About Champions and Heroes

[burrrata]

@decentralion

I propose that when someone becomes champion for an issue or initiative, they need to commit to a timeline, and stake Grain behind their commitment. The exact amount of Grain will depend on the size and scope and rewards/bounty on that particular initiative. If they follow through, they will get back their grain stake, along with extra cred and grain for successfully championing an initiative. However, if they never actually do what they promised, they lose their pledge.

Would this be related to the boosting feature, but rather than having boosting be a 1-way stream it could also be negative? Or are you thinking of a much simpler fixed deposit staking mechanism?

@decentralion

Also, circling back to earlier discussions around modeling and documenting cred/grain dynamics, are we ready to create a SourceCred User Guide yet? Would be awesome to have that as a reference, even if it’s a WIP living doc.

I think this would be really valuable. To get this started, it just needs a Champion.

Still unclear on this. Does one need to explicitly proclaim that the are a “champion,” or this a subjective measure that the community awards to outstanding community members? Another way to think about that is do you have to earn the right to be a champion (like completing a marathon), or do you take the title of champion (like signing up for a marathon). In the context of staking to align incentives it makes sense that you would take on the “champion” role. In the context of champions as outstanding long-term members of the community, however, it seems like that should be something awarded by others and not declared by one’s self.

@s_ben

It gives genuinely good maintainers cred they deserve while also providing a path to being a maintainer, or simply being more “maintainer like”, and provide extra value through championing. Reminds me of corporate jobs where people “own” something. But there you’re typically valued by a performance review from your boss, which is suboptimal.

Right, but does someone elect themselves as a champion or does the community review a contributor’s performance and award them the title of “champion?”

@s_ben

Could be a good idea, but a little wary…introduces complexity and a barrier, and I’m not sure how much value it will add. In my imagination, this issue could be solved already if we have metrics/heuristics that value people that stick around. In other words, you don’t get cred for talk and piddling about. You only start getting meaningful cred when you say, become a champion of a little project, or help meaningfully in other ways.

Agreed. The UX and narrative around this is concerning. What if there was a threshold where if you contribute to more than 20% of the cred of an initiative you get a “champion boost” where your cred for that initiative is doubled or something? (could be any percentage, but I just picked 20% as it seems achievable enough to motivate engaement).

@s_ben

I think having to put in a significant amount of work for free (or relatively little) functions in a similar way. The general ‘work token’ idea though, which I’ve seen expressed before other places, could have legs. And typically this scheme has people stake tokens to purchase the right to work and earn cred, similar to bonded contractors or taxi medallions. I wouldn’t be surprised to see those ideas surface in OSS too.

We already put in tons of work for free all over the OSS ecosystem. Enough is enough! Also, considering the early adopter risk of getting paid in “magic internet money,” I think that asking people to work for free or to spend real money to earn the right to work for “magic internet money” seems like a bit of a stretch. The UX should be such that anyone can start contributing right away and it’s a rich and rewarding experience for them.

@Beanow

Complexity wise, I think by incentivizing enough in the form of cred, grain (and glory!), there’s enough positive reinforcement to work out those details.

Disagree. There’s only a handful of people here. Obviously the “glory” is not enough (although the level of interesting conversations definitely is!).

@Beanow

Similar to how a lack of nice tutorials and fancy user-interfaces wouldn’t stop people from mining crypto.

This is actually a huge problem in the crypto space and the next generation of apps that have good UX are completely crushing the apps that don’t have good UX. Good ideas aren’t enough. You have to also build something people want.

@Beanow

“What can you plan around?” it’s not that change is unexpected. But you need something to plan around. When it comes to opportunity cost investments, like onboarding new contributors, or reliably being able to suggest another contributor to not do the same thing or talk to the champion, because someone already committed to it.

What if there was the option to stake cred to a commitment, but not the requirement? This really feels like boosting the more I think about it. You’re just booting your own initiative. If that goes well then everyone wins. If not, they you just spent a lot of cred. The boost signals the commitment, however, because you spent a rare resource to signal intent. On top of that, if there was a “threshold boost” built in to the Initiatives protocol then you would be rewarded to maintaining your position in an initiative as it evolves. Combining a regular boost (to signal intent) with a threshold boost (for actual contributions) could be huge, not just for the person “championing” the endeavor, but also the “senior” members engaging to help that champion (and thus getting the threshold boost themselves)