# Building SourceCred for the Wider World (Pt. 2: Get to your god damn point!)

**URL:** <https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/building-sourcecred-for-the-wider-world-pt-2-get-to-your-god-damn-point/964>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [December 17, 2020, 2:03pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/building-sourcecred-for-the-wider-world-pt-2-get-to-your-god-damn-point/964 "2020-12-17T14:03:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![eeli](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/eeli/32/1390_2.png) [@eeli](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/eeli)\
**Post date:** [December 17, 2020, 2:03pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/building-sourcecred-for-the-wider-world-pt-2-get-to-your-god-damn-point/964/1 "2020-12-17T14:03:59Z")

</div>

### TL;DR

NOPE 😃

## Purpose

In my [background](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/building-sourcecred-for-the-wider-world-pt-1-background/951) post I did my best to express why I’m a big advocate of great soft cred mechanisms/cultural practices, with hard cred / plugins as axes for growth.

Here, I want to explore how we can add a fork of _props_ / _did-a-thing_ to allow more communities (including ourselves) to:

1. More deeply embed _ **their** _ values in SourceCred, making SourceCred accessible to a wider _range_ of communities.
2. Keep their values from being diluted amidst growth while still allowing for evolution and decentralization, allowing them to be more _ **inclusive** _ without compromising the essence of what makes their community special.
3. More _consistently_ and precisely measure value.

#### Disclaimer // Motivations

I like SourceCred’s community and value it a **lot**. It has been a wonderful breath of air from the more bro-y feel of much of the crypto space. _Part_ of the motivation comes from wanting to sustain this culture amidst inevitable growth/participation. I’m not sure if this is right or not, but I thought I should put it out there.

## What to Expect

In the last post, I explained how in our current _props_ / _did-a-thing_ system, two contributors can and likely will receive different cred scores depending on who they are (not to mention when the post, how they phrase it, and a whole host of other factors). Solving this property is the _essence of this post_, so let’s start there. After that, I’ll explain some major benefits of the approach and look at them in a few _examples_.

#### Holding Contribution Consistent — Who dunnit? Don’t know, don’t care!

If we want Alice and Bob to receive equal cred for the same contribution, we need some rough **consensus** about how much a certain kind of contribution is worth. We have this for our plugins, **but _not_ for “soft cred”**. In the plugins, a post is a post, a reaction is a reaction, a commit it a commit. In other words, our plugins have some **accounting** of what contributions are worth in relation to each other. We also have the ability to change these configurations to align with the state of the community and what we value. This holds contributions consistent between contributors. Brilliant.

So how could we replicate this for “off plugin” contributions? Rather than leaning into complex cryptoeconomic voting mechanisms and that jazz, I suggest the _simpler_ approach of establishing some rough consensus about what’s worth what. **This holds contributions consistent between contributors.**

### Inspiration

The Token Engineering community uses a “praise” system, similar to our _props_. However, one key difference is that they weigh contributions based on a rough tier system. Certain contributions earn more “impact hours”. These might correspond to the intensiveness of a contribution or how valuable it is. Doesn’t really matter. The point is to get a general, very broad strokes sense of a contribution’s worth. It’s more of a way of making sure that contributions don’t fall out of some fair range than trying to account for things perfectly. Cool.

The issue they have is that they have to review these _manually_, which besides being a headache is centralized and not scalable. But these are exactly the issues that SourceCred is in position to solve.

We already have a “review process” in _did-a-thing_ and _props_ where the community will react and thus flow cred to posts. In the current case, reactions = varying degrees of cred. In this model, we can use different emoji’s to signal a certain tier of contribution. Rather than scaling cred for more reactions, we can scale the _trust_ that the contribution fits a certain tier.

Let’s see this in a few examples. But first, remember that the point isn’t to track every last thing, but to cover the _ **foundations** _ that the plugins might miss.

## Case Studies

#### Community Case: Dog Whisperers of America

The DWA has decided to use SourceCred to track and reward contributions to this much neglected field. They know exactly what they want to reward people for and roughly how much. Inventing a new trick, obviously a lot of cred. Volunteering for a conference, great. However, they’re frustrated as they don’t have a clear way of tracking these alongside their normal Discord and Discourse plugins. They like the plugins they use, but the DWA is _very_ clear about their values and want a better way to reflect that. They are tough customers.

By providing them an easy way to account for the value of contributions, _they can more closely align their SourceCred instance with **their** values_.

This is the tip of the iceberg, but you can begin to see how simple consensus around how valuable some basic non-plugin contributions are would help a _much broader range of communities_ derive value from SourceCred.

#### Community Case: Potentially SourceCred

As more people join the party, we’re going to face a lot of noise entering the project. By **noise** , I mean that larger percentage of _props_ and _did-a-thing_ reactions, messages, and thus cred will come from less “core” contributors, many of which will not have spent the time to become informed, engaged, or _ **value-aligned** _.

By establishing some rough consensus about non-plugin, soft-cred contributions we can better position ourselves to _gain_ from inclusiveness.

#### Individual Case: Casper

Casper does great work for their community. However, as an introvert, Casper doesn’t engage much with others. While they’d love to hear from Casper more, it’s just not gonna happen. Bonnie works alongside Casper and realizes how much impact they’re having. When Casper occasionally posts on _did-a-thing_, Bonnie is always there to flow cred to Casper. Bonnie will often dish _props_ to Casper, but since most people aren’t familiar with what Casper’s doing, not much reacting happens.

In this model, the community has been more specific about the value of Casper’s work. When Bonnie spotlights Casper, it’s not a question of who else will flow cred. The contribution clearly fits in a tier.

#### Individual Case: Alice

In the last post, I highlighted how Alice often found herself being rewarded less for the same types of contributions as Bob. Here, we can see that this problem gets handled up front. Because we have some rough consensus about that contribution, this can’t happen. The tiers of contribution are broad enough such that there’s no room to argue about what tier something fits in.

### Bonus Points

- One emergent property that I really like about this is that this allows anyone to emoji the shit out of other peoples’ stuff without having to think about if cred is flowing or not. This feels more natural and would allow a more natural onboarding to using SourceCred without any strife around scarcity fears.
- It’s easier to _ **give** _ trust out then to get it back. It’s easier to establish consensus around what’s valuable when the circle of trust is tight, and then include people liberally in a more robust system.

## From here

I’m going to tinker with building this out, and test how it performs/feels. It’s certainly worth a try, so I’m looking to for feedback to include as this develops. If you prefer to chat about it, hit me up on Discord.