V
Votum
Vouch · Earn · Stand By
a solemn vow for open source

Stars are cheap.
Votum is earned.

A bot-proof endorsement system for GitHub. Real developers. Limited slots. Personal accountability. The kind of approval that actually means something.
v0.1 · Browser Extension
MIT Licensed
Open Source
Figure I

A new button on every repo.

Sits beside Watch, Fork, and Star. Looks like it always belonged there. Means something none of them do.

github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-nodejs
sindresorhus / awesome-nodejs Public
⚡ Delightful Node.js packages and resources, curated and verified by the community.
nodejs awesome javascript awesome-list resources
312
Vows · Witnessed
VOTUM
  • s
    @sindresorhusYou follow
    Author. Stands by his own work since 2014.
    slot 3 of 10
  • t
    @tjYou follow
    Has staked their name here for 18 months.
    slot 1 of 10
  • m
    @mitchellh
    Recognized maintainer · Ghostty, Vagrant, HashiCorp.
    slot 7 of 10
  • d
    @dhh
    Recognized maintainer · Rails, Hey, Basecamp.
    slot 4 of 10
+ 308 other developers, all manually verified. Take the vow yourself
Figure II

A badge worth wearing.

One line of markdown. The first thing visitors see when they open your README, and the last metric a botter can fake.

awesome-nodejs

buildpassing licenseMIT stars★ 58.3k votum⚜ 312

⚡ Delightful Node.js packages and resources, curated and verified by the community.

Note the contrast: 58.3k strangers clicked a star. 312 named developers staked their reputation.

Drop the badge in your README. The number updates daily. The names are personalized to whoever is looking at it.

<!-- README.md --> [![Votum](https://votum.dev/api/badge/{org}/{repo}.svg)](https://votum.dev/r/{org}/{repo})

The badge dynamically renders the count and, when clicked, opens a page showing every voucher, every relationship to you, and every slot they've spent across the ecosystem.

Figure III

The same repo. Two truths.

A real example of how a star count can lie and a Votum count cannot. Same project, same time, two completely different stories about who actually backs it.

defi-ai-toolkit / agent-vault
⭐ GitHub Stars 47,200
Stars per dependent repo 0.04
Active dependents 3
⚜ Votum count 8

47,200 stars from accounts averaging 116 days old. 8 named developers willing to put their reputation on it.

vs.
tinygrad / tinygrad
⭐ GitHub Stars 2,100
Stars per dependent repo 0.18
Active dependents 412
⚜ Votum count 847

A fraction of the stars. Hundreds of senior engineers, including names you'd recognize, putting their reputation on it.

Figure IV

Three rules. That's the whole game.

Borrowed from medicine, mythology, and the way humans have actually built trust for centuries.

i.
Ten slots, no more.
Every developer holds ten Votum slots at any time. Want to vouch for an eleventh repo? Drop one of the others. Scarcity makes the signal mean something. A vouch you cannot easily give is a vouch worth receiving.
ii.
Your name is on it.
Every Votum is public, attached to your handle, and visible on your profile. If you stand by malware, that's on your record. If you stand by something that ships, that's on your record too. Skin in the game, the way every working trust system in nature has it.
iii.
Bots cannot enter.
Auto-qualify with twelve months of real merged PRs, or apply for manual review. Each application is a human looking at a real account for sixty seconds. To bot the system, you'd need a thousand of those approvals, one at a time. The economics break.