MeshJS SDK Operations: Supporting Open-Source Library Development, Developer Resources & Builder Community

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Hong Jing (Jingles)

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

hello@meshjs.dev

Additional applicants

Additional Applicants: Mesh Team (see below)

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

6

[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.” .

n/a

[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.”

n/a

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

Dev Tools, API or Library

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The Mesh team aims to provide the most comprehensive and easy-to-use SDK for practical dApp development on Cardano, accessible to new and experienced developers alike, with a complete and high-quality set of documentation and supporting resources. With this proposal we are applying for funding to be able to sustainably maintain and continue to improve the MeshJS projects. The requested funds will enable not only the continued development, but also guarantee additional operational processes can be covered, thus allowing the team to widen and increase community engagements and to engage and level up an active open source developer community at MeshJS.

The Proposal targets two main domains of activities:

1) Core Operations

Core Development

Mesh is dedicated to creating the best and most accessible open-source tools and libraries. Feedback from developers has shown us that among their top priorities are fixing bugs in the codebase and some technical features. All of these involve time-consuming (and not always fun) efforts: fixing the bugs themselves can be laborious and difficult, but also just reading through and responding to PR’s (“Pull Requests'' - code adjustment proposals on Github), improving & updating code, creating and updating documentation, tutorials and other supporting materials. As you can see, there is a significant amount of continuous work required in keeping MeshJS up-to-date and useful, even before one considers code testing and development of new features according to cardano blockchain updates/hard forks.

Maintenance & hosting

All current products and services are hosted by MeshJS team members out of their own pockets. To enable this to be sustainable, we require funding which can help to cover these overhead expenses.

2) Community Engagements

2.1) Workshops, Training and Demonstrations 

These sections are the crucial engine parts through which we aim to establish a strong MeshJS Developer Community, contributing and boosting open source development on the Cardano Blockchain.

Uptake of new tools, no matter how well documented, often benefits hugely from live workshops and recorded demonstrations. Aside from the time to actually schedule and deliver these, both also require planning, creation and preparation of suitable materials, rehearsals and skilled, knowledgeable facilitators to deliver them. A budget here would allow team members to dedicate the required resources to produce these essential services.

2.2) Engagement Capacity

At this still early stage, while there is limited knowledge within the community, it is essential that the team is able to respond to queries and questions from individuals in the community and often on a 1:1 basis. While we love to do this, it is extremely time-consuming and has proven difficult to stay responsive. A dedicated budget would allow team members to be able to dedicate more time in general to the project, and thus be able to engage more meaningfully with individuals to disseminate knowledge and answer questions while also handling their main tasks.

2.3) Bounty Budgets 

We have already begun work with Gimbalabs on the development of a Cardano Native bounty board. Since developing our own “Bounty Boards” requires some time, we have also started to experiment with those existing on the Dework platform. However, without funding, we are not yet able to launch rewarded bounties. This proposal would allow us to allocate dedicated financial resources to incentivised bounties, incentivising participation from the community in the open source development of MeshJS.

2.4) Outreach and awareness

As everyone in MeshJS is already at capacity, even as volunteers, developing tools, libraries, documentation, resources and so on, we don't have the additional capacity to also maintain social media at the levels required to keep everyone informed and up to date on MeshJS developments. A dedicated budget for outreach and awareness would allow us to onboard additional team capacity and to ensure strong outreach and awareness across different social media platforms such as Twitter, Youtube, Reddit etc. This category would also include the creation of content, such as articles, infographics, videos etc to help inform and educate the community.

 

2.5) Community moderation

The MeshJS Discord server currently hosts +500 members and we have around ~1400 followers on twitter, making it a real job moderating the growing community. The moderation currently falls back to the MeshJS team, which distracts from time which could be better used in continuing to develop the tools, libraries and documentation. We would love to grow the team and reward a dedicated moderator group for the MeshJS Discord, allowing us to provide constant guidance and support for Discord members and giving time back to the developers.

 

2.6) Community Online live events

Communities benefit a great deal from open online events where everyone is able to join and to meet and connect with like-minded people. However MeshJS currently hardly has the capacity to organise and run such events due to the lack of time and resources. Allocating our own funds to the creation of community events would allow us to increase the quality of community interactions.

