Project-Based Documentation for the Open-Source Andamio Platform

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

James Dunseith

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

jdunseith@gimbalabs.io

Additional applicants

• M. Ali Modiri
• Sebastian Pabon
• Nori Nishigaya
• Roberto Mayen
• Yoram Ben Zvi
• Adrian Hüetter
• Nelson Kshetrimayum
• Juan Salvador Magán Valero
• HongJing (Jingles) K

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

5

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

We are depending on the Cardano Community to keep changing the world!

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

Project will be fully open source. It will show how Cardano can help to set a new standard for what open source documentation can be.

[METADATA] Category of proposal

Dev Ecosystem Collaboration

[METADATA] SDG rating

Our project falls within the following SDG categories:

• SDG 4 Quality Education
• SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth 
• SDG 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The best open-source projects have great documentation and committed developer communities. Our proposed solution is to support the evolution of the Cardano development ecosystem by demonstrating how a set of Cardano-based tools supports open-source projects in a new way.

This proposal outlines the three parts to our solution:

1. Publish Project-Based Documentation for onboarding developers to the Open-Source Andamio Project.
2. Facilitate Live Coding Sessions and a recorded archive of past sessions, because collaborative development is an effective way to build skills and relationships.
3. Continue Developing the Andamio Platform, in public, so that all developers can learn in real time about new possibilities on Cardano - and build upon what we’ve started.

Andamio is a Learning Management System (LMS) built on Cardano. It is built for organizations of all sizes to share knowledge and onboard contributors. Andamio includes smart contracts and UI components for treasury management, skill and contribution tracking, and emergent reputation that:

1. Supports projects and organizations to deliver documentation, making it easier to onboard contributors to open-source projects.
2. Supports contributors to build emergent, on-chain reputation by learning from documentation and making contributions to a project.
3. Connects contributors and projects as expertise grows across a network.

With this proposal, we will engage with developers and organizations who want to use the Andamio Platform to build robust organizations and open-source spaces. We know that effective open-source development is much more than simply “releasing the code”. The real goal of open-source development is to create communities of developers, so that further innovation can happen.

Cardano is built for precisely this sort of innovation. The Andamio Platform demonstrates how. Aspiring developers are already benefiting from our work, and we have a long track record of supporting new organizations to take root. The existing Andamio code is already public, our MVP is live, and it is time to set a new standard for what open-source documentation can be.

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

The campaign brief says, “This challenge setting aims to incentivise large ambitious open source projects as the next phase as The Evolution of Developer Ecosystem”

We built the Andamio Platform to support the evolution of the Cardano developer ecosystem and beyond. It is an example of a “large, ambitious open source project” focusing on education that helps organizations thrive. Cardano projects do not yet address these problems. Our solution to well-known problems of education, organizations, and open source development will dramatically extend interest in the Cardano ecosystem by offering solutions to a new class of issues and igniting the imaginations of people who don’t yet see utility in blockchain.

The campaign brief asks, “What are the tools that we need to prioritize first and how do we incentivise projects to be open source?” and “How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst?”

Sustaining open-source developer ecosystems is a problem that pre-dates blockchain technology. By showing a new way to sustain open-source development, we are generating a new wave of interest from experienced developers and open-source advocates. We built Andamio precisely to do this. We have applied Plutus smart contracts, Cardano transaction templates, and new, emergent identity solutions that kickstart a new wave of development work.

The campaign brief asks, “What would make a developer motivated to grind through the docs and code no matter how hard it is to create a dApp?” 

If reading docs is a grind and it’s hard to create a dApp, then we won’t motivate a sufficient number of developers. You can’t have a successful open-source project if the documentation doesn’t motivate developers.

Great documentation is essential to great infrastructure. Devs know this and should expect it. Compelling examples are inherently motivating - just like a great game. And collaborative communities of practice make anything possible. When developers know that they are not alone, and have ample opportunities to learn alongside others, they engage. We know this because we’ve been practicing it.

The campaign brief asks, “What are enterprise dev managers looking for in order to be able to build out enterprise projects - either internal or commercial?” 

Enterprise dev managers know that they need skilled contributors to achieve their goals. Andamio doesn’t just support the training and onboarding of devs - it also helps enterprises validate the track record of any contributor, and for new networks of developers to form.

