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 “permission” 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 it’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 we’d want a build a reputation stack that is holistic (i.e. manual/person-driven like OtterSpace’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. It’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 reputation…and it’s fun!