Writing excellent Praise

When writing Praise, the most important thing to remember is that your praise will be scored by quantifiers. By making the impact of the contribution clear, it will be easier for quantifiers to score. Try to be as descriptive and specific as possible! This will help anyone understand the impact of the contribution you are praising.

Praise Guidelines

There are two main guidelines to writing excellent Praise.

1. Be specific! Name the exact contribution you want to praise.
2. Express personal or community impact! Say how the action or contribution has an impact on you or the community.

When a Praise is not specific, the praise receiver will not receive as high a score as they would with more detail. When the impact is vague or missing, the quantifier may not be able to determine exactly how important that contribution actually is. Here are some Praise examples that are not specific enough to quantify easily:

• /praise @xyz for his new article. What new article? What was it about? What impact did it have for the community?

• /praise @xyz for your continuous involvement in the community. How were they involved? What specifically did they do? What impact did that have for the community?

• /praise @abc @def @ghi @xyz for their participation in ETHDenver, for their great commitment to the community, leading calls and helping everyone around. There are 4 people being praised for 4 different actions all at once. How can anyone give all of this a single score? It is important to make it clear exactly who is being praised for what.

When a Praise is unrelated to any personal or community impact, they praise receiver will also not receive a high score. Always try to relate the Praise to a personal or community impact.

• /praise @xyz for being man enough to know how to change a tire. How is this related to the community? Praise that doesn’t have a clear connection with the community will receive a very low score, or even be dismissed. If you specify how it has helped the community, then the score should be much higher.

Objective vs. Subjective Praise

Praise can be either objective or subjective.

By objective we mean factual and not influenced by personal feelings or opinions. Here are some examples of objective contributions that could be monitored and rewarded by Praise:

• Basic engagements with the community on twitter or other social media
• Meeting attendance and/or participation

It may be easier to assign a specific value to objective contributions like the ones listed above but it is the subjective Praise that shows peer-to-peer gratitude and impact in the community. This is where the heart of the community can be seen.

By subjective we mean based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes or opinions. In order to avoid writing subjective Praise that is difficult to accurately quantify, let’s take a look at what they might look like. Below are some examples as well as question prompts to help craft the praise in a way that provides details about the contribution and the impact it made on a personal or community level.

Difficult to quantify	Question prompts to help	Examples of excellent Praise…
Being kind	How did someone’s kindness impact you or your participation in the community	Praise @Billie for her kindness in hosting me during EthRio. When my Airbnb fell through at the last minute, I didn’t know what to do but she so kindly stepped in and made sure I had a place to stay throughout the event.
Taking the initiative	Why was it important for someone to take initiative on that topic?	Praise @Billie for taking the initiative to bring the SWOT framework into the TEC discussions and sharing a presentation with her analysis and possible solutions to address some challenges that face the TEC.
Untangling	What type of clarity did their contribution provide?	Praise @Billie for spending time with me going over the praise documentation. The insights she provided has given me a better understanding of the context and structure of the documentation.
Asking relevant questions	In what circumstance?	Praise @Billie for bringing up great questions during the rewards wg call. These questions gave us another perspective into upcoming features to praise and how to get the SourceCred distribution past the finish line.
Helping to onboard someone	What needs were met? How did you feel with that help?	Praise @Billie for the warm welcome. She helped onboard me on Discord and was kind and patient enough to answer all of my questions about the different Working Groups.
Listening	How did this make you feel? Why was it important?	Praise @Billie for listening to me for an hour as I practiced for my talk at EthBarcelona. Having someone actively listen, provide feedback and recommendations as I practiced was so helpful. I feel very supported and prepared for my talk!
Commitment	What was the quality of their commitment?	Praise @Billie for his ever-present participation across all working groups, ably filling in for leadership where needed, and tracking the developments faithfully in all areas. This type of enthusiasm and dedication is incalculably valuable to the community, serving as the human thread that binds each of our efforts together.
Providing information and insights	What information did they provide? How was it helpful to you?	Praise @Billie and @Nellie for giving me very detailed feedback and reviews on using Gitbook for working group documentation. I have been searching for alternatives to Notion and their contribution has saved me a lot of time.
Leadership	What value did their leadership provide to you or the community? What makes you highlight it at this moment?	Praise @Billie for leading amazing sessions sharing awareness about Deep Democracy, error culture and inclusion, both in the graviton training, and in the Aragon community.
Being supportive/Holding space	How has this helped you or the community?	Praise @Billie and @Nellie for holding things down while I was away at EthBarcelona. Thank you for facilitating the weekly meetings and keeping the twitter page updated and active.You guys handled everything so well that my absence was barely felt.
Being present/ available	How does that make you feel? What were they available for?	Praise @Billie for taking some much deserved vacation but still being available when needed to answer questions around SourceCred and the reward system
Being proactive	What were they proactive with?	Praise @Billie for creating some Franken-scripts that allow us to liberate past rewards data from SourceCred. Now we will be able to do the SourceCred rewards payout!
Sharing responsibilities	What responsibilities were shared? How did you feel?	Praise @Billie For allowing me the pleasure to co-steward the community with you for so long! I am grateful for all I have learnt and really proud of how well we have collectively improved the structure, proactivity, accountability and organization here.
Giving valuable inputs	What type of value was added?	Praise @Billie for coming up with the idea to feed activity/contribution/engagement/impact streams directly into RAD. Making our rewards analysis tool into a complete community analysis tool will take a lot of work but might prove to be one of the cornerstones for building a thriving community.
High vibes	How has the high vibe of someone impacted you?	Praise @Billie for always showing up to the quantification review calls with such gusto, she always provides such great feedback and well-thought observations into our reward system and analysis.
For doing something no one saw but you	Be as descriptive as possible, it’s a gift to the other to have publicly visible the value only you saw.	Praise @Billie for spending so much thought power on the Zenhub issues templates. This constructive fresh look at how to make newcomers find pieces of work they can take on would greatly help with the orientation in the TEC.
For bringing in new connections or leads	What leads or opportunities did they bring in and how does that impact the community?	Praise @Billie for drafting and promoting an amazing proposal to launch the praise system in GnosisDAO. The proposal has successfully passed and this is a big accomplishment for Praise as we look forward to seeing it percolating into other communities!