Using Volume of ‘Pull Requests’ as a Public OSS Activity Metric (and Potential for CryptoToken-based OSS Economy)
The question addressed in this post is how do we encourage more companies and individuals to give back to the open source software (OSS) projects which they rely on?
One way is to choose an OSS activity metric, one that can be tracked by software, and encourage companies and individual developers to publicly advertise their level of OSS engagement via an e-badge that they can place on their website, LinkedIn profile, etc. For the OSS activity metric, I propose the volume of Git Pull Requests (PR). Developers and companies would get their own UU-URL (Universally Unique URL) from a community-guided, non-profit that acts the OSS Credit Registry and paste that UUID in the comment to each PR they make to note-worthy open source projects (which is defined here as projects 3,000 stars or more — feel free to propose a different minimum number of stars for projects to be note-worthy), be it their own projects or someone else’. The OSS Credit Registry would maintain a system that gets pinged every time the UU-URL is requested (whenever the PR is opened to be read) and would kick off an automated process to monitor when the given PR is accepted. Once the PR is accepted, the owner of the UU-URL (the user who made the PR) will get an e-pat on the back in the form of an increased numerical value in a live badge that can be opened at the same UU-URL.
For example, a company recruiting software engineers may display the live badge on their careers page, while an engineer seeking the attention of employers may display the badge on their LinkedIn profile.
This should encourage everyone to contribute more to note-worthy OSS projects.
To enhance the value proposition in contributing to OSS, the OSS Credit Registry, which is a non-profit, could launch an Initial Coin Offering to create an OSS-specific CryptoToken on the Bitcoin or the Ethereum blockchain thus giving backers of this proposal a chance to purchase tokens that would then increase in value as the proposition behind the OSS Credit Registry becomes a popular one and more companies and developers purchase tokens to use in incentivizing contribution to OSS projects and even to individual feature requests. In this way, OSS contributors get paid when their PR is accepted, but only if the OSS project’s maintainer chooses to enable Bounty-collecting PRs, and the value of each PR accepted (in terms of tokens) is decided by the project maintainer.
It’s a rough idea. I figured I share it anyway, and I’m sure others have thought of similar ideas, or maybe the exact same thing? It would be good to hear your opinion on both the non-fiscally-rewarding/honor-badge-only scheme and the idea of adding an optional fiscal reward that would be based on an OSS-specific CryptoToken, with an ICO bootstrapping the OSS contribution economy.
