One idea is to flow cred from users of a project to the features (and people) that make the project most valuable those users.
One way to make this system work, is to periodically allocate the cred that’s passed back to dependencies based on:
- the features those dependencies rated as previously important,
- the future features that will be important to those dependencies,
- the rest to the project overall.
Cred that flows to future features can be used as a bounty. (Perhaps with an escalating exchange rate.)
The team at priceintelligently has written a lot about using simple surveys to generate quantitative data about how different users value different features. Here’s a nice summary of some of their insights: https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/194853/Lessons-from-Sending-One-Million-Surveys
Bootstrapping
Before a project has dependencies that are using sourcecred, we might be just mint some amount of cred for the survey itself.
Secondary Incentives
It may also make sense to distribute cred to the survey respondents themselves. This way the act of using sourcecred in a project can help that project’s dependencies better allocate resources. This has the nice effect of encouraging use of sourcecred at the edges of the network.
This post is based on messages sent on the sourcecred discord on 2019-08-08. Thanks to @s_ben, and @decentralion for their questions and contributions in chat!