In our latest event dedicated to Nostr, we have also pioneered a humble innovation (powered by the Hive blockchain).
Problem
As the saying goes, "necessity is the mother of invention". So what was the necessity here, what was the problem we wanted to address? It's the uncertainty (and ensuing cost) arising from the unreliability of people. This manifests itself in multiple situations but I've exemplified with 3:
- free events (like ours): 40-50% of those who register fail to show up
- restaurant bookings: industry data indicates that the average "no show" rate is around 20%
- medical appointments (where 5 - 10% of them are no honoured, allegedly)
I'm sure it's not hard to think of other situations where people make commitments and fail to stick to them.
Existing solutions
Some solutions, or at least workarounds for these problems exist. However, we observe that they are usually punitive: the subjects stand to lose something if they don't keep their commitment.
We naturally asked ourselves: is there a way to add positive incentives? What are the psychological determinants at play?
Scientific bases of our novel approach
We based our reflections on established findings from the field of social psychology, namely on "operant conditioning" as can be seen in the below images.
Existing mechanisms use negative reinforcement or positive punishment. None of those we are aware of use either "negative punishment" or, especially "positive reinforcement".
Our solution
For this event, we asked those who registered whether they were interested in receiving a reward for their active participation, and invited those who answered to provide a handle. If they showed up and, even more so, if they engaged meaningfully with the presenters, I created Hive accounts for them and rewarded them with the token of our community, OCLT
Namely, we granted 42 OCLT tokens for merely showing up and, for each presentation, 5 prizes of 420 OCLT each.
Because many attendees were new to Hive, we also did a short explanation of the eco-system and where OCLT fits in
The deeper meaning
This is certainly not about money. We are building a true, "IRL" community where people meet and shake hands (like HiveFest but trading the "global reach" of the former for "monthly frequency")
If you want to learn more about our community, start here
Our OCLT token can only accrue value if it fulfills its intended role: fostering and facilitating collaboration in the community, so that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts and the additional value that collaboration generates is recognized by outside people.
After these few slides, we introduced our main speaker.
An interesting, noteworthy twist is that the OCLT we distributed was not "the equivalent of an airdrop" where the tokens would only hold a promise of future value. In our case, the tokens distributed by 
That points to an actual business model where it is not the attendees who pay to attend but rather the speakers who have something to show or sell.
We hope to be able to extend and popularize this model further in the upcoming events.
And to wrap up the story, here is a screenshot from the (publicly consultable) 
