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:
Experimentation in Gitcoin
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 code contributions which is highly relevant to our open source contributor proposal 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!