The idea is that you're exchanging your expertise with each other. Say John is awesome at javascript but sucks at photoshop. Susan is awesome at photoshop but s

The idea is that you're exchanging your expertise with each other. Say John is awesome at javascript but sucks at photoshop. Susan is awesome at photoshop but sucks at css. Rich is awesome at css but sucks at javascript. If they trade their tasks around and everyone focuses on what they're good at, they all wind up saving a ton of time. So the payoff is that you'll get help when you need it. The points facilitate that exchange with a minimum of fuss. There are already a number of sites that allow you to post tasks/projects for money; elance, odesk, freelancer.com. They have some good points and some bad points. The money exchange generates a taxable event and also frankly brings in many lower-quality workers. They also tend to require a lot of hoops to keep your interaction through the site itself so they can take a percentage of the payment. So this is just another approach with its own set of pros and cons.