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Show me the HONEY: Introducing the HONEY Rewards Calculator

New tool makes it easy to estimate HONEY rewards in your region

Since the launch of the Hivemapper network in November 2022, many people have asked for help estimating how many HONEY tokens they could earn with a Hivemapper Dashcam. 
With today’s release of the HONEY Rewards Calculator, community members can more easily understand how different factors affect the token rewards available for contributing to Hivemapper’s global map.
The calculator uses the exact formulas powering Hivemapper’s weekly rewards cycle, which accounts for several factors including the region in which you drive, the freshness of submissions, and the quality of submissions. This ensures the largest rewards go to contributors who add the most value to Hivemapper’s global map.
“Whenever someone joins the Hivemapper community, they are deciding to dedicate their precious time to building a global map with us,” said Gabe Nelson, Head of Operations at Hivemapper. “They deserve a quick and easy way to estimate the HONEY rewards they can expect to receive for their effort. This calculator is an important step in that direction.”
As a next step, Hivemapper plans to collect community feedback on the HONEY Rewards Calculator and use it to build a more powerful version in the Hivemapper Explorer
This step-by-step approach reflects Hivemapper’s belief in the power of moving fast and learning quickly. Starting with a humble spreadsheet model will allow Hivemapper’s product team to learn more about the needs of real-world customers before writing a single line of code, delivering an even better product in the future.
To share feedback about the HONEY Rewards Calculator and suggestions for future versions, contributors should submit a request using this web form.
How to get started
To start using the HONEY Rewards Calculator, follow these instructions:
  1. Click this link to access a read-only copy of the calculator.
  2. Make a personal copy of the calculator so you can edit the file.
    • On Web: File -> Make a copy
    • On the Google Sheets app: Menu -> Share & export -> Make a copy
  3. Get started by choosing your region and the most recent week.
  4. See how rewards are affected by making assumptions about:
    • The number of contributors in a region
    • How many km of map data each contributor submits
    • The freshness of those submissions
    • The reputation score of contributors
Here is an instructional video showing how to get started.
Before you start tinkering, here are a couple of important reminders and disclaimers:
  • This model uses the same formulas used to calculate HONEY rewards, but it is intended for informational purposes only. Outputs are not guaranteed to reflect actual results.
  • This model treats each input as independent. It does not account for interrelationships between inputs. For example, having more active contributors in a region will result in higher region progress (and thus a larger rewards pot) until the region reaches 100% progress. However, increasing the number of contributors in this model without adjusting region progress will always result in smaller rewards for individual contributors. In reality, contributors joining a region may result in more significant rewards for individual contributors, depending on how region progress is affected. At the project’s current stage it is beneficial to have more people mapping near you.
  • This model only includes map progress rewards, which account for most rewards issued. It does not include map consumption or bounty rewards.
Powering the calculator: rewards formulas
The new HONEY Rewards Calculator uses the same formulas used to calculate weekly HONEY rewards. Keep reading for more details on the key inputs.
Global Pot
A total of 4 billion HONEY tokens will be minted for map contributors over a minimum of 10 years, following a curve described in this Colab notebook. The number minted each week depends on Global Map Progress, a weighted average of map progress in every defined region of the world. For more details, see here.
The size of the Global Pot has steadily increased with the growth of the Hivemapper network. To understand what size Global Pot to assume when using the HONEY Rewards Calculator, you can use this query of public on-chain transaction data. For example, the weekly rewards cycle processed on Feb. 20, 2023 shows a global pot of 877,200 tokens.
Region Weight
Each defined region in the world has a Region Weight that impacts its contribution to Global Map Progress and its share of the Global Pot it receives. Region Weight is mostly based on road volume and road density. You can find Region Weights on the Hivemapper Explorer.
The Hivemapper Foundation manages Region Weights, which are subject to change.
Region Progress
Each defined region in the world gets a weekly Region Progress score that impacts its contribution to Global Map Progress and the share of the Global Pot it receives. 
Region Progress three sub-metrics: Coverage, Activity, and Resilience. These submetrics are designed to generate more rewards as the number of productive contributors increases and map coverage improves. For more information on these metrics, see here. In addition, you can find current and historical region progress scores on the Hivemapper Explorer.
QA Tax
In each region, we allocate a minimum of 97% of the rewards pool to map contributors and a maximum of 3% of the rewards pool to QA contributors.
Contributor Score
When rewards are calculated, each user receives a Contributor Score. This score equals the user’s Reputation multiplied by the freshness scores for map tiles submitted by the user for the weekly rewards cycle. 
Each tile’s freshness score is based on the number of days since the tile was last mapped. The average freshness of tiles contributed across the network is currently 5.2 days. (Note: freshness is calculated separately for both front and side mounts.)
Some users have lower average freshness because they drive the same routes regularly, for example, when commuting to work. One way to improve freshness is to review map coverage in the Hivemapper app or Explorer and choose variations on the usual route that have not been recently mapped.
Reputation is a score between 0 and 1 that is determined by the share of a user’s contributions that pass QA. As of this writing, the average reputation score is 0.35 with a floor of 0.30 to reduce the variability of user rewards at this early stage. 
Reputation affects the distribution of the rewards pool among the contributors in a region, but it does not affect the size of the rewards pool. 
Imagine a region with a pot of 300 HONEY to split among three map contributors, all of whom submitted the same amount of equally fresh map data, which we will call ‘x’ for simplicity’s sake. If these contributors also had the same reputation score, they would all receive the same reward: 100 HONEY. 
Now let’s imagine that Person A had a reputation of 0.30, Person B had a reputation of 0.40, and Person C had a reputation of 0.50.
 The total of their Contributor Scores would be 0.30x + 0.40x + 0.50x = 1.20x
Person A would receive 0.3x / 1.2x or 25% of the pot: 75 HONEY
Person B would receive 0.4x / 1.2x or 33% of the pot: 100 HONEY
Person C would receive 0.5x / 1.2x or 42% of the pot: 125 HONEY
Total region earnings: 300 HONEY
As you can see, reputation score has no impact on the total rewards received by the region. It also has no impact on Person B, who is submitting average quality data. However, it does result in a transfer from Person A to Person C to incentivize high-quality submissions.
Ways to improve your reputation include:
  • Mounting the dashcam according to mounting guidance to ensure clarity of view.
  • Stopping collection when visibility is very poor and map data is unlikely to be useful.
Reputation and Contributor Score are currently not surfaced in the Hivemapper app or the Hivemapper Explorer, but this may change in the future. 

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