DAOrayaki Research |SourceCred：A Contribution-Based Calculating Cred tool

DAOrayaki

8 min readJun 9, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee 5/7

Grant Amount：200 USDC

Category: DAO, SourceCred, Contribution Graph, Grain, Tools

Contributor：朱莉白, DAOctor@Daorayaki

Chinese Version: https://daorayaki.org/sourcecred-ji-yu-gong-xian-de-ji-suan-xin-yong-gong-ju/

1.Introduction:

SourceCred is a technology that makes the labor of individuals more visible and rewardable as they work together in a project or community. The goal of SourceCred is to use this technology to make rewarding labor as nuanced as human contribution often is. SourceCred hope to be one piece in the puzzle of a healthier future where systems serve community members, where financial maximization isn’t the end-all be-all goal, and where wealth actually flows to those who are creating the value in the world.

2.Team members：

The SourceCred working area is widely opened and There is not that much information about the SourceCred dev team as far as we know, major contributors on the SourceCred project are listed below:SourceCred

— — Michael Zargham：Founder, Researcher, Decision Engineer, Data Scientist; PhD in systems engineering, control of networks.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/mZargham?s=09

— — Dandelion Mané：Software engineer, fusion dancer, pragmatic idealist.

Account: https://medium.com/@decentralion

— — LB：an artistic, nonbinary human who heads the “Community Cultivation” third of the SourceCred project.

@LBS on Discord

— — Some contributors

3. SourceCred governance and incentive mechanisms:

1）Cred

Cred is the core idea of SourceCred. Cred is a score which is earned by making contributions to a project. A participant’s score reflects how valuable their contributions were to the project. Participants are then rewarded with digital currency, or “Grain”, based on their Cred.

Properties of Cred

· Cred is community-specific

Every community using SourceCred has its own independent “instance”, along with its own Cred scores. They have “cred in a project”, not just “cred overall”. Every community can control how Cred flows within its instance.

· Cred is not transferable

A participant’s Cred score is like their reputation. It’s something that is associated with them, but it’s not an asset that they own. Cred scores can’t be transferred, or bought or sold.

· Cred is retroactive

Cred scores can retroactively update to reflect new information. For example, someone might write a great forum post that goes initially overlooked. At first, it earns little Cred, but once it gets discovered, the Cred score will retroactively increase. This frees participants to focus on doing great work, without needing to worry that all of it gets appreciated right away.

· Cred is transparent

Cred is computed by an algorithm. The algorithm is open-source, and all of the data and parameters are public. This means that Cred scores are transparent: it’s always possible to inspect a Cred score and find out how it was computed.

Calculating Cred

At a high level:calculate Cred by first defining a “Contribution Graph”, which is a network of contributions, participants, and connections between them.

Every contribution is represented as a node in that graph. Then, the project chooses certain contributions to “mint” Cred, which means that those contributions are a source of new Cred. This could happen through automatic rules,Or the minting could happen through manual human review. Finally, Cred “flows” across the connections in the graph.

The result is that every contribution earns Cred if it was connected to, or depended on by, other things that earned Cred. Participants earn Cred if they author or contribute to high-cred Contributions.

2） The Contribution Graph

The Contribution Graph is a data structure that tracks all of the contributions to a project. It’s a Graph, or a network of nodes and edges. In a Contribution Graph, every node represents either a contribution, a participant. Edges then represent connections between these objects.

A stylized Contribution Graph. @-nodes represent participants.

For SourceCred to work, it needs data on what contributions exist, and how they are connected. It gets this data primarily via GitHub，Discourse and Discord plugins that export data from platforms where the community operates.

Choosing Weights

A key tenet for SourceCred is to let communities decide what they value. One of the tools for doing so is choosing “weights”, which are important parameters to the algorithm.

There are two major types of weights: node weights and edge weights.

· Node Weights

Node weights determine how much Cred is minted at a given node. For example, if you want every post in a forum to mint some Cred, you could set a positive node weight on forum posts.

However, that would probably not be a good decision. Because it’s very easy to make lots of forum posts, people might game the Cred scores by spamming lots of low-effort posts.

Instead, you might set a positive weight on likes on the forum. Unlike a post, a like indicates that someone else found the post valuable, and acts as a lightweight review pass on whether the post was valuable.

Further heuristics can modify the weights, e.g. ensuring that only verified or trusted users’ likes will mint Cred, and that if a user likes their own post, it won’t mint Cred.

