Two level framework (decouple appreciation from compensation value)

[techtonik]

(couldn't find a better place to share drafts, so started the flow here)

Money are always a point of conflict. But they were born a source to resolve the conflicts and backup the lifestream by fueling up the system we have known as economy. That was in a time of abundant resources, so we didn't have too many problems of converting the value of one resource into our personal lifestream need through the money. The universal price allowed to synchronize our values between each other by comparing our own views with the external "market". Now quite often the resources are scarce and money is the conflict. We can not express gratitude and appreciation in cash when we feel the lack of money or low on funds. That should be decoupled.

Framework for appreciation and crediting.

Some of us who are isolated in real cells connected through virtual internet links slowly lose communication skills and never acquire them again. Some of us can feel appreciation and may need it, but will never able to express these feeling - sometimes it is too much proudness, sometimes it is just fear to become weak. Gratitude is a feeling that you can feel universally for someone who does good things, but you may not appreciate him/her as a person. The framework is field for different sets of rules that can help people evaluate and appreciate the invisible work of others.

The current mechanism of Gratipay requires people to maintain the links and appreciation manually directing the flow using an awkward abstraction of a dollar. We can do better than that and make gratitude help both humans and technologies push the progress further towards sustainable future. This can be made by separating you value of some people work and feelings from the actual monetary value that is given to them. This way anybody who appreciate your work can make you feel better by directing their gratitute towards things and people that are important to you. This way an automatic system can provide help where help is needed in observing the goodwill value that is provided by people who are just doing their job, but are not communicative enough to promote their achievements publicly. People are bad at evaluating themselves, so this system can do even better for them, but for this workflow to exists, a human based communication system needs to thrive first. Removing the obstacles from people desire to distribute gratitude and providing a different mechanisms to do this is the necessary basis to make all above possible.

Appreciating independently

Let's write a wish. As a user, I want an easy way to appreciate work of other people (Like, +1, etc.) in both public and private ways. I don't want my private way to become an object of hacking, so it doesn't participate in automated value distribution (by appreciating everyone accumulates own "appreciate value" - it is not connected to funds at this point). I don't want to be a victim of a natural "preferential attachment" (rich become richer) mechanism, so I want to opt-out from it. It works by appreciating people who draw most attention, but.. instead of adding my appreciation value to them, share it between my peers using distribution models of these people tied to specific areas (groups, domains).

Converting appreciation value

The conversion scheme is highly context dependent. As it was said - I may not earn much and can't help people, but I have ability to monitor the areas where I'd like some resources to be routed, so a better gratitude conversion for me is the routing of resources to the areas that need it in my opinion.

And it is also not only about routing, it is also about the value. If the gratitude is about distribution of the value between different geographic regions, once it passes the region border, the dollar will likely to change. The true gratitude in money terms can only be expressed in percentage of your own income.

Conversion is also about the need - it also depends on the willingness of other person to accept it. An intention to express it might be enough and only in critical condition it might need to be converted. It was not important for Gittip, which was clearly a few $ to buy a beer. The Gratipay sounds bigger.

It is also about the feeling of other person. What do we pay for? Is it the price the we pay just to feel better? Is it the same process as making people donating to charity just because people don't want to hear about some problems? Is it the same as giving to church as a service to lift the guilt off? If we're expressing the gratitude, what is the limit of our expression? How do we convert our appreciation to the thing that other person can feel? For me $ don't have value, but I value the ability to use transport without thinking about it. The ability to eat a shawarma once a day. I want to thank people who give me this ability, but I would be more comfortable not thinking about this - I am not that communicative. With time it will become normal that you're useful somehow and that's why you feel good. Why would people pay you then? Well you need to be linked somehow, so there should be some feedback to preserve trust and the flow.

It might not be the role of Gratipay to maintain the flow of appreciation and convert it, but it can play a major technology enablement role to make it possible. Thinking about distant goals helps to define better blocks that could be reused in future for different structures.

[chadwhitacre]

@techtonik You're proposing this as a post for the official Gratipay blog?

[chadwhitacre]

Actually, I think this fits better in Inside Gratipay. How about submitting it as a story there? :-)