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Managing Contribution Credit

This is a template concept for how open source projects could manage contribution credit for their project(s). We hope that with the help of our community, we can begin to understand answers to questions like:

  • How can open-source projects manage credit for project contributions or upstream/downstream dependencies?

  • Who is/should determine the value of a project contribution or dependency?

  • Would the assigned value of a contribution change over time? Is time irrelevant to the assignment of value?

  • How do contribution value and project value relate?

For many projects, attribution of contribution credit doesn’t occur formally, if at all. In many cases it is simply a decision to merge or not merge.

The intent here is to begin to design methods that allow a flow of credit (financial, social, academic, etc…) from end-results that eventually trade with monetary value to the contributors and dependencies that helped create that value.

As a starting point, we created 2 files. These files would live in the GitHub repo of a project and be updated by the governance of the project and represent the current value of the dependencies of the project.

  • contribution_ledger.txt - An (optional) file representing the names of contributors to the current project and their credit allocations.

  • project_ledger.txt - A required file representing the names of upstream projects and their credit allocations including what the overall weight of the contribution ledger file should be (how much new innovation is in this project).

How to join in the conversation

  1. For asynchronous discussion around the contribution credit concept, go to the topic in our forum here.

  2. To contribute comments, ideas, proposals, edits, etc…please open an issue this repo.