SourceCred
= "A tool for communities to measure and reward value creation".
URL = https://sourcecred.io/
Description
"SourceCred (in the most basic sense) is a technology that makes the labor of individuals more visible and rewardable as they work together in a project or community. The goal of SourceCred is to use this technology to make rewarding labor as nuanced as human contribution often is. We hope to be one piece in the puzzle of a healthier future where systems serve community members, where financial maximization isn’t the end-all be-all goal, and where wealth actually flows to those who are creating the value in our world.
SourceCred’s Core Concepts 1: Cred
SourceCred uses an algorithm to determine how much value a contribution or contributor added to a project overall. When a contribution is made to a project, SourceCred’s purpose is to "see" that contribution and assign it an amount of "Cred" based on how much value it brought to the project as a whole.
That Cred flows from the contribution to all the people and other contributions that supported it. In this way, you can imagine how a project could be represented as a "node graph" made up of contribution and people dots (aka "nodes") connected by lines (aka "edges") that flow Cred around to the nodes based on what supported what. The more edges one contribution has to other important contributions in the project, the more Cred is going to have an opportunity to flow to it along the edges. In this way, it’s easy to tell by the Cred score which contributions (and contributors) are truly foundational and support future work in the project.
So how does an algorithm determine how much someone’s work is worth in the bigger picture of a project? Sounds a little dystopian, right? The algorithm uses what we call "weights", which are a set of rules stating which types of contributions are worth what amounts of Cred. The weights for Cred distribution are decided by each community individually, thereby giving every community the opportunity to decide what it values and which actions uphold those values as they work together to create something. Every community using SourceCred can decide for themselves what is valuable and deserving of Cred, and what is not.
Cred is "non-transferable" in that you cannot sell your Cred, or buy someone else’s Cred. It is solely a representation of where value in the project has been created.
If you want to dig deeper into the nuances of Cred, check out our How Cred Works documentation.
SourceCred’s Core Concepts 2: Grain
On its own, Cred may be a nice signal of what is valuable and who is really doing the work to make your project successful, but it’s hard to pay rent or buy dinner with a Cred score. That’s where "Grain" comes in.
Grain is a project-specific digital currency that is minted and distributed to contributors who have Cred in that project. Your Grain is tied to your Cred; as you earn Cred, you also earn Grain. Unlike Cred, Grain is a form of currency and is meant to be transferable both inside and outside of the project." (https://sourcecred.io/docs/)
More information
- An intro manifesto on SourceCred, https://sourcecred.io/docs
* Article: Rennie, Ellie and Zargham, Michael and Tan, Joshua and Miller, Luke and Abbott, Jonathan and Nabben, Kelsie and De Filippi, Primavera, Towards a participatory digital ethnography of blockchain governance (February 27, 2022). Qualitative Inquiry,
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4078259
"Blockchain Governance occurs through a combination of social and technical activities, involving smart contracts, deliberation within a group, and voting. These processes are significant as they demonstrate how governance of distributed infrastructures is evolving. While typologies of blockchain governance can be constructed by gathering on-chain interactions and formal rules, other aspects are more difficult to observe, including governance interactions occurring inside discussion forums. In this paper we discuss a participatory digital ethnography technique, whereby participants and researchers use a bespoke bot to identify governance interactions occurring within project forums (on Discord). The technique is designed to be used in conjunction with analysis of software for the purpose of mapping and understanding the ‘governance surface’ of different protocols. We describe our tools and methods for understanding automated futures through a case study of the SourceCred community, an organization using, developing and maintaining open source software called SourceCred. The SourceCred codebase is also used by other decentralised communities for various organisational functions, including reputation and compensation."