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A PROPOSAL FOR ACADEMICS,
RESEARCHERS, AND INTELLECTUALS

WE INVITE YOU TO THE FRONTIER OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND DATA SCIENCE

DonateOpen is building a system based on the recognition that donations are not mere gifts, but high — quality, costly signals of quality.

People donate to what they truly enjoyed, to what surpassed their expectations. This first-hand experience captured by donations holds immense value, yet it currently dissipates without benefit. By rectifying this fundamental oversight of the information society, we translate donation data into publicly accessible markers of quality. We face innovative, breakthrough challenges and invite you to join us in addressing them.

THE KEY CHALLENGE: REIMAGINING REPUTATION

We are building donation-based quality ratings. The core idea is analogous to that which propelled Google: the PageRank algorithm posits that a page’s rank is higher if more authoritative pages link to it.

We are transposing this logic from pages to people: in our system, a creator’s ranking is higher based on the donations they receive — with a critical distinction: we account for the status and reputation of the donators themselves.

Calculating status and reputation is a complex, creative challenge. Simply accounting for mutual references (likes, reviews...) can lead to distortions, such as a bias towards “hype”. Our reputation model is more sophisticated, integrating at least three components:

  • Social Weight: The volume of donations, likes, and reviews received, weighted by the reputation of those providing them.

  • Engagement: How deeply is the individual immersed in their field? How frequently do they produce and consume content?

  • Taste and Qualification: What is the level of the content consumed? (For instance, in literature, we differentiate the profile of an individual reading Booker Prize laureates from one whose consumption is concentrated in comics.)

Defining the taste, erudition, and qualifications of a referent based on their digital footprint is just one example of the R&D challenges we face.

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OUR PROPOSAL: REAL DATA FOR FUNDAMENTAL CHALLENGES

We are prepared to grant researchers access to our data (anonymized donation statistics, consumption profiles, mutual references), rather than the “polished”, sanitized datasets commonly available. We are posing real, compelling tasks that are simultaneously fundamental and applied.

A NEW MICROSCOPE FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Donations provide academics with access to revealed preferences. People often do not say what they think, nor do they do what they say. By observing how and for what people “vote” with their money, we can learn to measure social forces and account for factors we currently only vaguely perceive.

To digitize the subjective is a breakthrough for the social sciences. It is their new microscope.

The focus of the world’s most developed economies has shifted towards higher needs, yet how much do we truly know about them? Donations are three-in-one: indicators of the quality of time generated by a text, metrics for the quality of texts, and characteristics of authors. By collecting and processing these signals, we will reach a new level of exchanging experience and knowledge.

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A CALL TO THE ELITE: ELITES OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Academics, particularly in the humanities, find it difficult to collaborate effectively today. The current organization of science does not meet the challenges of our time: we see outdated labor organization, diluted reputations, a broken citation metric (the h-index), failed head-hunting, and an unsatisfactory conversion of symbolic capital into monetary capital. In academia, especially in the social sciences, adverse selection — before which traditional “manual” peer review is powerless — is rampant.

As a result, even the most successful researchers and intellectuals seldom feel empowered to change the world for the better. Yet, there is no greater fulfillment for a person than to “play in a team of one’s own league”. DonateOpen, by engineering navigation and matching, is creating the platform for such cooperation.

R&D TOPICS AND CHALLENGES AT DONATEOPEN

We invite you to collaborate on the following practical and theoretical challenges:

Collective R&D Challenges:

  • The Logic of Negative Donations: How should they function? Where should the collected funds be directed?
  • Content Complexity Ratings: How can we calculate a complexity index for a work? (This is key to building educational trajectories).
  • “Spam” Index: How can we calculate the reputation of entire content domains (e.g., dietetics, biohacking, AI) to separate expertise from noise?
  • Community Reputation: Developing models to calculate the reputation of clubs, communities, and academic disciplines or schools.
  • Support Mechanisms (Kickstarter/ICO): Designing the logic for “deferred” donations to creators not yet on the platform, or “crowd-equity” (ICO) models.

Fundamental Research Themes:

  • Navigation and Expertise:

    • Distinguishing “What is said?” (content quality) from “Who is speaking?” (author reputation).
    • Mechanisms of social expertise based on donations.
    • An antidote to “adverse selection” in information markets.

  • Donation-Ratings and New Meritocracy:

    • Modeling and calculating status and reputation.
    • “Status as a Service” (SaaS).
    • Symbolic stratification and the problem of inequality (a Gini coefficient for symbolic inequality).
    • A critique of existing metrics (e.g., the broken h-index).

  • The Economics of Higher Needs:

    • Analysis of the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid (self-actualization).
    • Modeling the “Zone of Proximal Development” (L. Vygotsky) and “Instructional Scaffolding” (J. Bruner) through hierarchies of complexity.
    • Cultural consumption tracking and autobiographical memory.
    • Post-marginalism: Higher needs do not obey the law of diminishing marginal utility that serves as the bedrock of orthodox economics.

  • The Economy of Reciprocity and Donations:

    • Donations as an adaptation of money for the digital age; the quantification and validation of non-utilitarian values.
    • The donation as a signal of “consumer surplus”.
    • Donations as a third, higher type of altruism (distinct from charity and reciprocal exchange).

  • Digital Polity and Social Bonds:

    • The fine structure of social ties; the economics of “social valencies”.
    • The information economics of clubs and community reputation.

  • The Dialectics of Values:

    • Matrices of consciousness, echo chambers, and “puzzles of imagined worlds”.