SourceCred Manifesto v1.1

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This is a continuation in my ongoing manifesto drafting process, which started here. I’m going to experiment with making each distinct “draft” its own topic, so that it’s easier for new contributors to comment on just the current state, without needing to scan through all past discussion

Manifesto v1.1

In the past decades, we’ve learned a lot about games. Through game theory, we’ve learned that we can mathematically model games, predict perverse incentives and bad behaviors, and design against them. And from game design, we’ve gained experience with how coming up with rules, goals, and scores, we can coordinate wonderfully complex communities and economies. (Consider the raiding guilds of World of Warcraft or the incredible market economy of EVE Online.)

This begs the question: can we apply our new knowledge to build better games, not just for our entertainment, but our society? Can we make games for collaborating on open-source software, or for protecting the environment?

Is Capitalism just the world’s most successful and popular game? If so, can we design a new version with fairer and better rules?

We believe the answer to all these questions is “yes”.

Followon content (maybe continuation of manifesto, maybe separate documents we link into):

  • How we can understand Capitalism as a multiplayer game, based on a minimal set of mechanics and participant types
  • Why Capitalism’s rules cause it to systemically undervalue shared things we really care about, leading to a worse society for everyone
  • Why Capitalism’s rules make the game work very poorly for open-source software, in particular
  • The design for a new game, which changes some key capitalist assumptions, and can reward and coordinate open-source development
  • How the new game could address key issues facing society, if it grew in scope
  • A general roadmap for prototyping, deploying, and growing the new game

Thanks to @flyingzumwalt for structural feedback which made me realize that we should re-orient the manifesto to make it more accessible to people who aren’t already steeped in the SourceCred/Web3/Game Design noosphere. This draft is considerably based on that feedback.

Clearly this draft is pretty incomplete (or possibly the pre-amble can be the whole manifesto, and we need to write the supporting materials). Please give feedback on the overall structure :slight_smile:

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So, we should (primarily) read and respond to the latest draft rather than previous ones then right?

These parts don’t make sense. Did something get cut off here?


Is it kosher to plug the SourceCred: an MMO for life thread as a potentially relevant reference for the manifesto and/or direction to further research?

So… we should (primarily) read and respond to the latest draft rather than previous ones then right?

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Yeah, I would say primarily respond to the latest drafts (there’s a newer one now) but feel free to leave comments on old drafts too. I will read all the comments, but I’ll probably just keep hacking on the latest copy.

These parts don’t make sense. Did something get cut off here?

Those were sort of bullet points alluding to where I would go… so they made sense to me but may not make sense to anyone else. :slight_smile: The latest draft (v2) is more fully fleshed-out.

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