Cred Boosting

[decentralion]

Cred Boosting

Status:

Proposal

Champion^?:

Initiative Description:

Let’s add “cred bounties” to the initiative system. The basic idea is that the initiative will have a bounty amount, and a defined “success condition”. Once the success condition is realized, we mint new cred (equal to the bounty amount), and flow it to the initiative node. From the initiative node, it will flow to the contributions, to the initiative proposer, and to the references.

The bounty getting paid out doesn’t necessarily mean the initiative is complete. If there are e.g. bugs, the bugfixes will also get linked to the initiative. This means that the cred bounty not only funds achieving the outcome, but also maintaining and supporting it. (It also means that people who rush to finish an initiative with shoddy work will not get that much cred, because it will leak out to the bugfixes that follow.)

Initially, I imagine the bounties getting set by administrative fiat by your dear leader cred executive. However, I would like to switch quickly to a more “market based” mechanism where people with mana can “boost” an initiative, thus giving it a bounty, and also receiving some cred in the initiative.

Benefits:

It will give us a SourceCred-native way of directing attention towards prioritized initiatives.

Implementation plan:

TBD

Estimated Work (hours):

TBD

Dependencies:

Better Cred Minting (TODO: write initiative for it)

• Unified reference detection
• Discourse mirror revision

@decentralion do the above Initiatives address the “Better Cred Minting” dependency? If not, does something else or do we need to add it to the Initiatives Wish List

Write the Initiatives Plugin

Write the Initiatives Plugin Status: In progress Champion?: [Avatar Beanow] @Beanow Initiative Description: We now have an initiatives category on Discourse (this one). However, SourceCred isn’t yet aware of it, so Initiatives don’t yet flow any special cred. We should add initiatives directly to the SourceCred graph. Benefits: Initiatives will add a layer of interpretability and robustness to the SourceCred graph. They are more interpretable (vs. pull requests where it can be hard to parse th…

References:

SourceCred Boosting: a prediction market on ideas

Boosting Mechanics A few ideas on boosting have been discussed so far. Speculative Boosting Boosting promotes downstream engagement, but boosting also increases the cred that will flow to the booster. This creates a prediction market on ideas. Community members are incentivized to boost content that they feel is “valuable,” where “value” describes content they think people should (or will) explore. It’s a signalling mechanism for content curation with economic incentives built in. If a mechani…

@decentralion said they would boost the following Initiatives once Boosting was enabled (see thread comments)

• Retroactive Initialization: Pre-requisite to distributing a lot more Grain
• GraphQL Mirror fidelity awareness

Contributions:

[burrrata]

This is really really interesting!

We’re in the middle of designing better community engagement/reward structures for 1Hive (and Aragon more broadly), but most of the models we use are priced at the time of a transaction (due to Ethereum’s limited computation). This results in us having to split bounties or grants into chunks that are manually released upon the completion of milestones. This works, but it’s incredibly high touch and requires lots of human coordination.

What you’re describing, could, potentially… hopefully! solve the maintainer’s dilemma where people start things or almost finish, but don’t follow through. If they do follow through, it’s usually the bare minimum and there’s no incentive to provide ongoing maintenance. We’re trying to fix this via milestones and monthly rewards for the most used/downloaded apps. The SourceCred “bounties” model you described, however, does this automatically. It flows cred to bounties iteratively so people get rewarded for the work they do, and it does so in perpetuity so there’s an incentive to maintain the ecosystem. Is that correct?

[decentralion]

The SourceCred “bounties” model you described, however, does this automatically. It flows cred to bounties iteratively so people get rewarded for the work they do, and it does so in perpetuity so there’s an incentive to maintain the ecosystem. Is that correct?

Yes, that’s precisely right. Also, once we have the boosting mechanism working, people with mana will also be to fund the bounties and (in return) get some future cred in the output. So on the one hand, stakeholders can fund initiatives they personally care about. On the other hand, people who have a good understanding of the project can increase their cred by boosting valuable initiatives.

[burrrata]

Wow. I really really want to see this in the world.

So how is SourceCred going to make that happen? Is the general idea that if cred/mana is freely traded it will achieve a market rate, and as demand for bounties/governance/stuff increases then so will the value of a projects cred/mana, so then that project can bootstrap it’s development/maintenance by allowing outside contributors to purchase cred/mana to request features or boost bounties?

Has an analysis been done as to all the ways that SourceCred, and specifically cred/mana, can capture and create value? Thus allowing open source communities, or really cool project, to become self sufficient and/or profitable?

Or is the idea mainly that SourceCred will be the distribution mechanism, but it will be up to each community/project to find ways to create and/or capture value on their own; SourceCred just channels that incoming value once it starts flowing into the system?

[decentralion]

Is the general idea that if cred/mana is freely traded it will achieve a market rate, and as demand for bounties/governance/stuff increases then so will the value of a projects cred/mana, so then that project can bootstrap it’s development/maintenance by allowing outside contributors to purchase cred/mana to request features or boost bounties?

