As someone who’s a bit more critical of this proposal, I feel it’s my responsibility to offer alternatives that we can work from.
Back in December, I wrote this post addressing this issue, with a proposed means of solving it, which I’d like to bring to light here.
In that post, I also used props and did-a-thing as means of recognizing “soft cred” (i.e. non-plugin cred). However, the main difference is that I sought to create rough weights for non-plugin contributions, such that they could be essentially “plugin-ified”.
For instance, leading a meeting, self-care, or providing guidance could have some rough cred minting, just like GitHub commits, emoji reactions, or Discourse likes. This would involve coming to consensus about these weighting. This seems to massively reduces the problem of popularity contests, abuse, personality type biasing, and unnecessary conflict about recognition.
In addition, it also allows us to cleanly reweight these types of contributions. For instance, if we want to tweak meeting cred later, we can do it, because we’ve tagged/identified it directly. The proposal as is will struggle with this, because it doesn’t recognize different types of props (only the popularity of it), will make retrospective action much harder.
Ironically, the situation we’re in is evidence of this. We are having a tremendously difficult time figuring out how to reward community cultivation and care work because we have not identified it in the system.