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Because it is a complex subject with long-term consequences, climate action often involves questions of both facts and judgements. 

For example, with the Investor Climate Disclosures ProjectDisclosure, questions of verifiable facts may be "Did American Airlines disclose that Scope 1, 2, and 3 were such amounts", and questions of judgement may be "Is American Airlines on track with the Paris Agreement?" 

Similarly, with the Completed Research: Voluntary Carbon Offsets Directory Research Project and carbon offsets, questions of verifiable facts may be "how big are the trees in the forest?", and questions of judgement may be "did carbon credits improve the forest?"

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  • Peer reviewed academic journals – Academic journals accept contributions and send them to qualified experts in the field for review.  There is an informal yet highly developed reputation system for academics based on the number of published papers, the number of citations of those published papers, and the journal rankings of where the papers are published.    These metrics may be viewed as "tokens" of reputation, which are then used for getting more papers published, jobs and tenure at universities, and other professional advancements.  
  • Stackoverflow - Stackoverflow has formalized the reputation system for answering questions on its website.  Its reputation score unlocks more features on the website, and its badges are a source of personal pride.  More importantly, though, they are a proof of expertise for members when applying for jobs.  Therefore they may also be viewed as "tokens" of reputation.
  • Wikipedia - Wikipedia has an elaborate system of governance which includes editors, stewards, an arbitration committe, and administrators.  While anyone could edit a page on wikipedia, a group of volunteer editors are responsible for keeping them "accurate," while the arbitration committee resolves disputes.  Increasing levels of involvement in the Wikipedia project then leads to higher level positions with more privilege.
  • Open source projects - Open source projects such as ours are generally run informally.  In most projects, there is a group of maintainers who control what goes into the project and its general direction.  Members of the community gain attention of the maintainers through their activity and could eventually become maintainers themselves through their contributions.  However, because it is easy to fork open source projects, it is also easy for members to leave the community and start on their own with the code.  Therefore, most open source projects tend to be homogeneous, rely on direct trust between the developers and the community, and don't have a formal reputation system, and many open source developers rely on Stackoverflow to build their personal reputation capital.  
  • Blockchain oracles - Oracles such as Chainlink are designed to provide accurate data to blockchain smart contracts.  Because they're designed to operate in a purely decentralized environment with minimal trust, they have very formal reputation and credit systems.  The Chainlink 2.0 white paper, for example, spells out how oracle members stake Chainlink tokens on the data they provide.  They earn rewards for supplying correct data but could lose tokens for supplying incorrect data.  An arbitrator could be called upon to decide whether the oracle member provided the correct data.  
  • DAO's - The difference between an oracle and a DAO is that oracles are supposed to supply verifiable facts while DAO's are for collective voting.  Compound has a sophisticated DAO for voting on its platform.  We have a customized version of this DAO as examples of how it could be used. 

Economists (such as Partha Dasgupta) have observed that smaller networks (rural villages, open source projects, academic journals) tend to rely on informal reputation, whereas larger networks (international finance, DEFI blockchains, social networks) tend to rely on formal and quantitative reputation capital.  Stackoverflow has in fact used a formal reputation to connect multiple open source projects’ smaller, informal networks.  As a result, they’ve monetized the informal networks of open source projects.  Stackoverflow has in fact used a formal reputation to connect multiple open source projects’ smaller, informal networks.  As a result, they’ve monetized the informal networks of open source projects.

The oversight or steering function is a common feature of governance for many communities, from large social networks such as Instagram to small open source projects and academic journals.  The steering committee doesn't have to be   knowledgeable about particular topics, which requires specialized expertise, but should know what is general acceptable, which is something that a lot of people should understand.  For example, Instagram doesn't get involved in whether pet or vacation photos should get more likes, but it will control what types of content are allowed.  Similarly, the maintainers of an open source project may not be the most knowledgeable about each feature in the code base, but they should insist that there is proper documentation and testing for all the features that go into a project.

Reputation Tokens

The examples above are all networks run by centralized authorities, which grant reputation for activity on their websites.  This creates two problems: The centralized authority would need to invest significant time and capital before there is enough activity to find experts.  Meanwhile the experts find their reputation or social capital tied up in another network, which could disappear or make changes that devalue the reputation they've earned. 

In a decentralized network, reputation should be earned for activity anywhere and owned by the experts.  That way the network would not need as much time and capital to start up, and the experts could control their reputation capital better.  

For example, we could allow users to submit their blog posts, twitter, reddit, stackoverflow, etc. profiles or activity streams.  Then the governing oversight committee could vote to grant them reputation tokens for staking on oracles or voting on DAO's. 

Alternatively, we could post a series of questions about the topic on public forums and grant reputation tokens to the responses.

Use Cases

We can explore this further in use cases such as:

Ideas for Speakers?

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Reference