We envision different formats of online live events:

• Live Coding Session on Discord

Inviting the community into live coding sessions, where experienced developers guide and provide answers to questions from new and prospective developers

• MeshJS Playground

Inviting the Community into live Zoom Calls, providing latest news and updates from the MeshJS Team & Community and present ideas and projects from the Community

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

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

The perception that building dApps on Cardano is difficult is holding back the whole eco-system’s development: web2 developers are running first to the “simpler” EVM chains and some developers have even left this ecosystem out of frustration. However, with good, well-documented tooling that brings the code to the developer, rather than scaring them off by having to learn complex new languages or to work with frustrating software, this need not be the case. Cardano can and should be easy and welcoming for a much greater number of developers to begin developing and become productive.

Mesh is dedicated to creating the best and most accessible open-source tools and libraries, with high-quality documentation, examples and integrations, maximising the productivity of both new and experienced developers coming in from web2 or other blockchain eco-systems. The current Mesh JS SDK and site is already a huge step in this direction: it is consistently cited as being one of the easiest to use and best documented Cardano dApp SDKs. Our aim is to expand on this early work to make the tools and libraries more comprehensive in response to the feedback from developers: a revamped and improved Mesh JS SDK will prove that building and deploying dApps on Cardano is both practical and fun, encouraging a new generation of developers from all over the world to create value in this ecosystem.

Mesh is in line with and directly aims for and contributes towards the achievement of all of the “examples” mentioned under the campaign brief, namely:

• * 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

Further, MeshJS is fully committed to Open Source development. All our products and services are fully open-sourced with a commitment to comprehensive, high-quality documentation and supporting resources. All of this reflects our commitment to providing quality, easy-to-use development tools for the community. 

Current and previously developed products by MeshJS fully align with several KPIs and intentions of the OSDE Challenge:

• More open-source projects, developers, and users
• 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
• Improve adoption of Cardano technology

MeshJS builds open source libraries and tools that enable developers to easily build powerful dApps on the Cardano blockchain. You can see our work at: https://MeshJS.dev/ 

To allow people to easily get started, we have developed several guides which allow developers of any level to make their first step building on the Cardano ecosystem: https://MeshJS.dev/guides, as well as some basic starter templates https://MeshJS.dev/starter-templates. For developers who would prefer to integrate MeshJS into an already existing project, we provide support for that as well with our https://MeshJS.dev/migration-manual-installation guide. 

For advanced builders and projects, we go quite granular and provide easy to use and open sourced customisable code which includes integrations for cardano wallets, utilities and transaction builders. Currently, we are focused on establishing a comprehensive new open source library for cardano smart contracts. Additionally updating the full stack into a version 2 in TypeScript. 

So hopefully it is evident by the work we’ve already done and continue to do, that we are fully committed and busy in working as active contributors to the open source developer ecosystem on Cardano.

All of the previous and current development relies fully on volunteer based contributions, and maintenance costs such as hosting are being paid out of our own pockets. This obviously puts a limit on the amount of time and resources that can be dedicated, as well as not being sustainable. We would love to keep building and ensure that the required dedicated time is allocated and practical. As we are now forced to confront the real challenges of sustainability and the need to have space to grow, we have come to the wider Cardano community to request support. This support will allow us to continue and level up our contributions, as well ensuring the maintenance of our already existing open-source products, and to help us to further develop these and new projects in the future.

Our vision for the long term is to develop a serious enterprise with its roots deep in the Cardano ecosystem, advocating open source and blockchain technology. The funds from Catalyst would help us achieve these goals. 

We have also submitted a second proposal for the MeshJS Version 2 in the Developer Ecosystem Challenge as we see it better fitting to the intent of the challenge there. If you like this proposal, we hope you will find some exciting things at the Version 2 proposal as well.

Further, there are several things one can do to support:

https://MeshJS.dev/about/support-us 

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

Community feedback: Direct feedback from the community on the quality and usefulness of the resources (SDK, documentation, team interactions, resources) - via direct engagements, conversations, events as well as active interviews and surveys.

