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📕 Glossary

This is the SourceCred glossary of terms. While some of these terms can be easily defined with a search, the definitions here are specific to SourceCred. If you would like to suggest a change to a term or addition of a term, please open an issue.

SourceCred Glossary

The "SourceCred Glossary" is ideal if you want to understand SourceCred from the perspective of using it in your project. For example, you might need to understand what terms SourceCred uses to define people or currency.

Champion

A champion is an individual that starts an initiative with a determined promise to finish it. The individual generally takes charge of a well-scoped task, and provides clear direction and confidence about completing it. By calling someone a champion, you are placing faith in their ability as a leader and visionary. You can read more about champions here

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Cred

Cred is a metric that describes how important a contribution (or contributor) was to a particular project. Using SourceCred's own documentation as an example: the pull request that added this term to the glossary might have 10 cred, while a different pull request that fixes a typo might have only one cred. That would indicate that the first pull request was ten times as important. Cred "flows" between contributions and contributors; so for example, if you write a pull request that earns cred, some of that cred will flow to you.

Cred is project-specific, and is computed based on the project's own contribution graph. For more details, see the deep dive guide on cred.

References

Grain

Grain refers to project-specific cryptoassets that represent contribution to or support of a project. These cryptoassets hold promise to make open-source projects financially sustainable which is currently an unsolved problem.

References

Contributor Glossary

The Contributor Glossary is ideal if you want to participate actively in the SourceCred community. Terms that are used commonly used in commonity forums, issue trackers, or other discussion platforms are included here.

Bikeshedding

Bikeshedding means talking (or even arguing) about a small detail instead of a larger issue at hand. If you imagine building a house and having a bike shed outside, it would be akin to anything over the color and fun name for the bike shed instead of working on actually finishing the house. At the end of the day, you won't have a place to live because you were lost in details that didn't matter. Read more about bikeshedding here.

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deep then wide

SourceCred is a young project, and as we grow it, we can either go "wide" (encourage adoption by a lot of projects) or go "deep" (focus on intense adoption by fewer projects). While both are meaningful goals, in the case of SourceCred, it is logical to go "deep" first. Read more about this reasoning here.

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