SourceCred is dead, long live SourceCred!
Source-cred down, MyMeta out and Metafest 2 on the way!
These past 2 weeks have been… let’s say eventful. A lot has happened, both for MetaGame but also for the whole DAOsphere with the most worrisome being SourceCred as an organization winding down. Inspired by this event, here’s a brief opinion piece by UniPuff about the notion of death when applied to organizations and what it means for all of us involved in web3.
Can a project die? ☠️
Some of you might have already heard the news but for those who haven't, the original team behind our beloved SourceCred has dissolved into the aether.
The news hit especially hard for MetaGame because as you may know, MetaGame was the first to fully adopt SourceCred and use it for compensating its members (😏). The reputation properties of SourceCred have been a cornerstone of MetaGame's XP system and leaderboards as well as how work is valued and assessed. Simply put, SourceCred has been a part of MetaGame and seeing the organization wind down feels like losing a limb...
However, there is a hugely important distinction to be made between a concrete working product and the team responsible for building and maintaining it. The SourceCred community has been very careful to point out that what is indeed winding down is the organization behind it and not the whole algorithm. This distinction should always be kept in mind in web 3.0 because it is exactly what differentiates it from its predecessor. Corporations, businesses and organizations don’t have to be exclusively tied to their product anymore and their product can keep on being upgraded by interested contributors independently of whether they are official members of the organization or not. In other words, through the renaissance of open-source philosophy in web 3.0, we are now witnessing a new phenomenon in the sphere of digital infrastructure. It has been witnessed already by various web3 natives but to truly bring this phenomenon to awareness, it deserves its own name. For lack of a better term, let's call it "Organization-Product Decoupling" (or OPD for short).
This can play out in very interesting ways and with some imagination, we can start thinking about an alternative and more humane system of production. For example, imagine a future where no company owns a product but the product can be owned by everyone that has worked for it. Shares are replaced by stakes in the form of tokens sent out to contributors, proportional to the value they have added to the product through their work. We could also imagine this work as unshackled from its technocratic bonds, being able to accommodate diverse kinds of contributions beyond development and debugging (community building, strategic design, care work, lorecraft, etc). Software, products, algorithms, systems, platforms and media can all become sites of collective boundary-less work where the contributors own a part of the product and can directly feel the impact and value of their work. No more exploitation, no more alienation. A future stepping on capitalist means only to overcome them (rather than avoiding them or being subsumed by them). If we want to truly achieve the collective goal of creating infrastructure to support the (digital or not) commons, the normalization of OPD would be a crucial step for completing the movement towards it.
In some respects, not long after the disbanding of the SourceCred OGs, we have witnessed the opening of the SourceCred algorithm to the world, ready to be recycled and repurposed. A lot of projects saw the news and jumped in on the action to figure out ways in which SourcCred (the algorithm) can stay alive, but this time through a more decentralized, more inter-DAO endeavor. For anybody attending the post-mortem SourcCred calls, beyond the grief, one couldn’t ignore the atmosphere of novelty in the air and the blossoming of collective creativity. Is the death of the SourceCred organization an opportunity for OPD in practice?
If that is the case, we can see a transformation of organizations into collective facilitators, organizing and managing people in order to work on these publicly open products.
In such a context, the death of an organization can be the occasion for celebration rather than mourning.
💀💀💀
If you still have macabre appetites, last month’s podcast episode with Jordan Hall on the rise and fall of organizations is more relevant and insightful than ever.
⛓ Chainlog
🤝🏽 Community
MetaFest2, June 2022 🎉
Calendar and schedule set up, planning docs outlined, tools investigated, tommy, Misanth, UniPuff, Musashi13, luxumbra, and tenfinney are making it happen.
Want to get involved? Hit up the crew in the MetaGame Discord.
MetaFest2 Landing Page
luxumbra has been working on one of the coolest landing pages for MF2 that the world has ever laid eyes on. 3D particle simulations, embedded Cryptovoxels eyeframe and octos flying in space. If you are intrigued, have a sneak peek at an alpha preview and make sure to share your feedback if you spot something weird!
