“Individually We’re One Drop, But Together We’re An Ocean”
Collaboration pays off. In the wild, the coordinated teamwork of animals that hunt together, yields greater success than that of any individual hunter.
African wild dogs, as just one example, increase their success rate up to 67% and can target animals twice their size when they hunt in a pack.
While today humans don’t usually need to go hunting for food, we’re all still on the hunt: for information, audience, high-quality personnel, other people’s attention… In the modern world, we actually need to collaborate more than ever before to succeed in achieving our goals. Especially when these goals include an element of searching over large geographical areas.
Technology gradually gave humans the ability to to collaborate on wider and wider scales. The internet enabled us to easily share information across geographical barriers and gave rise to online social networks, which turned out to be incredibly efficient at connecting people and disseminating information. Human collaboration through social networks achieved such incredible challenges that it surprised even the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Human networks have demonstrated an ability to identify and precisely locate targets, with unmatched speed and accuracy, the trick was to individually incentivise each person in them to collaborate by sharing their little piece of information. Such targeting capabilities could easily be harnessed for a multitude of uses in various fields: finding personnel with very specific qualifications, finding the right audience for a specific type of music concert, finding students for a courses or workshops… the list is nearly endless.
Yet none of these capabilities are being used today.
Because so far, technology is missing a single key ingredient.
The Reward Of A Thing Well Done Is NOT Having Done It
People need to be incentivized to collaborate. Simply knowing that “it’s good for them” or “good for society” doesn’t really motivate action. So while we now have the technology to collaborate, we haven’t developed the technology to motivate collaboration. As it turns out, motivating large groups of people across large spaces to collaborate effectively is far more complicated than it first seems.
Collaborative efforts require the right incentivization of every individual participating in them. Each of us wants to feel that we’re rewarded INDIVIDUALLY, in-line with our individual efforts and contribution, in a way that ensures that those who contribute more also receive greater rewards.
Collaborative search tasks, the role of each person is simply to pass-on information to others. Because the entire point of the search is to find something, if people continue to share information about the search target, it will eventually be found.
The problem? current social platforms don’t reward people for collaborating by sharing information. So people mostly share information randomly and never enjoy the benefits created by their online sharing.
To reward people individually for passing on information, there’d have to be a way to keep score of every person who shared the links in order to be able to reward each one of them backwards if a target is reached and the result is achieved.
2key is now at the final stages of developing precisely such a technology. The new 2key protocol is called multi-step tracking, making it possible for links to record every person who’s shared them. The protocol enables links to automatically reward every participant who’s shared them once they’ve reached the desired targets.
It turns out, however, that the secret ingredient to motivating the masses to collaborate is to reward each participant according to their relative individual contribution.
The Right Game: Using Game Theory and AI to Motivate Collaboration
To motivate participation, people need to feel that their actions have meaning and therefore each person must be incentivised individually according to their own efforts and contribution.
The question that remains is according to what variants each participant should be rewarded: is it their location on the chain? Their past success in referring information to the right targets? Their overall level of participation and commitment?
2key wanted a model that takes into account all of the above.
To do this it assembled some of the greatest minds in the fields of game-theory and AI and is now leading the front in building the first general incentive model for online sharing.
According to the unique incentive model, which is based on game-theory, participants are not rewarded in an equal measure, but according to a complex algorithm which takes into consideration dozens of parameters, including a person’s position in the referral chain, the relative result delivery-time and the referer’s relation with specific domains, according to a taxonomy of 1600 verticals.
Each of the participants in the network earns and loses reputation points in line with their actions, the reputation score then influences the proportion of the reward that they will gain for every successful sharing.
In this way each individual is incentivized not only to share but to continue sharing the links that are passed down to them, until reaching a result. At the same time, the model encourages participants to consider whom to share the links with, so that results will be obtained most effectively.
The incentive model is not only tasked with giving positive feedback to “good” influencers, but also with giving negative feedback to “bad” influencers, by making it entirely unprofitable to try to abuse the network by spamming, for example.
The model not only uses game theory, but also machine learning algorithms that teach the entire system to better optimize the incentivization with time. The process uses artificial intelligence to analyze the vast amounts of data from each result-driven online search and incrementally optimize the incentive model. This means that incentivization on the 2key network will only improve as more and more people use the system.
Collaborate for Success
Now that there’s a way to easily motivate people to collaborate online, what can you do with it?
2key is using the protocol to build the 2key Network, designed to motivate and facilitate p2p sharing of referrals about people, products and events. The way this works is that someone defines a goal, say, finding people who’d like to participate in a local initiative for producing and selling solar energy by installing solar panels on their roofs. Details about the initiative are published on the 2key network and viewed by a small initial group, who then pass the link on to people who they know may be interested. When someone signs up, each person in the chain of people who’ve shared the original link is rewarded precisely according to their individual efforts.
In this way, everyone are incentivised to collaborate in achieve the desired results of finding the right people for the initiative.
The 2key network is more accurate, quick and efficient than our current social platforms that rely on robots to distribute information to the right audience. That’s because 2key relies on human intelligence and social knowledge to find the right audience for the right messages at the right time, redefining online sharing as we know it and taking online collaboration to a whole new level.
