FAQ thread: let's answer questions together!

Community
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Hi all,

@Bex ran another great FAQ jam session wherein we whittled down the list of starting questions for our FAQ page on the website. We want to gather answers drafted by the community, allowing anyone who feels like they have a good answer to a question to provide it (and earn Cred).

When writing answers, please consider the SourceCred Brand & Language guidelines.

To answer a question, please do this simple two-step process:

  1. Copy the question in your reply to this thread
  2. Prefix it like this ### <question> and write your answer below it!

Due Date: 10/6

@Bex will go through to gather the answers after October 6th, so get your answers in before then!

We will do one more FAQ jam to review on 10/8 (around 3pm).

The FAQ List: Questions to be answered

  • Cred

    • Can I manually edit Cred scores for Participants?
    • If I keep giving likes/upvotes, will I run out of Cred?
    • When and how is new Cred minted?
    • When and how does Cred flow between people?
      • the previous three questions can all have one answer perhaps
      • link to How Cred Works + brief mention that you don’t share your own Cred when you reward someone else
    • How do I earn Cred?
      • i.e. Where’s the source of Cred, how does it flow, and what are the best/minimal starting parameters for bootstrapping a diverse open source community?
    • Is Cred a reputation score, or something else?
      • it’s a reputation score for your contributions, but not you as a person.

  • Grain

    • How do I earn Grain?
    • Is Grain real money? include answers to the two sub-questions:
      • How much is Grain worth?
      • Is Grain always a fixed price?
    • How does Grain get value?
      • It’s worth whatever your community decides it is worth; let’s aim to include specific examples of SC, Maker, MetaGame, etc.
    • How do I convert Grain into other currencies e.g. Dollars?

  • Community & Values

    • What problem is SourceCred solving?
    • Can SourceCred be used to empower marginalized people?
    • What social values is SourceCred based on?

  • Project & Governance

    • What is a Contribution Graph?
    • How is this different from being Yet Another Tech Solution to a human problem?
    • How is SourceCred governed?
    • Does SourceCred require one governance system across all projects?

  • Technology & Algorithm

    • How do I request a feature or plugin for a platform not already offered? - 4
    • What is the best way to start using SourceCred in my community? - 5
    • How gameable is SourceCred? - 4
    • Is my community’s data safe with SourceCred?
      • to also answer in this: what data does SourceCred store, exactly?
    • How does SourceCred keep track of intangible work? (e.g. organizing meetings, emotional labour, etc) - 4
      • 1. not every individual thing needs to be tracked, but a rough assessment of overall activity is enough to make SourceCred a valuable tool to help bring visibility to previously-invisible contributions
      • 2. The Creditor is for awarding/designating Cred to intangible work
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<Can I manually edit Cred scores for Participants?>

No, you cannot manually edit anyone’s Cred score, including your own. If you feel a person or group is earning Cred that is not equivalent to their contributions to a project, you can change the weights, which determine what how much Cred each type of contribution earns. A community will determine their own rules for when to change their community’s weights.

<When and how is new Cred minted?>

If a contribution is valuable, there are mechanisms for the community to signal their appreciation of it. These mechanisms vary between platforms, and each community can choose which of these mechanisms will mint Cred for their community, and how much, through their community weights. Each mechanism “mints” (aka creates) new Cred for that contribution node. This Cred minting is like new water falling into the contribution’s pond in the form of rain. That new water flows through the creeks to the other ponds downstream of it.

<How do I earn Grain?>

Grain is created during what we call “Harvests.” A Harvest is a two-step process in which the Cred is recomputed (so scores are as fresh as possible), and Grain is then distributed based on those Cred scores. By default, projects re-compute Cred every 6 hours, but only distribute Grain once a week: on Sunday morning, UTC time. Thus, the project has a full harvest only once per week.

