Tracking effort and merit in Cardano Working Group Meetings
Tracking effort and merit in Cardano Working Group Meetings
Tracking Working Group - July 2021
Meeting, Thursday, 8th July 2021
Tracking effort and merit, NFTs, social media, SourceCred and testing it out in The Catalyst Alliance.
Anna Maria (New Mindflow) Dan Verowski (Secret Decks) Jonathan Adjei (The Catalyst Alliance) Rares (New Mindflow) Stephen Whitenstall (Catalyst Swarm Support) and Tyler Wales (Secret Decks)
Note : Timestamp links open in a new window
Introductions
Stephen Whitenstall (Catalyst Swarm Support) - 0:24
Jonathan Adjei (The Catalyst Alliance, https://fluid7.co.uk/) - 0:38
New Mindflow, Anna Maria and Rares - 1:13
Dan Verowski (Secret Decks) - 3:05
Tyler Wales (Secret Decks) - 4:00
Using NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) to reward Idea Fest Participants - 4:55
An NFT Award prototype for the Catalyst Idea Fest - New Mindflow - 5:28
Fungible and Non-Fungible Awards - 6:24
Processes of discovery in how to recognize contribution using NFTs- Stephen Whitenstall - 6:59
An experiment in recognition and encouraging participation - New Mindflow - 7:21
Some tracking related to voting ? - Stephen Whitenstall, New Mindflow - 9:03
At the end of Idea Fest there will be polls to gather votes from attendees to track the popularity of presentations.
Do the polls gauge the public's reaction or to acknowledge participation ? - Tyler Wales, New Mindflow - 10:11
We have tiers of recognition. A General Participation Award and By Category of Proposal Presentation. To gauge the public's reaction to the presentations. - New Mindflow
Immediate recognition as one aspect of tracking - Stephen Whitenstall - 11:19
Thoughts on recognition - Jonathan Adjei - 11:35
How do we gather in contributions from across the Cardano ecosystem ? - Jonathan Adjei - 12:26
Now there are NFTs for Idea Fest, SPOCRA (Cardano Stake Pool Operators) have issued Awards and a Kudos bot in The Catalyst Alliance (TCA) Discord Server. Cardano Project Catalyst Discord Roles - people get assigned roles if they are particularly active. The Community Advisor and Veteran Community Advisors need recognizing. There could be NFTs to recognise all these roles.
Do NFT Awards accrue value in themselves & can we remove that value ? - Jonathan Adjei - 14:26
Vesting periods - Stephen Whitenstall - 14:57
Why not use an aggregation layer like SourceCred ? - Dan Verowski - 15:23
To avoid the difficulty of minting a specific NFT every time you want to reward a contribution why not use an aggregation layer like SourceCred? Then just take the data and put it in a very small format like JSON, validate it, put it as metadata on a Catalst ID or passport NFT. That is individual to each person in the Catalyst community who has a Cardano wallet address or Ideascale account. Then just aggregate the contribution data as an NFT. Later on you can vest the NFT for a certain amount of time and access a faucet where you can take (binding or non-binding ) voting tokens. And get a proportional amount of tokens to your reputation. Non-binding voting could be returned, whilst binding voting tokens could be lost. To incentivize making the right decision on the vote.
An experiment for Catalyst wide recognition systems - New Mindflow - 17:59
Specifically targeting non-funded proposals as the group most in need of recognition and reward. Funded proposals get funded, Community Advisors and Veteran Community Advisors get rewards. But it is possible to put a lot of hours into a proposal and you end up with nothing to show for it. Which is potentially demoralizing and a disincentive to participate in the Catalyst process in the future.
Ideally the Community Advisor input and feedback would have its own value - Dan Verowski - 19:10
Broadening out the Awards NFTs to reward unfunded people- Stephen Whitenstall - 19:52
Funded proposals have a burnout problem too - Tyler Wales - 20:21
If the funding is not enough to compensate everyone in a collaborative project the same problem of being unrewarded and disincentivized arises.
Community Advisors overworked - Tyler Wales - 21:21
Community Advisors are overworked. In the most recent proposals there were only 4 or 5 CAs rank each one. Which is probably not enough. Even for CAs there needs to be some additional incentive. We need to incentivize better proposals that focus on tangible results.
A shift towards more goal oriented proposals ? - Stephen Whitenstall - 22:35
A reward system would improve everything - Tyler Wales - 23:11
Otherwise whoever has the best marketing message might have the best chance of being funded.
Goal oriented prizes ? - Stephen Whitenstall - 23:59
A need for varying degrees of reward - Jonathan Adjei - 24:11
The ideal rewards are in fungibles or voting rights (as Dan was saying). If you have a reward that is representative of the amount of effort or the goals achieved then that is far more fair and equitable than an NFT that can increase in value arbitrarily with no further contribution.
Reward of unfunded proposals as a starting point - New Mindflow - 25:59
Minting reward NFTs can be seen as inefficent - Stephen Whitenstall - 26:15
SourceCred - 26:37
In a previous meeting we discussed implementation of SourceCred. Possibly starting a test server or channel in Discord.
Set-up a SourceCred test server - Dan Verowski - 27:50
Starting simple with Emojii data on Discord and see how well GitHub integrates with SourceCred.
