Praise
Praise was the Token Engineering Commons’ system for recognizing contribution. It was a “culture of gratitude” that turned everyday acknowledgment into a measurable, and eventually economic, record of who had helped build the commons. It sat at the heart of the Cultural Build and connected directly to the token economy.
For how Praise fed into ownership, see Economics & Token Design and The Hatch.
Origins
The Praise system was not invented from scratch. It evolved out of the Giveth community’s experiments with Reward DAO, was iterated on by the Commons Stack, and was then adopted and adapted by the TEC. What the TEC added was scale and cultural centrality, where Praise became a defining part of how the community saw itself.
What Praise was for
Praise served several purposes at once:
- Acknowledge and reward contributions, including work that traditional systems miss.
- Create a culture of gratitude as a deliberate social norm.
- Instigate decentralized updates about what work was actually happening across the community.
- Distributed early governance rights widely, since recognized contribution translated into Impact Hours and, later, tokens.
- Give feedback on what kinds of work the community valued.
A notable design choice was that Praise was subjective on purpose. It was meant to capture not only clear, visible actions but also less concrete contributions such as care work, emotional labor, and the quiet maintenance that held the community together.
How praise was dished
Recognition was peer-to-peer and low-friction. When a member noticed someone helping the community, they could “dish praise”:
- On Discord, by posting a message starting with
!praise. - On Telegram, using the format
!dish praise to/for [handle] [reason].
Each praise named who made what contribution. The ability to dish praise was a permission (“praise powers”) that members could request from a community steward and that could be granted onward, with a dedicated testing channel for newcomers to practice. Anyone active in the TEC Discord or the Telegram praise channel could be praised. The only constraint was the Code of Conduct: praise had to be respectful, but there were no limits on what kind of contribution could be recognized.
How praise became Impact Hours
Praise on its own was qualitative. Roughly every two weeks, the dished praise automatically collected into a spreadsheet by the praise bot and was quantified by community members into Impact Hours (IH), which served as the system’s unit of measurement.
Quantification was kept deliberately manual, because turning qualitative gratitude into numbers required a human sensitivity that bots could not provide. Members with higher Impact Hours were invited to do the quantification, on the reasoning that they had the context to assess contributions fairly and sensitively. The rules of praise and quantification were themselves documented and refined through community proposals over time.
From Impact Hours to tokens
Impact Hours were the bridge from culture to economy. The total Impact Hours a contributor accumulated would convert into TEC tokens at the Hatch, provided the minimum Hatch goal was reached, which is how people who had worked for the commons before it had any money became token-holding members of it. See The Hatch and Tokens of the TEC.
How Praise evolved
After launch, Praise matured from a cultural practice into an ongoing operational system. The community built recurring rewards rounds around it, developed Praise analysis and quantification tooling, experimented with SourceCred-based measurement, and modeled contributor factors, while also working through the genuinely difficult question of fairness between Praise-based rewards, paid work, and unpaid volunteering. The tooling behind this is preserved in Code and Technical Artifacts.
Related: Economics and Token Design · The Hatch · Ostrom and the Cultural Build · Tokens of the TEC