· Edge Weights

Edge weights determine how Cred flows once it is in the graph. Each SourceCred plugin comes with default weights, which is calibrated based on the tem experiments. However, users can change it according to their needs.

4. Token:

1. Grain

Grain is a community-specific digital currency that is issued on the basis of Cred scores.

Every community will use Grain differently. In the SourceCred community, Grain is currently redeemable for USDC, a stable coin that is worth 1 US Dollar. Communities without funds might treat this as a share of future income. Another might treat it as weight behind a community member’s vote.

Note that Grain does not have to be tied to any actual monetary reward. A project using SourceCred can name it “Points” and use it solely as a scoring system in addition to Cred values.

Each community can choose the price of their own Grain. They can choose a fixed price, or choose to make their Grain a floating financial asset and let the market decide the price; their Grain would then fluctuate in price based on supply and demand. They can also choose for Grain to have no monetary value, and instead only use it within their community, such as for governance or prioritization.

Grain is project-specific, not universal. Every project that uses SourceCred creates its own independent Grain token and calls it whatever their community chooses.

In the SourceCred community, Grain stays at a fixed price of $1 per Grain.

Projects can choose to issue their Grain as a cryptocurrency or token, such as by issuing Grain as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. This allows Grain to be a conduit with which a project can pay or financially reward participants.

Grain is foundational infrastructure for building economics and governance mechanisms. here’s two ideas:

· Pay contributors based on their cred scores.

· Build apps that use Grain scores as certificates. For instance, anyone who stakes some amount of Grain score gets edit permissions on Google Docs.

2.Token Distribution Policies

Grain distribution is a two-step process in which the Cred is recomputed (so scores are fresh as possible), and Grain is then distributed based on those Cred scores.

SourceCred currently has three policies for how a project distributes Grain:

· IMMEDIATE

splits Grain evenly based on how much Cred each participant earned in the last week. (This policy ignores all Cred from previous weeks, and is intended to give fast rewards to active participants).

· BALANCED

splits Grain based both on lifetime Cred and on lifetime Grain earnings. Balanced tries to ensure that everyone in the project receives a total Grain payment which is consistent with their total Cred score. The balanced policy sees that this contributor is underpaid, so it will pay them extra to “catch them up” to others in the project. Conversely, contributors might be “overpaid”.

· RECENT

splits Grain based on recent Cred using an exponential decay to prioritize more recent cred. The recentWeeklyDecayRate parameter determines to what degree users want to focus on recent contributions.

3.key properties of Grain

· Grain is transferable and tradeable

Users can send their Grain freely to others, or exchange it as part of an agreement. Within a project, Grain is fungible. If Grain has been put on a blockchain (e.g. as an ERC20 token), it can be swapped or traded via protocols like Uniswap or 0x, just like any other ERC20 token.

· Grain is opt-in

Since Grain can have financial value, receiving Grain might create legal and/or tax complications for participants. As such, Grain is opt-in; only participants that have explicitly opted in will be eligible to receive any Grain.

4.Trust Levels

SourceCred’s purpose is to empower communities to allocate rewards to contributors, through Cred and Grain. However, this allocation leads to gaming opportunities which are not part of the community values. For SourceCred to help sustain community safety, it must be resilient to such gaming.

The SourceCred team has developed the concept of “Trust Levels” in an attempt to determine which communities SourceCred is ready to support, provide a structure for communities using SourceCred to use if they choose, and consider what kinds of problems communities might encounter along the way.

· Trust level 3 (TL3): Collaborative.

This is the highest trust level. It is taken as common knowledge that everyone in the community is acting in good faith. Discussions of accidental or subconscious gaming are treated as precious data to be shared and analyzed, never as evidence of any kind of wrongdoing.

· Trust level 2 (TL2): Wary.

The community has a core backbone of contributors that are focused on common goals, but some members may be more focused on optimizing their own rewards. TL2 is primarily distinguished from TL3 by good faith is no longer a uniform assumption. Expect skewed voting records, underrecognition of others’ help, and quarrels over attribution or allocation.

· Trust level 1 (TL1): Alert.

This community controls a scarce resource. That resource is considered intrinsically valuable by some people outside the community, who are willing to devote their time to acquiring that resource without much thought for scruples.

TL1 is primarily distinguished from TL2 by gaming being the main goal rather than an opportunistic “side hustle.” Expect voting cliques, sybils, chains of obfuscated self-dealing, and attempts to corrupt structures of leadership and governance.