Issuing POAPs to Radicle contributors

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Hello Radicle community! My name is Colfax and Iā€™m working on building GitPOAP, a platform for minting POAPs for contributions on GitHub and other software & contribution platforms (hopefully radicle.xyz someday :slight_smile: ).

Weā€™re beginning by minting historical ā€˜annual contributorā€™ POAPs to anyone who has had at least one PR merged for a project in a given year (ex. ā€˜2021 Radicle contributorā€™), and will eventually build out tooling for different levels of contributors (ex. 5 PRs) over different timeframes (quarterly, releases, etc) and other customization.

For our launch in a few weeks weā€™re onboarding a cohort of open source projects central to the Ethereum ecosystem such as HardHat, OpenZeppelin, Web3.js, ethereum.org, and others.
Including Radicle in cohort seems like a natural fit so I wanted to reach out to the community to see if youā€™d be interested.

Weā€™ll be sharing a bit more information publicly about the launch in the next week or so, in the meantime feel free to drop any questions here and take a look at the links below!

Website: https://gitpoap.io/
Intro post: https://twitter.com/gitpoap/status/1467900592584638467

Either way, looking forward to getting to know this community better and seeing how we can work together and add value to the ecosystem.

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Hi @colfax,

Thanks for sharing more info about GitPOAP. Admittedly, it took me a while (and a click) to figure out what POAP means (Proof of Attendance Protocol). As a side note, it is pretty remarkable that even the POAP website fails to explain the acronym: https://poap.xyz/

Weā€™re beginning by minting historical ā€˜annual contributorā€™ POAPs to anyone who has had at least one PR merged for a project in a given year (ex. ā€˜2021 Radicle contributorā€™), and will eventually build out tooling for different levels of contributors (ex. 5 PRs) over different timeframes (quarterly, releases, etc) and other customization.

I think this is an interesting concept and Iā€™ve been thinking about something similar recently (but I am not involved in any project addressing this problem space).

As the contributor, I find value in keeping a record of my contributions on chain, because it can essentially form part of my CV. I could point people to GitHub as well, of course, so I guess the real value that GitPOAP offers is in the independent persistence of the data (on chain)? What other value proposition does GitPOAP bring me (the contributor) ?

As the maintainer, I find some value in that contributors to my project may perhaps start feeling more engaged with my project, but I have to admit that sounds rather limitedā€¦ :thinking:
What are some other value propositions to the maintainers of a project, so that they would promote the use of GitPOAP on their projects?

As a final point, I find it interesting that you bring up PRs as an example. The ā€œPull Requestā€ was introduced to the world by GitHub and is - largely - GitHub specific. In addition, to the code being merged, a PR also encapsulates other data, such as:

  • code reviews / suggestions,
  • comments / discussion with reactions, etc. ,
  • checks / pipeline run results,
  • labels,
  • etc.

It seems to me that none of this data is git-specific, so I am wondering: is GitPOAP aiming to capture only code contributions (since it is just the code that lives in Git) ? Or is GitPOAP also aiming to capture general contributions to a project, including, notably, pull requests and issues ?

I am asking because, as a maintainer, community contributions to these areas are perhaps even more important to begin with than code contributions (all that activity encourages me to spend more time working on my project, since folks are using it).

P.S: please note I donā€™t speak for Radicle - I am just a community member here.

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Hey @yorgos,

Apologies for the delay here! My fault, I should have provided a more detailed description. It seems youā€™re up to speed now on POAP, but to review, POAP indeed stands for Proof of Attendance Protocol, and the term POAP is used to describe both the protocol and the NFT that the protocol mints. A POAP is an NFT that represents an action youā€™ve taken (event attended, contribution, etc).

POAP collections can be viewed to learn about what someone has done (ex hereā€™s mine POAP - The bookmarks of your life), there are some fun apps like POAP.fun (raffle system) and POAP.art (collaborative art drawing platform), and many POAP holding gated integrations (you can view some here: https://poap.directory/en/resources/access). The ecosystem is continually evolving around POAP and how we can mint & use them.

