Contribution Credits

The Idea

When your knowledge helps answer someone else's question, you earn credits that extend your own query allocation. The network rewards contribution — the more useful your knowledge, the more you can query.

This is called Recognition of Contribution, or RoC.

How Credits Are Earned

Every time Rosie retrieves your content to help answer a question, it records how much your content contributed to the answer using an attention score. Your credit is proportional to that contribution.

If your document was the primary source for an answer (high attention), you earn more. If it contributed a small supporting detail (low attention), you earn less. This is fair — you're recognized for the actual value your content provides.

Credits accumulate automatically. You don't need to do anything beyond contributing content — the system tracks usage, calculates attribution, and credits your account.

How Credits Are Used

Your monthly membership includes a query allocation. When those are used, your earned credits become your reserve — additional queries you've earned through contribution.

Credits persist across months and never expire. They represent the cumulative recognition of your contributions to the network.

What Earns the Most Credits

Not all content earns equally. Content that gets cited frequently and contributes significantly to answers earns more than content that's rarely referenced. Over time, the most useful, accurate, and current content rises to the top.

What tends to earn well:

• Practical, actionable guidance that answers real questions
• Specialized knowledge not easily found elsewhere
• Content that's kept current and accurate
• Documents that cover topics members frequently ask about

What earns less:

• Generic or duplicative content
• Outdated documents that have been superseded
• Content on topics rarely queried

Leaderboards and Analytics

Your dashboard shows your contribution metrics — how many times your content was referenced, your total earned credits, and your contribution rank within the network. This isn't just vanity — it shows the tangible value of your participation.

Organizations can see aggregated contribution analytics to understand which content is most valuable to their members and where gaps exist.

The Contributor Cycle

The contribution credit system creates a natural cycle:

1. Contribute — share your knowledge with the network
2. Recognize — the system tracks when your content helps others
3. Credit — you earn queries proportional to your contribution
4. Query — use your credits to access more knowledge
5. Repeat — the cycle sustains itself

This is the Contributory Ecosystem Model in practice. The network sustains itself through the contributions of its participants — not through platform extraction or advertising.