Badger Governance Grant/Improvement Proposal (Discussion)

[jzjallday]

Per @DeFiFrog 's suggestion, I wanted to put this idea in the general discussion first before I proposed it as a BIP. I’m looking to get some feedback and field any questions or suggestions you may have about it. Some of you may already be familiar with SourceCred and what it can do, others may not. Either way, please consider the following information and let me know what you think of it becoming a grant proposal.

---

SourceCred Implementation: Badger Governance Grant Proposal

Introduction:

My name is @jzjallday , I am an active member for both SourceCred and the Badger DAO communities; amongst others. I have been involved with the communities since October/November of 2020 respectively and am very excited with what they have to offer. I have been contributing to the communities through discussion boards, member navigation, Q&A, artwork, and have contributed to the dialogue of ideas on both the Discourse and Medium forums. Needless to say, I am looking forward to becoming more involved with the Badger community and would like to propose this exciting new idea to all of you.

Objective:

To implement a new way for the Badger DAO community to interact and be rewarded for its efforts through various media applications, some of which we already use. Specifically Discord, Discourse, and Github. Since the Badger DAO relies heavily on the community to grow and develop the project; I feel strongly that utilizing SourceCred will help enrich and drive our members to contribute toward the projects development in a more rigorous and satisfying way. Based on my own personal experience, this application can help spark new innovations, discussions, partnerships, and increases the overall social interaction within the community.

SourceCred helps discover the hidden variable every community driven project is looking for and I believe that finding this hidden variable is at the heart of all successful projects. Once SourceCred is implemented, the community becomes keenly aware that what they are doing, saying, and even the ideas they are sharing all hold a certain value. This technology aims to expose that value and bring it to the forefront for everyone involved. As a result, members become more excited to share, contribute, and grow the community they are a part of.

Please, don’t just take my word for it, here is a testimonial from a SourceCred community member who wanted to share their own unique experience with Badger.
[[Discussion] What has SourceCred Meant to You? - Governance - The Maker Forum]

What is Source Cred:

From their own Website-“SourceCred (in the most basic sense) 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. We 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 our world.”
https://sourcecred.io/docs/

SourceCred’s technology runs autonomously and rewards the contribution of its users based on a developed contract that the community decides what it deems valuable. Essentially, if a community is already interacting, reacting, and applauding its members through social media interactions, SourceCred provides a new way to synergize this ongoing activity and helps reward its members for their contributions.

This is done by giving members measurable credit (Cred) to actions they complete and reactions they give/receive to/from others. Think of it as a sophisticated point system that shows you how you contributed to a community and how the community reacted to your contribution(s). For a deeper dive on what cred is and how its used, please check out SourceCred’s explanation here.

Once the Cred is recorded it can then be issued into Grain, which in turn is redeemable for a currency of the communities choosing (e.g. stablecoin, Badger, Digg, or bBTC). For a deeper dive into how that works, please check out their explanation on what grain is and how its used here.

Who is using Source Cred:

Some of the names currently using SourceCred are MakerDAO (MKR), DAppNode, Balancer (BAL), and 1hive (HNY). According to Github there are 76 forks to the repository, so there is a decent amount of interest in this growing technology already. Based on these successful implementations and the great team over at SourceCred, this idea has a high probability of implementation.

I encourage everyone to take a look at some of the preliminary data found from the Maker DAO project after they used SourceCred technology on their own Discourse forum here.

Some of the important details gleamed from this Discourse data over a 3 month period are as follows:

Metric % Change (6/1 - 9/1)

Visits
+28%

Topics
+88%

Posts
+120%

Likes
+130%

Daily Engaged Users
+70%

New Contributors
+55%

Signups
+2%

Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU)
+2%

Project Summary:

With the adoption of BIP 28, I wanted to bring forth the idea to integrate SourceCred’s technology into the Badger DAO community. I am looking for a governance grant of _____ Badger Tokens to introduce a new SourceCred instance on GitHub for a trial period of 3-6 months. Once implemented, the technology will scrape data from the following sites; Discord, Discourse, and Github (I am suggesting we utilize all 3). This scrapped data then provides measurable rewards for its user’s contributions to the various applications they are apart of. This includes emoji reactions, discussion contribution, and commits for projects/tasks/bug fixes on GitHub. This credit is all weighted based on the communities feedback or from the core team’s suggestions.

