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Plural Credits

A key device that will be used by the community to accomplish our governance goals is a system of unique credits we call Plural Credits.

What are Plural Credits?

Plural credits (PCs) are used to formally recognize when someone contributes to the project. PCs will initially be interchangeable, quantitative, and divisible indicators of contribution. Individuals will not be able to transfer or sell credits to one another. While of no (direct) financial value, PCs will entitle holders to several social benefits.

Benefits of Plural Credits

  1. Recognition: Our ledger of PC holdings will be the definitive source of information on the contributions to the book. We plan to display the ledger in in several ways. One of these ways could be to create collective image that acts as a “credit scroll” of contributors. The more significant one’s contribution is to the project, the more prominently they will be displayed in this image. Whenever we refer to the “⿻ community”, we will implicitly be referencing this ledger.
  2. Governance rights: PCs will be the tool that is used to govern the project. They govern by determining the priority of work, and the changes or contributions that should be accepted. When PCs are used for governance, they also determine who will receive PCs in the future and thus who will be able to make further governance decisions. More on governance is discussed below.
  3. Resources: PCs will gate access to various resources. This includes ‘@plurality.net’ email addresses, GitHub Pro coupons, and other benefits (including possibly financial compensation from funds raised by book sales, all of which will be donated to the community’s collective governance). Resources will be voted on by the community and will remain consistent with our status as being fiscally sponsored by the charitable organisation (US 501c3) Open Collective Foundation. Any compensation is to be reasonable, transparent, and consistent with this status. After introduction of quantitative PCs we plan to introduce qualitative tokens. Qualitative tokens will be able to indicate the type of contribution that an individual makes (e.g. a written, design, or technical contribution).

Social capitalization table

We will shortly release a “social capitalization table” that will make the allocation of PCs now and in the short term more clear. Future evolution of the social capitalization table will be determined collectively by the community. The social capitalization table will initially be released as a simple spreadsheet, however it will eventually live in a distributed ledger maintained by the community through the open source Gov4Git (G4G) protocol.