Committable Protocol Revisited

The Committable Protocol is a protocol built to facilitate the growth of collaboration within the open-source community. It connects the blockchain and smart contracts as rules, developers as collaborators, and open-source works. We have been continuously engaging in internal discussions and exchanges with participating developers during the construction of the Committable Protocol, constantly contemplating the direction in which the Committable Protocol should advance.

This year’s EDCON returns to an in-person format, and we also want to share the latest progress of Committable with everyone through this platform. Therefore, we have applied for the Super Demo. During the application process, some forms need to be filled out. We would like to share some valuable parts with you here.

Committable aims to provide a more efficient way of collaboration for the open-source community. In the open-source community, developers collaborate to complete open-source projects, but there are some issues with the current collaboration methods:

  • Open-source projects lack sufficient short-term and long-term incentives, making it difficult for open-source authors to consistently invest in the maintenance and development of their projects without a stable income.
  • The public struggles to recognize the abilities and contributions of open-source authors, often only able to measure their value based on the number and popularity of projects they have participated in. It is difficult to assess and appreciate the specific value that individual contributors bring to a project.
  • Organizers of open-source projects struggle to manage them like businesses, as there is no management model based on positions or economic incentives, and there is a lack of effective means to drive projects forward.

Existing solutions, such as the Gitcoin community and the SourceCred protocol, are providing some solutions for open-source collaboration. Gitcoin focuses on optimizing the fairness of community voting to raise funds for projects, while SourceCred measures the contributions of different developers during the development process using social information. Committable approaches this problem from a different angle. We believe that the essence of open-source software development collaboration is people.

Collaborating in open-source projects represents a choice that people make. The selection of which projects to contribute to and what type of contributions to make reflects a developer’s taste, serving as a way for them to distinguish themselves in the symbolic realm.

Committable aims to put developers at the core, treating commits submitted through the git version control system as the basic units of collaboration. By measuring contributions through commits, developers can receive fairer recognition and rewards in the open-source community. We have built a reactor centered around the developer’s identity:

  • Analyze and measure the contributions of developers based on their submitted commits using scientific program analysis methods in a trustworthy environment, generating a meta report for each commit and storing it in a decentralized file system.
  • Mint commits and their associated meta reports as NFTs, using blockchain and smart contracts to witness these contribution units.
  • Donors can make donations based on developers’ contribution reports, while project managers can allocate funding based on developers’ contributions.
  • The entire process (development, funding, management) is open and transparent, with these traces collectively forming participants’ digital identities.

We are still exploring and, in addition to communicating with developers in the tech field, we are collaborating with experts in economics and psychology. We believe Committable can help developers in the open-source community in a new way, allowing their contributions to be sustained.

We will demonstrate the core concepts and features of the Committable protocol. We will illustrate the operating mode of the Committable protocol and some of the key technologies used in the process through a schematic diagram. During the feature presentation, we will show the complete usage process of the Committable protocol:

  • Connecting to a wallet and authorizing GitHub access
  • Selecting a project and generating a Meta Report for commits, as well as minting these details as COMMIT NFTs representing the developer’s contributions
  • Choosing a project’s Pull Request and providing funding
  • Claiming funds from linked Pull Requests based on the contribution volume associated with COMMIT NFTs
  • Building a decentralized identity for developers based on their historical COMMIT NFTs

In addition, we will discuss some of the challenges we have encountered while building the Committable protocol and share our experiences and reflections on resolving these issues.

Committable is an open-source project itself, and we need everyone’s participation and contributions, both in the implementation of the product and in providing feedback during its use. We will contribute to the best of our abilities to help the open-source community grow and thrive.