I read a little a few papers on the subject of incentives for Innovation Communities yesterday and wanted to share the main take-aways. Academic research focused on incentives for online communities is quite extensive. Consensus currently converges on the idea that economic and non-economic incentives are necessary to maximize quality contribution from online participants in collective efforts. Collective efforts are marked by volunteer-based participation. Antikainen and Väätäjä’s well cited research paper [1] on the subject concluded: “Based on the data, it seems that rewarding definitely has an essential role for the respondents of our survey. The survey results indicate that monetary rewarding is important as well as recognition according to the quality of ideas. Members also appreciate that rewarded members are announced on the web site.”

Incentives can be categorized as intrinsic or extrinsic. The former refers to the internal satisfaction online community participants gets from contributing and the latter refers to external rewards put in place to motivate action. Intrinsic incentives include “fun” derive from an activity, challenge of activity, peer competition, peer recognition, and self-growth. Extrinsic incentives may be monetary or non-monetary in nature. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations interact, so, a careful balance between both must be struck in order to maximize participation and quality contribution by community members. In this survey paper titled “Motivating Participation in Online Innovation Communities,” [2] the authors, summarizing previous work by Roberts, Hann and Slaughter 2006 wrote, “…extrinsic motivations actually enhanced intrinsic motivations. Specifically, an extrinsic incentive such as money, tokens, a gift or voucher increases the amount of contributed work thus raises a member’s status/recognition in the community, which supports an intrinsic incentive. This process can boost, regulate and maintain a member’s interest in doing a task, thus assisting with the self-regulation of motivation.” They continued, summarizing another previous work, “…In a self-regulatory system described in Sansone and Smith (2000), extrinsic drivers influence intrinsic motivation and interest-enhancing strategies predict continued contribution and participation. Sansone and Smith conclude that intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms alone are insufficient and the system must provide the right kind of performance feedback to increase motivation.”

However, the devil is in the details. A very important part of any incentivization mechanism is approach. If a design focuses too heavily or solely on extrinsic rewards, participants may only be motivated in the short-term, contribute low-quality work, and lose interest. On the other hand, if incentive scheme is solely intrinsic, the project may miss out on the growth-accelerating boost enabled by extrinsic incentives.

Below, I list economic and non-economic incentives external to the Foam smart contract (off-chain). As with my other posts, my aim is to anchor and aggregate the community’s conversations on the subject. My list isn’t comprehensive but will serve as a nice starting point. I welcome additions and suggestions. It should also be stated that the Foam Team recently published an in-depth article on the subject of incentives (https://blog.foam.space/foam-map-overview-of-the-tcr-design-and-incentives-3a26603d3bab ). Most of the items in this list are pretty traditional but were informed by my reading of academic research on online innovation community incentives. Some have been mentioned in different Foam community channels and a couple are quite new.

Some external non-economic incentives available to the Foam community include:

Leaderboards Work/excellence badges Webpage for recognition of contributors i.e. www.cartographer.foam.space Layered Token Curated Registries (LTCRs). In this approach, privileges, access control, governance rights, and rewards are granted in layers – based on the time spent, tokens staked, or value added to the map by a given community member. [4]

Some external economic incentives available to the Foam community include:

Mapathon events Contests Bounties Work/excellence Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

Recognition of previous work and excellence via the non-economic mechanisms listed above lend credibility to participants and their future work. It also bestows respect from peers and thus increased reputation. This interfaces nicely with intrinsic motivations discussed above. Layered privileges, access control and governance rights as the phrase suggests, refers to variable permissions afforded participants based prior work and achievements. Layer advancement must be highly meritocratic. The idea of layers applied to TCRs is quite new and was introduced by Trent McConaghy et al. [4]

Since the FOAM token is strictly a work utility token, behaviors, activities and achievements incentivized should increase the value of the Foam map. Rewarded achievements should also be versatile enough to be attainable by all members of the community – not only members with lots of tokens or early participants. This is what Trent McConaghy et al. referred to as “Diversity Management.” [4] This ensures incumbent community members don’t become complacent and/or monopolistic. It also ensures new members don’t become discouraged by an inability to contribute “recognizable” work. One way to achieve this is by rolling averages – achievements are recognized on a monthly or quarterly basis rather than over the full Foam history. Another strategy is through expiration of reputation status, recognition badges and NFTs. Also, the new ideas of layered age (Age-Layered Population Structure; ALPS) and fitness (Hierarchical Fair Competition; HFC) maintenance [4] can be employed here.

Below, I have listed cartographer achievements that can be recognized

Age of POIs: Oldest POI or oldest average age of POIs. This can be global, regional, countrywide, statewide, or district-wide.

Number of POIs: most installed POIs. This can be global, regional, countrywide, statewide, or district-wide.

POI token staked: individual POIs with largest staked token.

Successful challenges: cartographjer with highest number of successful challenges.

Frequent challenger: **may introduce perverse incentives

Challenge voting: cartographer with the highest number of participation in winning side of challenge votes.

Governance voting: cartographer with the highest number of participation in governance votes.

Leaders of community discussions, articles, and knowledge-based efforts deemed valuable by the community.

Tag leader: largest number of specific tags. This can be global, regional, countrywide, statewide, or district-wide. For example, cartographer with largest number of “restaurant” tags in the Bay Area, CA or Thailand).

Ground verifications: largest number of on-the-ground verifications.

Large token holder: largest participating token holder.

As always, I welcome comments, rebuttals, additions and suggestions. What do you think?

[1] Rewarding in open innovation communities – How to motivate members? (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.628.9113&rep=rep1&type=pdf )

[2] Motivating participation in online innovation communities (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d1d7/f8536c0eff28d06400039eb69a912e07d79a.pdf )

[3] Authentic Incentive Systems (http://danielbayn.com/authentic-incentive-systems/ )

[4] The Layered TCR (https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/the-layered-tcr-56cc5b4cdc45 )