For the following applications we are looking to gain the following benefits from a successful implementation:

Discord-Increased members, usage, engagement, and ideas to benefit the community as a whole. Users are rewarded for helping others, birthing new ideas, or creating new content that the community deems important/useful. Members achieve this through reactions to content, ideas, memes, etc. Various weights are assigned to the reactions, while the overall interaction(s) are also graded.

Discourse-Increased members, topics, and daily active users. To further enrich the user by diving deeper into topics/discussion started from discord or other platforms (e.g. Twitter, FB, Reddit). A place to propose new ideas and increase the depth of discussion across the community to the Teams leads, core, and developing groups. Contributors are further rewarded here by reacting to ideas, discussions, and providing solutions. Discourse is similar to what is being done on the Badger forum already.

Github-Not only will this be the formational tool to help develop the SourceCred instance but the addition of sourceCred to Github will also help develop future projects faster and with more engagement. By adding SourceCred to Github, it rewards users for commits and comments that help drive projects to completion or help report/solve/fix problems and bugs.

The Mission/Goal:
The ultimate goal is to provide an additional stream of value for our Badger DAO community members that contribute to the community, be it in large or small ways. To find idle talent that may feel marginalized or dis-incentivized by the current incentive structure. There are hidden gems still out there waiting for the right incentive or signal to get them involved in the Badger DAO.

The value of these contributions will then be channeled back to either the Badger DAO finance Dashboard or another agreed upon site so that users can see how their various actions/contributions are affecting their redeemable rewards (i.e. how much they have earned through their various actions/reactions [https://app.badger.finance/].

Capital allocation ____ Badger Tokens: (Will cover this section once the proposal is moved to a BIP).

Considerations:

After the initial contact with SourceCred they wanted to caution me that they are currently at capacity with onboarding new communities. They proposed an initial timeframe of 4th quarter 2021 to begin adding new communities. With the growing demand for the technology, I thought it would be a good idea to get the ball rolling now and put our place in line to begin implementation. With the scope of this proposal, we could use the added time to plan and make sure this is implemented properly. We should begin getting involved with their community now in case demand spikes even higher.

Conclusion:

In order for the Badger DAO to continue its success, the community needs to continue to innovate and seek out partnerships that make sense. SourceCred has the technology that enhances the spirit of what the Badger DAO is and has always been, “…an ecosystem DAO where projects and people from across DeFi can come together to collaborate and build the products our space needs…a community-led initiative from day one.” [Introducing Badger DAO. Dedicated to building products and… | by Badger DAO 🦡 | Medium]

Guidance for these measures and other helpful topics of information can be obtained from the SourceCred Team and their website found here.

Move this to a BIP

• Yes
• No
• More Discussion Needed

[Tritium]

In general this feels like it doesn’t give people enough autonomy and kind of forces them to justify their every action. Normally I would not be down for this. Currently we seem to be talking about hiring people who we are going ot pay 5-10x the normal wage, who have not been through any formal interview process, and who many of us don’t even really know what they do/how they are doing it.

Maybe sourcecred for the first year wouldn’t be such a bad idea, at least for the badger element of the salary. I also like the idea that it gives the community the ability to easily reward members of the community who maybe aren’t on the roadmap of our very busy seed/ops team.

[cryptouf]

@jzjallday

Move this to a BIP

• Yes
• No
• More Discussion Needed

you should edit your post. The pool is not working

[jzjallday]

This poll should be up and running now.

