Fair Compensation
The Fair Compensation pillar is currently in the planning and proof of concept stage. Compensation sharing has not yet been implemented in the Kestrel substructure.
Kestrel is designed to compensate contributors for the value they bring to a project. The pay-go model creates a natural revenue stream for projects as they attract users. On top of the base-layer costs of running a service, Kestrel also defines a premium for each project. Therefore a percentage of the revenue generated by that project goes to the contributors to the project itself.
Beneficiaries
Who are the potential beneficiaries of such an income sharing model? Obviously the core contributors deserve their share, but others who have helped to advance or popularize the project are also deserving. Furthermore, any dependent open source projects the application makes use of should also be considered for compensation.
In many case, a new Kestrel project might effectively be a fork of an existing open source project, with minor modifications made to adapt it to the Kestrel substructure. In this case, the appropriate income sharing might be for 90%+ of the income to be redirected to the creators of the original open source project itself - even though they may not even be aware of the Kestrel substructure. It is our intention to support such use cases, and in this way we hope to help sustain open source software development in general - not just for projects that run on the Kestrel substructure.
Defining Premiums & Income Shares
How are premiums and income shares defined? There are a few different models to consider:
Self-Defined Compensation
A simple starting point would be to allow creators to define an initial premium and income sharing split. There are clear downsides to this model however. Someone could simply fork someone else's project, decrease the premium to make it more attractive to users, and then define all income to go solely to themselves, with no recognition of the original creators' contributions.
Substructure.one-Defined Compensation
In this model, substructure.one (the organization behind Kestrel) determines the compensation model. This is the current model we use for compensation.
In this model, only projects that have a well-defined sponsorship model (typically via Github Sponsors or Open Collective) are eligible for compensation. Compensation rates are determined via a holistic but admittedly ad hoc assessment.
Community-Based Compensation
An improved model would allow users to provide feedback on what a fair premium and appropriate income shares should be for a given project. However this would require active involvement from a large base of users, and would need significant efforts to prevent gaming of the system.
Market-Based Compensation
Prediction markets have long been hailed as a way to combine the wisdom of the crowd with market incentives to make more accurate predictions. One compensation model would allow users to "predict" what an appropriate income share and/or premium should be for a given project, use the net consensus from those predictions to define the actual shares/premiums, and then in some way reward users whose predictions were close to the final result. In this sense it would be a "self-fulfilling prophecy" form of a market.
This approach would need to be carefully designed to prevent abuse. It may be more of an interesting thought exercise than an actually practical model.