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)
Earn incentives by contributing
Solution: A platform where developers get incentivized for contributing to open source projects, earn crypto or NFT for every approved pull request
Done Collectively Gitbook Integrati
Solution: Connect DC with best-available open source docs tools (Gitbook) enabling openness and transparency for any DAO - no github experience needed
Distributed Idea Mapping System
Solution: An open source collaborative idea mapping platform with a minimal comprehensive set of semantic components for ideation, maybe w/ voice chat
Developers Open Sourced Licensing
Solution: Build capacity of experts through an understanding of existing open source licensing models
Decentralized Community Chat Server
Solution: SPOs host a matrix instance where delegators sign-up using their wallet and staking address. Chat is e2ee, and matrix is foss+decentralized.
db-sync replacement in Oura
Solution: We will write an alternative to cardano-db-sync in Rust powered by Oura starting with the core functionality needed for light wallets.
DAO-NET: Development Funder
Solution: Create an experimental funding application that incentivizes communities, funders and proposers to rapidly fund new projects.
Contributor Infrastructure Analysis
Solution: Establishing an initial product development workflow and governance process that the Catalyst and Cardano contributors can start using
CNFTfolio #CNFTs Portfolio Tracker
Solution: Mobile App to track your CNFTs portfolio in your hand, monitor prices, trading volume, latest sales, Buy & Sell opportunities & alerts.
Circle Governance & Administration
Solution: Secure Catalyst funding to cover all aspects of the Circle, and its vital supporting entities: CC Admin, CC Treasurers, CC Mentors.
CCv3 members are professionals too
Solution: Propose to fairminded community for retroactive funding for CCv3 reps from February to April. You can already see how hard they work.
Catalyst Treasury Guild
Solution: Establishing the Treasury Guild, an Assembly of professional accountants, creating tailor made solutions for Catalyst Projects.
Catalyst Swarm Operations
Solution: The Catalyst Swarm explores establishes and maintains crucial community infrastructure by empowering and encouraging Community Initiatives
Catalyst Swarm Media&Marketing Lab
Solution: Establishing a Catalyst Swarm Media & Marketing lab to provide professional marketing & media services to projects within Catalyst.
Catalyst Streaming Guild
Solution: Instigate Catalyst Events toward a Focus on Proposer Reach and Exposure. Establish a Weekend Live Catalyst Guild Stream (48 Hour).
Catalyst GPS
Solution: We build a collaborative approach to help visualize why we exist, where we are headed and how might we get there. Anyone can join the fun.
Catalyst Circle - Funding Mechanism
Solution: Provide the elected Catalyst Circle with a pool of funds for community-driven, solution-based implementations for community-stated problems.
Cardano wallet recovery CLI
Solution: Provide a CLI tool that community members with little to no programming experience can use to recover and move the inaccessible funds.
Cardano Tools & Software for ARM
Solution: Build and support Cardano tools like cardano-wallet, cardano-node/cli, and more to work on ARM and Adroid computers, servers, and devices.
Cardano-Tools Python Library
Solution: The Cardano-Tools Python library should be expanded and updated to provide Python developers with more relevant tools.
Cardano Rust SDK Babbage
Solution: dcSpark will make the required changes to cardano-serialization-lib to update it for the Babbage hardfork
CardanoPlusPlus, a C++ Library
Solution: Build a librarie that will help ease C++ development for Cardano.
Cardano development library in C++
Solution: By developing an open-source C++ library for Cardano, we enable more developers to integrate Cardano with new and existing projects.
Cardanobi.io
Solution: Build a fully open-source Business Intelligence API Layer, provide on-chain data & analytics, enable new data-driven services on Cardano.