Community, indirectly helping to build the TE Commons. If a contribution is part of tier one or two but the contributor is being paid for it they’ll receive Tier 3 Praise — 5% “Power”

How to Earn Praise

Praise is dished for a variety of contributions such as:

• Participation and engagement in weekly calls
• Supporting the working groups with communications and deliverables
• Filling out surveys
• Submission, editing and feedback on work and proposals
• Sharing research and community news on social media
• General Token Engineering work
• Creating videos and art
• Great memes and jokes…

The Praise is collected in this sheet and the Praise Quantifiers hold an open bi-weekly meeting to assign points to each Praise dished based on the tier system above. These points are averaged out and divided by the estimated total hours of work done during that two-week period to become Impact Hours.

Impact Hours will be converted into TEC tokens at launch. As voted on by the community, the intention is that each hour will be worth somewhere between $20-$200 of contributions covested into the Hatch 🐣.

What Kind of Work is Earning Praise?

To see how this is working, here is a deeper look at the work that earned Praise for the top four contributors to the Token Engineering Commons:

Sembrestels ‍🧙🏾‍♂️

• Coming to the Tec Spec Working Group kick off and contributing to the manifesto
• Creating a great starter doc for the tech specifications
• His many contributions to making the Commons Stack Conviction Voting Pilot on xDAI a reality
• Hacking in the 1Hive pair programming room on the TEC Test Launch
• Working tirelessly on the TE Commons test deployment this week — putting in many, many hours

JessicaZartler 👩🏻‍🚀

• Volunteering to become a Community Steward
• Co-writing the TEC kick off medium article
• Leading the Comms Working Group
• Stepping up the communications effort for this Gitcoin Grants round, which has been an epic undertaking and looks like it is going to be our communities most successful round yet
• Hacking on the TEC logo
• Participating in multiple working groups and always being present at all the community calls

Akrtws 👩‍🏫

• Volunteering to become Community Steward
• Reviewing the kickoff medium article
• Preparing the TEC meetup
• All the work she has put in to promote the TEC and the gitcoin grants
• Setting up a special Community Stewards status for us at Bright ID
• Taking the initiative to host an onboarding experiment with weekly calls to welcome new members
• Participating in multiple working groups and being always present at all the community calls

ManuAlzuru 🏄🏾

• His hard work building the Communications Working Group story canvas
• Offering us an unlimited Airtable account to map our community
• All of his efforts learning how to dish Praise
• Upgrading the Airtable and making it ready to go
• His continuous presence and availability at the Comms and Soft Gov Working Groups

Congratulations on the hard work everyone and thank you for your contributions to the Token Engineering Commons! 🥳 Here is the full list of Impact Hours awarded for work from September 8th to October 9th:

Every contribution counts, and the Token Engineering Commons is incredibly grateful for its 86 active contributors that have earned Praise so far. 🙏 To see the list of total Impact Hours to date, check out the Rewards Results sheet.

🌱 Join the Community 🌱

We warmly welcome you to join and share:

👋 Pop by our Discord or Telegram channels, introduce yourself and share what you are working on

☎ Say hi on our weekly community calls at 2pm EST / 8pm CET on our general voice channel on Discord — add it to your calendar

💸 Submit a proposal for funding for your TE project

📑 Read more about our working groups and join one

📣 Follow us on Twitter & Medium to stay up to date on the upcoming hatch

In addition to the TEC tokens, participants can also receive CSTK tokens for Praise. To receive CSTK tokens they must apply to join the Trusted Seed. For any questions, reach out to @Liviade @GriffGreen @JessicaZartler on the TEC Discord or Telegram.

This article was written by Jessica Zartler and Livia Deschermayer with edits by Griff Green.