Observation: quality and quantity of projects created

Collaborations, partnerships and opportunities: quantity and quality produced over period

Improvement of the SDK over the period: more reliable, more features, more useful, etc. as judged by all stakeholders and community

Other measurements:

Amount of Github activity at the MeshJS Github

Measurable via MeshJS - Github activity chart

https://github.com/MeshJS/mesh 

Number of Completed Bounties at the MeshJS Dework Bounty Board

Measurable via the MeshJS Dework

https://app.dework.xyz/MeshJS-96531 

Number and quality of hosted online events and participations

Measurable through uploaded recording from events on the MeshJS Youtube Channel

https://www.youtube.com/@meshsdk 

Amount an quality of new content including educational, developer/training and social media content

( Blog Posts and Articles, Videos and guides )

Constant Community moderation on Discord and number of engaged newcomers, as well as the quality of interactions, engagements and things developed using Mesh

Measurable via Discord Server insights stats.

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

We plan to provide regular updates through the milestone reports to the challenge teams, as well as participating in Catalyst Town Halls & Swarm After Town Halls to provide updates on the proposals implementation. Furthermore we plan to record these updates and make the recordings publicly available via Youtube and sharing through social media as Discord and Twitter to ensure the reach to a broad spectrum of the Cardano Community

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

MeshJS has built multiple open source developer resources in the past and the engineering team has already proven high skills and knowledge in the development of Cardano Open Source tools. Our continued collaboration with Catalyst Swarm, who have a strong track record in community building, ensures that we can bring together a merged pool of knowledge and experience of the type that is required to deliver on the proposal at highest quality.

In addition, our collaborations with community-focused educational groups like Gimbalabs allows us to access and work with a team with valuable knowledge and experience regarding the education of Cardano Open Source developers. Given this track record as a starting point, and the fact that the Mesh team will be continuing to engage in many aspects of the community as well as developing its own, we are confident that we can provide enough trust and accountability to execute the proposal. As all of our products are open-source, and all members are quite well known within the Cardano builder community already, there is much transparency and community reputation already established, and we aim to honour the trust we’re worked hard to earn so far.

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

The main goal is to transform the experience of being a developer on Cardano totally from how it was perceived when we first joined it: difficult, poorly documented, buggy, obtuse and largely theoretical. Mesh have produced and shared the first early version of the open-source library and supporting resources, and our goals with this proposal is to ensure that we can sustainably continue to build on this promising start. Funding will support the key operations to ensure survival, no… the flourishing of the MeshJS project, enabling activities and to additional Community Engagements to build a strong core developer community of people learning, using and contributing MeshJS, and so boosting and contributing to Open Source development on the Cardano Blockchain.

In short: we judge this to be feasible as we have already created the main basis for some of the most user-friendly developer tools available on Cardano. The proposal is about guaranteeing sustainability so that the team can commit the time and resources necessary to develop the project and community and ensure it reaches its potential.

[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.

Milestone #1: (0 - 6 weeks) 

• Team members are able to commit a regular amount of time to working on Mesh core objectives 
•  re-launch of the community, with revitalised energy, interaction and engagement. A key part of this will be the launch of a new regular interactive team session by the end of the first month:

Launch: Hosting biweekly “live coding” sessions on the MeshJS Discord

Milestone #2: (6 - 24 weeks)

• Educational materials to bridge the gap for Web2 developers new to the blockchain development world, and Cardano in particular with its unique UTxO model
• Launch: Byte-size educational videos (Cardano / Mesh ) 
• Moderating the MeshJS community on the MeshJS Discord

Milestone #3 - (24 - 36 weeks)

• New engagements, events and materials
• contributions and work on core libraries in line with community priorities
• Established collaborations or partnerships with other teams building in the ecosystem to produce, consult, assist or partner on deliverable projects using Mesh
• Launch: Hosting biweekly “MeshJS Playground” sessions on zoom

Milestone #4 - (6 - 24 weeks)

• From a basic conception to the nurturing and growth of a thriving ‘bounty’-led developer community. Note: we ex[ect that this may take some time to build up initially and organically, especially as the whole eco-system strives to increase interest and adoption, but we hope that supplying quality tools, materials and engagement we can build a momentum
• Launch: rewarded MeshJS Bounties on the MeshJS Dework

Milestone #5 ( 12 - 30 weeks)

• One of the main basic aims is to get comfortably “on top” of the codebase so that bugs and issues are dealt with in a timely manner, as well as responses to feature requests, community developments and feedback
• Maintain or improve number of outstanding issues

Milestone #6 - ( 36 - 52 weeks)

• Whole team operation resilient and sustainable: contributing, self-evaluating as feeling happy and comfortable with fair compensations for work done for Mesh
• Comprehensive set of supporting resources: educational videos, recordings of live sessions, write-ups, etc.
• Library of applications (or prototypes of applications) built with Mesh
• Cardano a more vibrant, diverse and thriving developer community using Mesh among other tools

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

In general, each Milestone aims to:

• Increase the sustainability and likelihood of success of the project. This includes vitally important but less easily “measurable” aspects such as community goodwill, positive feedback, not just number but also quality of relationships, contributions and satisfaction within the community and increased commitments of both team and community members. Of course, in addition can use more traditional measurables such as increases in communications, mentions, engagements, awareness (number of impressions and activity level) etc.

