Individual contribution logs represent a record of an individuals contribution efforts.
Hey @Bunnic, thanks for the response and great to hear your perspective!
Bunnic: In my experience, sometimes you do so much during the day that you constantly forget to list things (especially during hectic days), and itâs easy to feel that âyou did nothingâ or see little value in tasks you completed, as they are normal and âpart of your jobâ to you, even if the value they add is there. Also, stopping after you finished to list what you did sometimes took you out of your âflowâ. Since I used to work closely with a group, it was honestly easier to ask each other what we did during the day and list that, as others tended to include small things you give for granted.
This helps to capture why I think there is such as a high importance of why automatically recorded contribution efforts are so important. A benefit of many digital based contributions is they should become increasingly easier to record and present. As an example for my own efforts, I only keep high level contribution logs that link to the resources and content Iâve worked on in a given month - Contribution log | Web3 Association. Some of the digital contributions can be seen through the git commits but the presentation isnât super friendly, this is simple solution that works for me at the moment.
Things that can be automatically recorded can be stored and presented so itâs easier to see the facts. Then beyond these efforts some manual process with peer review is needed to capture other types of effort, such as the process you had already been doing with other colleagues where you share and list what you worked on.
Bunnic: The opposite occurred to us during âcalmâ days: people tend to overexplain simple tasks they did because there is this sensation of âI need to fill the log and make it look nice and bulkyâ. Also, for those who are not fully aware of what completing your tasks implies, they can overlook the amount of time and effort it takes to do the job and easily misjudge it (âoh, they only did this during the day?â and you actually had to work during lunch to complete it in time⊠real story btw).
This seems to map more closely to daily recorded contributions which definitely does increase the cost of reviewing and verifying these that regularly. Some days you might just be trying to understand something so you have to then just explain that to others and document it down if it was a daily contribution log.
In terms of cadence, I imagine somewhere between monthly, bi-weekly or weekly are likely easier starting points to capture what actual outputs you delivered and then as the tooling gets better it should become easier to see the actual contributions made more granularly. At the moment iâm suggesting monthly as the easiest starting point.
Bunnic: In our case, in the end we decided to remove this practice as it fell closer to a micromanagement style we were against.
In more corporate or project owner led environments where a manager and leadership are deciding your value and compensation I think this approach very quickly could turn into micromanagement and a more tense day to day environment. This would be especially the case if the management and leadership arenât also recording their contribution efforts in the same way!
I made a comparison between sports teams and corporate environments to highlight the importance of contribution logs being made public and easily accessible. Having full ownership of your own contribution log data and having these public is where the contributor really can benefit from creating a long term reputation and gain more value from their recorded contributions. These logs could then make it easier for contributors to become paid what their worth without having to prove their value each and every time to new projects they work on. Itâll also be easier for others to determine when a given contributor could be highly insightful or relevant to their own initiatives.
A benefit of Web3 ecosystems is the network itself could pay for contribution efforts directly, which removes the need for manager and leadership roles that might currently dictate what someone will be paid in many Web2 environments and some Web3 environments. In Web3 environments the upper bounds for how much a contributor could be paid could be higher if they are able to prove they are a highly competent contributor. Ensuring top contributors are paid well for their efforts will be an important part of aligning the incentives so that people are rewarded when they make performant and impactful contributions.
I think some of the first steps for making individual contribution logs would be to start with making tools that make it easy to see what digital contributions someone has made such as code contributions, documentation changes etc. Making those easy to view in a single place is a good foundation for the next layer of peer reviews and attestations and community reviews. Will obviously take some time to build these solutions ofcourse but the upside should be that a large amount of power is pushed to the edges. If youâre a great contributor then you should be paid well for those contributions!