Below is the first podcast episode, an interview featuring @decentralion and hosted by @s_ben and @panchomiguel. (Artwork by @LB.)
We have another thread discussing the production and distribution of the podcast. This thread is specifically for Q&A. If the podcast inspired any questions or curiosity, please share your questions here!
(If the Mixcloud embedding isn’t rendering for you, you can also click here to find the podcast.)
A post was merged into an existing topic: Podcast #1 - Dandelion
Thanks for the podcast, it was very interesting.
Considering the challenges that crypto ecosystems have, how do you think SourceCred could help Bitcoin or Ethereum to evolve? i.e. faster? more efficiently? with more contributors involved?
Considering the conversations we’ve read on the SourceCred forum, do you think that it’d be easier for a project to use SourceCred to reward its contributors if the project is new than old (i.e. a few years old & 50+ contributors) ?
Within the tech space we can find quite a lot of different channels to support ecosystem contributions. That includes Bounties, Patrons (OpenCollective), Hackathon prizes, DAOs, Grants, Ecosystem Funds, and more. Considering the potential to use SourceCred to allocate rewards based on contributions, do you have a vision where you see SourceCred fitting with these existing funding mechanisms?
Hey @AdrienDLT, just wanted to let you know I really appreciate your questions and intend to answer. I’ve been writing up a really thorough reply, and found I need to produce a new mini-essay to properly explain my answer. So it will be a little while until I reply, but it’s coming!
Ok @AdrienDLT , I wrote a topic giving some more context on how I see SourceCred competing with / replacing the industrial age model for organizing purposeful communities (i.e. “closed hierarchies”, of which corporations are a great example). Please take a look here: Purposeful Communities, Closed Hierarchies, and Decentralization
With that said:
You can think of SourceCred as being purpose-designed for the task of helping projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum organize themselves more effectively. Such projects could turn on SourceCred and then issue grain (BitcoinGrain and EthereumGrain) to people that contribute to building the networks. By making their grain redeemable for BTC and ETH respectively (perhaps via a share of block rewards), they could make the value of the network directly incentivize people to work on the project.
This could solve major incentive alignment / coordination problems, where currently many talented devs who could contribute to these projects simply aren’t incentivized to do so. (In many cases, they are incentivized to launch competitor networks, or in Ethereum’s case, to build new tokens on top of it.)
As communities grow, they develop a lot of inertia around their practices, organizational patterns, ways of distributing rewards/status. Turning on SourceCred means changing all of these. So it will definitely be easier for new projects to onboard SourceCred than for large or established projects.
I expect that once we’re satisfied that SourceCred’s own dogfooding is going well, we’ll start by recruiting other small projects to become beta users of SourceCred, and we’ll slowly make our way up to larger ones. Let’s prove that SourceCred works on a few 100 contributor communities before trying it on a 1000 person community.
I see SourceCred as a system for community coordination and governance in general; using it for funding decisions is just one application. Since funding is very high leverage, we’ve focused a lot on it, so many people SourceCred is basically about funding, but the true scope is broader.
Of the projects you mentioned, some are really focused on specific types of funding (bounties, patronage subscriptions, etc). If people find those models work well, they can totally be incorporated / integrated with SourceCred. E.g. people could use OpenCollective as infrastructure for bringing funds in, but then use cred scores to distribute them. Or projects could use GitCoin bounties as a way to bring new contributors in, but have most of the contributors’ reward come from long-term cred rather than just the short-term bounty.
I think Aragon is particularly well-positioned to be a partner to SourceCred, since I would like to see SourceCred being used by DAOs, which means writing smart contracts that use cred scores and make grain a proper token. They have the expertise needed to actually do that.