Individual Contribution Logs - Contribution verification, reputation building, improved funding decisions, SSI adoption and more!

Conversation Governance Meta
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Individual contribution logs represent a record of an individuals contribution efforts.

Some Web3 ecosystems use a process for verifying contribution efforts within their own grants process. This verification process can help with protecting the ecosystems treasury assets by checking that the funding is being used as intended.

Contribution efforts could be grouped together by using a milestone approach or by using time intervals such as monthly. Alternatively contribution efforts could also be recorded by each individual in monthly time intervals.

After looking at the problems and opportunities for making group based contribution logs as well as individual contribution logs, we identified that individual contribution logs were the most promising approach worth considering. As well as verifying contribution efforts the individual contribution log approach also had a number of other use cases that could be highly valuable for contributors and Web3 ecosystems.


Advantages of individual contribution logs

  • Improved contribution verification - It is more difficult to hide poor contribution performance if efforts are recorded individually and at the end of every month. Individual contribution logs make it easier to verify which contributors have been making sufficient contribution efforts.
  • Improved decision making - If contribution logs are recorded monthly and are focused on individuals contribution efforts the measurability of these logs can be much higher than the group based approaches. This makes it easier for voters to identify the best and worst performers and also can make it easier for them to compare contributors across the ecosystem.
  • Retaining top performers - Some ideas and teams won’t produce the intended outcomes. Individual contribution logs can help with identifying the top performers in different teams that might have not generated much impact. Individual contribution logs could help with making it easier to for voters to see what actually happened.
  • Higher self awareness & accountability - Contributors would be able to more easily review the contribution efforts of other people in the ecosystem and use that information to become more aware of how performant each contributor is. This information can help contributors with becoming more accountable for achieving a similar or higher level of performance.
  • Empowers individual contributors - Individual contribution logs can help to empower contributors by making it easier for them to demonstrate their competencies and performance. Their contribution logs can help them with building a reputation in the ecosystem and wider industry that can make it easier for them to receive future funding and fair compensation for their skill level.
  • Removed intermediaries - Individual contribution logs can help with reducing the influence of certain individuals and project owners from determining someone’s compensation in group based working environments. Contribution logs can help with making it easier for someone to demonstrate themselves what their value is within group working environments.
  • Flexible information usage - More detail about the ideas that are being executed can be highlighted in someones contribution log. These logs could include which milestone would be relevant to the contribution efforts. This added context means that a collection of different peoples individual contribution logs could help with creating project based information such as the total contribution efforts towards an idea in the last month or the amount of contribution efforts that have been made towards a certain project milestone. More granularity and detail about each persons contributions efforts means that it can become easier to group and layer this information into different formats that could be more useful and insightful to the viewer.

Opportunities for individual contribution logs

  • Open source contribution data - The more that individual contribution logs are used over time the more valuable the information becomes. Monthly recordings of individual contribution efforts are much more measurable than the alternative approaches. Individual contribution logs can be used for making historical comparisons as the ecosystem evolves and grows over time.
  • Self sovereign identity adoption - Individual contribution logs can be tied to a persons identity. Contribution logs could be a powerful use case for increasing the adoption of self sovereign identity solutions.
  • Trust based networks - Verifiable contribution data could be used to create some form of trust based network that people use to prove their competency and reliability. Communities could start using this information as a form of identification and a way to trust certain individuals due to the reputation they’ve built and the common connections they share.

Resources

Read our full analysis, or watch our video summaries, that cover contribution verification and contribution logs:

  • Contribution verification (disbursement. treasuries .co/contributions/contribution-verification)
  • Contribution verification approaches (disbursement. treasuries .co/approaches/contribution-verification-approaches)

Experimentation in Cosmos

Individual contribution logs could be integrated into the existing grants process or be used by individuals in the ecosystem as an evidence based way to start building up their own reputation. Idea funding and contributor funding could both experiment with individual contribution logs.


Further investigation

These is an opportunity to create more tooling that could enable individual contributors to easily record and present their contribution efforts. Contribution logs could become increasingly useful and reliable for contributors to build their reputation in the ecosystem and for voters when making funding decisions.

In the comings months the Web3 Association is going to look at what tooling already exists that could be used and then explore what new tools could be created to make it easier to record and present contribution efforts. We’re especially interested in improving the exposure and presentation of code contributions, this is an area of high relevance to our open source contributor proposal (docs. contributors. org/proposal/open-source-contributors) that has been recently shared.


Community discussion

Share any feedback and thoughts you have around the topic of contribution verification and the different approaches we’ve explored in our analysis. Eager to hear any different perspectives or other approaches and analysis we might be missing that could improve our own understanding and improve our analysis further!

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This post feels like the very definition of “presented without context”

The subject matter seems interesting though

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Hey @Syed, thanks for the response, yes it is definitely more general purpose and not targeted too directly! Most Web3 ecosystems that do any form of grants funding will want to think about contribution verification so that’s the intentions of this analysis. Currently I’m mostly seeing a lack of contribution verification entirely in some ecosystems or more of a milestone based approach in others. Lack of contribution verification has higher risks of misuse and theft, especially for larger amounts being distributed. And second one has limited value for the contributors and voters. Individual contribution logs can provide far more information and also in terms of recording efforts the tools and processes for recording them will get easier and easier over time. Overall I’m trying to identify the most promising approaches to use in treasury systems that can fix the incentives and push more power to the edges. If you thought of any other approaches or feedback please feel free to send it over :smile:

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To iterate on your idea, I would like to share what we have brainstormed around this topic a while ago within the PRO Delegators’ team.

We were thinking about the user retention in the Cosmos and the enormous difficulty we were facing to build a reputation in this ecosystem. This task can be very challenging and disturbing, and our team has gone through all of this, so we are in a good position to share our experience, and most importantly the solutions we would propose to remedy this. Hopefully we can improve and even avoid this painful path to the new and forthcoming entrants.

Long story short, it took us an entire year to build a reputation, constant hard work facing mere indifference. This wasn’t just painful to achieve all this during a violent bear market, it was depressing to see that most of the existing actors were not incline to welcome new users without a solid history of developer contribution to the ecosystem. To be frank, entering Cosmos for us seemed a bit like being a black family entering a small rural city, people either judge you or ignore you.

A Talent Platform for Cosmos:

To avoid this, we brainstormed trying to find potential solutions to avoid falling into these traps which are mostly unconscious. Our best finding is that we need somewhat of a “talent platform” for Cosmos.
A place where contributors can register, share a resume or their github, assign tags defining their profile, keywords corresponding to their work, etc. This platform should integrate contact features to allow users to quickly interact with each other. This way we think the ecosystem will be able to foster collaboration. It may solve some of the issues we face today, requiring to meet with the right persons to be oriented correctly. With such platform, newcomers could better find their place in this ecosystem of diverse participants which complexity is only going to grow exponentially if we succeed.

We think the Interchain Foundation is the most suited entity to build such platform and therefore we are curious to engage with @Syed to have some feedback on this idea. If you’re interested, we’ll be happy to share the initial design we have.

Thanks for reading!
Govmos.
pro-delegators-sign

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In agreement with you there!

I agree that the ICF is the optimal steward for this, and something similar was an early-stage WiP I was overseeing before I left. I’m actually no longer at the ICF - at AADAO now, but definitely still interested in this. Will reach out to you on DM @Govmos

For ref: https://twitter.com/syedchoudhury/status/1781399940301828303