About Champions and Heroes

[burrrata]

@Beanow

If you think about the life cycle to develop a large feature:

1. Describe
2. Propose
3. Find out who cares about it and how important it is
4. Describe even better
5. Put it on the roadmap and commit to it
6. Do work
7. Get feedback
8. Do more work
9. Document
10. Feedback
11. Final touches
12. Release
13. Announce
14. Post-release care
15. Answer questions

There’s a lot that goes into the process. All too often that process falls onto a project maintainer, even if people are helping with the implementation. I would argue if someone just shows up to program (steps 6-8) and the maintainer does everything else around process and keeping the community informed, the maintainer championed it and delegated implementation work.

Conversely, if a contributor shows up to do all of this, I think it wouldn’t matter if the implementation was done by multiple people or if they delegated it and didn’t program at all. They championed it.

So I think one important aspect is, overseeing the process .

Why I believe it makes sense to do this per unit-of-work is that it’s a lot easier to agree on. The reputation of a person, I feel like should be what their cred score represents. So if we can agree who was the champion of some work, they can get extra cred from this. Repeating that will give you legendary scores.

+1 on all this! It’s incredibly time consuming (and sometimes emotionally intensive) work. The people best suited for it are those who show up consistently, understand the goals and pain points of the community, and work to make things better for all parties involved (often maintainers in open source projects). Identifying, supporting, and incentivizing this work is essential. As we keep saying, what gets measured gets managed. If we can agree who was the champion of some work or process, then we can reward that valuable contribution to the community. Again, this is incredibly important so thank you for starting this discussion!

@decentralion How can I boost this thread and/or flow more cred to @Beanow for starting this thread?

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.