This proposal is also on Balancer's Forum but has undergone minor edits to include the results of forum polls.

🔥_ 🔥 (Fire Eyes DAO) has been working with the Balancer team to develop governance mechanisms that complement the launch of Balancer V2.

At the end of 2020, we proposed Governance Mining to encourage community members and liquidity providers to participate in governance, and to compensate these people for doing so.

One piece to this incentive program is the implementation of a SourceCred instance to track contributions to the Balancer Community.

This proposal looks to leverage SourceCred to distribute 50 BAL per week based on the Cred and Grain scores accumulated by users across both the Balancer Forum and the #governance channel in the Balancer Discord.

Community members will need to opt-in to this program to be eligible for rewards, with specifics on the process to be finalized pending acceptance of this proposal.

Motivation

The introduction of ‘soft’ incentives around governance in Maker and Index Coop have improved the quantity, quality and diversity of contributions.

We aim to empower these contributions in the Balancer ecosystem via a suite of governance incentive programs. The GovFactor addresses the incentivisation of liquidity provider participation, and we believe that there is a much broader space for participation in the Balancer community from people and groups who may not have the capital to become LPs, or who otherwise choose not to do so.

Specification

The Balancer SourceCred Instance was set up in December 2020 and has been collecting contribution data for the past ~4 weeks.

We propose that BAL tokens are distributed to contributors based on the Cred scores recorded by SourceCred and the subsequent grain (or BAL) scores earned among active participants. For more on how this works, please see this documentation.

The following specification details our proposed structure for these incentives. Inspiration for the allocations and configuration of this instance were modeled after the MakerDAO SourceCred Trial.

Forum Incentives The Balancer governance forum is the home to the most important discussions and Balancer Improvement Proposals (BIPs).

This program looks to offer a fixed amount of BAL per month to those contributing in meaningful ways, measured using SourceCred to track aggregate likes, posts and engagement across all topics.

Balancer’s SourceCred instance is heavily weighted towards the amount of likes received across all posts, rather than the quantity of replies. This enforces a ‘quality over quantity’ approach, rewarding contributions that are deemed valuable by the community through engagement and signal.

Discord Incentives We’ve noticed community members on Discord play an active role in educating new users as well as providing valuable feedback and discussion around protocol governance. Through this integration, we want to create mechanisms for those actions to be easily validated and rewarded.

The first instance of Discord incentives will track activity in the #governance channel, rewarding participants for meaningful contributions in the same way as forum activity - focused on reactions as opposed to post volume to push towards a ‘quality over quantity approach’.

This program looks to serve as an ongoing medium for community members to be better rewarded for their discussion in Discord, with ambitions to boost the importance of BAL emojis and token-based roles using tools like Collab.Land.

Funding The proposed funding for SourceCred incentives is 50 BAL per week to start.

Please note that this program aims to ramp up in the event that it is successful, and we believe that starting with smaller allocations and building up as time goes on is the best way to approach these incentives.

SourceCred has an opt-in revenue model of allocating 5% of all BAL tokens distributed through this program back to their community, and we are very much in favor of supporting this intiative.

Drawbacks

Some points to consider around the introduction of SourceCred incentives for contributions to the Balancer Forum:

• There is potential for this program to be exploited using bots or through collusion between actors. We will be monitoring the rewards distributed by the instance and will take action if malicious activity occurs.