⚓️ Deep then Wide
SourceCred is still a young project. As we grow it, we have a choice of priorities:
- do we want to go "wide" (adoption by lots of projects) or
- go "deep" (intensive usage by a few projects)?
What does it mean to go wide?
Going "wide" means encouraging lots of communities to start using SourceCred. Since SourceCred can run on any GitHub repository or Discourse forum, we could roll cred out to many different projects and groups. We could optimize for the number of projects using SourceCred, and focus on features that make the scores more salient or engaging — for example, making it easy to generate "weekly reports" showing the new cred being earned by contributors.
Going wide is tempting because progress is very easy to measure, and the project would get plenty of buzz which could bring more contributors and opportunities.
What does it mean to go deep?
Going deep means that instead of focusing on finding many projects that will use SourceCred, we'll instead focus on making SourceCred work incredibly well for a few communities. In part, this means paying a lot of attention to the edge cases, and spots where SourceCred isn't working as intended, and trying to fix those issues.
Going Deep First
We've decided to go deep before going wide. That means proving that SourceCred can do a really great job at attributing cred with early-adopter communities before we try to scale for broader adoption.
We think that getting SourceCred to "really work" will require a lot of experimentation and iteration. That's easier to do when there are only a few communities using SourceCred, and those communities are all invested in working with us to improve the system. Once we go wide, and have lots of adoption, it will become harder to roll out meaningful changes to the system.
You can think of this as choosing to focus on quality before quantity. We want to be sure that we can produce quality cred scores before putting them in front of a larger audience.