About Champions and Heroes

[burrrata]

@decentralion

You’re conflating contributing with championing. Anyone can contribute to SourceCred, and they certainly don’t need to stake Grain in order to make contributions.

Championing, as I see it, is different. Championing is stepping up and assuring others in the project they will take care of something–like @AdrienDLT said, they’re providing consistency and predictability, which is very valuable. However, that is only valuable if they actually follow through. Champions that don’t follow through actually destroy value, by decreasing the community’s trust in champions, causing people to invest in a failed effort, and possibly by preventing some other, more serious, champion from taking on the initiative.

Therefore, champions should demonstrate that they’re taking skin in the game by staking some grain. Someone who hasn’t yet earned any grain may not be a good choice to be a champion anyway; they should consider doing some work as a regular contributor before taking on the mantle of championship.

Good point! I think you are right here in that the distinction was blurred. Also totally agree that someone who doesn’t already have cred is probably not the best fit to champion an initiative.

@decentralion

@Beanow said “cred, grain (and glory!)”, not “just glory”.

Another good point! I think I’m just a bit sensitive to projects/teams using altruism as a way to avoid rewarding their community. That’s obviously not happening here, however, so thanks for calling that out.

@decentralion

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.

Boosting is independent from who does the work. Given that I boost an initiative, it doesn’t necessarily give me a huge added incentive to do the work personally, it means that I hope someone does it. Whereas, if I champion it (and have staked behind my championship) I have a very strong personal incentive to make sure the work happens.

There’s a big risk to “bystander effect” issues where everyone hopes someone else will take on the big task. Champions provides a way for us to ensure that a single person is directly responsible, which is a great pattern for getting results.

Good things come in threes and this is another good thing. Agree that, upon further analysis, boosting does not provide the same incentives as championing. Thanks for helping to clarify that

[burrrata]

Reading through the Bitcoin Improvement Process (BIP) and came across this:

“The BIP process begins with a new idea for Bitcoin. Each potential BIP must have a champion – someone who writes the BIP using the style and format described below, shepherds the discussions in the appropriate forums, and attempts to build community consensus around the idea. The BIP champion (a.k.a. Author) should first attempt to ascertain whether the idea is BIP-able.”

[wchargin]

Yes, the term champion in that sense is fairly common. For instance, TC39 proposals have champions. There are, I think, some differences in connotation. A TC39 or BIP champion writes or helps write the initial proposal, and helps get the proposal through committee, but doesn’t necessarily carry the same implication of reliability and accountability that we’ve described in this thread. But certainly the two senses are related.

(Interestingly, one might speculate that the TC39-style term derives from champion as a verb, while @Beanow’s inspiration was from the noun form. Again, slightly different. )