For communities, having active records of your contributions can be powerful, and can enable a number of unlocks.
Let’s look at one concrete unlock and one abstract unlock:
- The Concrete - Recording contributions gives you insight into what’s actually happening in your community
DAOs often make many organizational tradeoffs, making important things like accountability quite difficult. Of course, not only DAOs but many online communities have this issue as well. Since there’s often no “manager“ or “boss“, it falls on your peers or yourself to record and verify the work that is being done. If this verification doesn’t happen, the community is essentially blind - nobody knows what’s actually being done, it’s almost impossible to follow up on other contributors’ work, and multiple people may end up doing the same task. Also, without being able to verify, anyone can lie about what they did or didn’t do.
- The Abstract - Recording contributions allows you to decipher the values and the culture of your community
What types of contributions does your community make the most? What types do you make the least? Who specifically makes them, and when? Do individuals tend to make the same kinds of contributions over and over or do they try a number of different things? How often do you all experiment? Are your contributions made solo or as a team? These learnings become even more apparent and actionable over time as your community evolves and builds out a full catalog of contributions.
The importance of all of this is also why at Govrn we’re doing in-house research on contribution taxonomies, to develop new understandings of how the cultures of communities are established and evolve over time. We’ll talk about this more in depth as we advance our findings!
Btw, you already know the drill. This is what we do at Govrn. Come level up your communities. Stop playin.