In Rovas, the Merit assignment has some rules, such as: a person pays into a (FOSS, volunteer, charitable, etc.) project and receives Merits. The project gets funded. However, the Merit score is not yet sought after by donors or philanthropists, and therefore we have a kind of chicken-and-egg problem.
Hence, I thought to look for and manually gather the names of donors and the amounts of their donations, and thus to “prime” the system manually. I assumed that once the league table exists, it would motivate other donors to report their gifts in Rovas themselves.
However, there is a problem with this idea: the data. Philanthropists often want to remain anonymous, and donations—even from those who don’t—are hard to come by. I think this approach can still work, but the system will either not scale well (if the league table needs to be maintained manually), or it will grow slowly as a byproduct of using Rovas as an aid delivery mechanism.
There is another avenue through which the league table could be instituted, as the (hypothetical) effectiveness of this signaling mechanism is not restricted to philanthropists. Every person on the planet pays some kind of tax, which is also a form of redistribution. I think rewarding tax payments with a signaling reward, and allowing citizens to have their Merit scores disclosed, could improve tax collections—possibly dramatically.
It is automatically updated whenever a registered user earns Merits. This can happen if they donate money or own labor to Rovas, or to a particular Rovas-registered project.
The system keeps track about the way a concrete user earned their Merits, albeit this information might be visible (currently) to registered users only.
The application is a proof of concept I have been working on for ~6 years, but all users and transactions are real. 10 Merits represent one hour of labor, so an EU user for example with 10000 Merit score donated ~15 000 euros to the “commons” in their labor, or actual money assuming 15 euro/hour average wage in their country (opportunity cost).
The rank page needs some work, to better communicate this information. :-)
The (Nobel laureate) economist Michael Spence also wrote on this topic last year in Project Syndicate. After reading the article, I realized the Merit reward in Rovas (the application I developed) could be a suitable measure for the social impact of the philanthropists he calls for. A list of Merit holders would then be Matt Levine’s league table.
In Rovas, the Merit assignment has some rules, such as: a person pays into a (FOSS, volunteer, charitable, etc.) project and receives Merits. The project gets funded. However, the Merit score is not yet sought after by donors or philanthropists, and therefore we have a kind of chicken-and-egg problem.
Hence, I thought to look for and manually gather the names of donors and the amounts of their donations, and thus to “prime” the system manually. I assumed that once the league table exists, it would motivate other donors to report their gifts in Rovas themselves.
However, there is a problem with this idea: the data. Philanthropists often want to remain anonymous, and donations—even from those who don’t—are hard to come by. I think this approach can still work, but the system will either not scale well (if the league table needs to be maintained manually), or it will grow slowly as a byproduct of using Rovas as an aid delivery mechanism.
There is another avenue through which the league table could be instituted, as the (hypothetical) effectiveness of this signaling mechanism is not restricted to philanthropists. Every person on the planet pays some kind of tax, which is also a form of redistribution. I think rewarding tax payments with a signaling reward, and allowing citizens to have their Merit scores disclosed, could improve tax collections—possibly dramatically.
I checked out your website thinking I’d find something like this but couldn’t. Did you have something different in mind re: league table?
The Merit rank page is here:
https://rovas.app/users-merit-rank
It is automatically updated whenever a registered user earns Merits. This can happen if they donate money or own labor to Rovas, or to a particular Rovas-registered project.
The system keeps track about the way a concrete user earned their Merits, albeit this information might be visible (currently) to registered users only.
The application is a proof of concept I have been working on for ~6 years, but all users and transactions are real. 10 Merits represent one hour of labor, so an EU user for example with 10000 Merit score donated ~15 000 euros to the “commons” in their labor, or actual money assuming 15 euro/hour average wage in their country (opportunity cost).
The rank page needs some work, to better communicate this information. :-)