🏠 Our Platforms
SourceCred operates on a few different platforms that serve the needs of our internal community:
Discord - for daily coordination and socializing
Discourse - for
proposals and larger community conversations
Roam - for research and
notes
GitHub - for code and project management
Join these to plug into the ongoing SourceCred conversation; it’s the most effective way to get up to speed on what’s happening in the project.
Learn more about how we use these major platforms below, and how Cred flows within and between each.
Discord
Discord is the main hub of our community when it comes to daily conversations and coordination. This is where you’ll have a chance to ask questions, share ideas, see our social norms in action, or shoot the breeze with other community members in the project.
Discord and Cred
In Discord, Cred is minted through emoji reactions. Any time you are on the Discord chats and you see a comment that you find particularly useful, insightful, interesting, or valuable, give it an emoji. Every emoji in Discord mints a small amount of Cred, so you can express yourself with any emoji image you like. If you feel strongly that something was really great, then put multiple emojis on it! If your intention is not to mint Cred but simply to use fun emojis, you can always add your emojis as a reply in the channel instead of as a message reaction.
Note: Only emojis in public channels will mint Cred. Direct messages and role-based access channels do not mint Cred regardless of emoji reaction use.
Special Channels
The SourceCred Discord has two special channels that affect how Cred flows.
The #didathing channel helps to catch contributions that our algorithm is not complete enough to see yet. Any time you complete an action that is valuable to the community but is not on Discourse or GitHub, you can post in #didathing describing what you accomplished. Make sure to tag any other contributors involved, and link to any useful notes or artifacts of your work. This allows the community to give emoji reactions and thereby Mint some up-front Cred for that contribution even if the algorithm couldn’t see it. Whenever you see someone post a contribution in #didathing that you feel was valuable, give it some emoji reactions! The flow and norms of #didathing will become more clear the longer you spend time with us.
The #props channel is a compliment to #didathing. Instead of posting about your own contribution, you post giving “props” to someone else in the community for their contribution which you know won’t be seen by the algorithm. To do so, describe what they did and tag them in the message so that other community members can mint Cred with emoji reactions. A good example is when someone helps you out in a private DM; afterward, you might post to #props saying e.g. “Props to @LBS for explaining the various SourceCred channels to me!”
GitHub
GitHub is where our software engineers and other developers organize their coding efforts. If you are code-savvy, come poke through our codebase, learn about our atomic coding philosophy, and see if there are any good first issues for you to get started on!
As you learn the norms of the repo and start to take on some of your first issues, our devs with high context are always keeping an eye on the #programming channel on Discord and will be happy to answer your questions.
Atomic Coding Philosophy
SourceCred developers endeavor to create semantically atomic commits. Each commit should represent one logical change, such as the refactoring of a block of code for a specific reason. This makes the review process easier and allows reviewers to better understand the logic behind a sequence of changes. This in turn allows for faster iteration on revisions and reviews. We've found that higher velocity can be achieved by keeping commits and pull requests small and ideally singular in scope. This is in contrast to large, multifaceted pull requests that encompass changes for many different reasons. For more details, check out our contributing guidelines.
GitHub and Cred
We utilize SourceCred to incentivize contributions that follow the atomic coding philosophy. Cred is primarily minted when pull requests are opened and merged. This motivates contributors to create semantically atomic pull requests when possible. Each pull request review also mints a small amount of Cred for the reviewer.
Explore our public GitHub repository
Discourse
The Discourse forums are where we expand on ideas brought up in calls, on the Discord chats, etc. Write full posts (aka “topics”) on the forums to provide more permanence and opportunity for feedback. Eventually, those ideas may become polished into features and/or documentation.
Our Discourse is currently a bit of a jungle that requires a determined heart to venture into. While there are certainly some nuggets of gold to be found, the forums as a whole are difficult to parse through due to organization issues. Improvements are on the way, but until then you can use the "Latest" button to find the most recent topics, or simply follow links you see in the Discord chats to individual posts.
Discourse and Cred
Cred is minted based on “likes” in Discourse. Any time you read a topic or a comment in Discourse and use the interface to give it a little heart (a.k.a. a “like”), a small amount of Cred is created and flowed to the author of that topic or comment, as well as anyone the author tagged in it. Show the love and like something whenever you find it valuable!
Roam Research
Roam is a note-keeping platform that allows editing of the same note by different people simultaneously, and is where we archive our meeting notes. It is not necessary to join Roam or create your own account, but you will frequently see links to Roam notes dropped into the chat as a meeting gets started. Roam has the ability to link docs together through topics linked within them. We use Roam for notes from our meetings, work sessions, and jams.
Roam and Cred
SourceCred does not currently have a plugin or integration for Roam and no Cred is minted from Roam notes as of right now. Eventually we will be able to flow Cred based on factors we track, like meeting attendance, who hosted, who recorded, etc; and Cred will be distributed retroactively based on data from those past meeting notes.