I apologize for misspelling your name Mateusz :-)

Mateus, thank you for reminding me that big corporations are driven primarily by the profit motive - that I agree with of course. However I still believe that similar to people also corporations do respond to non-monetary incentives. The degree to which they would respond to something like “the invoice” we do not know, especially as there is no precedent (that I am aware of).

The perverse incentive threat you mention regarding to paying for edits was discussed briefly here already with @imagico, to which I responded that Rovas has an approval and verification mechanism for every report. Two verifiers are algorithm-selected and directed to OSMcha to check the edits against the reported editing time. I personally have been checking edits made in my neighborhood for years (before Rovas existed) and most mappers I know do it as well. That might be also the main reason why the OSM Rovas users are not rebelling against the verification duty when asked to perform it.

There might be another incentive at play that will keep the players honest - fairness. Sociological experiments show that most people will punish defectors to rules even at their own cost, if they get a chance. Finally, as the Rovas users gain more understanding of how the system works, they might realize that the more Chrons in the system, the weaker the exchange rate against the national currencies. That might sharpen their judgements even more.

This is an open experiment - we will see how it goes.

The only way you can hope to impose moral constraints to economic actors is through hard rules that are enforced with zeal.

I do not dispute that, but I think most will agree that it is overwhelmingly the social pressure and signaling concerns that makes anybody to pay at all for volunteer goods today. This is the case for individuals who are prompted to open their wallets when they see a banner asking them to do so on Wikipedia, or big companies who pay to become the “platinum partner” on the OSMF donor list. What I am advocating for with the “invoice” is to start using the psychological responses it should trigger to increase awareness among the volunteers as well as the public at large about the economic asymmetry.

My immediate goal is for volunteers to join in and have their labor counted. As discussed above, the invoice has no legal power, but I do believe it can be a good way to advance what I am advocating for. Imagine a page similar to this, where we will have two numbers - the number of “merits” the volunteers working on the project received, put next to a number representing their collective effort. The Merits - it will become clear from the description on that hypothetical page - is a reputation-like, non-transferable and non-tradeable reward one can grant to a project by paying with own labor, or (say) euros. In the OSM project, the money paid is not distributed directly to the people working in the project, but benefits the whole (NEO) system. On the invoice we will also include a list of benefactor and the amounts they paid to reward the project. I believe that if the “effort” number (measured in time) becomes sufficiently large, the invoice will attract attention and eventually also donor money, especially if the Merits number is much smaller. Due to the way NEO is designed, such funds will benefit the least wealthy volunteers most, which should increase mapping effort in the most needed locations and also should appeal to a larger class of donors who do not necessarily care about mapping.

The second aspect of having volunteers use NEO is that they earn community currency, equivalent to the number of hours they worked. That money can be used to reward other users in the system, buy merit shares in other users’ projects, or access the products and services created in NEO. This is where we will be able to build fences you @imagico are writing about in a way that is fair to the volunteers. I mention in one of my comments above a crowdsourced web portal that uses NEO to allow the portal content to be accessible only to visitors who reciprocate with their own labor or with money. That model (pay with the NEO currency for access) can be used in various ways in other contexts.

Lastly, given sufficient support (number of participating users) we can maybe find a legal way to fork the OSM database and/or make it available under different license.

I agree, my line of argument mingles together legal (the invoice thing) and moral arguments. The legal language is problematic, as situation there - as you are pointing out - is quite clear cut.

I believe however, that a moral argument can be made that users - and especially the big corporation consumers - of the volunteer-made osm data are by and large not reciprocating for the value they are receiving. For lack of a better term I used the term “invoice” in lieu of that moral obligation. We might need to come up with a different one.

Now, one can argue that no obligation to reciprocate, beyond the monetary one exists, because we have a license that allows unlimited use. But I would argue that the license does not cover all of the value produced by our work. If this was the case, then on what basis would (especially rich) consumers of volunteer work be willing to make donations to the organizations running such volunteer projects? I believe it is due to the feeling we all share, that a person should be rewarded for value they provide, even if they explicitly state that no payback is necessary. The same mechanism is used by non-profits when they ask for money from donors to fund their operations - they use the psychological lever of the need to reciprocate we all instinctively understand.

