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)
Open API for Adatar.me
Solution: Develop an open API that dApps can consume to be powered with human readable addresses as well as adatars.
Onboard Freelancers to any projects
Solution: A system where project can establish transparency of team members doing various roles join on a shift basis and be paid for the shifts.
NFT Verification Tool
Solution: Open source decentralized tool that verifies NFTs based on both onchain and offchain sources of truth
NFT Swap Infrastructure Templates 1
Solution: Create an open-source NFT swapping smart contracts template, easily adaptable and implementable by any NFT project in the Cardano space.
NFT Guild: Cardano NFT Reports
Solution: Create a reliable and impartial source of in-depth reports, published regularly & authored by Cardano NFT insiders and QA specialists.
.NET CardanoSharp – Deserialization
Solution: Build a developer friendly way for using the library to deserialize Cardano Transactions into representative C# objects.
.NET Blazor Web wallet Support
Solution: Build a .NET Blazor component to interact with CIP 30 compatible web wallet in C#.
Mobile In-App Wallet (RN) 🔥
Solution: Create a React Native library for storing hashed mnemonics and private keys inside mobile's secure context, by leveraging other tools.
MLabs - Spec DSL for dApp Security
Solution: We are building a spec language for formally describing dApp behavior and generating tests to validate an implementation against its design.
Milkomeda docker fullnode setup
Solution: We will provide an easy to run docker solution so that users and developers can easily run their own full nodes and/or archive nodes
Low Cost Node Hardware - Revelar
Solution: Look at alternatives to the Raspberry Pi (e.g. Rock Pi) for ways to create low cost Cardano nodes.
Learn token engineering🥕elements
Solution: Teach product managers and developers about designing the fundamentals of token engineering through video and written tutorials.
LATAM Cardano Community Operations
Solution: This proposal aims to enable the required budget to reward LATAM Cardano Community core contributors over a 3 months period.
Konma OpenLib
Solution: KonmaLabz will document and maintain a repo of all smart contracts which can later be used by developers by either forking or importing.
IRI: Cardano & Urbit Hackathon
Solution: We will hold a Hackathon for development of tools that will bridge Cardano with the Urbit computing platform.
Interest free stablecoin protocol
Solution: We are working to reduce this risk factor by introducing interest-free stablecoin protocol with fully collateralized stablecoins.
Gnosis Safe UI
Solution: We will deploy Gnosis Safe on Milkomeda and deploy a UI for it for ease-of-use
Funding Categories Analysis
Solution: Analysis on the challenge setting process, comparisons of categorisation approaches, analysis documents and funding category suggestions
Fund8Proposals + SDGs - Cardano AIM
Solution: Analyze Fund 8 proposals for UN SDGs, Human Rights and Planetary Pressures Human Development Index connections, and publish for open access.
FOSS funding mechanism to save 🌍
Solution: Ecosia but fully OpenSource, to build closed loop food production system and other SDG driven projects, powering circular economies.
Flutter SDK
Solution: Continue adding smart contract features, APIs, data structures, tutorials and community support to open-source Flutter SDK.
Find your Way Route Optimizer App
Solution: Create a system so staff collects food and distribute to beneficiaries, minimize costs/time of the process, using a route optimization app
Enable Cardano DAO for new users
Solution: Establishing service and community to create, connect and maintain successful Decentralized Autonomous Self-organizing Organizations
Empower thru Project Based Learning
Solution: Innovative PBL concept to empower developers to build on Cardano, incl. opportunity to access peer-experience & feedback & network