[Discussion] How should we measure guilds' contribution?

Near Community and nodes Guilds
3

In reference to ranking guilds -

  1. Ranking implies comparison and ordering and comparison is most beneficial if one can put similar things side by side and evaluate/order specific criteria. Think that’s always going to be an issue unless all guilds fit into some nice set of parameters (which they probably don’t).

  2. A ranking system is going to naturally “force” guilds into a certain set of activities to optimize their chances of rewards. If that’s the desired behaviour, that’s ok, but would suggest being very careful about what you’re ranking as it may have unintended effects. For example, if guilds are ranked on social media outreach - then a large focus of a guild’s time is going to be on optimizing their metrics in that realm - perhaps at the expense of other activities that might bring more value or are deemed more important at any given point in time.

I do think it’s important to measure the value a guild brings to the ecosystem - especially if that guild is being resourced by that ecosystem. Thus, if ranking is pursued, then I’d recommend:

  1. Not calling it ranking (as per title) - recommend putting the focus on measuring value.

  2. If we need to compare guilds to each other, then categorize them so similar types of guilds are “competing” against each other. Activity level of a developer guild (perhaps measured by Github commits) doesn’t necessarily say much when compared with the activity level of a marketing guild’s twitter likes.

  3. Let the sub-system that each guild operates in (in their category) naturally determine the value of that guild and figure out a way to represent that. Basically the basis of an effective reputation system.

I like Nima’s thoughts on using tokens for this valuation and have been working towards this kind of an implementation in my current project. But, instead of being non-transferrable, I do see them being bought/sold. If there is value in the guild and the number of distributable tokens is fixed (notwithstanding speculation), the value of that guild to its community should be represented in the price of their token - perhaps that’s an effective way of ranking all guilds without suggesting certain criteria are more important than others (effectively boxing a guild into certain activities if they want to be rewarded).

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