[jzjallday]

I think that uncertain feeling might come with the DAO territory. Its not a normal business setup and can feel like its just flying in the wind sometimes but the incentives and community drive the production of the project. Typically, people don’t get paid unless milestones are met but I’m not sure of exactly what you are referring to. If they don’t have the chops and aren’t contributing in my eyes, they are replaced or found into another area that better suites their skills.

Also, to address your point. The justification of actions are built into the SourceCred technology and it should be decided through careful consideration of how work can be recognized and rewarded on our platforms in addition to what is already being done. This is ad hoc to current incentives and these rewards should flow organically through the communities reactions and interactions of the named platforms.

Take your comment about my post for example. You did not justify anything about what you wrote in another platform but I feel it is a valuable contribution to the overall discussion of this topic, so I have hearted it. If we were using Sourcecred, I would have just flowed cred to you. If more people agreed with your point or thought it to be valuable, more people would heart it which in turn would flow you more cred. The fact that you are participating and engaging in this topic is what’s valuable and the data of such actions is also usable. We want to explore these considerations and focus on how the Badger DAO community could use this to our advantage.

Keep in mind, the people govern how this is used and help decide what it deems valuable and how its used. If you are racing for likes and trying to game the system they have considerations for this type of behavior as well.

[Justsomeguy]

I’m going to find some time to read up on SourceCred, as I’m only vaguely familiar with it’s implementation.

Anytime I see forms of social media combined with a monetary incentive…it gives me a feeling of caution. Can easily breed armies of garbage content and send the underlying platform into chaos.

As far as having this be a part of the team’s compensation…I’m not for that. If anything happens with this program, I believe it should be for community members.

[jzjallday]

@Justsomeguy It is a very interesting and innovative read. The SourceCred community is great and I hope you share your findings with us. Please let me know what you have found once you go over the particulars.

When I initially started using SourceCred, I thought the same thing. That people were going to be able to game the system and flood them with garbage but they have thought of those instances and it is fairly easy to weed those individuals out. The technology can be used in a number of ways that the community would vote on depending on what they feel is valuable. Being that you think it should be used mainly for the underlying community, what ways do you see it benefiting them?

The concept can garner a lot of attention rather quickly which brings in more capital, new blood/talent, and innovation to the table. Along with that, it can also bring forth some negative qualities from the community but that is seen even without this technology. Heck when people heard Badger was doing an airdrop traffic spiked, its part of why airdrops are done. Some people just want free money and only think about the short term gains they can acquire without having to do much. In my opinion, there isn’t alot that we can do to stop that mentality in a decentralized community.

For me, the whole concept makes me want to innovate and think of the project I am working on to design a better idea or be more thoughtful about what I am trying to say. It actually makes me want to contribute more frequently and pushes me to make better contributions. If I don’t have anything good to contribute or its out of my sphere of capabilities, I sit back because I know if its not good quality the value will be reflected.

[Justsomeguy]

@jzjallday

Being that you think it should be used mainly for the underlying community, what ways do you see it benefiting them?

One of the things I see in this community, is that many members feel that they don’t have a voice…outside of casual interactions on Discord. We’re a new community and rapidly trying to figure things out, but the current enviroment on this Forum does not promote new comers to present their ideas.

If you look through the entire history of this Forum, you will see a lot of interesting ideas that failed to gain any traction. My belief is that, they failed because they weren’t approved or commented on by a member of the team, not because of their content per se. While I don’t think this is a fault to blame on the team, it’s something I would like to see improve over time.

If adding something like SourceCred will help to elevate our active and committed members of this community, giving them a little clout, and perhaps confidence to speak openly…then I will 100% support it.

I still need to get more familiar but wanted to drop my thoughts.

[Mr_Po]

Hello @jzjallday, thank you for the very comprehensive topic.

I know about SourceCred, I watched their presentation on youtube and enjoyed watching it.

