Thanks to hard work by @Beanow, we’re now turning on the Initiatives plugin for SourceCred. This means that we now have a form of “manual mode cred”, which we can use to reward work that didn’t show up in GitHub, Discourse, or our other plugins.
This is really important to me because we have a number of contributors who have been adding a ton of value through organizing events, running community calls, spearheanding partnerships, and more. So far, these contributors haven’t been receiving cred for this work, and that isn’t fair. Now that we have the initiatives plugin, we can start to make this right!
To kick this off, we’re merging sourcecred/cred#27, which adds a bunch of initiatives related to CredCon, and to our partnership development with Maker.
This is a first step, so we don’t expect it to be perfect. We’ve tried to capture the “biggest pieces” from CredCon, and to recognize the champions of those major pieces. However, we aren’t yet recognizing a lot of smaller contributions that were vital to the event. As such, we’re currently flowing too little cred to people who contributed to these initiatives without championing them, or to people who contributed to or championed smaller initiatives that haven’t been recorded yet.
As with everything else in SourceCred, we’re going to keep working on this to make it more expressive, fair, and inclusive. If you feel like work you did has gone unrecognized in this first pass, please don’t despair, or assume that we don’t intend to value your contributions. Instead, help us track the issues! You can let us know that something is missing by either:
- posting about it on this thread
- filing a GitHub issue on sourcecred/cred
By the way, a note about the weights in the initiatives: we set up all the weights during a team call when we drafted the initiatives. We used Fibonacci weights for everything (i.e. only chose weights that are in the Fibonacci sequence, like 1,2,3,5,8,13…). Using Fibonacci weights was helpful because it reduced the number of possible options, and let us focus on big categories rather than tiny distinctions.
Over time, I expect we’ll come up with a more formal process for reviewing initiatives and setting weights. For now, we’ll try to get general consensus on weights and values via the team calls. As TBD, I have final say over what weights we use, but will try to keep the weights in line with the community’s expectations.
Finally: in discussing the cred from initiatives, please be empathetic and considerate towards your fellow contributors. It’s OK to say “I think this contribution recieves too much cred relative to…”, but it’s not OK to say that a particular person is overvalued.
