SourceCred Initiatives Wishlist

A place for ideas that could be turned into initiatives.

Each idea can be a comment in this thread. Each comment should be a Wiki. This signals that the idea is open for improvement by the community and/or adoption by a champion. It is expected that ideas are rough, so making them editable by the community will help to refine them over time. If you end up championing an idea please just add that to the comment linking to the official Initiative for that idea! :slight_smile:

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Was talking with @decentralion about the idea of

More info here.

This would be really cool, but more research needs to be done to turn it into an initiative. As such, leaving it here for anyone to adopt.

I really like the idea of having an initiatives wish-list, @burrrata. In the coming months, I’d also like us to go and retroactively-initiative-ize past work in SourceCred (e.g. creating an initiative for the logo work) so we can do a better job of giving past contributors cred.

What is the contract you expect for this thread? Should we make the top post a wiki that anyone can add to? Should people make one reply per initiative they wish for? I notice you made your reply a wiki, are you expecting everyone to do that? (Maybe tricky to get follow thru.)

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This seems really important. Who/how would we decide on that though? Would this first require creating Cred weighted voting?

Great questions!

Ideally there would be a summary post linking to all of the current wishlist items, perhaps arranged by cred voting and/or boosting to signal which are the most favored.

For now, however, was just thinking to create a place for ideas. I made my idea a wiki because I’m freely giving it up for adoption. Anyone can add to it, modify it, or champion it if they so desire. Maybe I should specify that in the intro post so it’s clear Added that to the intro section to make it clear what’s going on. What do you think would make it tricky for people to make their posts wikis? (for the record, is creating wikis a feature that everyone has, or just some users?)

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Anyone can create an initiative. (It doesn’t require any permissions, or anything.) So anyone could do a bit of research, look into the historical PRs, and create an initiative documenting the work that the PRs represented. However, realistically, it will probably be @wchargin and myself doing this work, as we are directly familiar with all of the PRs and past initiatives.

(Note: It’s not just PRs - setting up this discourse, organizing the Odyssey hackathon, creating the logo, founding SourceCred itself, can all be seen as past initiatives).

As for valuing the initiatives: I’ll probably come up with some really crude heuristic like “medium-size thingy is worth 100 cred, small thingy is worth 20 cred, big thingy is worth 200 cred” and use this to give first pass valuations on the initiatives. As we come up with a better framework, we will apply it retroactively (yay retroactive update-ability!).

So, we don’t really need to make a wishlist for that. Since, anyone can write a new initiative, and then we can do cred-weighted voting on the initiatives directly.

I think the value of a wishlist is making it suuuper easy to suggest a new idea. Writing a new initiative is a fair bit of work and requires some thought around how to implement it. So the wishlist can be a way to easily keep track of ideas without needing to do the work of having a full initiative.

Now that you mention it, I totally see how cred-weighted voting on the wishlist would be a good idea. It signals which things people care enough about to inspire someone person in particular to do the work of writing up an initiative. It’s kind of a fractal structure: we have cred signals to decide which initiatives get prioritized, and also cred signals to decide which ideas should be written up as initiatives.

That said, we’re already pretty off-track on the intended format here, since we intended to make each post an initiative wiki, but now the first few posts are about setting up the wishlist itself. :slight_smile:

People will often not read the directions, or not know how to make things into wikis, and therefore most of the posts will not be wikis. Not judging, just stating.

I believe I’ve configured Discourse so that all users (regardless of trust levels) are allowed to make things into wikis.

Maybe one way to achieve your goal, without needing a new concept, is to make a new sub-category of initiatives, called “wishlist”. Then anyone can make a topic-per-wishlist idea there, but unlike with a full initiative, to put something in the wishlist you can just write a tiny description to get discussion going. Then, once we decide it’s something we care about, someone can take the responsibility for “promoting” it into a full initiative. (From the perspective of the full initiative, the wishlist discussion would be the first contribution to the initiative.)

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This reminds me of the rail laying train metaphor you described on the podcast. Totally agree, however, that a “wishlist” category would be a better UX for people. Just checked and I don’t believe I have the ability to create new categories, but if someone does I’ll create an About section and start creating threads :slight_smile:

Here you go, @burrrata!

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