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 Project, 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 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?"
Traditionally, questions of facts and judgements require answers from parties accredited by centralized authorities, such as doctors licensed by the Boards of Medicine and attorneys by the Bar Association. In the absence of central authorities, however, successful decentralized networks have developed ways to answer complex questions. A few examples are:
- 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.
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