In light of this, I believe the license governing use of the OSM data is wrong. I think the license was formulated and adapted for use in the OSM project by people who already addressed their existential needs and get their reward for their volunteer work in terms of high-level psychological signals. They - and us, the mappers as well - ignore the exchange value aspect their work generates, as that is not what motivates us to provide the labor. This nonchalant attitude however is a mistake, as illustrated by the fact that producers of volunteer goods have to constantly beg for money to sustain their involvement, or their very functioning as project-running organizations. Another aspect visible in the OSM project context is, that most volunteer mapping is done in rich countries, while the underdeveloped and developing ones are much less mapped. The money we leave on the table could be used to support mapping efforts in these places where we have “white spots” on the map.

How should the license look like? In my opinion it should be based on the concept of fairness, for example using words like “fair reward is expected.” I would certainly advocate for avoiding economic terms like “free to use.” This way the value would be determined by social mechanism - the same one the volunteer producers resort to when they need to raise funds for their operations today. If the big corporations couldn’t live with such nebulous terms and choose not to use our data, we would still be here mapping and maybe be even happier.

…However what i am pretty sure about is that automatically rewarding a third party with own economic interests (like the OSMF) economically for the work of mappers is a bad idea.

I agree. This must be a community decision

Re. bullet No. 1

In NEO, the effort one exerts to make a product and market value of that product can be made orthogonal (independent of each other). From this perspective then, no system is needed to quantify the relationship between effort and value. However, maybe you had something other on mind…

In NEO, value assigned to an individual in a project that has many collaborators (called shareholders in NEO) can be determined by three factors: 1. a share of time they invested into the project, 2. by a set (negotiated) percentage, 3. by a combination of the two parameters.

Thus in the concrete case of the Openstreetmap project, where the No. 1 method is used - one might argue - the distribution of Merits is not completely fair, because some mappers might generate more accurate data than others during a work session of the same length. This is true. If users start demanding a more fair share for their work however, the Merit distribution scheme can be changed, for example to No. 3, where some user will receive a percentage-based (larger) share. Other distribution schemes are imaginable too and they can be programmed into Rovas.

A side note: I believe that distribution of shares in group projects is going to be in NEO as messy as it is in capitalism and ultimately depend on bargaining. NEO does not solve this problem by some magic algorithm, but makes the process much more fair, because creates a more level bargaining position for all. I can elaborate if asked.

Re. bullet No. 2.

Very good point. Yes, there is such danger and I think we will have to wait and see how this plays out. The OSM mappers might learn that - due to the way the Merit distribution is set up - the amount of their work effort is directly proportional to the number of merits they receive. Some might attempt to cheat. On the other hand, other might notice and either reject inaccurate reports if they are the designated verifiers for them, or open disputes against already filed and approved false reports. This is possible in Rovas today. In the [crowdsourced portal[(https://nabezky.sk) where Rovas was integrated first, I was surprised to see that verifiers were quite harsh when judging some reports and a percentage of such reports was rejected. That seems to have made time reporting over time more accurate, but I do not have this statistically evidenced. Again, I do not know how this will play out in the OSM context, we will have to see.

Developers of open source software, people who maintain crowdsourced projects and other volunteer entities have to constantly beg for donations and seek sponsors, regardless of the fact that these projects often produce real and significant economic value. True, we have a license that we have, but we can ignore it. There is no clause there that would prevent us from asking compensation for our work. Of course entities like Apple or Facebook could ignore our request, but given enough people will see the issue as I do, we can make a difference. Eventually we might even find a way to fork the project, but that might not be necessary in my opinion.

Maybe you could pay someone to add that feature to osm.org ;)

I think the issue is not a technical one, but an intent - the system creator wanted to prevent folks from changing their comments after they were made to prevent all kinds of communication-related issues… … and yes, I eat my dog food and pay for other people’s work. I do so with real money, but it is more fun to pay with Chrons that you get for doing what you love to do. Check NEO and Rovas out, you might like it :-)

hmm, the bold section should not be bold, but I do not see a way that would allow me to edit a comment…

Psychologists tell us that the most important attribute of work motivation for people who addressed their basic existential needs is autonomy. It is the ability to freely choose the type of work we like to do, the time when we do it, or intensity of our engagement. Notice, that this is the modus operandi most creative people work under - “occupations” like artists, scientists, or entrepreneurs. For this reason, there is a major difference between being an employee, or a volunteer and this is the main reason why your recommendation to seek employment when we desire a payment is neither good for “the soul” nor necessary for a functioning economy. In fact I would argue that an economy like NEO that rewards people for (almost) any actually performed activity is the best not only for individual well being of the participants, but also for performance of such an economic system.

