SourceCred "Sales" Model

Thought of this idea a few weeks ago, but didn’t share because… well… I dunno. Then @YalorMewn created the SourceCred technicians quest (which is more of a quest to build a quest) and mentioned that you guys started talking about creating programs to teach people on how SourceCred works so that they can share that value with the world. Had a few ideas on how you could do that by creating Initiatives for relationships and letting the leads/technicians/whatever champion and contribute to the relationship. The client/partner can then boost the Initiative to flow Cred to the people helping them use SourceCred.

Right now SourceCred has 2-3 pilot programs. There is more demand than the capacity SourceCred has to provide. In short, SourceCred’s onboarding and support proecss doesn’t scale because they’re in dogfooding mode with the CredSperiment. Anyone who wants to use (or even understand) SourceCred needs someone on the inside to help them out.

Traditionally, when people need help using a product there’s an account executive who owns the relationship with a lead/client and provides white glove service to make sure they’re happy. This is great, but sales has historically been an opaque industry. To create a more open permission-less sales/BD model we could have Partnership Champions. The way this would work is that the champion of a partnership would create an initiative for that relationship. It would have dependencies of all the modules/plugins the client uses for their SourceCred instance. In a post-boosting world, the champion would then get Cred based on the amount that the partnership Initiative is boosted. It is expected that, if the partnership is creating real value, the SourceCred community as well as the partner themselves would boost the Initiative to keep the relationship alive.

This way it would be easier for people interested in SourceCred could find awesome projects, sell them on the idea of using SourceCred, help them set things up for their community, and provide support to ensure their ongoing happiness. The amount of Cred that flows to the Champion would be dependent on the value of the partnership (direct boosting as well as connections to nodes within the SourceCred graph). This way anyone can organically create partnerships and provide support, and anyone can support that support, and it can be done in a way that is (hopefully) more meritocratic and postive-sum than a traditional sales cycle.

Not sure how you would transfer championship if the project wants to get a new Partnership Champion, but otherwise it could be cool. I dunno, just a few thoughts

For reference, this same idea was also posted to the MetaGame forum so there might be interesting ideas there too! https://forum.metagame.wtf/t/sourcecred-technician-quest/106/5

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This is an interesting concept. Like many things in SourceCred, it would be interesting to test it out via dogfooding.

I think designating a “champion” too early might be an anti-pattern; it might encourage people to try to “stake out territory” (potentially crowding out other voices) rather than focusing on contributing. But I think that the general idea of having an initiative for each partnership makes a lot of sense. Then, partners who want to be prioritized can buy grain to “boost” their partnership, incentivizing people to contribute to the boosted partnerships.

The MetaGame partnership could be a good dogfooding test case for this! What kind of contributions do we need to do a good job supporting MetaGame? cc @s_ben and @META_DREAMER

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On the technical side, improvements to the discord plugin and initiatives plugin, but that’s already in the works and isn’t “MG specific”, just a waiting game now. Also, a way for us to implement a “SEED Ledger” where we can keep track of who already got paid out how much etc.

On a more collaborative level, would be nice to have SourceCred peeps involved in the “design decisions” for how best to implement SourceCred for our use cases and give some guidance / affirmation on how we are doing things.

e.g. For quest completions / player profiles, we plan to have a discord bot with a Postgres backend where users can create their “identities” within discord and we save their discordID, discourse username, and GitHub username to a “user” table in the DB. Also planning on putting the scores.json output into the database so we can more easily query it to display on players profiles in our web app.

Also will be using the discord bot for quest completions, so when a user completes a quest, they can post in the “quest-completions” channel with a bot command "!complete quest1 " and when a diamond ranking player reacts to that post with an emoji, the bot will make an entry in the database following the “initiative format”. Then, we hope that SourceCred can query the database directly to load this information. For all this stuff, we don’t know if this would be a good idea or if there’s a better way to do it. Its something we came up with and are asking for SC teams feedback, and I think that works fine for MG since I have a more technical grasp of things, but I’m guessing a lot of other communities wont have that and would be looking for the SC team to take the initiative and give them guidance on where and how SC can be integrated. If we want to dogfood this with MetaGame, would be cool if SC team came up with ideas / suggestions for how to improve MetaGame (but that also means that SC team needs to understand MG well, so its a two way street and takes two to tango).

Also, I think it would be valuable if there was structured “releases” of SourceCred with a changelog of new features and additions that would help users keep up with new developments without needing to dig through all the PRs and forum posts. A public “short term roadmap” would also be really nice so we can know when to expect certain features and adjust our development roadmap accordingly and ensure that we dont waste time building things that are already being built