Contribution verification
Exploring the opportunities and importance of contribution verification
This page contains the same information that is covered in the above video
Web3 treasuries have been increasing in value over time as ecosystems continue to grow and get more adoption. The amount of funding that Web3 ecosystems are disbursing each year is also often increasing. Ideas that a community wants to execute can often take longer than a month's worth of contribution effort. Complex ideas can require multiple months or years of contribution effort and involve numerous phases of development.
Ecosystems that are disbursing larger amounts of assets upfront to pay for executing different ideas can face a growing risk that the contributors involved in executing those ideas start to misuse or steal the funding they receive. The larger the amount of funding being distributed the larger the incentive there is to misuse or steal these assets.
Recording and verifying peoples contribution efforts can help with reducing this problem of misuse and theft of treasury assets. Instead of disbursing a large amount of assets in a single transaction an ecosystem could instead distribute funding over a number of smaller increments. Splitting up the payment for contribution efforts into different milestones or time periods means that any recorded contribution effort can be verified and measured before future funding is then released. This enables an ecosystem to check that their treasury assets are being used for purposes that they were intended for. Contribution verification can help an ecosystem with better identifying bad actors or poor performers that could be wasting or misusing treasury assets.
As Web3 ecosystem treasuries continue to grow in size the importance of managing and disbursing these assets effectively will also continue to increase. Contribution verification is a foundational reason why contribution efforts should be recorded and verified so that treasury assets are better protected and used as intended.
Contribution log usage
Contribution logs represent a record of the recent contribution efforts that an individual or project team has made over a certain time period or they could capture the efforts involved in completing a certain milestone. Contribution logs could be used across Web3 ecosystems in a number of ways.
Contribution verification
Contribution verification is one of the reasons to record contribution efforts that we just mentioned already. Contribution logs help to enable an ecosystem to verify contribution efforts. This verification can help Web3 ecosystems with ensuring that treasury assets are being used as intended and not being misused or stolen.
Performance measurement
Contribution logs could help with measuring and comparing the contribution efforts from different contributors and teams. Increasing contribution measurability can help with identifying the most performant contributors and teams based on the quality and consistency of their contribution efforts. Contribution logs could help with increasing the accuracy of measuring the performance of individuals and teams. Top performing contributors could then be more easily rewarded.
Impact measurement
Some contribution efforts can lead to more impactful outcomes than others. Knowing which contributors and teams are responsible for each contribution outcome can help with identifying the contributors who have been the most consistent and effective at allocating their time towards initiatives that have helped with generating the most impact for the ecosystem. Contributors who are more effective and consistent at generating impact could be increasingly rewarded for their contribution efforts.
Reputation building
Contribution logs can be a great way for contributors and teams to build up their reputation and showcase their skill sets across different areas. Recording contribution efforts so that other people can verify those contributions means it can become easier over time for anyone to identify who has what skill sets and competencies. Contributors that build up a reputation of being highly performant through a provable history of contribution effort could use their reputation to more easily move to projects and ecosystems that they want to work in. Contribution logs could replace CVs and interviews as they can provide a more verifiable and useful information source to review someones professional background and competencies. A software developer could decide to make contributions to an ecosystem's code base that help to prove their competencies through their open source code commits. This could replace the need for them to take a tech test in an interview process. These code contributions are beneficial to the contributor as a way to build up their own reputation, it’s beneficial for the ecosystem as it receives impactful contributions and it’s valuable for projects interested in working with this software developer as they get to see how the developer makes contribution in real life scenarios.
Social trust networks
Contributors could make attestations about other contributors. These could be comments, reviews or statements about someones contribution efforts. Attestations could provide valuable information and insights about each contributor. Interlinking connections between contributors and the different contribution related information could then help to build a form of trust based network where people can more easily collaborate with other contributors due to the mutual connections they both share and the attestations those contributors have received from their shared connections.
Detailed contribution insights
Having an increasingly comprehensive record of contribution efforts could help with creating highly insightful information about an individual contributor or a cohort of contributors. Contribution log data could be useful for looking at a cohort of contributors overall performance and their impact over a set time period or for identifying any gaps in contribution effort or skill sets that might be missing.
Historical contribution comparisons
Recording contribution efforts that can be compared with other contribution efforts means that better historical comparisons can be made. These comparisons could become increasingly useful to an ecosystem. An ecosystem could look at how the overall performance of contributors is changing over time as different factors change such as the amount of compensation being offered, the tools, processes and infrastructure that they’re using, the total number of contributors in the ecosystem and the average duration of each contributor's participation. Making contribution outcomes easier to compare makes it possible for an ecosystem to identify any trends more accurately and then determine which approaches and outcomes are most correlated with improving contributor performance. If an ecosystem introduced a new incentive to improve the performance of contributors, having a way to easily measure the change in output over time would be highly insightful for determining whether that new incentive was actually effective or not.
Contribution verification analysis
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