RFC: change Initiatives plugin to be file-based instead of Discourse-based

[burrrata]

@decentralion

how can we acknowledge where we are today, and also grow the project in ways that make it more inclusive and accessible over time?

Just own it. Earlier on the impression I got (from comments and the Cred weights) is that a lot of work was needed in regards to strategy, game design, and community engagement. Now it’s clear that the focus is on developers. That’s totally ok, but just make sure that you own it and communicate that clearly across all words and actions. People don’t mind if you’re transparent, but when projects (esp crypto/tech projects) try to be something they’re not (regardless of their intentions) people generally aren’t into it. If SourceCred is currently only accessible to developers, and you’re trying to recruit developers, I’d also focus on developer/open-source projects as the initial target market. This way you can recruit contributors while you also onboard new end-users. Win/win for all parties involved

@decentralion

Every time you use GitHub for anything non code related you create organizational debt.

I’d be interested to hear more about why you think this is the case.

GitHub is an amazing tool, but it suffers from being biased towards developers which limits participation. Also, usually better to find (or create) a tool that fits your workflow vs fitting your workflow to the tools you have. This is a universal truth, but I’ve found that developers trying to stay on GitHub long after they should have graduated to other platforms is a common trend. That being said, if your target market for contributors and users is developers, particularly open source projects, then by all means use GitHub all day long! It’ll be great. Just be aware that if/when you expand to other markets you’ll have to improve UI/UX as well.

@decentralion

Overall, it’s a road to ruin.

We’ve been pretty clear that the alpha instance of initiatives is just that–an alpha–and that we will build a dedicated UI for initiatives, artifacts, and boosting that is accessible to SourceCred’s userbase at large. Given that this is explicitly a short-term decision, I feel that framing it as a “road to ruin” is unnecessary.

I ask you to give some thought to whether framing things in this way shines light on the discussion, or only makes it more heated.

This was meant to be a general comment, not anything specific to SourceCred. Sorry if that wasn’t clear lol

@decentralion

Without infrastructure, we have no way to communicate, no way to coordinate, no way to share results, and no way to move forward as a community. Today, the infrastructure that works, and that we know how to use, is web2 infrastructure. If the future web3 governance systems were already ready for us, we wouldn’t need to do this work.

Totally. But lots of alphas end up getting used far beyond their originally intended shelf life. It’s a slippery slope. That’s the point I was trying to make here.

@decentralion

To reject the tools entirely is to disempower ourselves.

Yeah 100%. Just don’t get attached to them or design around them. Tools should work for us, but we should not work for the tools (otherwise we become the tools lol)

@decentralion

In the long term, we want to design a fair and effective system for awarding credit, recognizing contributors, and distributing rewards.

In the short term, we want to hack together a system that works well enough to bootstrap the resources and labor we need to build that long-term system.

I’d focus on developers and GitHub support. Doing one thing for one market and doing it really well will provide a foundation to expand to other markets/use-cases. It’s so easy to lose focus. Don’t lose focus. I’d love to see SourceCred become the absolute best in the world at the thing it does. Deep, then Wide.

@Beanow

OSS as a natural fit

LMAO reading through this thread as I comment and it looks like we’re on the same page! Totally agree that OSS is a great initial target market for SourceCred

@Beanow

we need a springboard that offers:

• Open data
• People who are already willing to work permissionlessly
• Technical affinity to be able to grapple with graphs and game theory and algorithms
• Funding

And focusing on OSS let’s us dogfood SourceCred.

So I think SourceCred v1 should be a tool / protocol that delivers on it’s promise in the Open-Source Sustainability space. And expand from there.

100% all the way. This. This. And This some more

@Beanow

In that regard the Git part of GitHub is very much an improvement over Discourse. Git’s decentralized design has made it useful with and outlive many of the transport protocols.

Yeah git is amazing. It’s honestly almost as cool as Bitcoin, but so underappreciated lol

@Beanow

I wish Discourse could fork and merge the way Git does. I’ve been considering a bounty for this.

This is blowing my mind right now In the original thread I was focused on the bus factor thing, but when put simply it’s a really powerful idea: fork Discourse. That would be so great, but then you’d have to figure out how to fork the user’s private data without compromising it, which seems non-trivial. Still, would be so cool to be able to fork and merge Discourse branches.

@Beanow

GitHub is exactly designed as the type of collaboration tool we’re looking for. When the choice is between Discourse and GitHub, it’s clear that GitHub has a collaborative review process (the PR) as a first-class concept.

Yeah GitHub is great for reviewing stuff. Just saying that it’s not great for everything (like broader community engagement). Now, if the target market is developers anyways, then that’s not a problem which is totally ok. Actually solves a lot of problems all at once so that’s great.