a reputation protocol for open collaboration
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William Chargin 08cb60e762
Make all `neighbors` options required (#354)
Summary:
In actual code, we almost always call `neighbors` with a specified
direction. Usually, you want to inspect some relation like “parents of
this commit” or “GitHub nodes referenced by this comment”, and so the
edge direction matters. In each of the above cases, forgetting to
include the direction would introduce a bug: you’d get parents _and
children_ of a commit, or GitHub nodes referenced by _or that refer to_
a comment. It’s easy to forget this when writing the code, so we prefer
to make an explicit direction required, and allow people to specify
`Direction.ANY` in the case that that is what they want.

(In other words: we want to make the common thing easy, the uncommon
thing possible, and the wrong thing impossible.)

A similar situation holds for filters. By forcing clients to think about
what kinds of edges they want to follow to what kinds of nodes, we
encourage them to write more robust code. As before, if clients do want
to consider all nodes or all edges, they can pass the appropriate empty
address (`nodeAddress([])` or `edgeAddress([]`), which is a prefix of
every address.

Therefore, we require that clients pass an `options` object to
`neighbors`, and we furthermore require that each of the three options
be present.

Paired with @decentralion, in spirit.

Test Plan:
None; this changes the API for a function that has no implementation or
clients.

wchargin-branch: neighbors-options-required
2018-06-06 15:39:08 -07:00
config Update `src/v1/` paths for CI cron (#337) 2018-06-04 14:16:43 -07:00
flow-typed/npm Add react-router-dom 2018-05-08 12:55:38 -07:00
scripts Unify a command-line entry point module (#344) 2018-06-05 11:11:48 -07:00
src Make all `neighbors` options required (#354) 2018-06-06 15:39:08 -07:00
.eslintrc.js Disable the `no-useless-constructor` lint rule (#308) 2018-05-28 15:01:28 -07:00
.flowconfig Flow: enable `//$ExpectFlowError` (#315) 2018-05-29 13:56:36 -07:00
.gitignore Configure Webpack for backend applications (#84) 2018-03-18 22:43:23 -07:00
.prettierignore Only exclude top-level directories from Prettier (#154) 2018-04-26 19:47:58 -07:00
.prettierrc.json Move package json to root (#37) 2018-02-26 22:32:23 -08:00
.travis.yml Ensure build failure emails (#339) 2018-06-04 14:52:07 -07:00
LICENSE Add LICENSE 2018-02-03 17:58:49 -08:00
README.md Update the README (#124) 2018-04-09 08:49:54 +03:00
package.json Upgrade flow to 0.73 (#338) 2018-06-04 14:22:10 -07:00
yarn.lock Upgrade flow to 0.73 (#338) 2018-06-04 14:22:10 -07:00

README.md

SourceCred

Build Status

Vision

Open source software is amazing, and so are the creators and contributors who share it. How amazing? It's difficult to tell, since we don't have good tools for recognizing those people. Many amazing open-source contributors labor in the shadows, going unappreciated for the work they do.

As the open economy develops, we need to go beyond commit streaks and follower counts. We need transparent, accurate, and fair tools for recognizing and rewarding open collaboration. SourceCred aims to do that.

SourceCred will enable projects to create and track "cred", which is a quantitative measure of how much value different contributors added to a project. We'll do this by providing a basic data structure—a cred graph—into which projects can add all kinds of information about the contributions that compose it. For example, a software project might include information about GitHub pull requests, function declarations and implementations, design documents, community support, documentation, and so forth. We'll also provide an algorithm (PageRank) which will ingest all of this information and produce a "cred attribution", which assigns a cred value to each contribution, and thus to the people who authored the contributions.

Principles

SourceCred aims to be:

  1. Transparent

    If it's to be a legitimate and accepted way of tracking credit in projects, cred attribution can't be a black-box. SourceCred will provide tools that make it easy to dive into the cred attribution, and see exactly why contributions were valued the way they were.

  2. Community-controlled

    At the end of the day, the community of collaborators in a project will know best which contributions were important and deserve the most cred. No algorithm will do that perfectly on its own. To that end, we'll empower the community to modify the cred attribution, by adding human knowledge into the cred graph.

  3. Forkable

    Disputes about cred attribution are inevitable. Maybe a project you care about has a selfish maintainer who wants all the cred for themself :(. Not to worry—all of the cred data will be stored with the project, so you are empowered to solve cred disputes by forking the project.

Roadmap

SourceCred is currently in a very early stage. We are working full-time to develop a MVP, which will have the following basic features:

  • Create: The GitHub Plugin populates a project's GitHub data into a Contribution Graph. SourceCred uses this seed data to produce an initial, approximate cred attribution.

  • Read: The SourceCred Explorer enables users to examine the cred attribution, and all of the contributions in the graph. This reveals why the algorithm behaved the way that it did.

  • Update: The Artifact Plugin allows users to put their own knowledge into the system by adding new "Artifact Nodes" to the graph. An artifact node allows users to draw attention to contributions (or groups of contributions) that are particularly valuable. They can then merge this new information into the project repository, making it canonical.

Community

Please consider joining our community.