<Can SourceCred be used to empower marginalized people?>

(I’d prefer this wording --> Can SourceCred be used to empower marginalized communities?) We certainly hope so. SourceCred enables its users to work asynchronously, remotely, and take time off without affecting their income. This enables self-care and job flexibility. Furthermore, SourceCred is based on the accountability of community members. Read our document on Trust Levels (include link) to learn more on this. That being said, communities that define values such as putting marginalized people in positions of power or strict guidelines around hate speech, can use SourceCred as a tool to make sure these goals are met.

<What social values is SourceCred based on?>

self-care, people-first, mental health, soft skills, clear communication

<What is a Contribution Graph?>

The Contribution Graph is a network of every contribution and participant, and how they’re connected to each other. You, and every contribution you make will each be represented as a separate “node” in the graph. SourceCred, uses this Contribution Graph data to create a Cred score for each node via a modified PageRank algorithm.

<Does SourceCred require one governance system across all projects?>

No, SourceCred is a technology for communities with their own governance systems. We do advise however, that while SourceCred is still young, it is better suited for smaller communities with emotional maturity and a high level of existing trust.

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These are generally good answers, solid writing. A couple points that may make wording more accurate:

Pretty sure this is correct, though remember at one point in time we had a ‘manual mode’ plugin that did allow you do arbitrarily change a node’s score. Presumably refactored out by now.

This is a good answer, but just to nitpick, “signal their appreciation of it with likes or emojis (depending on the platform)” isn’t exactly accurate, at least not all the time. Right now, we only mint Cred on likes for the Discoruse plugin, and emojis for the Discord plugin. However, for the GitHub plugin, we mint on merged PRs and reviews on merged PRs. And, a community can (and very well might in the future) change the weights such that Cred is minted on raw activity; indeed, the way we “hacked” minting only on like in the Discourse plugin is by setting the other weights to 0. Generally speaking, I would say the the community signals their appreciation by engaging with the contribution, such as with likes and emojis (which are a specific type of engagement that implies some kind of review/value judgement, as opposed to raw activity (e.g. responded to).

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Not sure what you’re referencing, the ability to arbitrarily change a node’s score has never existed. Even if we wanted to make it, I don’t see how we could, it would not really fit in with how Cred scores are calculated.

We do still have the initiatives plugin, which allows minting an arbitrary amount of Cred, which could be used to arbitrarily increase a node’s score. But that’s different from arbitrarily changing a node’s score. For example, if I wanted to reduce your Discourse Cred to a particular value, there’s not really any way to do that.

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Ah, my bad. Probably just misremembering, this would have been a long time ago.

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@s_ben How’s this: If a contribution is valuable, there are mechanisms for the community to signal their appreciation of it. These mechanisms vary between platforms. In Discord there are emjois, in Discourse there are likes, and in GitHub there are Pull Requests and Reviews. Each mechanism “mints” (aka creates) new Cred for that contribution node. This Cred minting is like new water falling into the contribution’s pond in the form of rain. That new water flows through the creeks to the other ponds downstream of it.

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This reads fine too, but still has the issue from my other comment. Namely that we’re specifically describing the mechanisms that SourceCred uses to mint Cred (likes on Discourse, PRs and Reviews on GitHub). Other communities may use different mechanisms. E.g. maybe they mint Cred on Discourse (as we originally did) when Posts are created, as opposed to when they are liked. In fact, we’ve talked about how some communities might use this configuration when a forum is brand new, and they want to encourage creating a lot of posts to fill it out.

I feel like I’m being a little nitpicky here. I think this (and the original answer) are fine. Just would be good to make it a little more general and evergreen so it’s more widely applicable and we don’t have to change it later should we change specific mechanisms for instance. Maybe this just means explicitly framing the mechanisms as example. E.g. “In SourceCred, in Discourse Cred is minted on emojis…”? Or just explaining the above in a more concise manner?

