Hey all, this has been a long time coming (very long indeed)! Finally got the chance over the past few days to dig into all the posts on Discourse and Github. Hopefully will be able to attend more community calls to discuss this working proposal in more depth. I wanted to outline a project for Commonwealth and Sourcecred based on the documentation and the calls that we’ve already had.
What is Commonwealth?
Some of you all have already poked around, but in short, we’re building the best way to organize crypto communities. An admin can create their own community. Each community comes with a few key features:
- Rich interactions within communities (discussions threads, wiki posts, link sharing, creating polls and surveys, ranking posts, and more)
- We are building features for “authenticated forums”, creating safe spaces for a subset of community members to discuss privately using an on-chain source of truth—i.e a blockchain or cred instance.
- Unified profile across communities and feed for activity tracking
- Link on-chain addresses and sign transactions
- Purpose built UI for voting in and participating in every protocol governance process (I.e raising inflation or changing cred parameters)
So far, we’re working with NEAR, Edgeware, Polkadot, and few other projects to build and add specific features that are needed in their communities. As @decentralion has mentioned, we’ve chosen to work on this in a closed-source manner. We did this so we could iterate quickly. Over the course of 2020, we’ll be working to open-source everything, and get the codebase to a point where any group could contribute to the project.
Sourcecred ←→ Commonwealth Integration
As we’ve talked about on the community call, a good first step would be to have a SourceCred / Commonwealth Integration, before moving on to more fun research-type things. An integration would include. This would include a few weeks of architecting and dev work:
- Integrated UI for Sourcecred Boosting: Users would be able to view and boost any type post natively within the UI based on existing grain distribution.
- Integrating SourceCred into other communities: We can point to the running SourceCred instance and populate the cred of each interaction. This would look like something like the existing Discourse Plugin. From our side, we would expose the Commonwealth API, so anyone can do the current cred calculation. Once this is done, SourceCred could be toggled on in one-click from any new or existing Commonwealth community, enabled by retroactive initialization!
- A SourceCred community forum + authenticated forums: We’ll create a SourceCred community on Commonwealth so that there is another place to share ideas. In addition to that, the SourceCred community should feel free to use the “authenticated” forum feature to create sub communities / working groups. One example could be an authenticated forum that is only viewable to users who have cred scores above or below than a certain threshold.
- Bonus: Discourse to Commonwealth Import tool. With this, the SourceCred community could take advantage of native boosting / viewing boosted proposals on posts that have already been created.
When all the dev work is done, we can start to seed some other communities on Commonwealth with different cred instances and also have something where we can open source to the public! We have a few ideas for “general topic” communities within crypto (ZKP + DeFi + Validators). Communities like these exist without a native token, but still feel like places where granular tracking of contributions could be very useful. Beyond those crypto-native communities, we think there are other places where this could be layered on—Future of the Web, a bio journal club and more). We can flow both grain and budgets to them.
Future Work
Here, I’ll lay out some more speculative (and fun) ideas for more SourceCred and Commonwealth fun! Some of these have already been discussed within the community as initiatives. I think the Commonwealth team would be able to pick up some of the work.
- Implementing the Keybase / Discord / Telegram / Twitter bots previously discussed in the forum. Looping in Abridged / Metacartel here would be useful…
- Running some on Edgeware DAOs: We could seed some grant giving organizations to community participants and weigh voting power based on cred. This would potentially be a welcome point of decentralization on Edgeware and could also just be very cool, and might be related to work on CreDAO
- Building other sources of truth for cred allocation / APIs. I know the idea of integrating into reddit / other chat apps has already been discussed. It would potentially be interesting to allocate cred based on an open graph, using the bots built above! twitter community or arxiv or Wikipedia posts.
Wrapping Up
I’m curious to hear if this is in line with what the SourceCred community is thinking and how we should move this forward—should we create an initiative and more are there other contributors who might be interested in taking on some of the work? I’ll make sure to hop on the next community call to talk about this.