# Maintainers User Stories discussion

**URL:** https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/maintainers-user-stories-discussion/110
**Category:** Research
**Created:** [May 17, 2019, 7:27pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/maintainers-user-stories-discussion/110 "2019-05-17T19:27:59Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 5

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### Author: ![mzargham](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/mzargham/32/39_2.png) [@mzargham](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/mzargham)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2019, 11:15pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/maintainers-user-stories-discussion/110/5 "2019-05-17T23:15:00Z")

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> [@ryanMorton](#):
>
> > Another requested feature is time-based cred. In some projects, cred will be dominated by, for instance, people who are no longer with the project. Or a maintainer or community may want to somehow focus on recent contributions, or new contributors.
> 
> Definitely this - as an option. I can see wanting the whole project weighted equally for some things and more current contributions weighted more heavily for other things.

This is one of the main focuses ongoing research. It’s nuanced so there is not likely to be a “tada here is the answer” in some global sense, but we’re using numerical experiments to explore the way certain time dependent rules can result in different characteristics for the metric over time:

> [@Checkpoint: Research Report](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/checkpoint-research-report/104):
>
> This document is relatively technical; I outline mathematical formalisms, discuss a variety of computational experiments and lay the ground work for treating a SourceCred instance with a time varying dispersement of Cred as a mechanism design problem of a canonical class: a network formation game. All topics are anchored back to the SourceCred vision as outlined by @decentralion. cc’ @miyazono.

the thing that makes this research interesting and challenging is that you are computing a metric over a time varying graph, graphs sufficient complex objects that continuous metrics still change in unintuitive ways as they evolve in time.

@ryanMorton @s_ben :  
Here are some snaps from the report to demonstrate even the basic pagerank algorithm changing overtime given a relatively simple graph formation process.

**Graph forms iteratively:**

 ![51](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/uploads/sourcecred1/original/1X/3c8001458f557f9c4640f836f46fba4e5b3ffd77.jpeg)

**Summary of graph growth**

 ![28](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/uploads/sourcecred1/original/1X/89d10d783ae6c667aa147331a2cb15456279fc81.jpeg)

**PageRank calculation for each user**

 ![20](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/uploads/sourcecred1/original/1X/00b7d48ab51b6de9e13a0c4088c255f5ccf896c3.jpeg)

Graph contains both users and contributions by users but the below contains on the users cred. The seed for the graph formation was a subgraph of [GitHub - sourcecred/research: Repository for research-related items on SourceCred's agenda](https://github.com/sourcecred/research) which is where the real user names come from. For more of a dive into the research, feel free to jump into the “Temporal Context” Section, “Computational Experiments” subsection of the report.

There will be contributed research on this topic for sure. At the moment, working on collecting, digesting refining the work to date. I plan to write a medium article on this topic based on the research to distill it further. I will post a draft on discourse for feedback before it goes out.

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