Incentivizing Innovation & Collaboration

Since public goods are open for anyone to use and benefit from, in order to properly compensate public goods contributors for their work we need to map out the projects and sources that influenced a public goods project and determine the degree to which each of these contributed to the project.

For example, if an open source project is being evaluated, we can go over the project’s dependencies and estimate how much each of the dependencies contributed to the project’s impact score. Once an impact score is determined for the project itself, the dependencies should receive a share of the return based on their degree of influence.

This process ensures that public goods contributors are properly compensated when others use their work, while allowing anyone to use public goods permissionlessly. It also incentivizes people to create public goods openly and without fear that others might steal their ideas or profit from them without crediting the original contributors.

Contributors may include the team working on the project as well as people providing data and feedback that contributes to the success of the project. This means that, unlike with Big Tech, people can choose to provide data for a platform and expect to be compensated for that service.

Compensating contributors (and influencing sources) based on their level of contribution to a project incentivizes everyone to collaborate more openly for the success of the project as well as to maximize their contribution.