SourceCred,
I’m a respectful skeptic (because I’ve spent so much thought-energy trying to solve the same problem that SourceCred is working on, and feel like forces of nature and the god particle are guarding the solution from me)
I’d like to offer a low-tech alternative solution as an invitation to prove to me that SourceCred is the answer.
-
I have a repo in GitHub that represents my software product
-
each time I merge a contribution to the main branch, I decide on a dollar value for that piece of work and add it to a ledger (most basic idea of ‘ledger’ here–no crypto, although, I suppose the ledger document itself could be saved to a blockchain to make it trustable)
-
any time my software product is purchased, the money gets distributed according to the total percentages of value per-contributor documented in the ledger
-
over time, as the project owner, I will either gain approval or disapproval by the community of contributors as they see how the income is distributed
-
contributor Z could create a fork, and accept pull requests for their fork, and create their own ledger in the same way, so that when contributor Z gets their fork merged with my main branch, income flows to contributor Z based on my ledger, which is further distributed/flowed to their contributors, etc. etc.
-
any and every entity in this system decides when and how to flow their income to their contributors and dependencies, and the reputation system blossoms from each entity-outward
As I read back what I just wrote, (the part about saving the low-tech ledger to a block chain) I’m realizing that this basic idea IS a cryptocurrency. i.e:
- I spin up my personal token
- for every contribution, I decide how much coin to mint and award the contributor
- my coin’s trust value is represented by the historical flow of income to coin holders
Now to extrapolate to the logical future:
- my parents spin up my personal coin when I’m born
- and teach me how to responsibly mint and flow value to the contributors in my life
- so that I can grow up and engage with the economy of personal block chain networks
thanks to @s_ben for introducing me to SourceCred and meandering in discussion with me