Incentivizing Contribution in Decentralized Community Information Systems

Decentralized peer-to-peer architectures provide significant advantages in comparison to centralized solutions, especially for smaller Communities of Practice. They take into account the constant change of these communities and mitigate the need for central coordination or facilitation. Using blockchain technology, decentralized architectures can provide verifiable and secure collaboration, just like centralized solutions do, but without shifting the control away from the community to a single entity. However, blockchain transactions are not for free. This leads to the problem that in addition to contributing to the community, users have to pay the blockchain transaction fees. In this contribution, we try to solve this double-spending issue by introducing a reputation-based reward system for decentralized infrastructures. This system takes into account several aspects of a user’s contribution and her reputation, and on this basis calculates the reimbursement for her efforts. Our first evaluation shows promising results and this contribution provides a first step towards developing incentivizing mechanisms for decentralized community information systems.