Cryptovoxels takeover
tenfinney, Musashi13, luxumbra, and UniPuff did an unauthorized home improvement session at 63 Addy Gardens.
Season 5 players can try out the Gotchiverse courtesy of Musashi13—free Gotchi rentals, limited time only.
Onboarding
Misanth onboarded Jorjo, lala003, ohnevie, TH in recent cohort calls.
Upgrading
🥇🥇🥇 Polimyl ascended to the Golden Fam 🥇🥇🥇
📱 Technology
Pair Programming 💻
dysbulic and tenfinney have started to really get serious shit done with their pair programming sessions! 🔥
They have been hacking away at NFTs, Achievements, MyMeta Reward Systems and co-learning in the process.
They worked on a Hardhat script to distribute tenfinney's personalized Season Ⅴ NFTs to their recipients.
They are now working on integrating Coordinape into our contribution system.
Questing System
vid, beti and dan13ram gave birth to a new, more slick version of the questing system called DAOQuest for past weekend’s ETHGlobal hackathon, which runs like butter. Check it out and leave some feedback!
MyMeta
A round of fine-tuning by dysbulic, peth, dave, vid and luxumbra resulted in improvements to the profile creation and updates flow, and the landing page.
dysbulic has set a robot to work collecting artwork to use in MyMeta custom themes 🤖
dysbulic fixed a long-lasting recurrent issue with MyMeta profile information not updating correctly when changes are made.
’Chievemints 🍃
What are ’chievmints? ✨✨They are NFT drops for you as you rise in the MetaGame ranks, distributed every season. This way you can have hard proof of your progress and showcase your leveling-up to the world! Shoutout to dysbulic and tenfinney who have been ceaselessly working on them through their pair programming sessions.
Want a taste? See an example, courtesy of dysbulic and the Artists Guild.
Talking about MetaGame NFT drops, Season V players, check your OpenSea wallet for your Season V NFT, crafted by the Designers Guild and distributed by dysbulic, luxumbra, and tenfinney!
And last but not least, a huge shoutout to arsenijesavic and m9p909 for being willing to tackle Github issues on their own volition!
Be more like them, and get right into the action! 💯💯
🍰 Content
eowulia and peth put out a new MetaView episode with Stellar Magnet on “Decentralised Space Mission and Minimizing Dystopia” (Show notes by Rose)
peth made a big graphic to explain the Tokens and Phases of MetaGame, and eowulia helped to make a video to explain it all
The MetaGame Path to Sustainability got an update courtesy of peth
peth wrote a proposal for Metagame to go PRO
Dave worked on the Quests UI design process.
The Blockchain Socialist resurfaced an interview with peth from last year’s Crypto Commons Gathering in Austria. Go check it out!
🌱 Growth
The fundraising went well enough for peth to drop the ‘needs your eth’ from the username. 🔥🔥🔥🥳🥳🥳
Also …
Anna worked on a shilling strategy for Season VI
Web Three Prophet proposed recruiting as a possible answer to Metagame’s challenge of sustainability and immediately jumped right into action, researching recruiting strategies
Web Three Prophet worked with Misanth and experts on new approaches to recruitment. Check the proposal, and play back a recording of a talk with Dalila, an expert on how companies can become “Great Places to Work”
UniPuff and tommy have been working on getting MyMeta into use outside of MetaGame. See Alec’s notes from a recent call on that topic
MetaGame Season VI is coming
If you are curious take a look at the Season VI Roadmap
⚔️ MetaAlliance
Giveth’s Meet the Makers series continues, this time featuring environmental projects Moonjelly DAO, Regenerating Sonora, the Diamante Bridge Collective, Free the Food, and more. Replay the conversation on Twitter (1hr), read all about it on the GivEth Medium blog
Catch up on token engineering with TokenEngineering Fundamentals AMA #2 (Youtube, 52mins)
1Hive hosted a short session on avoiding scams and rugs in crypto (2mins)
DAOhaus explains how to give your DAO a boost by using a Gnosis Safe cross-chain minion to lower transaction costs
The Commons Stack launches the Commons Prize, for communities focused on a common cause—find more details on their blog
A series of short videos about all of Panvala’s work on inclusion at EthDenver
CRE8R DAO got weird about googly eyes
Opolis got a mention in Time mag: “What It’s Like Working at a DAO”
🎩 Open Roles 🎩
The above made you want to jump in & do shit? 🙃
Here are some of the open roles 👇
🐙 Normal Roles
Normal roles are entry level roles that anyone can take on without committing too much time or taking on too much responsibility.
