New Activities That Earn Credit
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Teddie Goldenberg
Apr 27, 2009, 7:54:48 PM4/27/09
to OFCS
I've been brainstorming the ramifications of being able to, as a community, approve of crediting certain activities. Here's some things I've thought of:
* Credit students for going to school (if they maintain passing grades). Not just college students, but the most young students (kindergarten and up). The principle would be that a child is doing a service for all of society by achieving in school. This negates the "value-added time" problem that Ithaca hours has (where a dentist is paid 3 hours per hour, for example).
* Credit mothers for being pregnant, giving birth, and nursing. That is, if they're not drinking and smoking the whole time. I dunno, there could be a lot of pitfalls in this one. Then again, this would be like a built-in maternity leave.
* Credit people for recycling. It would mean measuring the amount of recycled materials, but doing so basically reverses some of the debt from their consumed products.
* Credit people for working on open-source software projects like this one. If a community uses the software, isn't that a tacit approval of the programmers' labor? I guess we can't make it retroactive, however. I mean, imagine what people will think if we create a credit system where all of the developers (us) are already rich?
* Credit people for restoring land to its natural state. If you're replacing a mountaintop removed by mining, what you're doing is mitigating the social debt that mining company has incurred.
Those are some thoughts I have. I worry that credit may be too "easy" with OFCS, but like Ed pointed out, it's not for us to design a system with equilibrium; different OFCS implementations will have to be tried before we achieve anything even near equilibrium.
-=Teddie=-
* Credit students for going to school (if they maintain passing grades). Not just college students, but the most young students (kindergarten and up). The principle would be that a child is doing a service for all of society by achieving in school. This negates the "value-added time" problem that Ithaca hours has (where a dentist is paid 3 hours per hour, for example).
* Credit mothers for being pregnant, giving birth, and nursing. That is, if they're not drinking and smoking the whole time. I dunno, there could be a lot of pitfalls in this one. Then again, this would be like a built-in maternity leave.
* Credit people for recycling. It would mean measuring the amount of recycled materials, but doing so basically reverses some of the debt from their consumed products.
* Credit people for working on open-source software projects like this one. If a community uses the software, isn't that a tacit approval of the programmers' labor? I guess we can't make it retroactive, however. I mean, imagine what people will think if we create a credit system where all of the developers (us) are already rich?
* Credit people for restoring land to its natural state. If you're replacing a mountaintop removed by mining, what you're doing is mitigating the social debt that mining company has incurred.
Those are some thoughts I have. I worry that credit may be too "easy" with OFCS, but like Ed pointed out, it's not for us to design a system with equilibrium; different OFCS implementations will have to be tried before we achieve anything even near equilibrium.
-=Teddie=-
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