SourceCred

• Name: SourceCred
• URL: https://sourcecred.io/docs/
• Category: contribution-graph reputation system / retroactive rewards infrastructure / community accounting
• Summary: SourceCred is contribution accounting, not magic reputation. It turns GitHub, Discord, and similar activity into a graph, runs retroactive Cred over it, and can turn that into Grain payouts. Useful as a contribution-legibility and rewards mechanism, but the real control still sits with whoever chooses inputs, weights, and payout policy.
• What it does:
  • Builds project-specific “instances” that ingest contribution data from platforms such as GitHub, Discord, and Discourse
  • Represents contributions, contributors, and their relationships as a contribution graph over which Cred flows
  • Lets communities choose node and edge weights so they can define what kinds of actions mint Cred and how that Cred propagates
  • Retroactively recomputes Cred when new data, new links, or new weighting choices change the picture of who created value
  • Optionally issues a project-specific reward currency called Grain and distributes it according to configurable policies such as immediate, balanced, and recent
  • Uses a fairly opinionated instance architecture around plugins, GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages, and admin operations for identity merges, transfers, and maintenance
• Key claims:
  • The introduction docs say SourceCred exists to make the labor of individuals more visible and rewardable, which is the clearest statement that the project is targeting labor legibility rather than only social reputation or token incentives
  • The Cred docs make the central mechanism explicit: communities define a contribution graph, choose which nodes mint Cred, and let Cred flow across edges according to community-controlled weights
  • The same Cred docs emphasize that Cred is community-specific, non-transferable, transparent, and retroactive, which is analytically important because it separates SourceCred from tokenized reputation systems that treat the score itself as a tradable asset
  • The Cred-flow explanation introduces a seed node plus “alpha” radiation back to that seed, showing that SourceCred is not just adding up events but running a specific graph-propagation model with a tunable locality parameter
  • The setup guide says SourceCred instances depend on platform plugins plus GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages, which matters because practical authority sits partly in data-source choice and instance operations, not only in the abstract scoring formula
  • The Grain docs separate value measurement from reward policy by introducing multiple distribution modes — immediate, balanced, and recent — so the same Cred history can produce meaningfully different payout outcomes depending on operator choices
  • The Grain docs also stress that Grain is opt-in, transferable, and can but need not be monetary, which makes SourceCred a useful bridge case between reputation, compensation, and governance tooling rather than a pure payroll system
• Whitepaper: No canonical standalone whitepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official docs on introduction, Cred, Grain, and setup, plus the official documentation and monorepo repositories; see ../whitepapers/sourcecred-primary-sources-2026-05-09.md.
• Sources:
  • https://sourcecred.io/docs/
  • https://sourcecred.io/docs/beta/cred
  • https://sourcecred.io/docs/beta/grain
  • https://sourcecred.io/docs/beta/setup-guide
  • https://github.com/sourcecred/docs
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sourcecred/docs/master/docs/beta/cred.md
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sourcecred/docs/master/docs/beta/grain.md
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sourcecred/docs/master/docs/beta/setup-guide.md
  • https://github.com/sourcecred/sourcecred
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sourcecred/sourcecred/master/README.md

Internal linkages

• Closest contribution-scoring sibling: praise

• Best upward reads for treasury-routing and constitutional context: allo-protocol and commons-stack

• Last reviewed: 2026-06-04 UTC