🛠️ Builder - An evergreen role, always looking for more TypeScript & other kinds of builders. Know someone? Bring them? Its you but you got frustrated with stale PRs & bad PMing - give us another chance 😇
🔍 Journalist - Research and collect info about happenings in the world that are relevant and valuable to write about.
📣 Shiller - Promote MetaGame and its products in any adjacent DAO or crypto community
💩 Shitposter - Come up with funny tweets & memes to post on twitter, drop in 🐤-tweet-arena
🧠 Educator - Come up with useful knowledge & tips we should be posting from MetaGame’s twitter account, drop in 🐤-tweet-arena
🐙🐙 Deputy roles
Deputy roles are more important, thus come with some responsibility & commitment. You will be working with Champions.
🤑 Rainmakers Guild Deputy - Rainmakers are about saving Seeds from the collapse & helping MetaGamers build through the Winter Season as well as the upcoming many & towards sustainability. Join peth in securing MetaGame’s future & secure yourself a spot in MetaGame’s history.
🙌 Meetup Master Deputy - To help Tommy with organizing community events with the focus on workshops - facilitating knowledge exchange by scheduling workshops based on 🧠-brain-exchange
🎨 Artists Guild - We're trying to make MetaGame into "an intersection of technology, philosophy & art". Well, we need more art! There is no lack of art that needs to be made, just ask about it in 🎨-artists-guild
✍️ Writers Guild - Words are one “s” away from swords and we need people that can wield them with mastery. There is a lot to write about and there are newly concocted editorial processes to be tested out. If fancy yourself as a mighty wordsmith, introduce yourself in 📝-writers-guild
🧚 XP Fairies - This one's for those who get frustrated with the injustices in the XP system. Sourcecred is great but its not a panacea & there are problems that can be fixed, things that can get balanced! Ask 🤗-innkeepers-guild & help.
🐙🐙🐙 Champion roles
Champion roles are of the highest importance and highest commitment & responsibility roles. There are requirements that need to be taken seriously.
🤖 Bot Army - Bot army champion does what bot army champions do - work on bots. The needs for bots are many & varied, there is much to do
🛠️ Builders Guild 👀 - Michiel has some real-life shit coming up soon, looking for someone to carry the Builders Guild torch, run meetings & organize sprints
👩🏼💼 MyMeta PM - If you feel like you are up for a challenge, you are welcome to disentangle the overly-ambitious mess that is MyMeta and help make a user-friendly product that will revolutionize decentralized collaboration.
✊ Onwards!
Metafam going to Amsterdam baby!
We made a telegram chat for anybody who is interested in meeting Metafam in Amsterdam and joining our group activities!
There is also one open spot for one of the shared houses Metagame will be living in! If you are interested, DM us on Twitter or the abovementioned TG group.
Coming up:
Richie Bonilla will be coming to our community gathering next week (April 22) to talk about Clarity.so.
Recap Time!
Last month felt like a (much-needed) reality check that good things do in fact end and that unexpected change is part of life. But it also felt like the same fact can be the reason for new and wonderful things to emerge.
Springtime seems like the best time for new alternatives to blossom🌼
Unipuff & HHH
Long live MetaGame and its players
Long live SourceCred........ when a crop dies it sprouts out anew and afresh