Start with a Discord channel - Stephen Whitenstall, Tyler Wales - 29:21
A wider collaboration on SourceCred ? - Stephen Whitenstall, Dan Verowski - 30:00
SourceCred solely based on Kudos and Reactions ?- Anna Maria - 30:23
How can we make sure it remains fair ? And prevent people's preferences and gaming the system ?
It is a system that needs tweaking - Tyler Wales - 31:02
You setup your SourceCred parameters (reward and contribution) you run it for a few weeks. Then you evaluate the results. Figure out where there are gaps and where people are abusing the system. It is not going to be perfect, only capturing some of the organic value.
Any tracking system needs a process of value discovery - Stephen Whitenstall - 31:44
Cultural discovery of value. What our community values. That will change from community to community. How to set-up from a social perspective.
Secret Decks validator pool - Dan Verowski - 32:32
A validator pool to validate contributions prior to minting an NFT. The data will be checked for any obvious mishaps and revise the process accordingly.
What is our ultimate goal ? - Rares - 33:33
If our ultimate goal is to capture value being generated in the Catalyst community as a whole going down the path of SourceCred might be a dead end. It only operates on Discord and GitHub. It does not integrate with Ideascale or tracking deliverables on funded proposers. It might be better to build a custom solution.
SourceCred allows for migration of data - Dan Verowski - 35:05
SourceCred strategy is to start very simple- Stephen Whitenstall - 35:41
The SourceCred strategy is to start very simple, in a very specific area and define what you were trying to achieve in a specfic channel on Discord. And then do a parallel implementation where you would complement SourceCred tracking with a "paper record" as a sanity check. To check if there is any distortions taking place. The more complex tracking gets the more massive the distortions of value.
Ongoing meetings and co-ordination about tracking in the Cardano community - 36:53
Anonymity and tracking, community involvement - Jonathan Adjei - 37:06
How to reconcile self-sovereignty of identity with contribution tracking? If we do not have involvement from all sections of the community, there will be no transparency.
Ongoing working group meetings - Stephen Whitenstall - 38:57
The Catalyst Alliance as the venue for regular tracking meetings - Stephen Whitenstall, Jonathan Adjei - 39:20
Digital Identity and Anonymity- Dan Verowski - 39:49
A regular forum for tracking and contribution issues ? - Stephen Whitenstall, Rares - 41:26
Community resources can be documented on The Catalyst Alliance GitBook.
Difference between incentivisation and tracking - Tyler Wales - 43:36
Difference between rewarding community members to incentive participation and tracking community contributions in general.
Scaling an Awards system to the whole Catalyst community - New Mindflow - 44:30
SourceCred as a contained experiment - Dan Verowski, Stephen Whitenstall - 46:02
Being aware of what is going on in terms of tracking contributions across the Cardano community.
A community overview - Jonathan Adjei, Stephen Whitenstall - 47:04
The wider the community involvement and the awareness tracking and reward systems have the better. Hopefully, we SourceCred we can develop APIs that can interact with various sources of data.
SourceCred is an open-source social algorithm- Tyler Wales - 48:00
Do we think that Ideascale is a long-term solution for proposals ?
Lessons learnt from different approaches - Stephen Whitenstall - 49:30
The lessons learnt from NFT Awards and from SourceCred can be compared. NFT Awards and SourceCred tracking are different paradigms, which is interesting. To compare the outcomes of these different approaches.
Tangible versus intangible data - Dan Verowski - 50:40
NFT Awards are based on tangible data that is not contentious. Whilst SourceCred tracking requires the weighting of intangible data in a social setting.
Give an NFT to every proposal ? - Tyler Wales - 51:42
New Mindflow is the idea to give an NFT to every person who submits a proposal ? Or as the proposal improves they get an goal based NFT award that recognizes deliverables ?
Unfunded proposals is just the first step - New Mindflow - 53:03
We identified unfunded proposals as being the group most in need of recognition and reward. Because that would be very easy to track data. But later SourceCred could be used and APIs accessed in other sources such as Ideascale.
Circle representatives could petition IOHK for better data access - Stephen Whitenstall - 54:05
Idea Fest voting data and Heidrun - New Mindflow - 54:53
Data on multiple groups and types of recognition. Distribution of tokens to organisers and attendees. Using Kyle Solomon's Heidrun to control access to a token faucet.
Documenting Catalyst tracking and reward systems - Stephen Whitenstall - 57:08
If we can communicate what is going on in various projects and provide a context we can advance understanding.
Community outreach and data - Jonathan Adjei - 57:52
Funding applications - Stephen Whitenstall, Dan Verowski - 59:34
Funding for on-chain binding votes .
References
Tracking tools
https://sourcecred.io/ A tool for communities to measure and reward value creation.
https://joinseeds.earth/ Seeds is a currency that aligns money with value. We value people, planet and prosperity for all.
https://coordinape.com/ Scale your community with tools to reward contributors, incentivize participation and manage resources
https://disco.coop/ The DisCO Project is a friendly and carefully planned approach for organizations that want to create and share value in ways that are cooperative, commons-oriented and rooted in feminist economics.
Resources
Building Web Reputation Systems - Randy Farmer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn7e0J9m6rE
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