The CredSperiment: An Ethnography of a Contributions System is a 2023 paper by Ellie Rennie of RMIT University. It studies the CredSperiment, an experiment in which contributors to the SourceCred project were paid according to algorithmic "Cred scores."
SourceCred is a contribution-tracking tool its own community built and then used to compensate itself inside a permissionless organization. Instead of paying fixed salaries or bounties, the project calculated each participant's Cred score from their activity and paid out on that basis. Rennie's ethnography treats this as an early attempt to institute a 📝Regenerative Economy.
The paper draws on Kealey and Rickett's 2014 concept of contribution goods. It asks how a community can define what it values through day-to-day actions, and whether that could counter plutocratic, token-weighted governance in 📝Web3 systems such as the 📝Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO). The experiment also exposed the weaknesses of permissionless systems, including members' perceptions that others were behaving extractively.
Rennie concludes that Web3 needs machine-assisted governance shaped by community inputs, which she calls "terraforming" as opposed to "environmentality," if the benefits of permissionless systems are to be realized. The 49-page paper was posted to SSRN on September 14, 2023 and revised November 30, 2023.
📝Daniel Kronovet shared this paper with me.