The campaign brief lists “Potential Directions”. Here is how we aim to deliver on several of them:

• Knowledge base & documentation - this is what we propose to deliver.
• Deployment, testing, and monitoring frameworks - we will show by example how deployment and testing works on Cardano.
• Samples, recipes, and templates - Andamio provides a set of components that can be applied flexibly depending on the developer and organizations’ needs. We will provide samples and templates for each.
• Hackathons - Gimbalabs & Plutus PBL are ongoing hackathons. We have shown that hackathons do not need to be one-off events, but can be continuous. Gimbalabs will continue to deliver value this way.
• Dashboards - see MVP at https://plutuspbl.io/contributors 
• APIs, and Oracles - Andamio provides APIs for connecting contributors and open-source spaces.
• Support, Incentivization, and Collaborative Structures - Andamio is the Spanish word for “Scaffold”. Scaffolds provide support for building new things. We will continue to show how collaborative Live Coding sessions are an essential part of open-source documentation.

The campaign brief says, “Beyond tools and infrastructure, we need to nurture a growing developer community with incentives for ambitious infrastructure projects.”

We agree! Andamio is an “ambitious infrastructure project” that is not just built to deliver documentation. Andamio provides a set of Cardano contracts and UI components that allow projects of any size to provide incentives for ongoing work. We will show how, by building the Andamio documentation in Andamio itself, which will provide an illuminating example for other organizations on how to incentivize ambitious open-source infrastructure projects.

The campaign brief says, “Accelerated dApp development and aligned strategic goal of Cardano which is increasing the number of open source projects on Cardano.”

The Andamio Documentation will provide a new example for what open source documentation can be. We call it “Project Based Documentation”, and it’s about more than simply telling people about the code. We will

1. Provide examples showing tools in action and allow devs to go under the hood.
2. Provide spaces where developers can learn together and start collaborating, because learning and collaboration are at the heart of open-source development.
3. Clearly show the work ahead and help people learn how to contribute - open-source development should help people improve as developers, and if they want, become valuable contributors to commercial projects.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

Throughout this project, we will ask: 

1. Are we making it easier for developers to build on Cardano?
2. Are developers contributing to Andamio?
3. Are developers using Andamio to support additional projects?

Each month, we will report our answers to these questions. When we are successful, we will share what we have learned. When we are not successful, we will build upon our experiments.

Project-Term Metrics

For a five month project duration we will track these quantitative metrics:

• Number of Contributors to Andamio codebase: tracked via project repositories on GitLab
• Number of projects and organizations sharing documentation via Andamio: tracked on GitHub and GitLab
• Number of contributor tokens minted on the Andamio Platform: here is an example
• Number of developers earning rewards for contributing to open source projects via Andamio.
• Attendance at Live Coding sessions: we will provide a public dashboard showing attendance and links
• Projects launched by attendees: self reported by learners and contributors

We will also use surveys and in-person feedback to collect qualitative insights that drive improvements to the Andamio Platform.

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

Output 1: Andamio Open Source Code + Documentation Site

• The key output of this project is the Andamio Platform Documentation. It will be available via a public URL, for anyone to access.
• The Andamio Documentation will evolve over the course of this project, based on what we learn by measuring success as described above.

Output 2: Live Coding Sessions

• We will host 3 Live Coding sessions each week for 20 weeks (60 Live Coding Sessions)
• Meeting recordings will be shared via YouTube and archived in the Andamio Documentation site.
• Registration links will be shared via public URL, Twitter and Discord every week.

Output 3: Public, Transparent Budget

• Project funds will be distributed to contributors with an Andamio Treasury Contract.
• Anyone will be able to see a detailed breakdown of how funds were used via a public dashboard.
• This public view will be a live example to be referenced in the documentation.

Output 4: Leading by Example

• The “meta” output to this project is that we are using the project to demonstrate a higher bar for what open-source documentation can be. This will create conditions for further development work, because when other organizations see how Andamio works, it will generate interest in further development and use cases.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Gimbalabs has been focused on developer education since Fund 1 of Project Catalyst, and we’ve delivered the Andamio MVP in the form of our Plutus PBL 2023 Course. 

We are confident that we will “deliver this project with high levels of trust and accountability,” because it is our goal to make it easier for everyone to increase trust and accountability among contributors and organizations. We built Andamio as a tool for this job.

Background

Gimbalabs was founded during Funds 1 and 2 of Project Catalyst, in 2020. For three years, Gimbalabs has provided value through initiatives such as Dandelion, Plutus PBL, Gimbalabs Playground, Gimbalabs Live Coding, and most recently, Voltaire Governance workshops. Its team has a track record of delivering value far exceeding the amount received in funding, actively engaging and fostering Cardano community creation and growth, and delivering on its promises.

