SourceCred

a reputation protocol

for open collaboration

How to distribute tokens in a DAO?

• You made a DAO, congrats
• It has tokens
• How can you distribute them in a way that
• fairly rewards people for contributions
• encourages new contributors to join
• produces good long-term incentives

Attempt 1: Distribute them yourself

​

• Works for startups, could probably work for you
• One problem: It’s centralized.
• Now you don’t have a DAO. You have a CAO.

Attempt 2: Distribute based on metrics

​

• # lines of code committed?
• # of commits merged?
• # of bugs fixed?

These are all easily gamed:

• reindent the codebase!
• spam tiny commits!
• sneak in easily fixed bugs!

Attempt 3: Bounties / Contracts

​

• Define + spec the work in advance
• Pay tokens out when the work is completed
• Community review (when creating and when paying out)

​

Most promising approach discussed so far.

Colony, Decred, Gitcoin all using it.

Still plenty of issues, though.

Problems with Bounties

​

• Lots of work can’t be neatly spec’d
• Speccing is itself a lot of work (& hard to spec 😉)
• Encourages competition instead of cooperation
• Encourages short-term orientation
• Fair upfront valuation is really hard
• Lots of friction

Properties we need

• Ability to recognize many different kinds of contributions
• coding, design, mediation, outreach, ...
• Retroactively value contributions
• reassess as new info comes in
• Start from objective data, but have room for subjectivity
• Be low friction (automatic / background process)

Interlude: PageRank 101

• Classic Google search algorithm
• Assigns scores to nodes on a graph
• Nodes get high score if they are linked to by nodes with high score

Contributions are nodes

Bug Report

Pull Request

Review

Contributors are nodes too

Bug Report

Pull Request

Review

@coder

@reviewer

@user

Can represent subjective judgement

Bug Report

Pull Request

Review

@coder

@reviewer

@user

@maintainer

👍

Can update in response to new info

Bug Report

Pull Request

Review

@coder

@reviewer

@user

@maintainer

👍

GitHub Release

sourcecred on sourcecred

sourcecred on sourcecred

sourcecred on filecoin

sourcecred on discourse

Next Steps: Dogfooding

​

• SourceCred produces “pretty good” scores for OS projects based on GitHub data
• need to validate on a project with real incentives -- and real gaming
• live experiment in cred-based pay starting end of this month

How to earn cred in SourceCred?

​

• contribute useful code on GitHub
• contribute interesting discussion on the Discourse

Learn more!

• links & more at sourcecred.io
• join our Discord at sourcecred.io/discord-invite
• follow me: @decentralion