My personal bent lately (not necessarily shared by all), is that we avoid reductionism by ingesting ALL THE DATA! Get a rich graph to analyze, then develop human-centric processes (i.e. decentralized governance) to reach consensus on macro issues. E.g. a couple times now we’ve come together as a group and discussed in real-time what the high-level weights should be for macro-level contributions, with real reputation and money on the line. I think it’s gone surprisingly well. There’s a lot of work to be done, for sure, and governance mechanisms to be explored, but I think we’re on the right track.
Another approach to getting a clearer macro view is data visualization. Tweak the weights until it feels right…then propose changes. I’m excited that @anon60584824 is creating a python implementation for this reason, as python is more accessible to the data science crowd. This will also be aided by the new CredRank algorithm, which groups contributions into time-based windows (called epochs), which will make temporal analysis easier.
If you haven’t seen it, in @decentralion’s podcast interview, they do a good job explaining the basic high-level philosophy, including a discussion of how to avoid creating a Black Mirror dystopia.
Yup.
They were thinking about making money 
From wikipedia article, “The term “open source”, as used to describe software, was first proposed by a group of people in the free software movement who were critical of the political agenda and moral philosophy implied in the term “free software” and sought to reframe the discourse to reflect a more commercially minded position.[3]”
The holy grail 
The problem of funding open source has been worked on for decades by some of the smartest people on the planet. Yet it remains uncracked…But I do think blockchain is providing some major breakthroughs. I make my living primarily from working on SourceCred, and another OSS project (Decred). That’s pretty amazing. SourceCred is still funded with investor money, for now, but Decred has block reward funding that will go for years, possibly decades. And once SourceCred implements boosting, I think it has a real shot at financial sustainability (so bullish on boosting…). We also have a kind of dream team working on all the related problems, from ex-Googlers, to a PhD social scientist entrepreneur that models membranes for a living (@mzargham), to an veteran OSS developer that’s been working on the OSS sustainability problem (@Beanow), and more. But yeah, lots of hard problems still to be solved.
Lately, I have been meditating a lot on power. Specifically Faucault’s idea, explored in this amazing podcast series, that there’s two types of power:
Foucault would want to draw a distinction between two different types of power that we come face to face with in our societies: a distinction between what he calls repressive power and normalizing power.
Repressive power is the type of power I was just referencing…boots on the back of the neck, military invasion…essentially someone forcing you to do something you don’t want to do. But there’s a sense in which this type of power is inefficient and really only necessary if someone is actively defying you, which can raise the question: are you really in power if someone has the ability to cross you like that. No, TRUE power would be if you could somehow get people to believe that it was their idea to behave the way you want them to behave. True power would be if you could get people to think it was part of their personality, the very DEFINITION of what it is to be themselves is in accordance with the way you say they should be. THAT is the task that’s accomplished by the normalizing power of society."
SourceCred has explored repressive power a bit, in the form on licensing–even in cuddly OSS projects that comes down to state violence, if used. But I haven’t heard talk of that in a while. The current approach relies on game theory, which incentivizes projects to flow their project-specific grain to each other (extrinsic carrots). But, I also suspect that we’re playing with normative power. We’re creating cultural norms, and scaling them. One way SourceCred has been described is that is “scales community values”. The dystopian potential, as addressed by @decentralion in their podcast, is primarily mitigated by not having a single, monolithic system rating us all. But rather each community setting their own norms, customizing the algorithm, using decentralized governance to set weights, etc. This to me seems idealistic and pragmatic. It enables decentralization, localism and the power of exit. Macro issues are solved (within projects) by their own governance, to which SourceCred is just one input. Boosting (if it works) brings in funds from outside the “membrane”, allowing projects to trade and be financially sustainable…holy grail.
A short answer might also be, I believe SourceCred will work for the same reason I just spent 45 minutes writing this for free. Or rather, a likely small, but still as yet undetermined amount of cred->grain->USD.