F10: OSDE: Open Source Dev Ecosystem

Since Fund 6, 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.

Core Idea

The projects funded by Catalyst should be able to generate business value retained by the teams, and at the same time contribute back to the Cardano community.

For example, a funded project can develop an idea, leverage its business value, and share the non-core-business efforts with other teams by providing examples, documentation, code, or a framework accessible to the community.

The ecosystem will be improved by leveraging the increase of knowledge in the community.

Examples:

• Increase open-source project visibility --> increase adoption
• Improve documentation --> increase adoption, increase the number of people that understand / can work on the project.
• Adopt frameworks --> less boilerplate code, fewer bugs, more focus on core-business ideas
• Many well-documented projects --> higher chances to have a commercially-viable marketplace
• Many well-documented examples and demos --> increase the perceived reputability of the community

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

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 other challenges that don't require open-sourcing a project to the community.

Note

• This is a continuation of the F8:OSDE Challenge

Challenge Team Details

Ninh Tran - CEO @Snapbrillia - Open-Source Quadratic Funding & Open-Source Bounties

Johnny Nguyen - Head of Open Source @IOG, Cardano Open-Source Fund, Open-Source Contributor

Patrik Suzzi - Sr. Software Engineer, Eclipse Committer, Cardano FP, Open-Source Contributor

Beatrice Thelisma - CTO @Snapbrillia, Long-Standing Open-Source Contributor

Frank Albanese - CSO @Snapbrillia, Long-Standing Open-Source Contributor

James Willingham - CIO @Snapbrillia, Long-Standing Open-Source Contributor

Seomon - Co-founder @CardanoAfterDark, Littlefish, C4C, Catalyst-School, Open-Source Contributor

Luke Hoare - Mlabs Admin & Catalyst Lead, Mlabs' Open-Source Team Coordinator

Links

• Linktree: https://linktr.ee/cardano.opensource
• Discord: https://discord.com/invite/EnfZdJgdzg
• Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qiy3FM08LgJ7zFCmtvCeNh-nPoYPwIhXSiZxfJtLRjQ/edit#slide=id.p

Why is it important?

Growing a marketplace & ecosystem of experts able to work on complex software is important to build and maintain the foundations of Cardano.

How does success looks like?

• More open-source projects, developers, and users
• Improved visibility and quality of open-source projects
• Improved open-source infrastructure

Key Metrics to measure

• Increase the number and quality of open-source projects
• increase the number of open-source tools and frameworks
• Increase the number of open-source contributions and maintainers
• Increase the visibility of open-source projects
• Increase in collaboration in and out of the ecosystem
• Improve adoption of Cardano technology
• Improve integrations and interoperability between projects
• Improve the documentation of open-source projects