However, personally, when it comes to the method, that’s not my type of jam.
I guess I prefer a more qualitative assessment when it comes to ideas.

I did take a look at one month of the Maker rewards and which posts received the most $ value, and tbh I think a human (or a network of humans) would do a better job than the algorithm.

Again, it’s just my personal opinion, if the community wants to be Sourcecreded, I’m sure it will be

@jzjallday

They proposed an initial timeframe of 4th quarter 2021 to begin adding new communities.

But as you mentioned, even if it were to be approved, it would take a long time before it could get implemented, so at the very least we have time to try our own methods in achieving the community involvement we want to have.

So let’s think about what we want and how we want it. There are multiple options, so let’s discuss.

One of the things I see in this community, is that many members feel that they don’t have a voice…

@Justsomeguy, my take is that the community lacks a communication channel.
The one with a high signal to noise ratio, where the best ideas and discussions are presented in a clear and condensed manner. A digest of sorts, as it clearly is hard to digest everything that’s out there.

Before Badger launched, I was able to read all channels on Discord, after launch I’ve only been able to read a couple. And since I’ve been involved more closely in development, I’ve had almost no time + headspace to read them at all.

You’ve been doing a great job at participating in discussions and summarizing them since the beginning, perhaps you would be interested in taking an initiative on that? Trying to give the community a voice?

I have a couple of ideas about a structure that could be interesting, but curious to hear your thoughts first.

[jzjallday]

@Mr_Po, thank you for your response and joining the discussion. I’m wondering if you could clarify some things that you are referring to in your response.

@Mr_Po

However, personally, when it comes to the method, that’s not my type of jam.
I guess I prefer a more qualitative assessment when it comes to ideas.

I’m wondering what you mean here. Are you referring to my post/grant proposal that needs to be more qualitative or the SourceCred method for rewarding users?

If you are referring to my topic/Grant proposal, my own personal experience and that of an outsider were provided to try to give a more human experience of the technology alongside the raw statistical data provided. In the Maker Final Report, they also provided a survey based on the Maker Communities user experience during that trial period. All of which were very positive and in the end their community decided to extend the trial. They labeled it a success. Keep in mind, this is a fairly new application so massive qualitative data sets, like surveys, are going to be hard to come by.

If you are referring to the SourceCred method, the qualitative assessment of “ideas” being shared are discussed through the dialogue between the people having it. That wouldn’t change and doesn’t have much to do with the function of the protocol. People are simply rewarding each other for creating value either through dialogue, ideas, or actual actions (i.e. actions in the case of Github).

In a superficial sense, this is already happening. We like/heart/emoji and have connected dialogue with good ideas, actions, or reactions. Ideas that foster a lot of discussion/reactions generally draw more attention and then garner more feedback. Again, this is already happening. The technology simply harness what is already going on. When members see that they can be rewarded for what is already going on, it gains more value. I think this is what @Justsomeguy was getting at. People might not have a voice because they don’t see the value in participating/contributing.

On a higher level, I think this helps to show those community members that are providing value even if they haven’t made a major contribution to the project. You have the actionable developers and their contributions can seem really obvious to reward based off milestones, functional results, and achieved metrics but what if a different member helped someone work through a tough problem on discord? What if a member brought new people to the table and helped them navigate the dashboard? What if you inspired someone to create a new idea? Think about it, there are tons of questions being answered on Badger DAOs discord right now by the community. Is that not valuable?

@Mr_Po

I did take a look at one month of the Maker rewards and which posts received the most $ value, and tbh I think a human (or a network of humans) would do a better job than the algorithm.

I guess my main confusion comes from the abovementioned statement. Regardless of which posts created the most value over the month for the Maker Community, a network of humans did decide what was valuable for that community. Discord and the discussion boards are a network of humans. The data for those values was simply tracked and in the case of SourceCred rewarded. If a human was doing the same job, looking at vast amounts of topics and interactions, they would reward the topics or ideas that had the most attention/reaction/dialogue. I’m curious, how you came to the conclusion that a human would do this portion better?