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@s_ben ah I see now, I misunderstood your point earlier. I’ll change it to, “### <When and how is new Cred minted?> If a contribution is valuable, there are mechanisms for the community to signal their appreciation of it. These mechanisms vary between platforms, and each community can choose which of these mechanisms will mint Cred for their community, and how much, through their community weights. Each mechanism “mints” (aka creates) new Cred for that contribution node. This Cred minting is like new water falling into the contribution’s pond in the form of rain. That new water flows through the creeks to the other ponds downstream of it.”

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@Bex according to @KuraFire initial question(s), this one was not answered and/or expounded upon. Is cred withdrawable and able to be traded like an ERC coin?

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(please review)

Cred is non-fungible; cannot be sold or transferred. Cred is used to distribute a fungible token. In SourceCred, this is Grain.

Grain is worth whatever the community decides it is worth. It does not always have to be a fixed price. SourceCred, today, pegs Grain to Dai, because SourceCred’s budget is currently a function of a grant from Protocol Labs.

Other projects can choose to distribute something that is not Grain. For example, 1Hive is currently using Cred scores to distribute Honey, which does not have a fixed price.

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@panchomiguel do you know where the interface is to see your personal grain?

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This explorer shows your Cred score; the “Grain Accounts” tab on the left will show Grain.

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Thanks for pointing that out. It looks like @panchomiguel answered these later on, with the exception of "How do I convert Grain into other currencies? " which I am not sure of. We will make sure these are answered when the FAQ doc is put on the SourceCred website.

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Grain within SourceCred can only be converted into Dai right now, by way of a personal message to the treasurer (hi hello, that’s me) + filling out this form. Once you receive the Dai, it can be sold on the open market for real world currency, or other cryptocurrencies on many exchanges (e.g. Coinbase, Binance, Uniswap)

Other projects that use different tokens will all have different protocols for redeeming their version of “grain”. For example, as mentioned above, 1Hive uses Cred scores to distribute Honey. That Honey can be sold and transferred on the open market in a DEX It’s not hard to imagine a future in which SourceCred’s Grain is also a freefloating cryptocurrency that can similarly be traded on the open market, but happily we’re not there yet.

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Do you get grain bonuses for completing the badges listed on the site? I think that would be a great way to get people more engaged with the community. You could have bonuses for each badge and then a large bonus for completing all of them. Kinda like video game trophies!

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  1. Equitable distribution of wealth based on impact of contribution instead of power/privilege.
  2. Bringing social health and nuance into the technology and systems that govern distribution of money.
  3. Alternative to capitalism’s obsession with financial maximization at the cost of other, more important priorities.

SourceCred provides the informed opportunity to build a community based on its values and distributes reward according to alignment with that community’s health, goals, and values. Every community using SourceCred will have access to our technology and perspective that, by design, can improve the disparity between power and lack of power that often occurs around rewards for labor. Each community has its own values and governance, SourceCred is a nuanced tool to empower that.

Needs to be its own doc and has a lot of pre-work before this can be answered imo.

A Contribution Graph is a visual graph of all the contributions and participants in a single project. It can help with understanding what kinds of contributions have been made and how they’re flowing Cred to each other. The visual graph is made up of two components; “nodes” (dots or circles) which represent the individual contributions or participants, and “edges” which are the lines between nodes showing that they’re connected and flowing Cred in at least one direction. SourceCred’s technology creates and uses these Contribution Graphs (in combination with social communication) as a way to compute what the Cred scores should be for every contribution and therefore the participants linked to them.

New question: What’s the difference between Cred and Grain?

Cred is a score that shows how valuable your contributions have been in a specific project. In a sense, it’s your reputation as a creator in that community and therefore cannot be bought, sold, or traded. It’s simply earned.

Grain is the fixed-price digital currency you receive in proportion for your Cred. It is meant to be bought, sold, or used for governance depending on the needs of an individual project.

SourceCred is not meant to replace the critical components of human collaboration, decision making, and social resolution of conflict that help a community thrive. It is merely a thought-out tool built to work alongside these nuanced and powerful ways humans interact and create together.