A reward system is something nice for new contributors in my opinion. I am currently thinking of something similar for the Debian project to incentivize new contributors with a bit of opt-in gamification.
However I did not understood why NFTs were necessary. We had badge systems way before NFT became fashionable, on forums for example.
They are absolutely not necessary. I'm guessing it's just part of the hype and trying to plug their product in some way. If you go into the website mentioned in the article you'll see they don't really have any open-sourced code.
Though rewards are definitely good, I wonder if this system of incentives is the best way to move forward with regards to open source code (and creative - information based work in general).
In many ways, it is difficult to assess how valuable each piece of code is and there is a reason why developers tend to be paid by hour that is work instead of by feature that is implemented (features which are usually translated into hours). But obviously, this model not only is not ideal but it's not even feasible to implement in open source contributions. Rewarding someone 100 points because they've gotten a merge is not really effective; how many lines did they write? how impactful was the work as a whole? You can't measure that so simply.
I think we ought to think a little better about how do we want to rewards contributions and, I really want to say, how we should reward contributors. I think a more wholesome model and maybe even more useful model is trying to set aside some money from a project and have more democratic ways of distributing those funds between open contributors. I don't really know, but I think more thought needs to be put into this.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 19.0 ms ] threadHowever I did not understood why NFTs were necessary. We had badge systems way before NFT became fashionable, on forums for example.
In many ways, it is difficult to assess how valuable each piece of code is and there is a reason why developers tend to be paid by hour that is work instead of by feature that is implemented (features which are usually translated into hours). But obviously, this model not only is not ideal but it's not even feasible to implement in open source contributions. Rewarding someone 100 points because they've gotten a merge is not really effective; how many lines did they write? how impactful was the work as a whole? You can't measure that so simply.
I think we ought to think a little better about how do we want to rewards contributions and, I really want to say, how we should reward contributors. I think a more wholesome model and maybe even more useful model is trying to set aside some money from a project and have more democratic ways of distributing those funds between open contributors. I don't really know, but I think more thought needs to be put into this.