Why do we — the Eco community — give away Eco Points?

Eco Points are what we call an "open rewards currency" — or at least, they're becoming one.

We want Points to become universal — a transactional layer across every community and person in existence, enabling an experiment: can something start as a toy, then move to rewarding pro-social behavior and actions, and then become something more? Something universal, open, and useful?

In order for that to happen, these Points need to become widespread. They need to be distributed widely within communities that can use them and whose help we can use, and they need to be distributed widely among wildly different communities. A new open rewards currency would be no fun — and more importantly, nearly useless — if it stayed within a single social circle or set of related social circles. It would stagnate as a scoreboard for a single group, not a means of coordinating between groups.

Practically, that means we all need to bring more and more people into the wonderful, positive world of Points.

It's a little bit unusual, what we're doing here, and it breaks a lot of people's common sense and intuition. Most companies that give away points of some sort (credit card companies, airlines, other businesses) don't have an ultimate goal of making the points themselves as useful as possible. And they certainly don’t have the goal of making the points that they give away as useful as possible for products and services that are completely unrelated to their business.

Their points are a means, not an end. They're just trying to use the points to motivate you to take some other action which usually results in the transfer of funds from the consumer to the corporation — like spending on a credit card or paying for flights.

But for Eco — here's the tricky bit — our ultimate goal is the Points themselves. The Points are the point.

Where rewards points are usually a means to an end for a corporation, the situation is reversed in our case: our other projects exist to support our points system. What we're trying to do here is make these Points useful and universal. And so giving them away to a broad array of constituents is key — whereas other points-granting enterprises want to do the opposite, only giving points to those who take the specific company-benefitting action.

On the other hand, it's easy to say "we need to give away Points to invite the world into this system" — but if we simply opened up an indiscriminate firehose of Points, spewing infinite Points at anyone who raises their hand, it wouldn't work.

Why? Because then, they'd be useless for a different reason —they wouldn’t mean anything anymore.

So: we need to give away Points, but not too many.

We call that balance (along with some related ideas) eco-librium.

It means giving away enough Points to break inertia and build momentum; but not so many that the next marginal Point negatively impacts that momentum and usefulness.

We're figuring it out as we go, but we think it’s worked pretty well so far — and we're looking to keep that streak going. Our belief is that the next step is bringing other communities into the fold, building a pro-social transactional layer between them.

And in order for that to happen, we need to give Points away to those communities.

If you'd like to participate in this experiment, let us know. We'd love to eco-llaborate.