SourceCred Beta and Pilot Partnerships

The CredSperiment
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SourceCred is currently in alpha. It’s being actively dogfooded by SourceCred itself, and showing promising results. As an overarching goal for 2020, we’d like to launch the SourceCred beta, and onboard a few pilot projects into using SourceCred.

In keeping with the rule of three (ht), we should onboard three Pilot Partners for the SourceCred beta. We’ll work closely with the pilot partners to ensure that they can use SourceCred successfully.

What we’ll do for Pilot Partners

  • Help them configure and maintain their instance
  • Update documentation and UI based on their questions and feedback
  • Build features as needed for their use cases
  • Build moderation tools as-needed to protect them from attacks and gaming

What we expect from Pilot Partners

  • Be active partners in working to make their SourceCred deployment successful
  • Create their own Grain, and give it real economic value
    • (e.g. flowing reward tokens to Grainholders, having a foundation repurchase their Grain, etc)
  • Model good behavior of flowing Cred/Grain back to their dependencies (including the SourceCred pilot program)

What we’re looking for in Pilot Partners

  • An engaged open-source community that’s excite to experiment with governance and incentives
  • A community with a high trust level (either L3 or L2)
  • A community with 10-100 active contributors
  • If possible, usage of both GitHub and Discourse
  • Not a corporate project (i.e. not de-facto controlled by a centralized entity; most contributors are not employees)

Non-partners Discouraged

While SourceCred is still in alpha and early beta, we discourage you from using SourceCred with incentives outside of the pilot program. Flowing financial rewards to pseudonymous actors on the internet creates a lot of risk around gaming and abuse. With the pilot partners, we’re planning to actively support them to prevent attacks, including building new moderation tools as they’re needed. Without that level of support, there’s a serious risk that attackers will game your instance, take your money, and hurt your community.

Since SourceCred is open-source, we of course can’t stop you :slight_smile:. But we ask you to wait until SourceCred is ready (or apply to be a pilot partner!).

Timeline

We aim to onboard the first pilot partners around Q2/Q3 2020. We will likely take a staggered approach, onboarding partners one-at-a-time, in order from smallest community to largest.

How to apply

If you represent a community that is interested in being a pilot partner: awesome! If you’re comfortable proposing in public, please create a new thread in the “The CredSperiment” category proposing that your project be a pilot partner. If you’d prefer to handle things with more confidentiality, please email partners@sourcecred.io to start the conversation.

Please reply on this thread if you have questions or comments about the pilot partnership program in general.

4 Likes
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This is great!

One question: are we actively looking for pilot partners now? Is there a process for submitting prospects, filtering/discussing them, and crediting contributors if they generate a lead that becomes a partner (i.e. what The DAO is looking to do)?

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We aren’t yet actively looking for pilot partners. We need a champion on our end first.

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A champion to manage business development and outreach, a champion as the point of contact for the pilot program, or both? Regarding the later, that would be like an account manager type role where someone would answer questions and relay information between the SourceCred core community and the user right?

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At a high level, someone should be championing that the overall project succeeds, which includes a lot of different workstreams:

  • Defining overall goals for the program and timeline
  • Figuring out what needs to happen before we launch this project (e.g. beta roadmap) and working to make sure the pre-reqs are met
  • Sourcing and engaging with potential partners, making sure we get applications from projects we want to work with
  • Leading process for deciding on top 3, and timeline for onboarding them
  • Acting as point-of-contact for the pilot partners
  • Working to onboard the pilot partners
  • Keeping track of how they’re doing, intervening when issues come up

For some of those tasks, it seems like I’m the natural owner, specifically defining the overall goals, identifying dependencies, and making sure the dependencies are satisfied. However, I’d like to delegate a lot of the BD tasks. So maybe we should think of this as three initiatives:

  • Overall Beta Initiative
    • Define goals & timeline for the project
    • Ensure feature work gets done on schedule so we can launch it
    • “The buck stops here” responsibility for the overall beta
  • Pilot Partnership Recruitment
    • Define what makes a good pilot partner
    • Recruit pilot partners, figure out a process for tracking applications, etc
    • Lead process to choose 3 partners
  • Pilot Partner Point-of-Contact
    • Once the program is on, responsible for tracking how they’re doing, ensuring they get support, etc

In that case, I’m the champion for the overall initiative, and we need a champion for the second one (recruitment) to answer @s_ben’s original question. Part of my job as meta-champion is to recruit the sub-champions.

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Sounds like you’re directing a set of Initiatives as part of a larger strategy? lol