Awards and rewards each have unique benefits, utilities, and tradeoffs.
Rewards typically have monetary value, whereas awards typically have sentimental value. Communities can give rewards, awards, or some combination of both to participants in fractal meetings. You can compare this to sports where players can earn cash prizes or trophies for winning competitions. There are different purposes and important reasons for both.
The Optimism Fractal community awards public goods creators with Respect, which helps recognize, measure, and evaluate their contributions to the Superchain. This complements Optimism Retro Funding quite nicely, which can use the Respect awarded to determine how to distribute rewards to public goods creators and allow community members to earn funding by focusing on what they love (without needing to also manage a treasury of liquid tokens).
You can think of onchain awards like Respect as a form of potential energy that helps people build reputation on an open, immutable, composable, and verifiable ledger. This allows anyone to allocate rewards, awards, or other utilities (such as decision-making power or social influence) in the future to the people who have earned Respect.
This is very powerful and we’ve only just recently started to see it’s potential come to life…
Of course there are also many other benefits to participating in fractal events, such as opportunities for networking, collaboration, friendships, learning, teaching, promoting, creating videos, sharing experiences, raising awareness for your work, having your voice heard, having fun, building a better future, supporting fractal democracy, connecting with others, and developing community….
You can think of participating in fractal events and earning Respect as a form of building heavenly savings, as defined in More Equal Animals: Consider heavenly savings to be the good will of your community earned by being a reliable, trustworthy, and giving community member. When your earthly savings fail you, your heavenly savings can bail you out. This is what community is all about.”
