For a while I've been seeking to grow the Tor network in both size and goodput. Towards this end, I've explored various avenues such as increasing user-awareness via tor2web. More recently, I've been exploring financial incentives like TorCoin.
Not wanting to strictly limit ourselves to financial incentives, I began reading the literature on incentivizing volunteers. The most relevant papers I found are:
* http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/LMS2_ManSci-Paper-Final.pdf * http://pareto.uab.es/~prey/gneezy_254.pdf * https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3308162/Slonim%202013.pdf
The most relevant of these papers (Lacetera 2013) cites the major motivations for volunteer labor are: "pure altruism, warm glow, self-image, and reputation". Upon reading this I realized TorCoin's technical interestingness had blinded me to much easier to leverage motivations of "warm glow" and "reputation".
I propose the following system for harnessing "warm glow" and "reputation" for Tor relay operators. I am willing to fund this in its entirety.
I propose establishing a subdomain on torproject.org giving each Tor relay operator (hereafter affectionately called "Torati") his/her own page using the information her machines provide to the Tor Directory Consensus. The fields to show on her "Torati profile page" would be things like: ContactInfo, PGP fingerprint, list of server nicknames, date the Directory Authorities first saw her contact info, etc. You can also imagine a receiving special "special recognition stars" for operating an exit or bridge node. Moreover, some bandwidth measurement like EigenSpeed or TorCoin gain traction, the Torati page could recognize contributors with by listing the sum total she has relayed to the Tor network.
Naturally a node can opt-out of Torati recognition by setting a parameter in the torrc file.
I argue this would be a cheap and easy way to motivate operators to volunteer more bandwidth for the Tor network. As mentioned before, I am willing to fund this in its entirety.
-Virgil