@econoar’s recent topic raised the question of how to fix the GNO distribution problem.
One interesting tool that may help with this is Sourcecred, a tool for communities to measure and reward value creation.
Essentially, it is a system for rewarding specific behaviours within a community based on how much the community values those behaviours. It can be plugged into Discourse, for instance, allowing forum users to earn “cred” for their contributions (topics, posts, etc) based on how the rest of the community interacts with their content (likes, links to, shares, etc). “Cred” scores are then used to proportionally distribute tokens on a regular basis.
This would help with the distribution problem in two ways.
It provides a viable avenue for people to earn GNO simply by providing valuable input to the community, rather than having to purchase it on the market somewhere.
It reinforces active contribution to GnosisDAO governance.
Sourcecred has been used successfully in communities like MakerDAO and Raid Guild.
Out of the box it can also be integrated with our Discord server and Github. We can also add functionality for it to track activity in just about any other system.
I really like the idea of simple rewards for small contributions. Do we have any data on how Sourcecred did increased participation in other communities?
To make this work we have to define rewards for certain contributions. Are there examples of what kind of reward is appropriate for what kind of contribution?
I was wondering if we should consider a new contributor token as a reward instead of GNO? There is the tax advantage of receiving a token without value. In the future, the DAO could decide to do a buy-back of this token.
For things like Discourse, Github, and Discord, I think there are some reasonable out-of-the-box defaults that we could probably use.
My approach would be to define some reasonable rate of funding (x GNO per month) to be distributed proportionally to contributors via sourcecred. The assumption being that disproportionately large initial rewards would incentivize early contributions and that this will quickly normalize to a fair price as people become aware of and start to contribute more regularly.
If this token can be redeemed for another valuable token, it would probably end up being valuable anyway, no? If so, it seems redundant to create another token.
True, but if you receive a valuable token you have to pay taxes on reception whereas with a valueless token you pay taxes when selling the token. ++ There are advantages in some jurisdictions to pay less taxes when you hold a token for a long time (1y) before selling it.
Hi Guys. Someone shared a link to this discussion in another DAO. I just created an account here to share my experience with you.
I’m involved in Yearn, and we had this idea to use Sourcecred for our Discourse.
(sorry can only add 1link, and the next one is more important IMO)
I was sceptical first, and I learned that MakerDAO is using this system. So I created an account in order to try it. For some reasons I really enjoyed MakerDAO discourse, so I stayed !
It works very well, and it seems that what people receive is nicely correlated with their work/participation. But MarkerDAO has a very solid community and the content is really amazing and qualitative. (not saying it’s not the case here, as i said i just saw this topic). As you said cred is gained based on likes and other things (we don’t exactly know what, but likes to seem to be important). So it works if people play the game. And give a like when a content is useful, and do not like their friends for no reason. It can quickly become a game of popularity. So I think it works well for a discourse where things are more structured. Not sure for a discord …
Thank you for sharing your experience and the references @cryptouf!
I agree we have to be careful to set the right incentives. Useful content should be rewarded and it should not be a popularity contest. I think the forum is probably the best place to start as forum posts usually require more thought and are of higher quality compared to e.g. discord posts.
Maybe a light way to start is to give out a new token (Gnosis Contributor Token) and at a later point trigger a buyback from the DAO using GNO. By doing so, we eliminate the risk of people trying to game the system as the DAO could still decide to not pay out obvious scammers and make rewards more favorable from a tax perspective.
I think we should give this a try. Maybe first subsidized by Gnosis LTD to get this started faster.
I do like the notion of a contributor token (or point system) that could trigger more meaningful contributions to the system - and a big fan of sourcecred. Might be helpful to think about encouraging contribution from a group outside the core proposers to avoid conflicts of interest + ensure there is some form of vesting schedule for rewards.
I’d also really like to start thinking about whether it is possible for using conditional market mechanisms to weigh in on the cred score computation (as part of the adaptive component).
I wonder how would the Gnosis employees Github and Discord interactions be accounted for, as it’s part of their (our) job to provide support on Discord and code on Github and so on anyway.
Wouldn’t this measuring system cause an unfair advantage of employees over community members?
It’s a cleaver idea. I didn’t spend a lot of time here, but if if the community is composed of serious members it should not be a problem. And you can very easily spot new users only joining for rewards. Then of course you can never remove all biais and “old” or popular members will always get more likes.
If I’m not wrong, on maker, members receiving a salary are not part of the source cred. So they don’t receive extra reward. On Maker you have to opt-in to be included on the process. It’s not automatic. So you also need to spend some time are read the forum before understanding you have to do it ^^ it’s not hidden, but it’s not automatic.
Yeah, agree. No need to over-engineer this at the beginning
If I’m not wrong, on maker, members receiving a salary are not part of the source cred. So they don’t receive extra reward. On Maker you have to opt-in to be included on the process. It’s not automatic. So you also need to spend some time are read the forum before understanding you have to do it ^^ it’s not hidden, but it’s not automatic.
Just double-checked: You are right it is opt-in. I think we can piggyback on this trail post by maker:
As we did not see any arguments against it, I think we should move ahead and start a trail very soon.
We can just use the default parameters to for now and we should start with just the Discourse plugin. We can add Discord and/or Github later if we like what we see.
That’s a legit concern. On the flipside, employees are indeed important community members and I think that GnosisDAO will benefit from increased participation of employees as well.
Maybe limit rewards to employees to some percentage of total rewards, for example 20%?
