Brainstorm: SourceCred Idea Curation

Trying to figure out how to effectively curate the ideas in this forum into intuitive and actionable insights.

How do we do this? There’s both theme and time to work with. My initial thought was to build it up layer by layer, so with each new summary it’s building on those before (weekly, monthly, etc…). That’s based on the assumption that the linear progression of ideas through time tracks progress. This might not be the case! Often when ideas are revisited and seen in a new light they can feel completely fresh and/or spark insights that were originally lacking.

With this in mind, theme and intent might be more important: creating summaries based on core themes (governance, incentives, SourceCred meta-game) and then also have summaries based on initiatives (things we want to do). This would provide ongoing overviews of the core SourceCred topics so that the community can more easily stay up to date. This would also make it easy for community members to see what the current initiatives are, what the relevant information is, and how they might contribute. When an initiative is created, part of creating it could be to curate all the relevant conversations/data for that initiative, creating a summary that recycles past contributions to make the initiative more actionable (no ideas left behind!). This might even involve reaching out to those who were earlier brainstorming on similar things and asking them if they want to contribute to this related initiative to earn cred (or have fun).

So from the perspective of a community member, when they open the SourceCred Discourse they would see:

  • general conversations
  • summaries of core topics
  • summaries of initiatives that they can contribute to

There’s probably better ways to go about this too. This is just my second idea after the default assumption that chronological things are good lol


  • As a community member, would this be helpful to you?
  • What other ways might we curate content, with the goal being to distill open ended brainstorms into actionable insights or initiatives

Well if I’m honest. I feel like people currently active are short on time, so any help in sharing the load and/or saving time I think will help. In the same line I’m not too picky about how it should be done, but it will help and needs doing, whether it’s a fully designed process or ad-hoc cat herding :smile:

Another way to do this and there’s some overlap with is Produce SourceCred Podcast. I’ve suggested using the podcast agenda as a good starting point for weekly summaries on the forum as well.

A thought that also came to mind is, this is a very specific step in the process to focus on. I think any “community managing” work to go from: ideas to actionable ideas to PRs to releases to feedback to new ideas. All of it would help I think :]

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moderation note: I’ve moved this out of the Initiatives category and into the general CredSperiment category, since as written it isn’t an initiative. Would love to see a concrete initiative come from the brainstorm, though!

Yep, I agree with @Beanow here (I’ve been saying that a lot lately!) that basically anything you can do to let people leverage their time investment in the forum would help. I’d love it if it were easy to point people who are interested in SourceCred towards your curation posts and they would get a good hook to start exploring on their own.

Yeah, I think starting simple and doing progressive filtering are both great ideas. Here’s a concrete suggestion:

We have this old spotlights category which was intended for “shining a light” on other peoples valuable contributions. It hasn’t been used much, but it exists. And it seems to me that curation is basically about bringing people’s attention to quality content.

To start, how about you make a weekly spotlights thread, and have each post in the thread be a quote (with some context/exposition) from another thread, that you think is interesting and you want to bring people’s attention to.

After a few weeks of this, you can aggregate across the weekly threads and create a monthly spotlights thread, which picks the most interesting discussions from the month (both from what you found in the weekly thread, and anything else).

The threads would be open, so anyone else can contribute spotlights too, but you would be driving the process.

After a month or two, (or whenever it feels right) we can pluck from the weekly and monthly threads to create new theme’d wiki posts.

The benefit of this approach is that we can start super simply, and then learn organically what works well and keep optimizing as we go.

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Sounds kind of similar to Long Reads Sunday: a recap of the top crypto twitter convos of the week. The format is: (1 sentence commentary + link to tweet), and then many of those woven together to tell the larger “naratives” of the week. It’s actually quite good - if you’re into crypto twitter.

One thing, however, is that curating a theme or narrative is something that is done iteratively. As you read through you find things that fit a theme, add them to a list, then go through that pile of ideas to figure out the core ideas and weave them together into a cohesive story.

With Discourse, however, that’s a bit tricky because the quotes and things are 10X easier to manage within the Discourse editor. Maybe rather than having a weekly/monthly thing, we could just have a bunch of themes. Then when anyone sees something that relates to a theme, they could copy the quote and add it to the theme thread with a little explanation as to why it’s relevant. This would be more work than just reading, but it could increase cred so people might do it. It would also be a 24/7 live thing that evolves organically vs being managed by one person on a regular schedule.

I dunno… this would probably end up being quite messy, but overall something crowdsourced and “live” seems like an ideal design direction to be thinking in

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Started a Spotlights thread on Cred/Grain dynamics.

It’s a start, but there’s things missing and/or things that need to be updated. Is it possible to make every post in a thread a freely editable wiki so that the community can contribute?

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Thanks for making it, @burrrata! I quite like it so far.

I believe that you can click the gear icon on each post to make each one a wiki.

But I don’t see a gear icon… Is that an admin thing? It’s actually a wrench for me lol