Impact
A new measure of success.
Stars, downloads, forks, contributors — and now: impact generated. The maintainer never runs a fundraiser. They build software; the software does the rest, and the Association's certificates make it verifiable. Below is what the three displays are built to show.
1. The maintainer dashboard
The number stars and downloads cannot express. A project's lifetime public-benefit figure sits next to the metrics a maintainer already watches, each deep-linked to its source: the ledger rows for the money, the registry for the entitlements.
Illustrative — sample figures, not a ledger
Project dashboard — a mature product repository
mock-up
routing mode: project_default (sample) · weight class: Standard (sample) ·
last quarter and lifetime figures each link to their ledger rows
2. The contributor impact card
Give contributors more than a green square. Contribution statistics, an attributed Impact Share under the published algorithm, the categories they chose, and a certificate anyone can verify. The contributor did not donate anything: they created software, and the software's usefulness created the impact.
The card below is one project's. The design intent is a cross-project identity above it: a contributor profile that aggregates their impact across every registered repository they touch, a maintainer profile that aggregates their projects, a company account that aggregates its entitlements — so a career of contributions reads as one record instead of ten unrelated histories. None of it exists yet, and no aggregate carries a figure before the ledger rows behind it do.
Illustrative — sample figures, not a ledger
Contributor impact card — one project
mock-upCertificate of participation (sample) — issued to a contributor of a registered project; attributes an Impact Share under algorithm v0 (provisional); categories chosen: health, education.
- certificate id
-
cert_sample_…(no such certificate exists) - signature
-
ES256 · key id
psn-sample - verification
- verify only at purposesource.org/verify
3. The company annual impact statement
Licensing stops being purely transactional. Once a year a paying organisation receives a statement in the exact wording of the claim-language kit — the only wording its certificate permits, because generic "we support charity" framing is a regulated claim and is contractually excluded.
Illustrative — sample figures, not a ledger
Annual impact statement — a Pass holder
mock-up[Organisation] holds the Pass for the 2027 term (sample); contribution amount: $5,000 (illustrative — sample figure); categories: health, education, environment.
Usage declared across 12 registered projects (sample). Impact multiplier: none — base credential (sample). This statement is issued under the Purpose Source claim-language kit and may be reproduced only in this wording.
- entitlement
-
ent_sample_…(no such entitlement exists) - verification
- verify only at purposesource.org/verify
Why the numbers are gated
The materiality gate
Points and percentiles are always displayed. A currency figure is displayed only above a published floor, per person and per period. Below the floor a figure is real but too small to mean what a reader would take it to mean, and displaying it anyway converts recognition into dollar-precision shaming.
Aggregates are different: a project's lifetime figure and the network's ledger total are published in full, because they are ledger facts about money, not judgements about people.
Why there are no leaderboards
A leaderboard would rank people by a number the algorithm attributes to them, reward optimising for it, and expose contributors whose employers would rather they were not listed at all. Recognition here is coarse on purpose — percentiles, not ranks; opt-in, not scraped; a certificate you choose to show, not a table someone else compiles.
The same rule bars per-person currency figures below the floor on every page of this site, in every export, forever.
What becomes real, and when
The counters on the home page show mechanism copy until launch; after launch they show projects, contributors and companies as numbers and the money slot as the date of the first scheduled quarterly disbursement; after the first disbursement the money slot shows the ledger total, linked to the ledger. Certificates that attest a figure are issued only for figures with a ledger row behind them. The first real number on this site will be small, and it will be real, and that order is the point.