The 1UP curation system designed by 
The 1UP development will incorporate an additional “1UP” upvote button to the Steemit, Busy and Utopian platforms through the browser extension SteemPlus. This button will allow users to vote on their preferred Utopian posts using their daily allowance of “1UPs” and every 2.4 hours the highest ranking post by number of 1UPs will be rewarded with upvotes from the 1UP curation trail. The curation trail will operate prior to the powerful Utopian bot allowing members of the curation trail also to be rewarded through higher curation rewards.
The 1UP system is a brand new open source project, having been started in December last year. It has been developed through the collective work of many contributors on the Utopian platform who in return have received rewards for their efforts. The aim of this study is to examine the 1UP project as an early example of how the Utopian platform can act as a powerful tool in allowing a new project to come swiftly to fruition.
The two main areas of this study are:
- An analysis of the 1UP project contributions by date and type to establish the timing of the project work-streams from inception to go-live and their associated rewards;
- A breakdown of the contributions by author and type to illustrate how many Utopians have been mobilised to contribute to the project and how they have been rewarded.
0 Summary of Findings
I start by presenting the summary of findings for readers who have limited available time. The full details of the analysis are included in the later sections of this article.
0.1 Analysis of Project Timing and Work-streams
In the first area of the study I analyse the 1UP project contributions by date and type to establish the timing of the project work-streams and their associated rewards.
The calendar diagrams below illustrate the timing of the 1UP project from inception to go-live. The first Utopian contribution was on 14 December 2017 and the latest contribution was on 22 January 2018.
The Utopian contributions for the 1UP project fall into four types:
- Development (red): This includes (i) the back-end development work implementing 1UP on SteemPlus which was carried out by
and (ii) the styling and front-end development work which was produced by
.
- Task-graphics (blue): These were requests made by
- Graphics (purple): These are contributions from many individuals in response to the task-requests from
- Blog (pink): A post from
The calendar immediately illustrates one of the strengths of Utopian: The platform is not just for rewarding development work but also incentivises contributions to be made in wider areas, allowing much rounder projects to be fashioned. For the 1UP project we can see that there were many contributions made for the graphical design. Utopian also has categories of contribution for tutorials, copyrighting, analysis, translation and bug-hunting - it is likely that many of these will also be employed on the 1UP system once the project moves from initial development to live status.
Another strength of Utopian seen in the data is the ability to quickly resource contributors through task requests, since there are a large number of contributors available on the platform. As illustrated for the two graphics task requests, the time from request to completion was only a week in each case and was enabled simply by launching the task request on Utopian.
The calendar also illustrates how quickly the project has been completed, with approximately seven weeks from inception to go-live. Whilst the data shows that a large part of this is thanks to the swift development work of
The overall rewards for each contribution type were as follows:
In the next section I will illustrate how these figures break down by contributor.
0.2 Mobilisation and Reward of Utopians on the 1UP project
In this section area of study I analyse the breakdown of 1UP contributions by author and type to illustrate how many Utopians have been mobilised to contribute to the project and how they have been rewarded.
The sunburst chart below shows the breakdown by contribution type (inner circle) and contributor (outer circle).
A summarised version of the above sunburnt is included below for clarity.
In total there were fifty-three successful contributions to the 1UP project from thirty two contributors (and three that did not pass moderation). Two of those contributors were on development, both of the task request and blog categories were covered by
The development work was best rewarded, with an average payout per contribution of $68. The graphics contributions received $28 on average (all figures are author rewards only, excluding both curator and beneficiary payments, and as expressed on the user interfaces, i.e. not converted into $US values).
The breakdown illustrates the two different approaches taken to the development and graphics work streams. Whilst the development was covered by two individual developers working on the front-end and back-end, the graphics contributions were made through a competitive process involving many individuals.
The graphics work-stream shows the power of Utopian in quickly mobilising many contributors. As Utopian grows and attracts more open source developers from outside the Steem blockchain, there is potential for the development work to be equally well resourced, with a corresponding benefit of swift development of open source projects, many of which are likely to benefit the Steem infrastructure itself.
However the graphics work-stream could also be considered as quite inefficient compared to the development work-stream. As Utopian continues to grow it will be interesting to see whether different systems are put in place to maximise the efficiency of producing work and distributing rewards. For example a system of tendering, or direct requests to contributors from project owners based on evidence of prior work could be possible approches.
Outline
- Summary of Findings (see above)
0.1 - Analysis of Project Timing and Work-streams
0.2 - Mobilisation and Reward of Utopians on the 1UP project - Scope of Analysis
- Tools Used
- Scripts
1 Scope of Analysis
The analysis is based on the data for Utopian contributions to the 1UP project. The data has been obtained through SQL queries of SteemSQL, a publicly available Microsoft SQL database containing all the Steem blockchain data.
The 1UP project data has been filtered from the overall steem blockchain data by use of the .repository.name label information in the json_metadata column of the Comments table. The .type label allowed the separation by contribution type.
The analysis focuses on the time period of December 2017 and January 2018 (although data was extracted from September to capture any potential data since the start of the Utopian project). The data has been filtered by date using the timestamps in the created column of the Comments table.
2 Tools Used
Valentina Studio, a free data management tool, was used to run the SQL queries. The raw data was then verified and analysed in the spreadsheet application of the LibreOffice office suite.
Graphs and charts were produced using RAWGraphs, an open source data visualisation framework.
SQL scripts are included at the end of this analysis.
Summary of Findings
Analysis findings have been included in the summary of findings at the start of the report. I have decided not to repeat the information here.
3 Scripts
This was the script used to extract the data relating to the 1UP project:
SELECT
Comments.author AS [Author],
CONVERT(date, comments.created) as [DATE],
Comments.category as [category],
IIF(isjson(comments.json_metadata) = 1, json_value(comments.json_metadata, '$.repository.name'), null) as [Repo],
IIF(isjson(comments.json_metadata) = 1, json_value(comments.json_metadata, '$.repository.full_name'), null) as [RepoFull],
IIF(isjson(comments.json_metadata) = 1, json_value(comments.json_metadata, '$.type'), null) as [Type],
Comments.total_payout_value as [AuthorPayment],
Comments.curator_payout_value as [CuratorPayment],
Comments.pending_payout_value as [PendingPayment],
IIF(isjson(comments.json_metadata) = 1, json_value(comments.json_metadata, '$.app'), null) as [App],
case when comments.last_update > comments.created then 1 else 0 end as [Edited],
Comments.title as [Title]
FROM
Comments (NOLOCK)
WHERE
CONVERT(date, comments.created) >= '2017-09-01' and
depth = 0 and
Comments.category = 'utopian-io' and
IIF(isjson(comments.json_metadata) = 1, json_value(comments.json_metadata, '$.repository.name'), null) = '1UP'
ORDER BY
Comments.created
That's all for today. Thanks for reading!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors