Building on Product Strategy discussion.
These are the same product architecture principles being explored in the commons stack: this project is framing a Minimum Viable Commons which is essentially the out of the box (and credibly neutral) configuration, but with the idea that this is not a one size-fits-all design but rather a starting point to lower adoption friction.
The concept of credibly neutral is incomplete for good governance, because it implies that something credibly neutral is sufficiently fair in some static sense. I would argue that claiming/achieving credible neutrality serves as a means of abdicating responsibility for steering by community leaders. Certainly, their power should be checked, but in practice, leaders will not cease to be disproportionately influential; they are natural to social systems ~ mechanism design can only reshape their effects AND if the mechanisms attempt to constrain the natural process to much, new influence flows will emerge outside the control of the mechanisms in question. With this in mind, governance must be considered as more than just mechanism design. Governance is inherently dynamic (and adaptive) in that the rules of the game are always changing (both explicitly and implicitly), the capacity of the governed to change the system to meet its context is critical. I do agree that rate limiting change is important feature for good governance.
SourceCred itself, in its current state is a perfect example of a community not ready to be in a state of credible neutrality. Aspiring to meet the credible neutrality requirements is good, through I would strongly recommend expanding the paradigm through which we view governance. @jeffemmett expended a great deal of effort to distill Ostrom’s 8 principles for consideration by the dGov/DAO design communities:
On the point of front-ends. I think its probably worth looking at what DAOstack is doing with Alchemy:
Although at this stage it’s not visible, their roadmap is primarily focused on abstracting away the blockchain/web3 frictions to provide applications that look and feel the same as web 2 applications. Of course this opens up questions about what kind of services and applications need to be built to safely handle the abstraction without creating points of power that can be leveraged.
Ultimately, I believe the product strategy of SourceCred and any project aiming to facilitate self-actualizing inclusive communities must be to provide
- a framework that balances constraints (to limit complexity and avoid obvious degeneracies) with features to provide a large class of viable automated micro-instition infrastructure.
- a concrete and easily deployed vanilla instance of that framework which minimizes the friction of launching a fork which works out of the box.
- well fleshed out guidelines for the stewards of the newly minted micro-institution to engage with their communities around customizations with transparency about the implications of those choices.
- low friction user experience, which includes front-end development. while there will be learning curves in every community, UI/UX work for the vanilla instance will help ensure that the product itself doesn’t facilitate the use of friction to exclude people.
Probably the most exciting thing is that so many people in the web3 space are pursuing grassroots approaches to public goods problems. It sits in stark contrast to the systematic degradation of systems historically provisioning public goods top-down. (I read this piece this morning: The Twin Insurgency - The American Interest after it was tweeted by @vgr)