F8: Open Source Development Ecosystem
Campaign Brief
Context
In the first iterations, Catalyst started as a Challenge proposed by the Catalyst team. Initially, the majority of its budget was destined to the Developer Ecosystem. For instance, in Fund 6, the Developer Ecosystem was assigned 1 mil. USD, that was 25% of the total 4 mil. available for the Fund.
In Fund 7, Catalyst released control of the budget to the community, which was able to choose the destination of the funding through voting. Unfortunately, the Developer Ecosystem challenge proposed for F7 was rejected because it did not receive enough votes. This led to the lack of an important resource stream that could have been used for the development of the Cardano technology.
The Open Source Development Ecosystem Challenge
The OSDE challenge aims to provide a stream of resources to teams that want to develop their projects and contribute back to the community by sharing part of their efforts in terms of open source projects, open-source frameworks, and accessible knowledge.
The main idea is that projects funded by the community can both generate business value retained by the teams, and at the same time contribute back to the community by improving the ecosystem itself.
For example, a team can be funded to develop a project; generate business value by leveraging a profitable idea, and share the non-core-business part of their work in terms of shared knowledge or in terms of building frameworks or projects with other teams - such that is possible to solve complex problems by joining minds and dividing the efforts across different teams.
Motivation
Catalyst exists to gradually work towards the final stage of the roadmap of Cardano: Voltaire. We are building tools to support new forms of governance and collaboration, on top of technology that is still being developed. The development of this technology itself, in the end, will have to become part of this same process as well. Such a complex and daunting task requires experts from a variety of disciplines to work together with a common goal.
Guiding questions:
How can we ensure future efforts benefit from the work that is funded today?
How do we align between different open source community efforts?
What are the next steps to fuse IOG development with the community?
How can we encourage experts to collaborate and share their knowledge and work?
How can we develop a sustainable ecosystem while sharing knowledge and efforts?
Possible directions:
Education for development in the Cardano & Catalyst ecosystem
Developing common tools, frameworks, core infrastructures, or proof of concepts
Incentive systems for development & hosting
Common audited repositories & overviews of existing solutions
Organizing events to bring the development ecosystem together
Collaboration to improve interoperability within the ecosystem
Note
For a challenge with this budget and these aspirations, it is essential to have a broad consensus. If that support is present, then the results will be owned by the same ecosystem that supports its development.
Complimentary Challenges
This challenge is about growing the open-source ecosystem by funding and improving projects that should share part of their efforts to make the ecosystem grow, and it is not to be confused with:
The Developer Ecosystem Challenge 1 mil that focus on developer ecosystem not necessarily open source.
The Open Standards & Interoperability Challenge 500k that aims to establish standards, processes, and foster interoperability.
We have aligned our efforts with these other challenges and aligned our budgets. We feel there is space for all three. Many open source projects start out as closed source and many contributors to open source projects started out as people using the open source as part of their own private project. We feel that having both is would lead to the best of both worlds. Splitting the challenge helps create a less competitive environment for the Open Source projects.
Why is it important?
We need to grow an entire ecosystem of experts to build and maintain the foundations of Cardano/Catalyst together with the current IOG teams
What does success look like?
A growing number of experts join forces to build collaboratively on community owned infrastructure, tooling, standards, libraries and docs
Key Metrics to measure
- increase the number and the quality of Cardano Open Source projects
- increase the number of contributors
- increase of open source tools and frameworks from the community for the community (dog-fooding)
Youth Block Open Source Education
Solution: Enable youth with direct open access to engage within the Cardano ecosystem, discussing emerging technologies/models of community governance
User friendly NFT minting feature
Solution: Creating a user-friendly NFT minting feature easy to link to servers and wallets and available for all developers.
Transaction resubmitter daemon
Solution: A software component that monitors if the transaction makes it on chain and if not, resubmits it correspondingly.
Tarax: a news and media DAO
Solution: We will create a news and media DAO.
StakingDAO: DAO Tools & Scripts
Solution: We have built DAO tools for our platform and will use this to provide tools & docs to overcome challenges building trust-less & secure DAOs
Smart Contract Library - Phase 1
Solution: Publish a series of smart contract templates, similar to Ethereum's OpenZeppelin, for Cardano developers.
SAF Simple Application Framework
Solution: Let's build a modular and extensible framework for bootstrapping Cardano applications!
Reference Inputs SDK ▶ MLabs+Orcfax
Solution: An open source Javascript SDK that demonstrates how best to publish and consume on-chain data using Cardano's CIP-31 reference inputs.
Proposal Framework Tool - AIM
Solution: Add an additional 3rd framework, the UN planetary pressures adjusted Human Development Index, ready for proposers in the AIM Proposer Tool.
Procedural 3D assets generator
Solution: ProtonGraph is a FOSS software enabling easy 3D content generation for everyone, even for non-technical people.
Plutus Project-Based Learning
Solution: 10 Week course where participants learn by doing.
Plutus-extra: Plutus helper library
Solution: Plutus/PAB utility functions & data structures for Plutus scripts; Open source (Apache 2.0) & in use on mainnet by projects like SundaeSwap.
Plutarch: typed eDSL in Haskell
Solution: Typed eDSL in Haskell for writing significantly more efficient Plutus Core validators compared to the PlutusTx smart contract execution cost
PHP SDK for Blockfrost.io
Solution: We want to build an open-source SDK (Software Development Kit - a set of tools, libraries and documentation) for PHP developers.
PCDiscord - Social Media Automation
Solution: Automating Discord (social media application) servers to share and distribute information.
PanDAO Focus on Treasury Management
Solution: A set of open-source tools and utilities, which can be worked upon and improved, for projects that need treasury management functionalities.
Organization membership mgmt
Solution: Standard Plutus smart contract for DAO/SC membership, with different member functions, and standard web interface.
Open Source Translate 2 Earn Webapp
Solution: Opensource our current translation tool so anyone can deploy it to manage translations & compensate participation using ADA or Native Tokens
OpenSource Quadratic Voting Funding
Solution: Bring GitCoin to Cardano with quadratic voting and funding to amplify trust and opportunities to build the future of open-source Cardano.
Open Source Play-To-Earn - Revelar
Solution: Develop of a set of foundational math/economic models that are open-source and that can be used to design tokens for new games using CNFTs.
Open Source d-edTech For LatAm
Solution: Our vision is to create code for a d-edTech Platform in Spanish that will be open-source, and available for others to develop in LatAm
Open Source Collaboration Platform
Solution: Establish a Continuous Open-Source Collaboration Platform designed to build Open-Source proposals from collective Catalyst contributions
Open Smart Contract Library
Solution: Create a platform that allows Cardano developers to upload smart contracts and earn profit when other developers and/or projects use them.
Open Data Lake Blueprint
Solution: Work with Catalyst community to outline initial needs, training, whitepaper, and resources for constructing phase 1 of a Data Lake plan.