Now about that license. In the first draft of this blog post I addressed the issue in the following way: * To get a better grip on the situation, let’s first take a look at the “free for anybody, even for the richest companies in the world” type of licenses, like the one that governs access to the OSM data. Was it really the goal of the license creators to use work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to increase wealth of companies like Apple or Facebook? I think only a conspiracy theorist could think so. I believe the language of ODbL and other similar FOSS licenses in general reflects our innate human desire to share, to be useful to others. We do not do volunteer work to get paid, as we **instinctively expect the consumers of our work to pay back in kind, at some point in the future. This instinct was formed during evolution of our species over the past two million years, when our ancestors lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, whose existence depended on cooperation. In the past 10 to 15 thousand years however, our “tribe” grew to over seven billion and during that time the socio-economic arrangement evolved into a situation where the legal institutions we created often exploit our instincts to benefit a small part of the population.

What can be done? The OSM data license is set and putting up a paywall around the OSM data seems to be a non-starter. Situation in other contexts where user data is exploited for economic benefits is similar (wikipedia articles, facebook posts,…) - the Genie seems to be hopelessly out of the bottle. Our evolutionary history however suggests a way out of the predicament. Cultural anthropologists who study hunter-gatherers found, that the peculiarly egalitarian socio-economic arrangement within the hunter-gatherer bands was maintained primarily by social pressure. Where our ancestors used praise to support pro-social, or ridicule to suppress anti-social behavior, we can do the same to the consumers of the volunteer-generated data. After all, not only individuals, but companies as well are known to care greatly about their social standing and we can use the desire to have a good reputation as a tool to increase the consumers to reciprocate for our volunteer labor. ***

So that is that. One might disagree and think the form of exploitative capitalism we have today is the pinnacle of economic arrangement, but I and others do not agree.

Lastly, about that shaming. I agree, we can put the proposal in a positive language as much as possible and suggestions about how to do it are welcome. We however should be firm in our claim that an economic reward for our work is justified even if the actual “invoice” does not contain that language.

@kucai, one day we will have a connector for ID and you will get paid. Today, you would have to use JOSM and the Rovas Conenctor plugin.

Hi @AkuAnakTimur and thank you for your comment.

There are many schemes like the OSM BTC fund, for example Open Collective and others. My proposal is different in many aspects:

1. unlike projects like OSM BTC fund, we are not begging for donations here. We are claiming that our work has economic value that its consumers should reciprocate in the form of their own work for the commons, or by paying money. I am pointing out, that corporations like Apple started paying for work that we have been providing cost free for years and use it as a proof of what I am claiming - our volunteer work has economic value that can be easily determined. One option is to multiply the number of our editing hours by the hourly rate companies like Apple pay.
2. The ranking scheme affecting the amount of payout to the editors the OSM BTC fund is using, is only briefly and insufficiently described. What real-world parameters are used as a metrics is obscure. In NEO, monetary reward is determined by the length of labor time - pretty clear and history tested method for measuring economic value.
3. Use of Bitcoin is a non-starter for many people due to many factors, like its environmental impact, exchange rate volatility, or the arcane on-boarding procedure and other factors. NEO uses its own currency, issued whenever human work is reported. The currency can be exchanged for national currencies directly in Rovas.
4. NEO has two rewards - The one easily to understand is the monetary Chron payment reward for effort, equivalent to the labor time. However, it offers also s reputation-like, non-monetary and non-transferable Merit reward an individual earns, when the product or service they produce is purchased. I expect this reward to become more important than the monetary reward over time, because a person’s Merit score is a well-defined indicator of one’s work value for the society.
5. NEO constantly and fairly redistributes economic value among the participants, therefore extreme economic inequality as seen in capitalism can not arise in this economy. Exceptional value producers are not rewarded monetarily, but with Merits. No other scheme or economic system has this feature and that makes NEO the only truly community economic system.

There are more differences and features of NEO one can learn by consulting the NEO rules and other sources of information about NEO.