• Increase number of active community members at MeshJS

(measurable on the number of MeshJS Discord members, number of participants in live events, followership at the MeshJS Twitter, amount of uploaded recordings from live events to the MeshJS Youtube channel, number of views on recorded live events)

https://www.youtube.com/@meshsdk 

• Increase number of Pull Requests on the MeshJS Github repositories 

(measurable via the MeshJS GitHub)

https://github.com/MeshJS/mesh 

• Increase the amount of completed tasks and bounties on the MeshJS Dework

(measurable via the MeshJS Dework)

Specifically:

Milestone #1 Deliverables: 

• Retain core team members with dedicated time
• biweekly “live coding” sessions on the MeshJS Discord
• Discord engagement (Developer issues/questions/feedback etc.)

Milestone #2 Deliverables: 

• New education materials (byte-sized videos, new tutorials, resources)

Milestone #3 Deliverables: 

• New events and materials, including “MeshJS Playground” sessions
• New partnerships / collaborations

Milestone #4 Deliverables: 

• Bounty program live

Milestone #5 Deliverables: 

• Actively developed well-maintained, up-to-date codebase
• Responsive team with engaged community of developers and projects

Milestone #6 Deliverables: 

• Mesh still exists and is thriving 6 (12) months later: Coherent, reliable internal team + engaged, contributing community
• Comprehensive set of supporting resources: educational videos, recordings of live sessions, write-ups, etc.
• Library of applications (or prototypes of applications) built with Mesh
• A professional grade suite of tools and libraries used in production in real Cardano applications
• 
  

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

Mesh Operations (Seed support: 6month)

Community Dev

Events - $1,080.00

Community Management - $2,475.00

Resources Dev

Media creation (vid/audio etc.: research, writing, recording, editing, production, deploy) - $5,184.00

Live Coding - $2,160.00

Docs, Tutorials, Guides development and maintenance - $7,776.00

Playground Sessions - $2,160.00

Library Dev

Tech Debt: Bugs, Code Maintenance, Updates to keep up with Cardano etc - $8,294.40

New Feature Development (includes R&R, development, testing, bounties…) - $18,144.00

Administrative

Project and Task Management (eg DeWork/Bounty management, work allocations...) - $3,037.50

Catalyst admin (Coordination meetings, reports, etc.) - $243.00

Misc

Zoom subs - $112.50

Other subs + misc $157.50

$50,823.90

Est 169413Ada (@0.30USD)

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

Top quality developers are expensive and hard to find. We believe establishing a serious commitment for a portion of the working time of committed, skilled and experienced professionals over an extended period is an important and valuable investment, as we are at a crucial point for the adoption of Cardano as a serious contender in the world of blockchain solutions. It is essential that a new generation of developers and builders are attracted to the ecosystem, and have access to an accessible and powerful set of tools and libraries that facilitate easy development.  

For developers who are already here, it is vital that the tools are maintained and updated, and for all it is necessary to have up to date and comprehensive documentation, supporting materials and a healthy community around. We see Mesh JS SDK as having a pivotal part to play in providing this, helping to lay the foundations of the developer experience on Cardano and therefore ensuring that the ecosystem prospers and grows. Thus we perceive that what we are developing is of great value to the community already, and will deliver further benefits which grow exponentially with adoption and the development of useful dApps based on our open source code.

The Mesh team consists of highly motivated, experienced people who bring their own unique talents to the table, including from their other commitments. In a highly competitive environment where technical and other high-value skills are rare, it is essential that the project is able to sustain and incentivise key contributors, as well as having a budget to be able to incentivize and reward contribution from the skilled members of the community as possible for the sake of the development of the SDK and Cardano overall.

https://youtu.be/hjgwQMI5sA8

[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