an attempt at answering this:
fact: people working on useful tools benefit us all
problem: incentive is only big-picture, feel good. money is, by design, ridiculously hard to come by for helpful projects. teachers, farmers, babysitters, soldiers and many other professions provide valuable service to society yet make only a fraction of what money-manipulators (bankers who specialize in generating $$ from $) or cross-cultural entertainment like motion pictures.
Patents, trade secrets, close source & government regulations all contribute to incidentally de-incentivize many projects built around benefitting a large chunk of humanity as opposed to localized (individual, corporate or nation-state) profiteering. I ran into this recently designing - a distributed protocol where programmers receive escrowed bitcoins for an open-source project accepting their work, merging it into the master branch of the project. The payout system sounded promising, but the money had to come from somewhere and be managed to fund these projects!
So how can we, the people, reward people for doing good things, things we like?
"FarmerCoin", described below, is a thought experiment where local Farmers can receive fiat-by-consensus cryptocurrency in exchange for an independent third-party recording (both videographically and on a chain of signatures) the farmer's produce.
I propose the formation of semi-independent regulators for specific industries who accept payment of their choice to regulate a deed done. Regulators film their investigation and verification of the deed, publish to the protocol along with a signed message containing a hash of the video and a magnet link for nodes to torrent.
Once regulators have published a video, end-users known as "verifiers" or "voters" who have clients monitoring the network receive a notification that there is a verification to vote on. This would involve torrenting or finding the video online, verifying its hash, playing the video, then presenting a vote to the user. This vote would say "This is acceptable" or "This is not acceptable".
In "FarmerCoin", this plays out by the farmer showing regulators a bin of vegetables. 10kg of tomatoes, for example. Regulators film the weighing of the tomatoes then use a software to upload that video, a signature of its hash and farmer identity information to the network. If the tomatoes were rotten, the regulators are incentivized not to upload a video because their reputation may become damaged and farmers will not hire them (see next paragraph for why).
Farmer receives "FarmerCoin" for 10kg of tomatoes as the network approves it. If the network disapproves the quality of the tomatoes, the farmer receives nothing.
I admit - there is a flaw in this design. How much "FarmerCoin" is 10kg of tomatoes "worth"? I'm not sure. I don't know how to answer that. Maybe "FarmerCoin" should be generated per calendar year. Please discuss because I think this, at the time of writing, is the only missing link I see in the system.
Regarding the voters - trusting the internet as a whole to vote on if a farmer gets paid is ripe for exploitations. Instead, "FarmerCoin" could use votes only from public-keys the farmer has explicitly accepted to vote for them! Namely these are the farmer's regular customers at the market. This solves the trust problem on a human level. Trying to make this system "completely automated" ignores the fact that real-world actions are happening, which require intelligence. We don't have software to do this process so I think the best bet is to incentivize voters by also generating "FarmerCoin" for each vote they cast.
To be clear, YES "FarmerCoin" is generated by fiat. It is a more decentralized kind of fiat. For that reason and the reason that it is in the voters' -- who are customers of the farmer -- best interest to see the farmer receive accurate feedback on their produce so they grow better yields. ((FIRST REASON???))
YAKSEE
As far as how does "FarmerCoin" have value or "Yet Anthoer Crypto Currency" - consider this. When people speak of "Bitcoin" as being "decentralized", they really are only referring to network logs and the theoretical potential to generate currency. In actuality, those who held existing fiat resources and hardware manufacturing quickly became juggernauts in the cryptocurrency world. I mention this because when I talk about the "fiat" of the above localized consensus I imagine many crypto-currency fans revolt and insist that no, only computationally generated cryptocurrencies are valuable because commerce should be "trustless". I feel that on an intuitive level striving for a trustless society is mal-incentivized. "FarmerCoin"(s) gives us another kind of cryptocurrency just like LiteCoin's alternative hashing algorithim co-exists with Bitcoin.
Besides the intrinsic value of whatever a cryptocurrency with a novel generation mechanism, "FarmerCoin" could be accepted by farmers for discounts on food that those same voters gave feedback on. I think this completes the incentive circuit quite nicely.
MANY FARMERCOIN
"FarmerCoin" could be Tomato Coin, Apple Coin. It could also exist for each specific farm, or region. This would be up to the farmers, regulators and community of voters to work together and decide. Having an exchange (centralized or not) for these currencies to trade could provide additional economic incentives to the voters and farmers. Even if "regular" cryptocurrency is not traded for FarmerCoin, community specific networks could trade eg plows, immunizations etc.
EXPANSE
This concept can be applied to many real world actions. Making a work of art, patching a pothole, giving someone the finger, giving your cat a ball of yarn. Only if the community finds vaue in the "FarmerCoin" they are receiving and the farmer finds it beneficial to receive this subsidized fiat-by-consensus currency will the currency survive.