Thanks! I think itā€™s an interesting concept too that can add value to contributors and maintainers. Expanding on that, I canā€™t say for certain how things will unfold, but here are a few more thoughts on the benefit for each contributors and maintainers/projects:

Contributors:

  • Unified record of contribution and achievement, your verified digital resume, across contribution platforms, projects, and orgs (more on this below)
  • Mentioned above, but the record is verified & issued by the projects youā€™ve contributed to, where most records (CV, LinkedIn) are not (GitHub squares are even gameable, although other records on GitHub arenā€™t, youā€™re right)
  • This recored ties into your on-chain identity that can be leveraged in other applications

Maintainers:

  • Many people are very passionate about collecting POAPs, it can serve as an incentive to contribute to a project
  • Community members feel more appreciated and recognized for their contributions

Once we have an on-chain record of contributions, there are a number of new applications that are made possible that benefit both contributors and maintainers:

  • Funding a project: we now have the addresses of the contributors and what theyā€™ve been contributing, we can fund them directly
  • GitPOAP gated integrations (nfty.chat, gather.town, poap.vote) that teams can use to coordinate (repasting link from above: https://poap.directory/en/resources/access)
  • An on-chain record can make it easier to find collaborators to work with & projects you may be interested in working on

Weā€™re currently launching with an MVP of the platform, and just recognizing ā€œat least one contribution in a yearā€. Eventually weā€™ll have different levels of contributors that are based on more data than just PRs.

On that note, great point on PRs. Quick aside, our goal and long term vision is to expand to many different types of contributions across many platforms (not just software, and not just confined to GitHub). We chose GitHub as a starting point because our inspiration came from working on open source and much of that is done on GitHub, they have good APIs, and a merged PR is a good atomic unit of something that has been deemed a meaningful contribution (since it has been reviewed). Agreed that not everyone who contributed to the PR (ex the reviewer, commenters, Issue submitter) is getting recognized. This is just a starting point, and very open for feedback and input here on how we can provide additional tools for you to recognize other types of meaningful contributions.

On Git vs GitHub, unfortunately (as you probably know) underlying git history can be altered and doesnā€™t verifiably tell a story of who contributed what, so weā€™ve piggy-backed on GitHub specific tooling to help at this stage.

Our broader vision is building an on-chain reputation building platform (weā€™ll probably have to change the name :stuck_out_tongue:), and PRs on GitHub are our starting point. We aim to integrate with other code repositories (incl radicle :slight_smile:) and other non-software contribution platforms.

I appreciate your taking the time to respond and I hope the above provides a bit more clarity on what weā€™re building. Iā€™m happy to jump on a call sometime to discuss too if youā€™d like! Iā€™m colfax#1983 on discord you can email me at colfax@gitpoap.io.

PS - we announced our launch (April 7th!) this week, a bit more information in this post: https://medium.com/gitpoap/launching-gitpoap-5df20e73f682

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Hello again Colfax!

Iā€™m in Paris this week during EthCC and saw a GitPOAP tweet and I remembered this post that I never replied to. Apologies for that (and thank you for sharing all that info!)

Not sure if it will still be relevant, but, some thoughts:

A way to address ā€œhistory can be alteredā€ is signed commits. Has that been considered?

Considering APIs canā€™t be used in smart contracts, I am wondering: is GitPOAP essentially aiming to become an oracle for GitHub data? :thinking:

  • If so, how can that work if GitPOAP is not open source (according to the GitPOAP website)?
  • If not, does that mean that all contributions are recognized by the GitPOAP platform and that maintainers would reward contributors through the GitPOAP platform ?

It is important for me to understand this point, because you mentioned a ā€œverified digital resumeā€ and I am trying to understand exactly how this verification happens. Is GitPOAP the entity that handles verification?

Thanks in advance (and apologies if these are outdated concerns - happy to learn more! )

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@colfax

Thanks for this post and lively discussion!

We recently funded the grant below:
Otterspace: Soulbound Contributor Badges for DAOs - Grant Application

It will start out as an NFT that a team can mint and manually send to a contributor. The use-case is to solve some problems seen in distributing governance powers to contributors at large; community, code, or otherwise. For example, a long-time core team member would have the ā€œpermissionā€ to mint and send the token to a new contributor. This non-transferable contributor NFT could give that contributor various permissions, such as voting on proposals and such.

So itā€™s not automated/connected with code commits. But I imagine we can extend it to do that at some point. It might make sense for you to chat with that team?

Regardless of what gets built, how, I think we can all agree weā€™d want a build a reputation stack that is holistic (i.e. manual/person-driven like OtterSpaceā€™s approach, automated to work completion like git commits, and something else that is community driven like a Stackoverflow/Q&A to communicate knowledge).

I think having badges is a nice way to gamify reputation building. Itā€™s like collecting little awards that go on your profile. Like imagine you get several of these from some well established DAOs. Then your wallet address (identity?) would have some good reputationā€¦and itā€™s fun!