[PROPOSAL: Reputation tool] IOTA X-Teams and SourceCred
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IOTA X-Teams and SourceCred
The IOTA Foundation launched the IOTA Experience Teams (X-Teams in short):
“IOTA Experience Teams are groups of dedicated community members that work together with IOTA Foundation members throughout different stages of development. IOTA Experience Teams strengthen collaboration with our passionate community and pave the road for IOTA to have the best developer experience in the DLT and IoT space.”
We intend to understand how various members of the IOTA community can and will influence IOTA Foundation’s projects and its ecosystem. Open source projects share many concepts and challenges and the beauty is that there are other projects out there building interesting ways to measure the value of community contributions and how to make open source sustainable.
During a chat with Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, he pointed to SourceCred’s reputation protocol and we wanted to discuss with our community, how it may benefit these endeavors.
Contributions and Reputation
One great challenge in open source is to understand the value of a contribution. How is it possible to understand the connection from a discussion on a forum, to a chat on Discord up to a pull request or issue on GitHub. SourceCred is a tool that assigns weights to contributions that helps the broader IOTA community and ecosystem to understand the context of proposals and initiatives.
X-Team members will have public hard data at their disposal that will show the importance of their contribution and subsequent work based on their contributions within the X-Team initiatives will grow their reputation and contribution value in the long term. New members of the community will also have the possibility to become an important part of the IOTA ecosystem through their contributions in order to gain trust, support and build their reputation.
SourceCred
SourceCred.io gathers data from different sources like GitHub, Discourse, Discord (WIP) to represent networks of actions with the CredRank algorithm explained here.
The CredRank algorithm is used to compute reputation scores. The intention of this PageRank-style algorithm is to calculate the relative value of contribution based on weights.
Test run
In the beginning a reputation leaderboard will be published to follow how contributions to GitHub repositories represent the X-Team member’s reputation. During this time it is possible to point out inconsistencies or make suggestions. As we go with the test run, we will define together how to improve effectiveness, like trying out different weights and their effect on the scores to finetune how contributions will construct the scores and the reputation.
Long term goal
Once it’s out of beta testing, SourceCred will support a system to calculate incentives of different kinds for the IOTA community members, the paths from here can follow different directions, most probably defined and built by the IOTA community itself.
Learn More
Presentation by Dandelion:
SourceCred: A Social Algorithm, Dandelion Mane at SustainWeb3
Forum post:
SourceCred in 5 Minutes
Protocol Labs:
SourceCred: an introduction to calculating cred and grain
Medium:
Network Formation Games
IOTA X-Team members, what are your thoughts in this regard?
Possible future usecase:
Since this sounds a little bit like those scorings on bughunting platforms, companies could search for individuals with high reputation for their IOTA related projects to hire them.
@Sibb0x5e we are looking to update our ecosystem platform. This will feature source cred and xteams info in their profiles. It should help identify experts on certain technologies.
The question is how can we apply tokenized assets (colored tokens) to this idea without minting coins out of thin air.
One big difference is that someone needs to "have 250m" tokens to color them and start such an initiative, while with an ERC20 I can "mint them from thin air" (besides some marginal costs).
Let's talk about this example:
A new project is decentralized, sets up SourceCred.io up and wants to give tokenized assets (a.k.a. IOTA Colored Coins) called Tonis (yeah) to people that participate. Tonis are used to accumulate reputation and power.
I can e.g. put some Tonis as reward for solving a GitHub issue and push it's development etc..
The thing is that Tonis are never worth as much as IOTAs, so what is the trade off, how would you make this work, instead of people taking the Tonis outside and spend them for IOTAs?
As more people start working on the project I would need a higher supply and I could take the FIAT donations to exchange for IOTAs, colour them and insert them as Tonis in the community for people to get incentives/tokens, that they can again, convert and use as IOTAs.. (here comes the mess I cannot hold on to)..
Because in the end Tonis will be what contributors will be "paid" in, or they can use their Tonis to boost other issues and gain more Tonis if that issue is valuable.
That is the SourceCred.io model (at this point in time) and where minting from "thin air" (based on contribution value) does IMO not work with colored tokens.
In the SourceCred example the token is minted on my time that has been dedicated to the issue I am working on (the "thin air" that of course is not thin air).. with tokenized assets it's a little more difficult as you would need a smart contract that colours them and the participants agree that 1 Toni equals the amount of time/work that is used by the algo to calculate the value of your contribution.
I mean the minting is based on contribution time. You contribute, this time is transformed in a token (minted) and now you have a token that you can use:
a) to cash out and be paid for your contribution
b) use the token as investment by putting it on a further contribution (e.g. feature request), so that the person adds that feature gets paid more. In addition, as you have put a "bet" on that feature request and more people build on that, you get more reputation/tokens, since it was useful.
It's a pretty interesting concept.
I think we should just go for it. LGTM!
Is there a blocker for this, or can it be approved and undertaken?
How is this integrated into each project repo settings?
@antonionardella
Is there something happening atm in this direction? Just saw it and think it has some interesting ideas... Whats the staus on that and what can we do to activate this...?