Andamio

The Andamio team is a unique blend of experienced developers, project managers, and business experts working together in the Cardano ecosystem for over two years. With their roots in Gimbalabs, a project deeply involved in the growth of Cardano, they share common values and goals, forming a dedicated and cohesive team. Over the past six months, they have diligently bootstrapped the Andamio platform as an open-source solution to address the challenges and pain points identified throughout their engagement with the Cardano community, where they have gathered valuable insights and collaborated with numerous learners and organizations.

After six months of rigorous testing, we are excited to present an open-source software development kit (SDK), ready to be developed into a platform that any Cardano organization can leverage.

Andamio includes a Treasury management system. We will use it to track the use of funds directly on the Cardano Mainnet. Even as we’re providing documentation about the tool, we’ll be showing how the tool can be used to “demonstrate that we can be trusted to manage funds properly”. In doing so, we’ll set an example for others to follow in the future.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

The purpose of Andamio is to increase the capacity of all people to collaborate in solving big problems. We must make it easier to build trust and accountability among contributors and organizations. Great documentation helps to build trust and accountability.

The main goal of this project is to provide robust, open-source Andamio documentation within the Andamio Platform, so that it will be accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

Our hypothesis is that it takes more than public code to bring open-source projects to life. We intend to contribute to the evolution of the Cardano Developer Ecosystem by showing how Cardano can be used to empower developer ecosystems. That’s why, with this project, we will:

1. Publish Project-Based Documentation with the Andamio Platform, to provide an accessible, illustrative example of how Andamio works.
2. Facilitate Live Coding Sessions where developers can meet, solve development problems, and learn how open-source code works.
3. Continue Developing the Andamio Platform, in public, so that all developers can learn in real time about new possibilities on Cardano - and build upon what we’ve started.

We will know if we are successful according to the metrics shared above, and will validate our approach by:

1. Showing that the combination of project-based documentation and live sessions creates a high level of engagement among developers.
2. Showing that a high level of engagement leads to high levels of trust.

Showing that a high level of trust increases our capacity to solve problems.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

View Milestones + Timeline here

Month 1: Publish Onboarding Modules

Key Activities:

1. Publish Front End Component Library
2. Publish Andamio PBL Onboarding Modules
3. Host + Facilitate 12 Live Coding Sessions (3/week x 4 weeks)

Month 2: Publish Front End Templates

Key Activities:

1. Build Front End Templates
2. Publish Front End Template Library
3. Build Governance MVP into Front End Template
4. Host + Facilitate 12 Live Coding Sessions (3/week x 4 weeks)

Month 3: Publish Building Background Knowledge (BBK) Modules

Key Activities:

1. Publish BBK Modules
2. Publish and Deploy Initial Governance Model
3. Host + Facilitate 12 Live Coding Sessions (3/week x 4 weeks)

Month 4: Publish Live Coding Video Archive

Key Activities:

1. Timestamped Live Coding Videos
2. Deploy web-based archive emphasizing discoverability and just-in-time support for people learning about Cardano
3. Host + Facilitate 12 Live Coding Sessions (3/week x 4 weeks)

Month 5: Publish Governance Starter Kit + Andamio Back End

Key Activities:

1. Publish Governance Starter Kit
2. Publish Back End Component Library
3. Release Feedback and Contribution Processes
4. Publish Governance Case Studies
5. Apply Andamio Governance to determine next steps for this project
6. Host + Facilitate 12 Live Coding Sessions (3/week x 4 weeks)

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

We will:

1. Publish Documentation
2. Publish Open Source Code Repositories
3. Host Live Coding Sessions and deploy a new archive of Live Coding Recordings
4. Publish an Andamio Governance Starter Kit

As a result of this work, Andamio will be accessible to anyone who needs to use it. If this project is successful, people will not just read the docs: they will experience new tools for themselves and be ready to keep building solutions to real problems. Andamio will set a clear example that community building is essential to open-source development, and will build upon the live sessions that Gimbalabs has been running for the last 2+ years.

Deliverables by Milestone:

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Budget Summary

Milestone -> Total Funds (ADA)

Month 1: Publish Onboarding Modules -> 61,736

Month 2: Publish Front End Templates -> 31,200

Month 3: Publish Building Background Knowledge (BBK) Modules -> 58,700

Month 4: Publish Live Coding Video Archive -> 41,200

Month 5: Publish Governance Starter Kit + Andamio Back End -> 126,200

Total -> 319,036 ADA

Detailed Budget Breakdown

For a full budget breakdown, please see this spreadsheet.

 

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

This proposal represents enough funding to help the Andamio team continue to bootstrap the Andamio project.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept