SourceCred Priorities 2021: What do you think?

Community Governance
5

  1. Building the community. We’ve both grown (in terms of # of active participants) but even more importantly deepened (level of knowledge, investment, engagement, and depth of connection to one another).

  2. Validating SC through actual usage (both by SC and co-communities). In the process of seeing SC used by other communities like Maker and 1hive, we’ve needed to improve SC to make it more robust to gaming. The fact that SC saw its first waves of gaming, and successfully adapted, is a very good sign.

  3. Deployability. SourceCred has gone from a rube-goldberg machine of one-off scripts and observable notebooks into a reproducible and deployable system which can be turned on with (minimal) engagement from the core team.

  1. Coordination and execution. This is particularly apparent on the technical execution side of things. If you look back at the Beta Roadmap (thanks for linking it @Monstrosity1), we really only made progress on one of the technical goals (deployability). My sense is that we aren’t good at follow-through; we have multiple projects (CredRank, dashboard redesign, etc) which are in half-finished state. Good work is being done but we struggle to actually land it.

  2. Cred quality. Right now Cred is way too indexed on contributions that have high platform-legibility (e.g. forum posts and pull requests) and misses a lot of the most important contributions. We need a solution for this before SC will be ready to scale to more projects, imo. I’m putting this second below technical execution, because we need good technical execution in order to improve the Cred. (But I think we can probably push on both simultaneously in the process of developing the Creditor).

  3. Communication, especially async communication. We’re not good at communicating what’s going on in SC, either to ourselves or to the outside world. I think SC is basically a black box for people who don’t have bandwidth to attend our meetings. This relates with pt 1.

  1. Develop the Creditor. I think we can design a Creditor that solves the dual function of recognizing contributions that have already happened (i.e. assigning Cred) and organizing expected contributions that haven’t yet happened (i.e. project management). Thus, we can work on our biggest issues of execution and cred quality simultaneously. In the process of developing the Creditor, we should focus on figuring out how to collaborate efficiently. (h/t @LB for a lot of offline discussion here)

  2. Integrate with Ethereum / build on-chain Grain. Getting to the point where Grain can be easily distributed on-chain without manual / centralized human intervention will be a big step forward for SC being useful for our co-communities. It’s also a vital step for our own process of decentralization–we should move control of our treasury out of the hands of individual treasurers, and into a trust-minimized smart contract.

  3. Experiments in decentralized governance. I think that in the long-term, SC is actually a tool for decentralized governance and coordination; deciding compensation is just a specific use case. We should start exploring and building out this functionality.

I think we need to develop new strategies for coordination and execution that reflect where we’re at as a team and community. For most of 2019 I was approximately the only person working on SC, and so the project’s development habits were oriented on my individual throughput. In 2020, the team grew but I don’t think our development approach changed in the ways it needs to (e.g. I stayed pretty focused on my own technical output, and we didn’t have much management/coordination bandwidth).

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