[Mr_Po]

Hey @jzjallday, you make some good points, but let me clarify myself first

I’m wondering what you mean here. Are you referring to my post/grant proposal that needs to be more qualitative or the SourceCred method for rewarding users?

No, I wasn’t referring to your post, in my opinion you did a marvelous job with it. And I also didn’t refer to the Sourcecred method as not being qualitative. Sorry for the confusion.

What I meant is that there are quantitative and qualitative methods of assessment.

The Sourcecred approach seems to be that everything qualitative can be transformed into quantitative metrics. At least they’re trying to do it in the most universalized manner, correct?

And I think that there are areas that are covered suboptimally by their system, that are better assessed on a case by case basis, that don’t have the common denominator if you will.
And those denominators are better decided by a human or a network of humans, but through expertise as opposed to the universalized algorthitm.

So I agree with where Sourcecred is coming from and I agree with where they’re headed, I even like a lot of concepts that they’re using along the way, but my idea of a preferred pathway differs.

Regardless of which posts created the most value over the month for the Maker Community, a network of humans did decide what was valuable for that community

To be exact, it’s a network of humans that decided what was valuable through an algorhitm, which is basically viewed as a higher truth. And I don’t share this opinion.

So when I took a look at Sourcedred Maker Forum rewards, my opinion about the value of the contributions differed from the results.
I think that works well for the Maker community and it for sure is better than nothing, but I also think there might be a better way for the Badger community.

You bring a good point about Discord discussions, and it’s true that they’re perhaps the hardest to keep up with for a human expert.
And I think the larger the dataset, the more valuable the signal the Sourcecred produces becomes.

So I’d be down for using Sourcecred inputs as part of the data that is used for the people involved in grant distribution to decide how community members are rewarded.

But still, I would prefer for people to have the last word as opposed to the algorithm.
I think it’s also more psychologically rewarding when people reward people.

So I’d be building something around that. It is a big area to explore, and the Sourcecred method can be part of it.

But if we wanted to use its inputs for DIscord data gathering we wouldn’t need to wait for the Q4 2021, correct? I’ve seen a Discord integration in another community, it’s all open-source, right?

[jzjallday]

@Mr_Po, thank you for clarifying that. I think you make some fine points and value the outlook you have on this.

I think you may be thinking of this in a more defined way for deciding grants for rewards. The way I’m envisioning this being used would be to reward everyone. These aren’t massive rewards we are talking about and the community votes and decides how that is weighted. Over time the rewards build up and on a higher level you can see who is contributing and providing value. The interactions/reactions on Discord would be assigned value and this is given to everyone. So this would be for larger datasets, at least how I see it.

It is open source and I do believe the badger community could take it on independently of SourceCred. I actually already forked the instance on Github to see if it was possible. I have spoken to @DeFiFrog and they suggested that we are stretched a little thin on the dev side. So part of my grant proposal includes sourcing out someone to develop this and possibly another to maintain/implement it to the various platforms it if it gets that serious. I think when SourceCred suggested that they wouldn’t be able to onboard another community, I think they are under the assumption that their dealings with the community are going to be heavy handed with the implementation. I believe they are meaning that they cannot support another community through the process right now. The fund allocation I left out of this discussion goes over how we could potentially get this done.

[Mr_Po]

In general, I think it would be great if our community would pick up the community-building process for the DAO and come up with and execute its own initiatives.
Soon, hopefully, we’ll have a process that will have a lot less friction for these initiatives to come to life.

The funding part should get covered by the grants council that will be elected soon.
As for the development side, we have a partnership with Gitcoin, so perhaps a process for finding interested developers could be arranged by interacting with them.