This is mostly correct. However, I don’t intend for cred to be purchasable. I want cred to be inalienably connected to the person or people who made contributions. (Remember that according to Marx, alienation of labor is what makes capitalism awful.) Concretely, this means it would be impossible to do a financial takeover of a cred-enabled project.

Has an analysis been done as to all the ways that SourceCred, and specifically cred/mana, can capture and create value? Thus allowing open source communities, or really cool project, to become self sufficient and/or profitable?

I have plans, ranging from

• the prosaic: stakeholders who want to guide feature development will fund the project by buying grain
• moderately ambitious: projects will flow some of their mana to upstream dependencies; cryptocurrency projects will make mana redeemable for their native cryptocurrency, providing ‘baseline value’ in the system
• staggeringly ambitious: we will coordinate a mass re-licensing of the open-source ecosystem, using a harberger license that forces all for-profit usage to pay taxes that fund the ecosystem (taxes distributed based on cred). Every corporation using open-source will need to decide whether they want to fund the commons, or get left behind.

Or is the idea mainly that SourceCred will be the distribution mechanism, but it will be up to each community/project to find ways to create and/or capture value on their own; SourceCred just channels that incoming value once it starts flowing into the system?

This is the baseline offering from SourceCred: it acts as economic scaffolding for flowing value within projects. Once this scaffolding is built, we will start on more ambitious projects (^ see above) that hook into this scaffolding.

[burrrata]

I want cred to be inalienably connected to the person or people who made contributions.

Right. That’s good. Glad that’s clarified now (at least in my head). This further reinforces my belief that a cred/grain overview and economics post would be great once we’re ready. That would be good for current and future community members

I have plans, ranging from

• the prosaic : stakeholders who want to guide feature development will fund the project by buying grain
• moderately ambitious : projects will flow some of their mana to upstream dependencies; cryptocurrency projects will make mana redeemable for their native cryptocurrency, providing ‘baseline value’ in the system
• staggeringly ambitious : we will coordinate a mass re-licensing of the open-source ecosystem, using a harberger license that forces all for-profit usage to pay taxes that fund the ecosystem (taxes distributed based on cred). Every corporation using open-source will need to decide whether they want to fund the commons, or get left behind.

Cool! This should also be a thread for the community to discuss and propose all the ways SourceCred, and Cred/Grain specifically, can be useful in the world. Then how to capture and recycle that value for sustainability

This is the baseline offering from SourceCred: it acts as economic scaffolding for flowing value within projects. Once this scaffolding is built, we will start on more ambitious projects (^ see above) that hook into this scaffolding.

This is also huge. SourceCred has utility on it’s own, but as the value of the token/community expands then more and more things become possible. Kind of like how FB and insta started as single feature apps that grew into platforms

[burrrata]

Started a thread to design the boosting mechanism and map out an implementation plan.

[Beanow]

Better Cred Minting (TODO: write initiative for it)

• Unified reference detection
• Discourse mirror revision

@decentralion do the above Initiatives address the “Better Cred Minting” dependency? If not, does something else or do we need to add it to the Initiatives Wish List

@burrrata I think these don’t address the cred minting part. I believe there’s still no initiative for this. But Write the Initiatives Plugin would eventually depend on this to mint cred from initiatives.

Right now we have only one way to mint cred: activity. So comments, PRs, new topics, these mint new cred. We’ll want a system that allows for more ways to create cred, such as initiatives and boosting.

[Beanow]

References:

[…]

@decentralion said they would boost the following Initiatives once Boosting was enabled (see thread comments)

• Retroactive Initialization: Pre-requisite to distributing a lot more Grain
• GraphQL Mirror fidelity awareness

@burrrata just a head up, please be mindful of using links in these sections of an initiative. The way the Initiatives plugin intends to parse these is as that every URL in that section should be an edge of that type.

So in this case these would be considered “reference material” for the Cred Boosting initiative.

• https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/decentralion
• https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/about-the-initiatives-category/242

My guess that wasn’t what you intended to do. You could rephrase it to remove the @-mention (they will be given cred by being the author of reference posts) and leave out the glossary link to the Initiatives category.

An alternative I like to use sometimes, you could write a short summary post in this thread, and link to that. In that case, make sure you add links and @-mentions back in (as you would take credit for being the post author there).

Realize this may be unintuitive, but that’s why we need a dedicated UI for this soon after

[burrrata]

Realize this may be unintuitive, but that’s why we need a dedicated UI for this soon after

Thanks for explaining this. As you mention, it’s intuitive. Teaching people how to play the SourceCred game is going to be very very important. If there’s a different workflow for general posts vs Initiatives that’s going to create a confusing/frustrating user experience. How can we either adjust the regular game or the initiatives format so that they are similar - allowing users to follow the same rules in all aspects of SourceCred?