Collaborative Design and WIP Proposal

The CredSperiment Research
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I am not sure what the right timeline for this goal should be, but I’d love to set a community level goal of delivering a high end prototype that serves the job of shining a light on SourceCred itself. Based on the experience at the hackathon, this is incredibly motivating. Special thanks to @LB for really forcing us to work through the narrative in making their awesome canvas!

Publicly host a SourceCred instance which tracks cred in SourceCred

of course this is not a new idea but I’d like to add some specific detail to the idea based on our experiences at Odyssey.

React Web App with the following user stories

  1. As a Visitor I wish to explore cred of all contributions and others relative to the values and goals set forth by the project maintainers (includes summary statistics, leaderboards, and graph traversal but not global network plot)
  2. As a Contributor I wish to explore the cred of my contributions, the breakdown of how i contribute most by project values and goals, as well as identify other contributions who depend on me most, and those i depend on most.
  3. As a visitor (including contributors) I wish to be able to make custom selections of the edge weight parameters, the seed vector of the teleportation coefficient (alpha) and see the same results from my customized point of view.
  4. As a contributor, I wish to report contributions of my team members via a manual mode plugin (ideally this requires some kind of login)

Configuration layer user stories

  1. as a maintainer I wish to define a modify the default edge weight parameters, the values and goals (seed vectors), and alpha parameter.
  2. as a maintainer I should have additional powers to use the manual mode to add contributions or cross-wire contributions that do not have naturally occurring edges based on the existing plugins

Plugins Supported

  • Manual Mode “Odyssey Plugin”
  • Github Plugin
  • Git Plugin
  • Discourse Plugin

Preliminary List of Values (drawn from Odyssey prototype):

  • Emotional Labor
  • Enthusiasm
  • Design
  • Communication
  • AI Expertise
  • Software Development
  • Narrative
  • Project Management
  • Technical Leadership
  • Artwork
  • Logistics

Open Questions:

  • In my mind the biggest barrier at this point is identity resolution.
  • How does high degree of ‘user’ nodes effect the cred scores
  • How to imbue temporal relevance without explicitly using timestamps
  • How to desensitize the system to spammy contributions
  • How to ensure quality work outperforms low quality work that demands lots of attention from others

The goal of this goal is to extend the Odyssey Experiment to the whole of SourceCred. By creating a clear mirror for ourselves as a community, I believe we can be the best version of ourselves: an empowered and appreciative co-creative community.

I am tagging in some new community members who have expressed interest in helping drive this:

  • Max Kudinov for design and access to front end dev
  • Abbey Titcombe for helping capture and articulate the narrative
  • James Waugh is interested in helping explore the open question around identity

[I will try to get these folks into Discourse so I can tag them]

Personally, my reason for placing this goal out there is to ensure our technical research is matched with social research. All the python simulations in world will not replace collecting data on real human behavior.

I believe that this community is an incredible reference case; as @brianlitwin pointed out, everyone seems to have their own intrinsic motivation and vision for SourceCred and yet there is an incredibly high overlap in values and goals.

To me this is a great recipe for an effective co-creative community: enough diversity to avoid group think but enough shared vision to be productive. Possibly the most important concept here from a conversation @decentralion was that the Hackathon was a microcosm of an open source project in that there was little to no command and control management; the authority to tell each other what to do was given freely, and it was largely bidirectional. In my opinion this type of coordination becomes possible largely through transparent shared goals, and transparent contributions to resulting outputs.

Thanks for reading. I hope to use this thread to collectively define a deliverables that extend beyond the backend functionality to focus on User Experience for community members. There is no better way to do that than ask the community.

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