Also, there might be helpful things to introduce around the governance process for the community initiatives. In particular, I like the idea of having a pre-proposal feedback channel on Discord. A channel where you can share your BIP draft and get feedback on its parameters before you publish it. And/or perhaps there could be project-specific channels that get archived once the job is done.

Personally, I would vote “yay” on rewarding our community’s Discord participation by using the Sourcecred method. I think it is worth rewarding, there’s not much cost or risk involved, and I don’t know of a better way to do it.

[Justsomeguy]

@Mr_Po

In general, I think it would be great if our community would pick up the community-building process for the DAO and come up with and execute its own initiatives.

I agree. I think this should be something that is built by the community, for the community. Core team is busy enough and while their involvement will be necessary at times, it should be kept to a minimum.

Also, after having read a little more on SourceCred, it seems to have the option for people to sort of manually over ride and tweak the system.

@Mr_Po

As for the development side, we have a partnership with Gitcoin, so perhaps a process for finding interested developers could be arranged by interacting with them.

I believe we can find people in the Discord that may be willing to pitch in with this as well. I can think of a few names already.

[jzjallday]

Excellent suggestions.

[jzjallday]

Yes absolutely, you can tailor the cred to flow in a way that the community deems valuable. You can even tailor the weight of rewards for direct reactions and edge weights for things like mentions, and the dialogue between people (the edges of interactions). This can all be tailored to how Badger would want to use it and what it deems valuable.

From here, I’d like to see if we could get a little more traction from the community and see if this is something we would want to move onto the next steps of a BIP. I have some decent proposal ideas for the capital allocation that I think would help move the project along through the trial period.

If you have some people that may be interested in working on this project from discord, have them take a peek at the proposal and see what they have to say. Thank you @Justsomeguy and @Mr_Po for the excellent dialogue.

[Justsomeguy]

I think you should go ahead with drafting a BIP and post it on Discord first. You could use the #proposal-discussion channel for now.

I believe it will get some traction over there, as you’re proposing to reward the community. I think many still don’t swing by this Forum as often as Discord and may not even be aware.

[cryptomooniac]

You make good points and provide metrics, which I love. I did some research on SourceCred and it is very interesting. However I am still not convinced that community participation should have monetary rewards.

One question: what happens when the rewards end? Will engagement and participation be reduced? How will the metrics change?

[jzjallday]

@cryptomooniac , thank you very much for joining the discussion. I’m glad to hear you have done a little research on SourceCred.

I think a big factor in your question depends on the amount of time that the rewards were alive in the community. If it was a short period of time that the rewards were around, I suppose it would be a lot like turning the shower off while the community was shampooing their hair. I think people would be disappointed in the fact that we would go through the trouble of introducing a feature like SourceCred for 3-6 months and then take it away. Most people I have spoken with that have used it in a community really seem to enjoy its application. If the amount of time was greater, say a couple years down the road, I would speculate that the effects of a reward withdrawal would be more muted.

These of course are just speculations. I do not have metrics on what happens to a community after the rewards are withdrawn and I don’t think anyone has done that type of research yet for SourceCred. I think it would be best to use the metrics already defined by what happens when it is introduced into a community to judge the impact it could have for us.

Take a second a think about what has made Badger so successful. Aside from timing and its market ingenuity; a major part its initial success was how it rewarded the people that got involved early on. It rewarded the community and gave back to ideas that fostered its very existence (e.g. github donations). If you are looking for another boon in ideas, engagement, and excitement for the Badger DAO, I think SourceCred is the right kind of injection that can boost a community like ours to the next level.

Have I provided any better insights for your convictions? Do you have any other questions or reservations about the idea?

[cryptomooniac]

I appreciate your thorough answer. Thank you for making those points.

I am still not convinced on the idea that the community should be financially rewarded for participating in forums or discord (in governance probably, there is another general discussion on that).

But if most people think otherwise I will embrace it. Wouldn’t hurt either, and sometimes it is good to experiment and see how much value this can add to the DAO.