83 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
83 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
## SourceCred
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[](https://travis-ci.org/sourcecred/sourcecred)
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[](https://discord.gg/tsBTgc9)
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## Vision
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Open source software is amazing, and so are the creators and contributors who
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share it. How amazing? It's difficult to tell, since we don't have good tools
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for recognizing those people. Many amazing open-source contributors labor in
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the shadows, going unappreciated for the work they do.
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As the open economy develops, we need to go beyond [commit streaks] and
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follower counts. We need transparent, accurate, and fair tools for recognizing
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and rewarding open collaboration. SourceCred aims to do that.
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[commit streaks]: https://www.mxsasha.eu/blog/2016/04/01/how-github-contribution-graph-is-harmful/
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SourceCred will enable projects to create and track "cred", which is a
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quantitative measure of how much value different contributors added to a
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project. We'll do this by providing a basic data structure—a [cred graph]—into
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which projects can add all kinds of information about the contributions that
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compose it. For example, a software project might include information about
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GitHub pull requests, function declarations and implementations, design
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documents, community support, documentation, and so forth. We'll also provide
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an algorithm ([PageRank]) which will ingest all of this information and produce
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a "cred attribution", which assigns a cred value to each contribution, and thus
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to the people who authored the contributions.
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[cred graph]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_graph
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[PageRank]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
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## Principles
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SourceCred aims to be:
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1. **Transparent**
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If it's to be a legitimate and accepted way of tracking credit in projects,
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cred attribution can't be a black-box. SourceCred will provide tools that
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make it easy to dive into the cred attribution, and see exactly why
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contributions were valued the way they were.
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2. **Community-controlled**
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At the end of the day, the community of collaborators in a project will know
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best which contributions were important and deserve the most cred. No
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algorithm will do that perfectly on its own. To that end, we'll empower the
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community to modify the cred attribution, by adding human knowledge into the
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cred graph.
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3. **Forkable**
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Disputes about cred attribution are inevitable. Maybe a project you care
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about has a selfish maintainer who wants all the cred for themself :(. Not
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to worry—all of the cred data will be stored with the project, so you are
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empowered to solve cred disputes by forking the project.
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## Roadmap
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SourceCred is currently in a very early stage. We are working full-time to
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develop a MVP, which will have the following basic features:
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- **Create**: The *GitHub Plugin* populates a project's GitHub data into a
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Contribution Graph. SourceCred uses this seed data to produce an initial,
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approximate cred attribution.
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- **Read**: The *SourceCred Explorer* enables users to examine the cred
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attribution, and all of the contributions in the graph. This reveals why the
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algorithm behaved the way that it did.
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- **Update**: The *Artifact Plugin* allows users to put their own knowledge into
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the system by adding new "Artifact Nodes" to the graph. An artifact node
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allows users to draw attention to contributions (or groups of contributions)
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that are particularly valuable. They can then merge this new information
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into the project repository, making it canonical.
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## Community
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Please consider joining [our Discord chat] or posting on [our forum].
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[our Discord chat]: https://discord.gg/tsBTgc9
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[our forum]: https://spectrum.chat/sourcecred
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