Contribution credits as a community currency

+1k

I love the idea of incentivizing work with staked credits 👍

It will be an improvement of our current credit system which can definitely help to move some issues forward. Bigger credit stakes will motivate Drupalists to participate in order to win a piece of the cake - we all know about how some already "game the system" to win reputation.

However I think it is restricted only to a (small ?) part of our community.

Who will have interest in earning credits? And what for?

As the credit system is now - and even with bigger stakes to win - I think only maintainers and organizations who can reuse this currency to promote their own issues/projects will participate in the game. We should try to empower everyone in the community - and why not even outsiders 🤷?

So my question is:

what can I do with my credits?

I suggest we implement a Drupal currency for Governance at a bigger scale: to vote for strategic initiatives, to vote for things to work/remove from core, fund the contrib modules I think are most interesting, to ask for places where to held the next DrupalCon...etc - kind of similar to how Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) work.

I would love to have a voice and to make choice about the future of Drupal. No matter who I am, I will do my best to contribute to Drupal if I know it gives me more power hover the future of the project.

No matter the outcome of this topic, thank you so much for filling this issue @mandclu.

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Some links I think are worth considering for a new kind of governance in our community based on contribution currency:

• Maker Governance
• Drips network

@matthieuscarset: gives me more power hover the future of the project

It won't work like that, maybe the opposite, credit trading system would amplify already superusers https://www.drupal.org/u/apaderno → / https://git.drupalcode.org/apaderno (as an example) who already hovering over everything to "hover" more. For those who already make and shape Drupal the most - to shape Drupal even more.

And for you, it can be at most some sort of gamification, improving your company ranking in directories or whatever else credit system is already designed to do. But Drupal would continue to be shaped and now also in amplified fashion by credit rich users.

I am not decided on @mandclu the idea overall, maybe its good idea, just commenting on your point.

In the meantime, I argued times before the opposite - that votes of people who don't even participate in the community (or who are not members yet) could count more (like here 1 → or 2 → ).

maybe its good idea or maybe its not

Maybe the question rather is what are the alternatives?

Another minus for idea: Credits are not reflective of actual work put in. Each of my 29 credits averages out to 30 hours of unpaid work (not including a lot of time for R&D to be finished (while a lot of my work is AI R&D), but including drupal open source uncredited work), while apaderno (as an example) averages out to 2.2 credits per day since credits were introduced in 2015 (averages 3.6 per hour per credit if calculating for full-time work). With all the assumptions, that is ~~~8x credit efficiency difference.

Credits have a niche, but it is far from being perfect - its not the best to strengthen a single flawed system. We have a little bit of credits, we have a little bit of no credits, we have a little bit of everything and this diversity of approaches is great. So I rather vote for focusing on introducing new different systems.

P.S. Considering the amount of work put in - my results are terrible and sad. But that what innovation is - even in highly financed cases - 1 out of 10 things work out.

@mindaugasd Your results are "terrible and sad" only to you and only through the lens of DA-calculated contribution credits. You have done lots of great work in helping our community embrace the transformative AI revolution that is underway.

The sentiments you express are ones that I have felt about my own contributions, particularly after weighting of contributions based on project usage was implemented to combat obvious gaming by certain community members. The decision by definition means that authors who create new projects effectively get almost no credit, no matter how innovative they are.

As maintainers and people committed to embracing innovation, we must accept this is a path that (for now, at least) is not incentivized by the contribution credits system. If it did, bad actors would now probably be using AI to generate modules en masse of questionable usefulness or added value to the community. Maybe someday someone will figure out a better way to walk that line, but that is not the focus of this idea.

My idea here is really more about giving maintainers (or people who contribute to the community through non-code contributions) a way to incentivize progress on issues they care about. I agree that any imperfections in how credits are awarded in the first place will naturally transfer into an imperfect means to leverage the system I propose.

From a pragmatic standpoint, I just thought that using our existing system of credits could be a pragmatic basis for a system to allow individual community members to leverage this new idea of bounties, instead of having it decided by a select few.

Bug bounties was simple to implement, now adding credit trading is whole new level of commitment needed to achieve. So next step would be helpful to have am implementation plan (how much would it cost to experiment with this).

I followed on @matthieuscarset comment which was about benefits to the individual, game and governance, so we gotten a little off tracs, but this also shows an important point - that there is continues danger of creating/strengthening wrong incentives. Creating a game instead of providing value.

So its important to emphasize that this idea is about solving issues sooner which a lot of people care about solving.

Difficult issues are solved by many people. Somebody would have to figure out how to allocate/spread the credits among many people.

We could continue define (make clear) what our core goals are.

For example, if we settle that one of our core goal is "solving issues sooner which a lot of people care about solving", then maybe this is better achieved by weighting issue just by how many people follow it (or vote on the issue), instead of weighting by how credit rich someone is.

That would ensure issues are prioritized by how many people prioritize that issue. Maybe each person could have 5 votes at any given time, so they could spread the vote among multiple issues. And that would introduce a new attack vector - people would start creating new accounts... So accounts would have to be validated for voting, ensuring accounts are unique.

Trading credits is also interesting, because its giving up something of value, in exchange for something else. Exchanging value of some sort. But the question is whether trading credits necessary to achieve the same goals just by having a regular vote.

Set as idea that needs work (community discussion).

Steps taken

• Removed [Idea] prefix in title.
• Changed component to Idea.

Next steps

• Community discussion of pros and cons.