Hey @s_ben, fantastic reply, much appreciatee!
I’ve seen SourceCred before and am a fan of what they have been working on, but not seen Govern or Armitage so will have a look at what I can find on both.
There’s two factors i think that are going to be important with recording contributions. One is it will be important to minimise the time it takes for people to record them. This is what automatically recorded ones such as git commits, doc changes etc are an important starting foundation to give people a way to better visualise there contributions without them having to do much work.
Without these tools the main thing that matters in a log is just a brief log about the outputs someone made. I’m recording all my contribution outputs in my own contribution logs - Contribution log | Web3 Association. These don’t take me more than half an hour a month to do. Verifying them would mostly be looking at the git commits for my examples. I think something like this is a good simple baseline, then the next step up is something like this but with automatically recorded contributions that bring in more information and present it better.
The second thing is considering what incentives are available for people to start recording these contributions. For DAO experiments that aren’t paying full time salaries it would be difficult to expect them to spend much time on recording their contributions very well. The logs need to get to a threshold of value to the contributor for them to want to spend any meaningful time recording them. The less time it takes them the lower that value requirement threshold is going to be. Per month I think it would be difficult to get someone to spend 1 hour per week on these unless there is significant value in doing it. Less than half an hour a month makes sense for me personally at the moment.
In relation to politics, in a group setting there is always going to be some process for how compensation gets distributed. In a more autocratic leadership approach, people are just letting someone else decide their value, which although might be simple, it can also easily lead to exploitation, conflict with leadership and excessive leadership influence / power. In group based decisions there is more decision complexity due to the need for people to understand what everyone else has contributed. In either of these scenarios, if a contributor can’t prove the contributions they have made easily they have less ability to prove and demonstrate their value - they could rely more heavily on the observations of the people in leadership or around them.
It’s due to this that it makes sense to just start with facts that are easily provable about someones contributions. Humans can still interpret the value of someones contributions as they do currently but they now have a simple source of factual information to consider that should be easier to use than before. Attestations could then be integrated on top of that baseline which add in more detail, this area needs a ton of thought though.
Here are some relevant and interesting projects I currently have noted down (added Armitage and Govern in there!)
- tea .xyz/
- armitage .xyz/
- govrn .app/
- gitroll .io/
- docs.opensource .observer/
- sourcecred .io/
- dework .xyz/
Another factor worth mentioning is the different between effort and output. The starting point for logs can solely focus on outputs - what outcomes have actually been produced by different people, which can often be mapped to digitally created outcomes - but not all the time. Effort can also be tracked but it makes it more complex to both record and read this information. Effort will be needed in situations where multiple people work on the same outcome and it’s hard to break that down into a simpler subsets of that work.
I am not looking to develop a separate solution for this, I would reach out to any existing projects I find first and see what I can learn from them and also see how we could collaborate. I’m trying to work out the best starting point to support the proposal of open source contributor funding. Making tooling for individual contribution logs could be a good starting point so it might well be a focus of mine moving forward. Still going through the motions thinking it through!
Thanks again, and keen to chat more if you had any other thoughts 