SC Office Hours Recap (7/31/2019)

Notes for Office Hours: 7/31/2019

Agenda:

  1. Eric’s new logo designs

  2. Dogfooding SourceCred

  3. WasabiWallet

Notes:

Introductions:

New contributor ZX Zhang had his first office hours this week. ZX has just finished his masters in Data Science at Penn under advisement of @mzargham and is excited to help out designing SourceCred’s cryptoeconomics. Welcome ZX!

Logo:

@ericronne presented various logo designs he’s been working on. After collecting feedback on the call, @decentralion has chosen to go with the powerful and challenging “eye” symbol.

This symbol evokes the idea of shining a light on things and examining them, with references to graphing, measurability, the sun and other visual metaphors. Eric’s next task is to run with this idea, evolving it into something that works in all the contexts: website, T-shirt, Twitter logo, banner, stamp, etc.

A more “street” logo is also being considered for stickers or other uses.

Dogfooding:

@decentralion outlined his plan to dogfood SourceCred by paying contributors based on CRED: “If SourceCred is a good tool for giving money to contributors, then the community we should try it on first is SourceCred itself. Both because we’ll learn so much from it, and because ethically, I kind of feel like we don’t know yet what will go wrong. We don’t know what kinds of weird behaviors or problems will come up, and we should accept all of those problems ourselves before we try to persuade some other projects to try it out”.

For the next three months, starting this month (Aug), contributors will be paid every month in proportion to the amount of cred they earn in that month. Payments will be made through Open Collective, with funding by @decentralion and @Protocol Labs, though any party can contribute via OpenCollective. Monthly payments are expected to be in the “couple thousand” dollar range. For details of the plan, see Dogfooding SourceCred via OpenCollective.

@mzargham asked if cred scores are going to be goal/KPI-oriented. @decentralion clarified that while every node is a source node–meaning all contributions are given a default amount of cred (e.g. 1 PR = 4 cred)–they will use the manual mode feature to adjust scores as needed. For instance, if there are obvious attempts to game the system, bikeshed, or other malicious behavior, @decentralion will simply zero their cred.

@mzargham suggested running “A/B” tests prior to disbursing payments, to give the community a chance to provide feedabck. @decentralion liked the idea, suggesting that they post proposed distributions a week before actual payments go out, giving the community an opportunity to discuss scores and raise concerns. Cred scores can then be adjusted as needed before disbursement. @mzargham expanded on how this could work, and later put his thoughts into a post: Dogfooding SourceCred via OpenCollective.

Ideas around identity mapping and governance in SourceCred were briefly discussed. It was decided that it was too soon to begin making major design decisions in these areas.

WasabiWallet:

@decentralion gave an update on the potential collaboration with WasabiWallet. @decentralion has connected with the WasabiWallet maintainer to discuss using SourceCred for its next Contributor Game, where BTC will be distributed based on contributions. For bringing SourceCred to WasabiWallet’s attention, @decentralion told @s_ben “consider this a downpayment on Cred for outreach to Wasabi”. @s_ben :eyes:.

New Tagline:

A new tagline was decided on for SourceCred: ““Reputation protocol for open collaboration”.

New Office Hours Cadence:

Moving forward, Office Hours will move to a bi-weekly cadence. @s_ben has volunteered to take notes.

1 Like

This is so cool! What happened to this?

The maintainer (nopara73) had a good talk with @decentralion and was excited about using SourceCred for their next contributor game. Then shortly thereafter stepped down amid some Twitter drama and decided to focus on privacy research. Haven’t heard from him since. I’ve actually been thinking about approaching WassabiWallet again, as they could be a good potential ‘alpha’ user. They’re already interested a problem SC addresses (distributing rewards (BTC) in an OSS distributed system), and have just closed a funding round, led by Cypherpunk Holdings:)

Exciting! I would be very interested in seeing that relationship/initiative come to life. How can I help?

@decentralion thoughts? Good candidate? Good timing? Would be happy to reach out, or assist if someone else wants to lead.