Maintenance of information incentives

Considerations for how incentives could be help with maintaining important information across the funding process

Information that is submitted through a funding process will often need to be maintained and updated as new information emerges or changes occur. Incentives could be used to encourage contributors to maintain this information over time. Alternatively contribution incentives could be used to handle the maintenance of funding information. The contribution incentive approaches that could also be used for maintaining information are covered here:

Contribution incentive approaches

Priorities

Priorities will often change over time as new information or changing factors and environments influence the current progress and importance of the existing priorities. Incentives can help with handling how priorities get maintained over time after they are submitted and selected through voting. Incentives could help with encouraging people to provide feedback and discussion around any of the existing priorities. Feedback could mean providing supporting or counter arguments to the points made in an existing priority. This feedback could also include further supporting evidence to better justify their feedback. Keeping priorities and any related information up to date will be an important part of keeping the voters informed on the progress and changing importance of existing priorities. The more accurate and reliable prioritisation is the more accurate an ecosystem can become in allocating treasury assets towards initiatives that address the most important priorities.

Potential incentive approaches

• Time incentives - Paying contributors to maintain and update priorities over time could be a simple and effective way to keep priority information up to date. Full time based compensation for this work could be an effective approach for this responsibility as the contributors involved in supporting the priority process would have the capacity to consider how any new information relates to any of the existing priorities. Contributors would have more capacity to moderate the information that gets attached to existing priorities which is important as otherwise priorities would become difficult to read and digest if too much information was added. This incentive approach could also help with ensuring priorities meet certain quality thresholds if this verification was deemed necessary.

• Performance incentives - If contributors were very actively involved in maintaining a priority process they would likely become much more informed of the different pieces of information that are emerging and flowing through the ecosystem. The better that these contributors are able to identify and understand this diversity of information the more effectively they should be able to highlight and apply that information to any of the existing priorities. Rewarding contributors who most effectively contribute towards achieving these outcomes could be an effective way to align the incentives for encouraging contributors to become increasingly well informed when contributing to the prioritisation process if this results in them increasing the likelihood they receive a larger amount of compensation.

• Task incentives - Contributors could be rewarded for every time they suggest additions or changes to the information that is attached to an existing priority. The benefit of this type of approach is it would add a simple incentive for contributors to keep a priority up to date with new information and could help to distribute that incentive amongst many different contributors. The main concern with this approach is that priorities can benefit from having the most highly relevant and concise information being added to inform the community on what is happening for each priority. Adding every piece of information that might be somewhat relevant could easily result in bloating the priority process. A task incentive could increase the risk that many contributors suggest many different pieces of information just to receive the compensation, rather than being very deliberate and considerate when adding this information.

• No incentives - If the priorities being submitted are less complex and don’t need updating over time with new information then adopting an approach that doesn’t add any incentives could be a suitable option for some ecosystems. No incentives is also a suitable approach if this incentive is already handled with other contribution incentives. If priorities do benefit from being updated with up to date information then there could be a risk that voters would become less well informed when making decisions if there is no incentive to increase the speed the priorities are kept up to date.

Ideas

Selected ideas that get executed will create new information about the progress and importance of those ideas over time. This information could be made more readily available to the voters for improving future decision making. Further evidence from different knowledge sources could also become available over time which provide evidence showing why one certain solution approach might be more suitable than another. Proposers may also want to add new information to justify why an existing idea needs to be changed and improved so it can create more impact for the ecosystem. Considerations can be made towards how incentives could help keep idea information up to date. The incentives could be handled with contribution incentives if contributors who are selected to work on an idea become also responsible for keeping idea information up to date. Alternatively added incentives could be used to encourage anyone in a community to maintain and improve the information that is attached to ideas. Progress and completion reporting, community feedback and discussion and any justifications for changing an existing idea could be some of the most common types of information that is updated and maintained over time.

Potential incentive approaches

• No incentives - Incentives aren’t necessarily required for keeping an idea up to date with relevant information such as progress or completion reports, execution approach or outcome changes or providing feedback and discussion around the impact being generated. The incentive to keep an idea up to date with the right information could be handled with contribution incentives where contributors who are selected to be compensated to help with the execution of ideas could also be responsible for keeping those ideas up to date. This could be a simple and suitable option for keeping the incentive design simple.

• Performance incentives - Compensation could be rewarded to contributors that are highly effective at keeping an idea up to date with relevant information. This could be effective to help with quickly updating an ideas information so that the community is always well informed.

• Task incentives - An incentive could be made available for each time that information gets added to an idea. This could help with incentivising a wider range of community members to keep an idea up to date rather than just the contributors who are executing an idea. The risk with this approach is that the incentives could lead to irrelevant information being added that bloats the funding process.

• Time incentives - Incentives could be used to compensate contributors for their time to help with keeping the information up to date about an idea. This could be useful for ensuring contributors are being very deliberate about the amount of time a contributor should ideally take when keeping an idea up to date and the information that they decide to add. This time incentive could be handled with contribution incentives that help with handling the execution of ideas, creating a separate time based incentive just for updating idea information could be adding unnecessary complexity.

Contributors

Selected contributors that start executing different ideas will generate new information about themselves that builds up over time such as their contribution history and profile information. Monthly contribution reports are one piece of information that could be attached to a contributor's profile to keep voters informed about the exact contributions they have made. There is a natural incentive for contributors to keep this information up to date as it can directly influence how successful they are in future votes where the community selects the most promising contributors.

Potential incentive approaches

• No incentives - Contributors have a natural incentive to keep their information up to date to maximise their chances of being selected and compensated for future execution efforts. There isn’t a large amount of information required to keep contributors profile up to date which helps to support an approach that doesn’t add any incentives for this part of the funding process.

• Task incentives - Task incentives could be suitable if it made sense to have a wider amount of the community being active in updating contributor information instead of just the contributors themselves. Contributors could also receive an incentive for updating this information but this might not make sense if they are already receiving compensation when they are selected for making contribution efforts. A task incentive could potentially be useful for moderating the information that is being added by contributors by the community.

• Time incentives - The accuracy and correctness of the information being added to a contributor's profile could be moderated and verified by people who are paid to moderate the information. This could be a necessary way to better identify when contributors have been lying or exaggerating about their background, education or contributions.